I am a pragmatist. I am not a Gordon Campbell-hater. He’s done some things I strongly supported, like crushing a rather frivolous teachers strike and saving money while he did it, and he made some harsh but fiscally necessary decisions in respects to health care. I have parted ways with him, however, over the HST debacle which some people still don’t see gives increased borrowing power to successive provincial governments via the de-facto 7% they will extract from each home sale, and be able to hold and invest for a fiscal year (in some cases a tad more) until they are obligated to turn this GST over to the Feds. “What” you may ask “will be the incentive to reduce PST in BC if they are already doing short term investing with GST from the same transactions?” Well anyway…

I am also not an Olympic hater. Not to say that I like them either. I really do not care about what kind of ball or rubber cookie young people from the lower classes are going to chase about on ice or grass or snow for the amusement of the bored and easily amused Euro-American middle class. I with only one exception I will expound on later, will not watch a single minute of the games, successful or otherwise, because I do not feel them any more relevant than the colors of Elizabeth May’s sweaters. Generally speaking, unless strong moral obligations present themselves, I am a fiscal conservative. So if the Olympics irritate a few Birkenstock-clad dreadlocked hippies, I really don’t care, but if they are going to bleed the province of what is ultimately my money, or infringe on the rights and freedoms of BC residents, then I am going to take serious issue with them. So, unlike the Olympics of 76 or 88, though perhaps because I have not really cared to look into these, I do take issue with the 2010 games.

Lets talk money and lets talk obvious figures. VANOC and the province have put forth expected revenues and investments at a figure of around 10 Billion. Currently, the Price Waterhouse Cooper Report, which was commissioned by the province, (a good firm to choose by the way as they assessed the impact of the Olympics before in Australia and elsewhere) has put the current figure at around a billion. This is considerably short of the 10 billion expected, even if you factor in the job creation and the estimated 800 small businesses that were created in response to Olympic needs (most of which will be gone by next year).

No matter how Price Waterhouse Coopers wants to cut the pie, plain reading their text shows that the billion made thus far has to be stricken off the books as doing worse than breaking even. Why you ask – well because the province is grossly in debt and has to incur a cost of one billion dollars (most of which it must borrow at interest) to provide security for the games – that’s right a billion! “Why a billion?” you ask. Well that is because we chose to hire the RCMP and they are basically a for-contract company anyway. Why couldn’t the province request a few battalions from our many undeployed navy, army and air force members and reservists who are being paid anyway and just give them more snazzy uniforms to make them publically palatable? Oh yeah that whole stupid Constitution Act of 1867 thing. The province would have to pay for them and reimburse the feds. They didn’t want to do this. From what I gather though, they didn’t even investigate the cost. Note to self however, a Private’s salary is a lot less than an RCMP collecting overtime. But anyway a billion it shall be – profits go where? – from taxpayer to police. This I don’t like.

Then there is the 600 million and rising costs (borrowed money remember) of the Sea to Sky Highway expansion.  Yes for an estimated additional 60 thousand cars (though I doubt that they will really get this) the province spent a thousand dollars per car simply to get people to watch the games live. Do they really think that the average car is going to bring a thousand dollars of revenue to Whistler just to watch the games when driving home at the end of the day to avoid hotel costs and packing a lunch are all that much cheaper? Apparently not! What could they have done with 600 million? Well they could have built more city parking and bought brand new buses to shuttle people to and from the Olympics while restricting the highway use to games and necessary transport for a week. Then they could take those used buses and sent them to the rural communities that have been lobbying the Legislature for the last decade for increased public transportation. My two-birds-with-one-stone plus the projected revenues off the buses for their period of use seems at least minimally sensible! Nope – didn’t even think of that. Not a word of such thought even appears in the Hansard, which means that the NDP weren’t thinking intelligently as an opposition party either (though they seldom do).

Finally there is the Olympic Village, which the city of Vancouver had to assume liability for when that went grossly over budget. And then there have been all the facility upgrades that were carried by Vancouver taxpayers. Gee, with all this debt will there be any incentive by Vancouver to counter the inflation bubble on homes? With those potential liabilities – no there will not. And now you see the true value of the games – indebting the city and the province to reduce incentives to have housing cost (and thus reduce property taxes) to meet actual instead of projected values.  With the province’s investors strained to recover on risky investments, those who have paid too much for the often poorly constructed, but mansion-like homes they now find themselves living in, can protect themselves from future market correction simply by driving up all home costs and keeping regular consumers from invading their market with fair land prices. Who does that benefit I wonder? I actually don’t wonder. It obviously benefits the 10 percent of Vancouverites who have invested heavily in overpriced homes whose portfolios would be shattered by a proper market correction. It doesn’t benefit the big banks, or the little ones, it doesn’t really benefit government but it does benefit large estate-holders and such types who, incidentally, often reside in North Vancouver – the same people who now have their own private monopoly in all of this. Trust me, this is so. If this were a longer article I would take the time to demonstrate the math, relevant tax and land laws, and accounting tricks. Since this is basically “cliff notes”, I leave this self study to the reader.

An interlude on death and the only thing that is awesome about these Olympics. Death… luge… well… stuff happens. All the athletes were given schematics of the offending luge course and chose to go on it. The only coercing pistol was a starting gun. As a moral libertarian I have no qualms in the realm of public safety for voluntary actions (hence my continued smoking, but only in government buildings and only to make them ask me to extinguish my cigarette, which I never do since I only light up when I am leaving anyway). Some Canadians will hate the Olympics just because of a death associated with it and precisely because of this one underlying phobia –revulsion at anything associated with, even tertiary to, death. Of course we all have a degree of this, but people such as myself have a certain disdain for how we Canadians have become rather paranoid and fanatical in our death-avoidance schemes. Truth be told, if I were slightly younger and not as chubby around the mid section, and if the games were not being patrolled by ignorant gun-totting, Prairie-trained black shirts, I would be sneaking up the hill and sliding down that thing on a crazy carpet just for kicks and for precisely the fact that someone did die on it – which is an enticing factor that makes such an act even more so thrilling. People over the age of 25 understand this urge because we come from a generation that “had a set and used them” and didn’t grow up reading bizarre Mormon tales of sexual tension and Emo-vampire-teens with chastity rings.

Canadians have become passive to the point of looking down on anything remotely dangerous or limb-shattering. I still recall the day that paint balls came out. Us older boys thought the ‘youngsters’ were all a bunch of (dare I say it) ‘pussies’ because we had grown up with war-games involving pellet guns and gas filled balloons. We had all tweezered a pellet or two out from under the three layers of clothes we wore which were our only protection, save for motorcycle helmets or welder’s masks to protect the eyes. Blah – “paint balls give you welts”, try fishing a pellet out your arm and dabbing lodge pole pinesap on it to seal it from infection when you are nine years old for fun. Did I mention that in my day we walked more than a mile to school? I actually did. And we all had lawn darts and we threw them at each other, not fluorescent hoops, and we called kids who had skateboard and bike helmets “dorks” and put stones in our snowballs. Call of Duty was played with sticks and forts that we built ourselves, and a real first aid kit! Now it’s the past time of pachydermatous ADHDers whose parents fear, on behalf of their children, five minutes of a chance encounter with a mysterious child-sodomizer more than they fear a lifetime of fat camps, hidden stashes of twizzlers, and the reek of Axe body spray to musk over the cheese between the roles. At least in the former scenario someone finds the kid attractive. Screw all this – watch the luge! It may be the only thing worth watching and may be the only time a gold medal is awarded to a corpse. “Well folks it looks like he was alive when he crossed the finish line… AWESOME! Too bad though about that wipe out during the slow down! One word “Glorious!”

Your rights and freedoms, however awesome the luge may or may not be, are more important than Eastern Europeans failing to act out a Calvin and Hobbes sledding panel for an oversized coin. Grim precedents have been set and more people should be taking a stand. The provincial government granted provincial regulatory power to the municipalities of Richmond, Whistler, and Vancouver to allow their respective law enforcement officials to enter property, homes, and places of business to seize anti-Olympic signs or notices.

Now, for the long term, this is really not a threat – per se, it is actually a clever administrative tactic. Our constitution protects us from this type of bullying. The problem, however, is that with all the misdemeanors, drunk and disorderlies, and the preferences that foreign “guests” get in our system so that we do not have to extend their travel visas, the dockets of these municipalities will be teeming to the brim. By the time a reasonable constitutional challenge is raised and some 500 bucks in compensation is paid to some protesting 60-year-old granny because the Coppers confiscated her knitted F**k Quatchi sign (with recyclable yarn I might add), the Olympics will be long and gone and the statute will have expired and be of no use. How does one protest against this obvious and manipulative infringement, temporary or otherwise, against our freedoms? May I add the sign and bylaw violations can carry up to a 10 thousand dollar fine or a six-month prison sentence? Really! Six months, or a quarter of the average annual salary for saying: “screw VANOC”, and putting a sign on your yard? Such an action isn’t even a disruptive protest!

I draw the more adventurous reader to the case of Sandison v. Rybiak 1974 (if you like you can read the whole case on Canlii.org – there are a multitude of similar cases as well). This is a case in which an arresting officer fails to inform both suspect and a friend the reasons for an arrest. The friend, in not getting an answer scuffled with the officer and was arrested. He sued back for assault, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution and won on all counts (and recovered legal fees). There are three doctrinal points of significance in this case but only one that is important for our purposes here – “If an arrest is unlawful (or unconstitutional) then any restriction of the liberty of the subject is false imprisonment.” It may be a stretch, but I suspect that the Constitution and the Charter allow freedom of expression and that a section one-ing to overrule that right for the sake of the games (actually reasonable limits for a just and reasonable society) would not be allowed by the courts. What I am saying is that I believe that citizens could more than likely put up statute-offending signage on their properties in the aforementioned cities if they did as follows: when the black-shirted, gun-totting-thug comes to do his job, recognize that he is doing his job. You likely have no action against him per se as the Criminal Code usually protects him if he is just following the law, no matter how asinine it is or who the donkeys that wrote it are. So don’t fight with him, just tell him how wrong his actions are but that you understand that he is following orders. Use a calm voice. Your target in civil disobedience is always the power behind the gorilla, not the gorilla itself. But, you should inform him that he is trespassing and that you demand he leave your property. He won’t, so then you have the city (not the officer) on trespass. Your next step is to hold your sign, also your property, on your land, so that the officer has to touch you to remove it. When he does touch you, make him pull it, but offer no further resistance, and it is best to make him touch your arm or hand, but not forcefully. Then you have the city (not him because he is just doing his job) on assault. Inform the officer that he is stealing your property and has just assaulted you (remember to remain calm) and demand the return of your property. He won’t give it back to you so you must tell him that he is stealing your property and that you are going to file a civil action against the department and the city (not him) for either trespass to goods (not theft) or that you may have to take action against the city in detinue (I am rusty on the distinction in this case between trespass to goods and detinue but you could possibly do both).  Do all this in the face of a witness and tape it if you can. Organize enough people doing this and you can class action against the city and likely easily find a young ambitious kid who wants to pro-bono – if not you can share costs. You may also have action against the province for delegating this power.

I feel that this is an appropriate response to the legal fascism that has been passed through the legislature of a free and constitutional society. It would also be tremendously more effective than protesting in the streets where law and regulations and protesters get increasingly more complex. Using my method you get the city on trespass of land, and goods, possibly Detinue, and assault. If the police think you need to be brought in you will have them on malicious prosecution (possibly) and false imprisonment at a minimum. You also get the benefit of a codified legal reaction to this legislative abuse which could serve as a further restriction on government power. Donate your winnings (which wouldn’t be small) to wherever you want – or buy a new hippie van if you like – I don’t care, but reading up on this legislation has boiled my blood and turned me off of the whole Olympic-Spirit-fiasco. I would happily join in on any such organized and careful civil opposition to this (aside from the luge) barbaric and horrendously mismanaged games.

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Tags: 2010 winter olympics, Gordon Campbell, Luge, olympic village, protest, vanoc

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 11:25 am and is filed under Humorous, Olympics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.