A well-attended public meeting on the evening of May 5 at the Britannia High School Auditorium showed why the Commercial Drive community is the enlivening and interesting place it is. The subject for discussion this balmy spring evening was a proposal made to the Britannia Community Centre Board by the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games to use the Britannia ice rink as a practice facility during the show.

The Olympics is by no means a broadly-welcomed event in Vancouver. Results of a 2003 city-wide referendum on whether the city should host the games showed the most significant “No” vote right in the neighbourhood surrounding, and served by, the Britannia Community Centre and ice rink. There is a sophisticated and wide-ranging anti-Olympic protest movement gaining momentum in Vancouver and most of the organizers, as well as the organizational meetings both formal and informal, are found in and around Commercial Drive.

The protest movement isn’t generally against sports or amateurs playing them. The coming of the Olympics means much more than a visit by some world-class athletes to show their stuff. In the thick cloud surrounding the athletes and outnumbering them at least 100 to one will be media, dignitaries, officials, politicians, technicians and—most significantly—“security personnel.”

The Olympics since the 1972 Munich Games, when Palestinian militants kidnapped several Israeli athletes, have been as much about showing security as showing athletic prowess. Reporting on recent Olympic games in terms of column inches gives almost equal weight to security concerns and incidents as to athletic exploits. Certainly that was the case in Atlanta in 1996, after a pipe bomb exploded in a park, and in Salt Lake City in 2002, mere months after 9/11 and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. The 2008 Beijing Games will likely set a new high-water mark for overbearing displays of security if protests and counter-measures against them during the recent world-wide torch relay are any indication.

By the time February 2010 rolls around, it’s a certainty that international tensions will be higher, not lower, than already high peaks today, and Canada, recently re-committed by the Conservative government in Ottawa to the NATO occupation of Afghanistan through 2011, will not be immune to security pressures.

The Olympics is strictly a television event if we compare the size of the live audience to the size of the television audience, which will dwarf if by a ratio of something like 10,000 to one. Almost the entire source of revenues for the games is found in television broadcast rights and sponsorship signs placed in view of cameras, with venue tickets chipping in a relative pittance. In this context, the live audience plays the role of props to the sporting action—extras, really—for what is, at 10,000 viewers for every one attendee, strictly a television show.

With all the dignitaries and media getting first dibs on tickets, the proportion of Vancouver citizens who will experience anything live connected to the Olympics will be a similar ratio—something like 10,000 to one. Instead, the vast majority of Vancouverites will experience the Olympics completely from the outside of security perimeter fencing. That is, the Olympics from the point of view of Vancouverites will be experienced only as an overwhelming display of security. There will be a minimum of sport on display, except on television, the way anyone else in the world will see Olympic sport. So far as Vancouverites may be concerned, it is the Vancouver Security Organizing Committee that is making proposals to people like the volunteer Britannia Community Centre board in preparation for the Vancouver 2010 Security Show.

What the proposal brought to Britannia Community Centre really entails is not so much a deal to borrow the ice rink for one month as a deal to establish a very advanced, high-tech and overwhelming security display in and around the community centre, in exchange for constructing separate women’s change rooms in the bowels of the rink.

That was certainly the read by the vast majority of those in the community who showed up to the Monday evening meeting to voice their concerns to the board members who are to vote on the proposal at a May 14 meeting open to the public in the Britannia Community Centre boardroom inside the administration building at 7 PM.

The proposal sounds absurd on the face of it. Why would VANOC even bother asking? Surely they know the history of activism and protest in the neighbourhood and they would have to know the feverish pitch of anti-Olympic sentiment brewing around the community. But then, as one speaker noted, perhaps that’s the point.

For the Olympics is not just the two-week show that happens on television in February 2010. It is a decade-long preparation process that includes real estate deals at a ferocious pace, road and rail and venue construction through zones that would never be allowed under normal, calmly-considered circumstances, and of course there is the ubiquitous security preparations comprising the biggest single expense item in the whole expensive affair.

Protest against the Olympics mars the event for the International Olympic Committee that needs above all to keep demand up among potential host cities for future games—a demand that would fall away if citizens in other cities hear and see too much from protestors in actual host cities.

VANOC has legal obligations to serve the IOC in this regard. For example, VANOC chief John Furlong revealed that it was the IOC’s rules that insisted that publicly-released cost estimates for games preparations borne by the citizens of host cities cannot include allowance for inflation during future years of construction, even though all normal and routine budget plans for all projects public and private include calculations of the future value of today’s dollars over the course of multiyear construction projects. The purpose of this rule can only be to obscure the true costs for cities thinking about making bids to host future Olympic games. The bid committee promised, during the referendum, that the City of Vancouver would incur no direct costs related to the Games. Still two years out, the City is already in for tens of million of dollars.

Perhaps the proposal to use Britannia rink appeals to VANOC because it would help serve obligations to the IOC to minimize any embarrassing scenes of protest against the Olympics in host cities. Establishing a practice venue in Britannia Community Centre would allow security apparatus and personnel to begin moving in close to the very centre of anti-Olympic protest and activism right in Commercial Drive’s own backyard beginning two years ahead of the actual Olympic show.

That’s certainly the suspicion of a great many of the residents of the neighbourhood. Security personnel would, immediately after a positive vote at the Britannia board meeting May 14, 7 PM in the boardroom directly inside the administration building at the end of Napier Street, begin sniffing around the entire neighbourhood to anticipate and imagine what security puzzles they will encounter before and during the Olympic show.

In these days of heightened official alert regarding “troubles” of every kind imaginable, security personnel in the Canadian Army, the RCMP and local police would be appallingly remiss in their duties if they did not constantly visit the site and its surrounding neighbourhood to assess and re-assess every possible risk to every potential visitor associated in any possible way with the games. Security personnel would be grossly negligent if they did not seamlessly slide into the community years ahead of the event to learn whatever they can imagine is possible to learn about who is who and what is being talked about. Can anyone imagine a chief of police leaving himself exposed, in an inquiry after some embarrassing breach of security occurring before a billion-plus television viewers and IOC officials, because No, he chose not to infiltrate the very well-known anti-Olympic activist community directly surrounding an Olympic venue because he wanted to be respectful of local sensibilities? It’s unlikely. Every base will be covered, and part of that base-covering, in this analysis, would be accomplished by establishing an unimportant practice venue cheek-by-jowl to the biggest anti-Olympic activist community to provide cover and pretense for a massive security preparation beginning two years before the big show.

For one question went unasked at the Britannia meeting: how is it VANOC could not count the number of rinks needed for athletes until now? Surely venues would be the first priority early on in the process six or eight years out in case construction is required. Security preparations, on the other hand, would naturally begin about two years out, long after all the venue sites would be established. The VANOC proposal to the Britannia Community Centre could not possibly be about arranging for a practice ice rink venue. VANOC surly knew years ago what it needed by way of ice rinks. What it’s working on now is what is needed by way of security. The proposal is most certainly a security-initiated proposal only masquerading as a venue proposal

Commercial Drive culture is defined by its tradition of protest and activism. Indeed, the Britannia Community Centre sits exactly where it does because it was meant to physically block a 1970s-era proposal to plough a freeway right through the community. Its very architecture says “No!,” thanks to heroes on the initial board.

It would be a recognition and celebration of deeply entrenched community traditions, and a re-affirmation of the very founding principle of the Britannia Community Centre, for the current board to vote a resounding “No” to the VANOC proposal at the meeting May 14 in the boardroom inside the administration building at the end of Napier Street at 7 PM.