Change in Tactics A Threat to 2010

serious threat to 2010 Games: analyst
May 4, 2008
By Stephanie Levitz, The Canadian Press

VANCOUVER - Changing tactics by Canadian activists pose a serious threat to security at the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver, security analysts say.

The usually fragmented, single-issue groups are converging and organizing in ways never seen before in Canada, said Tom Quiggan, a former security consultant with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Where there's usually a lull in protest activity in the years leading up to mega-events like the Olympics, the last year has seen at least 20 violent acts directly connected to the 2010 Games.

"I'm not aware of, nor have I seen in the past, this kind of organization that's that far advanced this far ahead of the actual event," Quiggan said.

"There is some commonality of thinking here between anarchist groups, social activists groups that happen to have a violent agenda and then I see native groups. When you see that kind of convergence coming up, it makes you a little nervous."

The Olympics is a perfect unifier for Canada's disparate activist community, said David Cunningham, the spokesman for the Anti-Poverty Committee, one of Vancouver's leading activist groups.

"Once you have an anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist analysis of the Olympics, you see that . . . this analysis or the targets or the demands are easily incorporated into what you're protesting within your own community," he said.

From Vancouver to Halifax, anti-Olympic slogans are popping up at rallies of all political stripes.

Even among international activists, there's traction for opposition to Vancouver's Games. At a recent convention in Mexico, the famed Zapatista protest group, along with native groups from Central and South America endorsed an anti-Olympic resolution and called for protest.

The Anti-Poverty Committee and other B.C.-based activists now go on speaking tours to drum up support. For example, earlier this year, two First Nations activists went on a three-week speaking tour to underscore their demands.

Though opposition to the Games comes from environmentalists, social rights advocates and taxpayer watchdogs, Cunningham said his hope is that everyone unites under the banner of indigenous rights for the 2010 Games.

Vancouver's Olympic Organizing Committee, known as VANOC, has spent time and money trying to include aboriginal people in the planning and execution of the Games, but there are still some who feel the entire event is illegitimate as it's being held on "stolen land."

Others - including the head of the Assembly of First Nations Phil Fontaine - say native leaders will use the opportunity provided by the Games to focus attention on aboriginal poverty.

Quiggan said Olympic sponsors like the Royal Bank of Canada have particular reason to be concerned about the convergence of activist groups.

Co-operation among various groups has seen RBC banks targeted for anti-Olympic vandalism at least nine times by activists in Vancouver, Ottawa and Victoria, and calls-to-action circulating on the Internet explicitly propose RBC president Gordon Nixon as a target.

RBC declined to be interviewed on its response to being a target of attacks, citing security concerns.

One private security company who has worked with RBC said company officials are well aware of the ongoing threats and are taking extra precautions as a result.

The Anti-Poverty Committee has also explicitly threatened VANOC board members, going so far as to attempt to evict them from their offices and threatening their homes.

Anti-Olympic activists are taking a page from the protest efforts of animal rights groups, said Michel Juneau Katsuya, a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent who now runs a private intelligence firm.

In England and in the U.S., those groups have specifically targeted researchers and executives of companies believed to be harming animals through their use as laboratory subjects.

"That has been a demonstration that there is more and more fringe groups that are starting to make a statement, not with the intent to kill people, but definitely to destabilize certain things," he said.

"The Olympics? That would be like a beautiful platform for them."

Security officials need to be a step ahead of all of them, said Quiggan.

Direct monitoring of these groups is essential to avert potential disaster, he said, and it appears right now that the security infrastructure in Canada is taking its time putting in place preventative measures to protect the Games.

Quiggan said the appointment in October of Ward Elcock, the former director of CSIS, to the post of head of Olympic Security, was a sign that things weren't going well and someone was needed to start moving plans along.

"Two years before, a year-and-a-half before, you shouldn't be planning, you should be doing," he said.

"You should have sources in the field, you should have agents in the field."

But Juneau Katsuya said its likely surveillance is already being carried out on activist groups and though the planning might not be obvious, it's definitely
underway.

The challenge, he said, comes from finding a balance.

"More security increases the budget, rather than better security," he said.

"Better security doesn't equal automatically more money spent."

Cunningham said the change in tactics are a direct response to heavier policing and people are drawn to subversive action out of a feeling that disruption is the only thing that works to effect change.

His group and others, he said, don't plan to stop at the Olympics.

The year 2010 will also see Canada play host to the G8 meetings and the Security and Prosperity Partnership meetings, held between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

Quiggan and Katsuya both said that's all the more reason a cohesive security plan needs to be in place.

"The point is to pre-empt the problem," Quiggan said.