Kelowna.com - Kelowna. Right Now!

By Adrian Nieoczym

I have to admit, when the Winter Olympic Games finally get going in Vancouver and on my television set in less than two weeks, I’m going to go from cranky critic to emotional fan whose mood is intimately tied to the triumphs and heartbreaks of the Canadian team.

I can’t help it. When it comes to the Olympics, I inevitably get sucked in by the spectacle and somehow, because the athletes have my country’s flag on their uniforms, I end up feeling strangely attached to them.

The Games seem to fulfill some primal need to divide into groups and battle for supremacy. I mean, it feels really good to watch our women and men beat folks from other countries, especially when the vanquished are our more brash cousins to the south.

So if as expected, Canada has a successful run on the ice and snow later this month, a wave of national pride will likely buoy Canadians’ spirits, making life generally more pleasant for a few weeks, provided of course you don’t live anywhere near where the events are actually taking place.

But the Games aren’t on yet and so I’m still cranky about them and my guess is I’ll be even crankier about them once they’re done.

First off there is the cost. Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer has pointed that when Vancouver and Whistler were awarded the games, VANOC and government officials predicted the Games would likely make about $200 million and in a disaster situation might stand to lose $100 million.

There was one caveat however. The calculations didn’t take the unknown security costs into account, which are now likely in the $1 billion range.

But security wasn’t the only cost to soar. In 2009, Palmer conservatively put the Olympic tab at between $6 billion and $7 billion and running. Where it stops, nobody knows.

If, when the government put together its bid for the Games in the early 2000s, it had said to British Columbians, ‘hey, we have over $6 billion to spend on a massive public spending program,’ and we’d had a rational conversation about it, I’m not sure we’d have concluded that hosting the Olympics was the way to get the best return on our investment.

Consider a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report which found that between 2003 and 2008, Olympic related projects were responsible for only creating between 25 and 100 jobs and economic growth of about one-tenth of one per cent. That’s not good at all.

Then there’s all the nastiness that goes on to protect the Olympic brand. For example, VANOC tried to get Vancouver’s 15-year-old Olympic Pizza to changing its name and logo while the Canadian Olympic Committee got into a trademark tussle with the Canadian Congenital Heart Alliance.

But even that pales to the violations of individual civil rights. Police have infiltrated anti-Olympic groups and gone to the point where at least one undercover cop drove a bus taking protesters to a torch relay event. People visited by police include a 73-year-old Surrey man who wrote a letter to VANOC and friends of university professor and Olympic critic Chris Shaw.

Undercover police in Whistler have even approached Whistler residents to interrogate them about their Olympic views.

Vancouver city council meanwhile, passed a bylaw giving police the power to remove signs from private property, including people’s homes. While public outcry forced officials to back down a little bit, even the compromise is offensive.

The core values of the Olympic movement are supposed to be excellence, friendship and respect. It seems to me we’re not living up to them.

adrian@kelowna.com

250-575-3517

Tags: anti-Olympics, civil rights, costs, Olympics

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Adrian Nieoczym. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.