Following the deluge of accolades being given to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, I feel it might be a good idea to reiterate some of the reasons the Olympics were worth critiquing. On Feb 12, 2010, several thousand, old and young, wealthy and impoverished members of the public, took to the streets to protest a variety of issues. Some were focused on the upcoming Olympics due to be held in Sochi, near Chechnya, while others protested issues such as those surrounding native land claims.

Admittedly, I may not be completely representative of the majority of the protesters there that day, in that I was not advocating stopping the games, but rather was protesting a number of worrying aspects of its implementation and wanting to draw attention to how the games should be improved. Given that Vancouver had voted approvingly on hosting the Olympics, and that I do genuinely enjoy Winter sports, I was about as interested as I usually am in the actual events themselves.

Whatever the reasons may have been for other people, these were mine. Some of these concerns turned out to be misplaced and some of these points were considerably reinforced by what actually took place.

1. Barring journalists like Amy Goodman. There were a number of journalists prevented from entering Canada on similar grounds¹ but Amy’s celebrity from her show on National Public Radio made the seriousness of the situation that much more pronounced. “U.S. journalist Amy Goodman said she was stopped at a Canadian border crossing south of Vancouver on Wednesday and questioned for 90 minutes by authorities concerned she was coming to Canada to speak against the Olympics. Goodman says Canadian Border Services Agency officials ultimately allowed her to enter Canada but returned her passport with a document demanding she leave the country within 48 hours.” ²

2. Restrictions on Free-Association and Free-Expression. We were lucky enough that this went largely unenforced, but that was certainly not clear at the outset of the games. The specific language of worry was neatly expressed here: “To meet its contractual obligations, Vancouver’s council recently passed an omnibus bylaw amending dozens of existing laws…Among the changes are the creation of so-called free-speech zones and blocks of the city (including David Lam Park, the main library’s precinct and the Vancouver Art Gallery) where no political pamphlets, leaflets, graffiti or “non-celebratory posters” will be allowed.”³

Another serious point of contention was that only after a “flurry of bad press”⁴ was a relatively banal piece of artwork, featuring frowning Olympic rings, allowed to return to an East Van art gallery. The removal of the artwork raised the real concern that anti-Olympic expression was going to be muzzled, even on private property.

3. Public Surveillance. The prospect of turning Vancouver into a modern Beijing or London, with their unprecedented and unscrupulous public surveillance systems, is not very appealing⁶ (I don’t want to digress too much in explaining my opposition to this, but I do believe surveillance hinders our ability to act naturally, can be a political threat, and is very often misused). Thus, when it was reported⁷ that we would be installing about 1000 cameras around Whistler and Vancouver, I was a little concerned. During the games that it was announced that many of these cameras would become part of some kind of “redeployable unit”⁸…whatever wonderfulness that entails.

4. Inauthentic – “The artist shall at all times refrain from making any negative or derogatory remarks respecting VANOC, the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Olympic movement generally, Bell and/or other sponsors associated with VANOC.” As Canada’s poet laureate Brad Cran notes⁹, a meritable part of Vancouver’s history is its commitment to intellectual freedom: “I do find this to be an unjust attack on free speech but more importantly it shows that VANOC is misrepresenting Vancouver. Vancouver is the most politically progressive city in North America with a strong history of political activism which most Vancouverites are proud of. Rather than finding a way to celebrate these important attributes VANOC has gone the other way and tried to suppress them. As George Woodcock teaches us: our freedom as a city is a tradition that should be protected and we should not underestimate an attack on that freedom whether symbolic or otherwise.”

5. Spending Priorities – I can understand making room for the Olympics in the budget. But why is it acceptable for us to spend so much money¹⁰ on lavish displays for a small sector of elite executives and politicians while continuing cuts to various social welfare programs? “Total bill for Olympic tickets on the taxpayers’ tab: $3.3 million. And the government has still refused to say who’ll get ‘em and which events they’ll attend.”

I learned a lot from these Olympics but that is the subject for another article. There were a number of points that could have been made in addition to these, but I wanted to restrict myself to those points I felt most confident about. Whether or not the money spent on the Olympics could have been better spent elsewhere, whether or not taxpayers will get their money back in tax receipts and some degree of commercial trickle-down, and whether or not native land claims should have taken precedence over the will of the population, are questions I do not feel comfortable answering.

One thing is for sure, I have no regrets about protesting an Olympics that journalists are barred from and enjoying an Olympics that gave me two weeks off work