Olympic Geometry

I’ve been telling people as of late that I’m a Vancouverite in exile. Let’s start there: Flung out to some other empire’s colony—Brazil—to be allowed to return upon the adoption of various axiomatic Vancouver-esque principles, such as, of course, a unilateral distaste for the Olympics. Indeed, my friend Alex Catchpole referred to my lacking such a distaste as being "spoken like a true absentee.” As it stands, I check the Brazilian sports networks daily for some ephemeral signal that they might deign it within their interests to show me—along with millions of other Brazilians who would very possibly be seeing it for the first time—my Olympic hockey. But given that the Olympics are upon us, I feel obliged to break from this semiological archeology into the programming schedule of SporTV Brazil to ask a question. That is, to ask: Why has it become so easy, so realistic, so perfectly in vogue to hate the Olympics?

Now, mind you, I am not asking what specific cost overruns, civil rights abuses, and profiteering has gone on to disenchant my fellow Vancouver countrymen—if you’ll allow an exile such as myself to jest thusly. But rather, what political geometries sprang up to result in these lamentable truisms, in regards to the current state of affairs? “What happened!?” bellows the peanut gallery in anguish, “how did this shit get so fucked up?”

More accurately, I’ve been asking myself a question that might put me out on a very long limb; put me walking the wrong way on a plank. Is it at all possible that the problem with the Olympics is that over the past four years the Campbell government has not so much spent too much money, but, in a cosmically and comically bizarre turn, actually spent too little?

Gordon Campbell was, after all, the one who won the latest election in his introducing legislation to the effect that budgets must be balanced, irrespective of the context in which they are introduced. It was only under the tremendous strain of a global slowdown and cost overruns—presumably caused by his own mismanagement, or at very least the acquiescence to VANOC’s mismanagement—that Campbell admitted that his government would, in fact, be ‘in the red,’ so to speak. This means that what we’re left with is the most pure form of inegalitarian government spending, where those holding the wrong end of the stick have only, at the end of the day, the potential use of some tertiary infrastructure, i.e. the Canada Line. And nothing was done about poverty, homelessness, social services like education and health, not to mention drug usage in the downtown core. And whatever little was being done for the arts community has either been scrapped or pared down to make way for a party that the same arts community is presumably supposed to cater to and put on a show for.

Here’s the rub. Have the political geometries leading up to the Olympics, in fiduciary terms, been a zero-sum game? Was it always the Olympics OR substantive action on these social ills? Hardly! It is precisely Campbell’s reticence to post deficit budgets that has resulted in the dearth of action. His hands were tied by his own vacuous rhetoric, and the people who suffer are two-fold: the citizens of Vancouver who are embarrassed by having had their city snatched out from under them overnight, and the most vulnerable citizens amongst them, forgotten in the mess so that Campbell doesn’t come out looking like a hypocrite.

I’m not going to tell you, as the Olympics are beginning, to enjoy yourself or have a good party, or anything else monstrously out of touch with the reality in Vancouver. That said, however, I implore you to not conflate the Olympics, as such, with the government they occurred under. If these Olympics had come with some realistic and well funded solutions to the real problems in our dear terminal city, then the price-tag would have been even bigger than the monolithic one we’ve got now; but Vancouver would have been the better for it, and there would have been a hell of a lot more smiling faces.

Me, I’ll be down here playing with the dials, hoping the static clears and the games somehow come into view, though I guess that’s what you guys are doing too.