How to squelch Olympic opposition

The ostensible critics of The Bid have actually been deeply involved in promoting it

by Reed Eurchuk <reurchuk@republic-news.org>

The shine is off the Olympics. While Mayor Sam Sullivan shamelessly wraps himself in the Olympic flag, the writing on the wall gets clearer and clearer. Costs have risen astronomically. On March 8, the NPA gutted previously agreed-upon levels of social housing in the Athletes Village site. Bulldozers stand ready to rip up North Shore parkland. The police department has begun another attempt at social cleansing on the Downtown Eastside. Construction on the RAV line is disrupting traffic in the city. Game boosters now advocate bringing in thousands of foreign workers to fill construction-related positions. What has happened to the labour-friendly and socially and environmentally sustainable games we heard so much about? Nothing. This is how the Olympics operate.

“The International Olympic committee is a multinational corporation that markets sports, and the local bid committees are basically real estate operations,” 2010 Watch spokesperson Chris Shaw told The Republic recently. (See Shaw’s article in this issue of The Republic.) Shaw’s statement is corroborated by a long list of developers directly and indirectly tied to real estate who lined up behind the Bid: Concert Properties, Bob Rennie, Caleb Chan, and Jack Poole, among others.

2010 Watch and their predecessor group, the No Games Coalition, have waged an ongoing fight against the Olympics, beginning in 2001. To refresh your memory, Vancouver held a plebiscite on the Olympics in February 2003. Residents voted 36% against bringing the Olympics circus to town in that plebiscite, a remarkable amount given the No Coalition had a budget of $5,000—140 times less than the Yes side, which had a budget of $700,000. However, the $700,000 is a gross under-estimation, since all three levels of government engaged in thinly veiled promotion of the project, adding untold amounts of money in free promotion.

At the time of the plebiscite, Chris Shaw told journalist Stanley Tromp that the fight had revealed a coalition of trade unionists and NDP apparatchiks working with the local business elites supporting the Yes side. This group, which featured many of the same players who later fomented the fracture within the then-ruling civic COPE party, included politicians, trade unionists, and representatives of local NGOs. In fact, Concert Properties President Dennis Podmore led the Yes 2010 side. Concert Properties, a local development company owned by a number of pension funds, including union pension funds, has close ties with the labour movement. In 2004, Charlie Smith reported in The Georgia Straight that, at that time, 12 of the company’s 17 directors, among them Canadian Labour Congress President Ken Georgetti, currently or previously had worked full-time for the trade union movement.

The role of local NGO Impact on Community Coalition [IOCC] in the selling of the 2010 Bid exposes partisanship behind a pose of neutrality. The IOCC claims it approaches the Olympics “as a non-partisan community-based coalition.” In the opaque, anodyne jargon of the IOCC mission statement, they seek to “evaluate the development of 2010 Winter Olympic . . . games from social, environmental, and economic perspectives, [and] advocate for a rich post-games legacy devoid of adverse impact.” The IOCC “took no explicit position either for or against [the] Bid, committing only to a healthy, sustainable process,” according to the statement. The local media portrayed the IOCC as skeptics on the Olympics finally won over by the 2010 Bid’s “socially and environmentally aware” Bid. Yet the IOCC’s ties to the pro-Olympic movement suggest that some IOCC members were neither neutral nor critical of the Olympic Bid.

Jim Green and Am Johal, listed as co-founders of the IOCC on their website, have connections to the NDP during the period when Glen Clark’s government first initiated the Olympic Bid process. The NDP installed Green as the “ward-boss” of the Downtown Eastside in the 1990s. Johal worked for NDP MLA Harry Lali. Green, of course was former mayor Larry Campbell’s closest ally on the previous Council, and Campbell loudly promoted the Olympic Bid.

Indeed, former mayor Campbell’s office sat at the centre of the group that worked to brand the Bid process as both socially and environmentally positive and labour-friendly. Campbell employed former Clark insider Geoff Meggs in his own office. On January 30, 2003, a few weeks before the plebiscite, Campbell and Premier Gordon Campbell jointly announced that the Province would sell the Woodwards Building to the City at a good price. CBC reported the Mayor “linked the deal to the City’s Olympic Bid, saying it will help ensure the 2010 Winter Games are ‘socially sustainable.’” The deal gave Green, who up to that point continued to play coy as to how he would vote, the green light to promote the Bid. Local columnist Allen Garr asked Green if his stance on the Bid “was deliberate, to see what he could squeeze out of Victoria, [and Green] said, ‘I don’t see anything wrong with that interpretation.’”

Most revealing, current IOCC Chair Linda Mix sat on the 2010 Bid Corporation Board of Directors. She also works at Tenants Rights Action Coalition [TRAC], a group that advocates for the interests of tenants. Her TRAC colleague Vanessa Geary later went to work at the mayor’s office.

The group helped elicit the “2010 Winter Games Inner-City Inclusive Commitment Statement” which made pleasant clucking sounds about “providing reasonable wages and decent working conditions for any local worker producing Games related goods and services.” This sorry little lullaby was enough for BC and Yukon Building Trades leader Wayne Peppard and Vancouver and District Labour Council President Bill Saunders to sign on with the IOCC, throwing further labour weight behind the Bid.

During the 2003 municipal plebiscite, the IOCC confused voters, dissipated opposition to the Bid, and soothed the anxieties of Vancouverites about the Bid. Listen to Linda Mix in January 2003, a bit more than one month out from the vote, in the thick of the campaign: “The Bid com-mittee is listening. They have taken some of our recommend-ations and will be including them in the bid book. . . . They’ve . . . made a commitment to work with the community.” The surprised interviewer, Bill Good of CKNW, replied, “I had rather presumed you were against the Games. It turned out you were not.” Equally surprised, Vancouver Sun reporter Daphne Bramham wrote, “These people [Johal, Green, Mix] actually like the Olympics,” and “they’re even reluctant to say they oppose the Bid.”

The confusion of the media is understandable. And if the IOCC could confuse inveterate city watchers like Good and Bramham, imagine what they did to the average citizens. The IOCC posed as critics of the games at the same time they both promoted the games and detracted attention from the real opposition like the No Games Coalition. The IOCC served the media by setting up the classic false paradigm: on one side sat the Olympic boosters; on the other, the Olympic skeptics. The paradigm served to marginalize the honest opposition.

Now, Linda Mix, quoted recently in the local press, expressed concern that the ballooning costs of the games will put the Bid’s social commitments in jeopardy. Her organization’s duplicitous role in the 2003 plebiscite confused voters and dissipated dissent. You’d expect the hoteliers and the tourism and real estate industries to have promoted the 2010 Bid, for they are its main beneficiaries. But why do we have putative oppositional groups like the labour movement, the NGOs, and so-called “left” politicians promoting this circus? These people play the part of the opposition so that the voices of an authentic opposition cannot be heard.

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