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I have to admit it, the Olympics are truly awe inspiring. They really are a testament to the human spirit and what people are capable of when they set their differences aside and work together in pursuit of a common dream.
Pursuing dreams, after all, is what we are constantly told the Olympics are all about.
Consider that the 2010 Vancouver Games which kick off at the end of this week, first started out in the 1990s as the brain child of an NDP government headed by Mike Harcourt.
But alas, the Olympic dream was not enough to save the NDP from the wrath of B.C. voters, who in 2001 blasted the party out of office.
Once Premier Gordon Campbell and his band of Liberals took over, they peeked inside the province’s books and immediately sounded the alarm. We were teetering on the edge of financial ruin they declared and then promptly prescribed a painful austerity plan.
They swung the budget axe with grit and determination. Hospitals and schools were closed. Government services were slashed and public servants laid off. Thousands of people were thrown off welfare and those who remained on the rolls had their rates cut.
Unemployment, poverty and homelessness increased. People took to the streets.
The cuts were necessary the government argued, to right a fiscal ship that had been allowed to drift dangerously off course.
But there was one dream the Liberals thought worth keeping alive: Bidding for the 2010 Winter Olympics. In fact, they thought the idea was so good and so important that despite the dire economic times, the Liberals decided no expense should be spared in pursuit of this now bipartisan fantasy.
And so, the cost of just bidding on the Games was allowed to go from about $23 million to $35 million, a pull-out-all-the-stops approach which clearly paid off.
As for staging the Games themselves, this province and this country have demonstrated an ability to move heaven and earth to ensure fulfilment of our Olympic ambitions.
When the International Olympic Committee expressed worry about the Sea-to-Sky Highway connecting Vancouver and Whistler or the lack of a rail connection between the airport and downtown Vancouver, we simply marshalled our best engineering minds and billions of dollars to take care of those little irritants. We were so happy to do it, we didn’t even bother to count them as Olympic-related expenses.
And now that the Games are here, with so much at stake, there’s no way we can allow terrorists -or even homegrown protestors exercising their democratic rights for that matter- to spoil our dream, even if it means letting a security budget originally pegged at $175 million to balloon to over $900 million.
Even the Lower Mainland’s notoriously mild wet weather, made milder and wetter by climate change, can’t stand in the way of this dream. If Cypress Mountain doesn’t have any snow, no problem, we’ll just bring it in by truck and helicopter from a spot off the Coquihalla Highway 200 kilometres away. Never mind the cost on that right now. We’ll spend whatever it takes and add up the bills later.
When it comes to the Olympics, clearly there is no obstacle too tall and no price tag too large. We are doing so much it is an awesome sight to behold. It makes me wonder what else we’re capable of.
The Games have me thinking about other dreams for this province, of a British Columbia that no longer has the highest rates of child poverty in the country, where everyone gets to go to sleep with a safe roof over their head, where every child gets the support they need to succeed in school and where no one, no matter their income level, has to put their life on hold while they wait six months for a surgery date.
And if our leaders tell us we just can’t do it, the job is too big, or heaven forbid, too expensive, we just point to the Olympics and say, “we know it’s possible to make dreams come true.”
adrian@kelowna.com
250-575-3517
One Response to “Adrian Nieoczym: The Olympics show us what we’re capable of”
Tags: 2010 Winter Games, costs, Olympics
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It’s possible to make Gordon Campbell’s dreams come true, dreams of lovely photo-ops with high profile athletes, for the rest of us, not so much.
I dream of a day there isn’t a waiting list of two years for an MRI, or three years to get admission to the St.Paul’s Hospital pain clinic. Another dream would be working equipment for the staff at the Province’s hospitals, not
the fancy stuff, just sphygmomanometers and thermometers.
But I guess we’ll just have to wait until a politician has the same dream.
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