Source: Politics<\/p>\n
VANCOUVER \u2014 On the opening day of the 2010 Winter Olympics, protesters marched to BC Place, the culmination of a decade-long tug-of-war over whether Vancouver had room for a global sports mega-event. Activists first tried to block the Olympics from coming to town, then tried to use it to extract social commitments from organizers, and finally to shame anyone involved.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, when Canada was preparing to play the most important match in the country\u2019s soccer history, the streets around BC Place appeared to be free of protesters, filled only with gleeful fans swathed in patriotic red and the occasional dishdasha preferred by the Qatar Football Association\u2019s traveling contingent.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s kind of a nothing-burger,\u201d observed Am Johal, who as the chair of the Impact on Communities Coalition had been a leader<\/a> of the city\u2019s anti-Olympics movement, hours before kickoff on the World Cup\u2019s second match day.<\/p>\n Johal was walking through the Downtown Eastside, a scruffy neighborhood that had been the site of the greatest pre-Olympic friction, along the lines of conflict that define the modern North American city \u2014 between new transplants and existing residents, tourists and locals, police and civil-rights activists, global capital and local resistance.<\/p>\n Now, however, Johal was carrying a fiscal conservative\u2019s laments rather than those of the community organizer. Canada\u2019s governments were projected to spend over $1 billion to host World Cup matches in Vancouver and Toronto, with a roughly even split between funds<\/a> coming from the federal budget as opposed to provincial and local ones. More than 70 percent of voters in both cities told pollster Angus Reid<\/a> that it was not worth the public cost.<\/p>\n \u201cI think if the government is looking to spend a billion of public funding related to economic and social benefit, it should really do a proper opportunity cost,\u201d said Johal. \u201cIf there’s a massive public subsidy being done to groups that are unaccountable to the broader city \u2014 if these things are going to go ahead \u2014 why is public money going into them?\u201d<\/p>\n Those were arguments Johal made when Vancouver voters were asked in November 2002 to weigh in on the merits of an Olympic bid. Almost two-thirds of those casting ballots in the municipal plebiscite voted to proceed. But over the course of the decade, as the games grew near, the coalition of skeptics appeared to grow<\/a>. (The Vancouver Sun dismissed them as \u201cwhiners and grumble-bunnies.\u201d)<\/p>\n There were anti-gentrification activists who feared that an Olympic Village and other new developments would price out renters and displace property owners. Anti-consumerist radicals, many with ties to the Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters, saw it as a corporate spectacle. Civil libertarians anticipated heavy-handed police measures to clear streets of the homeless and drug users. (Vancouver is home to North America\u2019s first supervised injection facility<\/a>.) Environmental activists and tribal groups, who hold disproportionate sway in British Columbia\u2019s politics, sought to protect what they said was unceded aboriginal land.<\/p>\n As the anti-Olympic coalition grew, it split along the lines that often fracture protest moments. Johal\u2019s community coalition sought to extract 37 specific policy commitments to ensure what one City Council resolution<\/a> described as a \u201ctransparent, inclusive and socially sustainable\u201d games.<\/p>\n The Anti-Poverty Committee took a more militant approach, threatening to \u201cevict\u201d members of the local Olympics organizing committee from their homes, attacking branches of games sponsor Royal Bank of Canada with rocks, and vandalizing the office of British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell<\/a>, a leading Olympic booster. The militants also took aim at those on their own side, even if more playfully: David Eby, who as executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association had been the anti-Olympics\u2019 movement most prominent spokesman, received a pie to the face<\/a> after arguing for non-violence at a community meeting.<\/p>\n Despite the irreconcilable \u201cdiversity of tactics,\u201d as activists politely described it, the rebellion attracted notice beyond Vancouver, inspiring a new era of local resistance to global mega-events. Veterans of the Vancouver campaign shared lessons with activists in Boston, who in 2015 forced then-Mayor Tom Menino to withdraw plans to bid for the 2024 Summer Games due to civic opposition. Two European cities, Hamburg and Budapest, subsequently killed their bids once voters expressed their disapproval in referenda. The NOlympics LA movement, currently attempting to rally political opposition to the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, draws from the lessons of Vancouver<\/a>.<\/p>\n Evidence of that legacy has been scarce on the streets of Vancouver this month, even after the city enacted \u201cFIFA Bylaws\u201d<\/a> designed to give police specific tools to use against street vendors and buskers and remove advertising that interferes with the World Cup sponsorship deals. The Pivot Legal Society deployed crews of \u201clegal observers<\/a>\u201d who chased law-enforcement officials through the Downtown Eastside, and activists shared Vancouver Police Department press releases boasting of new drone surveillance<\/a> capacities.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are always moments where policing gets new tactics and technologies,\u201d observed Johal, \u201cand they oftentimes get deployed during mega events as a way of moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n But the Downtown Eastside did not feel like a neighborhood under siege, as it had in 2010. Even if it competes with the Olympics in cultural and geopolitical salience, the World Cup is a more logistically diffuse experience. Rather than being consolidated within a single metropolitan area for two jam-packed weeks, this year\u2019s World Cup lasts for more than five weeks and is spread across 16 cities in three countries.<\/p>\n In 2022, the same year that Vancouver offered itself up to host World Cup matches<\/a>, Eby was elected British Columbia\u2019s premier. Now instead of using his words to inspire the activists who massed outside BC Place, he was inside. Inside a luxury box, Eby greeted sports executives who lobbied him<\/a> to make a new commitment to the Vancouver Whitecaps franchise that joined Major League Soccer the year after the Olympics. (Eby\u2019s office did not make him available for an interview.)<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re so excited to be hosting,\u201d Eby said in one social-media video<\/a>. \u201cAnd we\u2019re so excited to have a win under our belts.\u201d<\/p>\n