The IOC has captured Vancouver

And our local oligarchs have us in chains for years to come as the massive, globalized, corporate entity rolls over our city

by Chris Shaw

Flags are highly evocative symbols, designed to represent the essence of a people, a nation, or a cause. How flags are used is also deeply symbolic. American children start every school day with a pledge to the flag. Flags are lowered to half-staff to depict public mourning.

The most powerful thing flags are used for, however, is to demonstrate conquest and dominance: American marines are famously depicted raising the flag at Iwo Jima, for example. More recently, the world saw images of American soldiers raising the stars and stripes over the broken statue of Saddam Hussein after the capture of Baghdad. We in Canada do the same in kind if not in degree: The Maple Leaf flying over remote Hans Island tells Denmark who the island really belongs to, or over the Canadian military base in Kandahar, with the same basic message for Afghanis.

The last week in February saw a particularly symbolic flag-raising take place in Vancouver: Mayor Sam Sullivan had brought home the International Olympic Committee’s flag from Torino and ran it up the flag pole in front of City Hall. Marching police led by a bagpiper accompanied the mayor in his wheelchair to the flagpole and when the deed was done, they marched him off again. And there, fluttering in the breeze, was the flag for all to see: five coloured rings on a pure field of white, the flag of our new masters—the IOC and the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), and of course, the Vancouver Board of Trade.

That’s not the “official” version. VANOC CEO John Furlong spoke about the flag as a symbol of brotherhood whose origin over a hundred years ago was meant to represent the linking of the five continents of the world. (They couldn’t count very well even back then). That official version is one of the great myths of the last hundred years, one built by an incredibly astute advertising campaign, namely, that the IOC is only interested in promoting elite sports for peace. The accompanying myth is that VANOC—like their equivalents in other Olympic cities—exists only to bring the blessings of the games to a grateful public, a public that has been taught to expect not only a great party, but endless prosperity as well. It’s worthwhile to examine these myths in more detail, since both are widely believed, but neither of them is true.

Whatever the IOC may have been at its inception is not what it is now. In fact, the IOC is a vast corporate empire that controls the marketing of Olympic symbols and products. They make much of their money by selling television rights to broadcast the games. They make even more in product lines that include the five rings and other Olympic symbols. And nowhere, absolutely nowhere, does the IOC pay taxes on any of its profits.

For the IOC, the athletes are important, but only as part of the product line. Host cities are important, but only as a backdrop against which the athletes are shown. What really matters is TV and products. And, of course, the other thing that really matters to the IOC is linking up with the local bid boosters who serve not only the interests of the IOC, but also the real estate developers.

Behind every bid by any city are the developers, and the core reason for every bid is a development project at taxpayer expense. VANOC’s board is laden with those whose first allegiance is not to British Columbians but to the Vancouver Board of Trade: CEO John Furlong comes to his current position after running the private Arbutus Club for real estate tycoon Caleb Chan. Others on the “management” team include those who hail from one of Canada’s largest law firms (Borden, Ladner, Gervais), HSBC Bank, Orca Bay, Dominion Construction, and Placer Dome.

The Board of Directors has a similar make-up. Not surpris-ingly, VANOC’s predecessor organization, the Vancouver Bid Corporation, was top-heavy with most of the major developers of the province. And, lurking in the background, was then—and now—eminence grise, Jack Poole, who once told a group of developers that “if the Olympic Bid wasn’t happening, we would have to invent something” (Western Investor, June 2002).

Poole’s track record includes Daon Corporation, which lost investors nearly a billion dollars when it folded. Undeterred, Poole created Vancouver Land Cor-poration with union pension funds and the curious cooper-ation of Ken Georgetti (the current president of the Canadian Labour Congress, also once arrested for large-scale drug smuggling) and Tony Tennessy (retired union president). Free city land from then-mayor Gordon Campbell gave VLC their first products, then VLC dissolved to become Greystone, then morphed again into Concert Properties. Concert Properties became the main engine driving Vancouver’s bid for the 2010 games, while also pouring money into the provincial campaigns of Gordon Campbell’s Liberals.

If the IOC represents the world’s oligarchy, VANOC stands for our local rulers. Seen in this light, the five Olympic rings represent less the nations united in peaceful competition, and more the interlocked special interests that drive every bid: the corporations, the developers, the bought politicians, the unions that have become an integral part of an increasingly pathological capitalism, and last, sadly, the various other “special” groups that sign on in hopes of taking some crumbs from the table. Included in the latter are some First Nations leaders, arts councils, small-business owners, and anyone and everyone whose hand is out, hoping that the bosses will toss them something.

All of this goes a long way to explaining why, in spite of significant levels of individual opposition to the games, very little organized resistance has occurred: the unions and NDP follow the lead of Georgetti and Tennessy (the bid really began under former NDP premier Glen Clark), and have been locked in from the beginning. Opposition to the games is thus seen as anti-labour. First Nations leaders—paid to be on-side—decry opposition to the games as anti-native. Ditto the arts establishment. Ditto some anti-poverty groups.

The IOC and VANOC typify virtually everything that the progressive community in British Columbia rightly loathes: globalization and the rule of the big corporations and the oligarchs, destruction of the environment, marginalization of the poor and First Nations. The Olympic Bid and the arrival in Vancouver of the IOC flag could have—should have—been a rallying cry for social justice and true democracy. It could have created the most significant resistance to corporate rule in a generation, yet it passed in virtual silence, exposing an almost paralytic apathy of progressives unwilling or unable to fight back.

Look out your windows and see their flag flying over Vancouver. Five-coloured rings, forged together to chain British Columbians for years to come. The flag will leave in four years to seize another city, but the oligarchs will still rule here. VANOC couldn’t have done it alone: they needed the passivity of progressives, and they got it.

Vancouver is now captured territory. Welcome to corporate rule. Wear your chains with pride.

Chris Shaw is with 2010 Watch and can be reached at cashawlab @ gmail.com

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