Anti-Olympic Protesters Get Their Game On

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Anti+Olympic+protesters+their+game/...

By DOUG WARD, Vancouver Sun, January 29, 2010

VANCOUVER -- Anarchist punk ruled on the night of Jan. 22 at Victory
Square, in the heart of the Olympic city. More than 200 anti-2010
protesters, some carrying black flags and burning torches, gathered for
what had all the hallmarks of a dress rehearsal for the street protests
that could erupt during the Winter Games just over two weeks away.

The crowd, mostly young, some wearing bandanas over their faces, had come
to march against the "police repression" of anti-Olympic activism. A
portable audio system jacked up the energy level with the opening chords
of the Rolling Stones' Street Fighting Man. "Everywhere I hear the sound
of marching, charging feet, boy," howled Mick Jagger.

A few protesters with megaphones screamed slogans, often laced with
obscenity, at startled motorists: "No 2010!" and "Did You Vote For Gordon
Campbell?"

The small but angry far-left demo recalled the much larger
anti-globalization demonstrations of a decade ago: the APEC protest and
the Riot at the Hyatt in Vancouver, the epic Battle in Seattle against the
World Trade Organization and the violent clash between demonstrators at
the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City.

Many alumni of those so-called anti-globalization convergences were in the
crowd, along with younger activists seeking to emulate their radical
forebears.

Among the veterans of those earlier protests was Alissa Westergard-Thorpe,
an indefatigable anti-Olympic activist and a student at the University of
B.C.

Now 35, Westergard-Thorpe is a key figure in the militant Olympic
Resistance Network (ORN), perhaps the most radical of the anti-Olympic
groups behind the "Take Back Our City" march from the Vancouver Art
Gallery to BC Place Stadium, set for the afternoon of Feb. 12, when tens
of thousands of people will be arriving at the stadium for the Olympic
Games opening ceremonies.

"I hope it does go down like APEC," said Westergard-Thorpe, who was
pepper-sprayed, strip-searched and arrested by police at that protest.

"I hope it does look like when Jean Chretien used to come to the Hyatt and
we used to have thousands of people out in the street."

Westergard-Thorpe added that the Feb. 12 marchers should be able to
proceed toward BC Place as far as any non-ticket member of the public can
get.

Whether any protesters would try to breach the security fences, she said:
"That really depends on what type of police repression we face during the
day. You know if we have a day where we're being beaten back by the police
when you're simply trying to march, people's tempers can get high."

A 'mega-industry event'

As to whether she's hoping a disruption of traffic heading to BC Place
might affect the opening ceremonies, set to be watched by millions of
people around the world, Westergard-Thorpe said: "Absolutely, I would love
to disrupt the opening ceremonies."

Westergard-Thorpe said sports should not be immune to politics.

"I'm not anti-sport. But I am against the idea that sporting events like
this, which are really mega-industry events, are somehow separate from
political events and they're not."

The names, faces and views of ORN members are familiar to police, who've
visited many of the activists in recent months.

Staff Sgt. Mike Cote of the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit said
security officials are concerned about the threat of disruption on the
night of the opening ceremonies, but that the protest will be allowed to
proceed so long as it is lawful.

"The ISU has no issue with protest as long as the protesters don't
interfere with our security perimeter or with the rights of other people,"
said Cote. "And we have no reason to believe that the planned protest will
not respect the laws in place in Vancouver."

Cote said there may not be vehicles to disrupt because traffic will be
limited in the zone around BC Place, with little parking available in the
adjacent area — "in fact, it will be non-existent."

The ISU media official said the final leg of the Olympic torch relay will
be organized to ensure there is no disruption. "We have the capability of
changing the relay route and upgrading or downgrading security at a
moment's notice so it's really a call made on the ground."

ORN members said the protest size should be more than double the 400
demonstrators who disrupted the torch relay in October in Victoria. The
protesters created havoc in the capital city's downtown for three hours,
forcing relay organizers to move the torch by van to avoid the protesters.

Vanoc declined to comment on the proposed protest marches during the
Olympics, citing its blanket policy that it respects "every citizen's
right to freedom of expression as protected by Canadian law" and noting
its security partners will "ensure peaceful, lawful and safe public
demonstrations can occur outside of the venues in plain sight of the media
and the public."

The "Take Back the City" march is being organized by the ironically named
2010 Welcoming Committee, whose endorsers include the Workers Communist
party of Iran, the East Van Abolitionists and the Vandu Womyn's Group.
2010 Welcoming Committee spokesman Bob Ages of the Council of Canadians
predicted the demonstration will stay within the limits of the law. "It's
going to be very large and from our perspective it will be peaceful —
there's no reason for it not to be," said Ages, who has had discussions
with the Vancouver police department about the march.

But Ages' Council of Canadians is a middle-class, milquetoast group
compared to ORN and its younger activists.

Despite its small size, the far-left ORN will be the most visible because
the mainstream left, including the NDP and the labour movement, has mostly
been supportive of the Olympics.

ORN is an umbrella organization for groups like the Anti-Poverty
Committee, StopWar.ca, the Work Less Party and the Native Youth Movement.
Ages acknowledged that ORN members may not follow the game plan.

"We have in the movement what I call a diversity of tactics. Some people
have different ideas about the most effective way of getting their message
across."

Westergard-Thorpe and ORN want the protests to become as much a part of
the 2010 story as the gold-medal quests of downhiller Manny
Osborne-Paradis or the Canadian hockey teams.

ORN is holding a two-day summit in east Vancouver with various seminars on
the evils of capitalism and the Olympics. They are planning "days of
action," beginning on the first day of Olympic competitions, Feb. 13,
against Olympic corporate sponsors. (ORN members have defended the use of
vandalism, even arson, to target corporate Olympic sponsors.) They are
also participating in the annual Women's Memorial March, through the
Downtown Eastside, to remember women murdered or missing in B.C.

While most Canadians think the Olympics are about striving for athletic
excellence, most of these protesters believe the 2010 Games are just
another "capitalist circus" not unlike the WTO or the G8 Summits.

Many of them are anti-poverty activists who believe that the Olympic Games
have accelerated gentrification and homelessness in the Downtown Eastside.
They fault Vanoc and the provincial government for failing to deliver on
earlier promises to sharply increase social housing in the area.

Some have attacked the Olympics for damaging the environment, citing the
destruction of the Eagleridge Bluffs in West Vancouver by the widening of
the Sea to Sky Highway. Others say the Olympics are less about sports than
promoting the interests of local developers and the marketing strategies
of corporate sponsors like the Royal Bank of Canada, Coca-Cola, McDonald's
and The Bay.

Finally, the ORN protesters say repeatedly that the Olympics are being
held on unceded native land because the vast majority of first nations in
B.C. do not have land claims treaties. The activists heap scorn on the
chiefs and councils of the Lil'wat, Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh
First Nations for becoming official hosts of the games. They call Phil
Fontaine, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, a
"collaborator" for taking a new job with RBC and promoting its sponsorship
of the Olympic torch relay.

Grand Chief Tewanee Joseph, executive director of the Four Host Nations,
dismisses claims the councils are selling out to the Games, noting the $57
million and 2,000 jobs brought to the aboriginal community as a result of
the Olympics wouldn't have materialized otherwise. The Olympics are also
an opportunity to share Canada's first nation stories, successes and
culture with the world, he said, as well as educate the world about native
poverty, suicide rates and land claims through education.

"Everyone has a right to voice their opinions. These are our lands and the
Games are on our traditional territories but we don't need them to speak
for us," he said of the protesters.

"We're a full partner and we're a proud partner; indigenous people have
never been part of the Games before. We never want to be on the outside
looking in. If we didn't do it somebody else would have stepped in and
told our stories for us."

APEC remembered

Robert Diab, a lawyer who teaches legal studies at Capilano College, said
it's unclear whether the police have learned lessons from APEC or the Riot
at the Hyatt, two demonstrations where protesters were injured by the
police.

Diab said the long-running uncertainty in recent years over protest zones
during the Olympics could prompt some activists to see how far they can
go. "It seems obvious that all of the anxiety around security and civil
liberties at the Olympics may well become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There is so much tension over whether rights will be limited that we may
see protesters trying to test the limits in a way they might ordinarily
not be inclined to do."

To the protesters who turned out a week ago at Victory Square, the
Olympics are too good an opportunity not to exploit.

A young woman in a hoodie took a megaphone and said: "They say the
Olympics are coming in February. But we've been living in it for the last
five years. And now we're in the thick of it: a s—t sandwich with no
bread."

She passed the megaphone to a male comrade who raged that "these pigs
would like to see the last breath of sanity choked out of this world. To
me capitalism is exploitation and the state a murderer." Someone offered
up a pro forma "right on!"

Local activist groups have been talking about disrupting the 2010 Games
for years now.

They've put the word out to other anti-capitalist activists around North
America to converge on Vancouver during the Olympics. And over the past
few years, members of ORN have tried to muck up Olympic public events,
forcing Vanoc to stop staging large Olympic-fever rallies in downtown
Vancouver.

"If people have political issues, the Olympics is a way to get your issues
through the media to the forefront," said Westergard-Thorpe, adding that
ORN wants to illuminate the real Vancouver for the international media. "I
don't want them to see a sanitized, corporatized image given to them. I
want them to see what Vancouver is really about, which is poverty,
environmental destruction and a crackdown on civil liberties."

A protest veteran

Chris Shaw, perhaps the best-known of the city's anti-Olympic protesters,
also marched on Friday night as a medic, ready to help any protester
injured in any confrontation with the police. He too is a veteran of
earlier anti-globalization protests — "APEC sparked my interest and
Seattle cemented it" — but he's not out of central casting.

At 59, he's older than most anti-Olympic activists. He's also a top
medical researcher at Vancouver General Hospital, managing research
projects into Parkinson's Disease and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

Shaw was a key organizer of the No side in the 2003 plebiscite on the
Olympics in Vancouver, which was won by the Yes side with 63 per cent of
the vote.

As Shaw recounted in his book, Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of
the Olympic Games, he became interested in the 2010 Olympics while driving
back to Vancouver from a protest at the 2002 G8 Summit in Kananaskis,
Alberta. He and his friends saw an article in a newspaper on the floor of
their car about how Vancouver was hoping to get on the shortlist of cities
bidding for the 2010 Games. Shaw and his friends discussed whether the
Olympics was similar to the globalization phenomenon they had been
opposing in Kananaskis.

"If so, maybe exposing it could be our 'wedge' issue, one that we could
use to broach the flaws of globalization to an apathetic or uninformed
audience," wrote Shaw in his book.

Shaw said he doesn't want to see any violence at the Feb. 12 march on BC
Place. Shaw is the medical response coordinator for the protest.

"I would like to see a lot of people on the street, demonstrating and
talking to people. I would like to see the embarrassment that a
demonstration during the Olympics might bring to different levels of
government. It might force them to deal with issues they've neglected. And
if it was the start of a re-establishment of an anti-globalization
movement, that would be icing on the cake."

Shaw is among several anti-Olympic critics who have attracted the
attention of the ISU.

The police have visited the homes — and sometimes the workplaces and
friends — of activists. So far there have been no pre-emptive arrests and
the police have long dropped their earlier attempt to limit protest to
safe assembly areas. They agree now that the whole city — at least the
area outside security perimeters around Olympic venues — is a free-speech
zone.

Nevertheless, the police visits are viewed by the protesters as a tactic
of intimidation and further proof that the Olympics has undermined civil
liberties. To that end, the rally on Friday night was called Struggle
Against Police Repression and organized by the 12th and Clark Collective,
which sounds like your basic off-Commercial Drive activist communal house.
The march headed down Hastings Street, disrupting eastbound traffic.

As it passed the new Woodward's redevelopment, there was a sense of life
imitating art. The scene was strikingly similar to the massive photograph
mural hanging inside the atrium of Woodward's — Stan Douglas's Abbott &
Cordova, which depicts a scene from the 1971 Gastown Riot.

Only in Douglas's hyper-real tableau, the police are chasing protesters on
horses. On Friday night, policemen on mountain bikes accompanied the march
along Hastings and did nothing to stop its progress.

The new Woodward's was also a reminder that the anti-Olympic protesters
tactic of direct action — or "vulgar activism" as APC member David
Cunningham once described it — can be effective.

Many credit the 2002 Woodsquat occupation of the old vacant Woodward's
building for raising the issue of homelessness and setting in motion the
eventual redevelopment of the landmark department store building.

This is one of the arguments for confronting the Olympics put forward by
Gord Hill, a 41-year-old aboriginal activist, originally from near Alert
Bay. Hill is another veteran of earlier anti-globalization protests who
marched on Friday night and plans to join the Feb. 12 march on the Olympic
opening ceremonies. He was arrested for disrupting the unveiling of the
Olympic countdown clock three years ago and has been visited several times
recently by police officers from the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security
Unit.

He said the intersection of the Feb. 12 march and the Olympic opening
ceremonies is a "vulnerable point" for Olympic security officials. "We're
going to disrupt the traffic flow for sure. I mean you can't have hundreds
of people walking through the street and not disrupt the traffic."

He came up with the anti-Olympic movement's slogan of "No 2010 Olympics On
Stolen Native Land."

Hill acknowledged that the public sees the Olympics as a "benign sporting
event ... But when you scratch the surface you see what a putrid,
disgusting thing it is."

Hill has discussed on his No2010.com website why anti-Olympic groups are
willing to vandalize businesses. "Groups that carry out militant direct
action are just one part of the anti-Olympics movement. Most do not carry
out vandalism or arson. Those that do have targeted corporate sponsors of
the Olympics as a form of sabotage (along with police & military targets).
This can increase the costs for corporations seeking to profit from the
Games, and could potentially deter some corporate investment. All militant
direct actions that have occurred have consisted of property damage and no
person has been injured as a result."

Border issues

Also at the Friday march was Harsha Walia, project manager at the Downtown
Eastside Women's Centre and a regular participant in anti-Olympic events.
Walia, who also marched in Seattle against the WTO, said it's unclear how
many Americans will attend the anti-Olympic events. She expects that
Canada Border Services Agency will do its best to prevent activists from
crossing the border. She noted how the CBA stopped American journalist Amy
Goodman at the border and questioned her for 90 minutes about whether she
was coming to Canada to speak against the Olympics. American border
officials have similarly tried to stop recruitment of American activists,
added Walia, noting that B.C. Olympic critic Marla Renn was denied entry
at the border, preventing her from speaking about the Olympics to college
students in Oregon.

Both the Canadian and American border services say it will be business as
usual during the Olympics and there are no plans to increase security
measures to red-flag suspected protesters heading across the border.

Faith St. John, spokeswoman for Canada Border Services, was tight-lipped
about how CBSA would deal with suspected protesters, saying only that
Canadian admissions requirements will not change and individual travellers
may be subject to more "in-depth examinations" on a case-by-case basis.

The Friday march concluded peacefully at Thornton Park in front of the
Pacific Central Station. No laws were broken, traffic disruption was
minimal and a smiling policeman was satisfied enough to quip that he
thought the demonstrators' torches "were a nice touch."

Don't bet on the police being as complimentary during the direct action
protests promised by ORN members during the Olympic period.

"The general goal is to disrupt the Olympics," said ORN's Hill, "and to
send a clear message to the International Olympic Committee, Vanoc and
other Olympic host cities that holding the Olympics can bring you this
type of resistance."

With files from Kelly Sinoski