The pressure is on the 2010 Vancouver Organizing Committee after the spectacular opening ceremony in Beijing. Vancouver has to follow that act in just a year and a half. Comparisons will inevitably be made.

But it won’t just be the opening ceremonies that will connect thoughts about Beijing to thoughts about Vancouver. The other two overriding themes of Beijing are human rights and pollution. Let’s see now, anything in those departments anyone might find to allow a parallel to be drawn between Beijing and Vancouver?

No one in Vancouver really thinks to discuss environmental issues in the Olympic context if those issues aren’t in some way directly connected to the Olympics. Critics restrict themselves thus far to only those acts of egregious environmental degradation when they are brought about by the Olympics, like the Sea to Sky Highway and the obliteration of Eagleridge Bluffs. The government only makes its greenwash promises as they relate to the Olympics, like promising these will be the greenest games ever!

But no one extends the courtesy to Beijing. None of the famous pollution there is caused directly by any Olympic preparations. That hasn’t stopped anti-Asian screed writers in the National Post and Vancouver Sun from using the occasion of the 2008 Olympics to criticize all of China, its economy, its politics, its leaders and its history, for every instance and every evidence of pollution of every kind absolutely everywhere in the huge and diverse country.

Well then, Vancouver is hosting the Olympics: that makes the tar sands in Alberta, the single most prolific source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, subject to international condemnation on the occasion of the 2010 opening ceremonies at BC Place, downtown Vancouver, in addition to the belching Dofasco steel plant on the Hamilton, Ontario waterfront, the raw sewage outflow into the harbour in downtown Victoria, BC, and every other instance of corporate and government neglect and abuse of the environment from coast to coast to coast.

When you’re feeling like a summer evening stroll up Commercial Drive, drop in to Abruzzo Café, 1321 Commercial Drive. It’s genuine coffee right in the middle of the stroll, open late every night.

Uranium mining in BC, particulate matter rising up from the Vancouver Port Authority and along truck routes like Clark Drive, and the huge 24-hour-a-day chlorine gas plant on Vancouver’s harbour (yes, that’s mustard gas, and yes, every other city on the continent moved their killer gas plants away from their populations long ago), are all up for curious questioning when the Olympic show comes to the self-proclaimed Best Place on Earth . . . unless we’re going to say it’s fair to criticize every aspect of China’s environmental stewardship while the Olympics is in Beijing but unfair to look at any aspect of Canada’s environmental stewardship while the Olympics is in Vancouver.

Now let’s look at human rights. On the occasion of Beijing hosting the Olympics, it has apparently been found as fair game to seriously question, to even seriously suggest boycotting the Beijing games, in response to the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, the politics of the Tibet situation, the treatment in China of criminals, the response of the Chinese government to the recent earthquake disaster in Sechuan, and the general lack of press freedoms and electoral democracy in the country, not to mention the stirring display of security surrounding the city and games venues themselves. Fair enough.

So then, is there any grounds for rejecting the validity of criticisms of human rights in Canada when the Olympics come to Vancouver? Lord knows we have a shameful record too, and not all of it is buried safely in history. The very next stop on the road past Whistler brings one to one of the most impoverished Indian reservations in the country, a place where humans are living with dirt floors and suffering malnutrition, and have been for a long time with no visible mitigating effect from any level of government.

How does the central Chinese government’s plot to settle Han Chinese in Tibet to diffuse the ethnic solidity of the region differ from over a century of ongoing Canadian government efforts to do exactly the same thing with aboriginal communities across the country? How do the poor in China fare compared to the poor in Canada? There is nothing in China that looks like Hastings Street East in Vancouver, this scene being but a five minute walk from the future opening ceremonies at BC Place.

How does Matsqui prison with its annual riots resulting from overcrowding and desperate conditions compare to prisons holding criminals in China? How does the monopoly in the press held by CanWest Global compare in effects to the lack of press freedom in China? It’s a different dynamic, but the effect is what counts, and there is no question but that a highly crafted selection of news stories and the class perspectives they are given in make Canadian media, and media in Vancouver in particular, almost as weak in terms of public service as any in China.

Finally, how does Canada, and in particular, Vancouver, measure up against China when it comes to one of the most basic of human rights, the one that lies at the root of so many others: housing? With upwards of 2,000 living on the streets in Vancouver alone, and possibly a whole lot more, it is only fair to say Canada and Vancouver have utterly failed to deliver basic human rights to an entire class of citizens no less than the Chinese have.

But wait, there’s more!

Doesn’t condemnation of Chinese treatment of separatist Uighurs in Xinjiang bear comparison to Canada’s implied condoning of torture of child war victims (in the case of Omar Kadr, for example)? Oh wait, hang on, nobody in the West including our leaders and our corporate media has said a thing about China’s treatment of separatist Uighurs, utterly deplorable though it is, and why is that? While China’s treatment of separatist Tibetans and China’s silence in the Sudanese civil war and other places Chinese corporations have investments comes in for stern condemnation, the situation in Xinjiang involves Muslims, which makes them terrorists, and therefore fair game for China since Canada is also presently involved in fighting in a foreign civil war on behalf of vicious warlords and against anti-colonial nationalists who happen to be Muslim too, and so terrorist, and so fair game.

The instances of Canadian owned or based mining and other resource-extraction companies that enjoy the blessings and the subsidized marketing and trade relations-help of Canadian ministries like Foreign Affairs and Industry Canada is too long to list here. These companies exploit non-existent or un-enforced environmental rules that would land the executives in jail here if they did the same work here, not to mention the cases of sheer abuse of human rights, land rights and the undermining of moral standards our own companies daily practice. All of those ought to be held up for examination if Chinese government blessing of Chinese-based companies in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa is worthy of harsh comment in our media during the Beijing Olympics.

Look how our corporate media pundits tsk tsk the controlled Chinese media for not reporting to their very own citizens the environmental conditions and human rights violations taking place in their very own country. Now look for stories in CanWest media properties that report to Canadians the environmental conditions and human rights violations taking place in our very own country. The only difference between the two is, the government in China imposes controls to limit what the citizens learn about, while in Canada, the government doesn’t have to, the corporate media provides the same control of information on itself. There certainly won’t be any mention of environmental degradation across the country or human rights violations by Canada’s governments at any level of jurisdiction during the Olympics in 2010.

So fear not, Vanoc. You’ll follow the whole Beijing show very well and will meet the high standards they have set quite easily.