[mobglob-discuss] "Van Olympics: Who Pays? Who Benefits?"

[Alan Ward]

 VANCOUVER OLYMPICS:
        WHO PAYS?
                WHO BENEFITS?

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                Article in Vancouver-Kingsway NDP's newsletter #4.
                An electronic or printed copy of the newsletter is available
on request.
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-- by Marilyn E. Young

They've told you the Olympics will cost $1.3 billion, but factor in a few
Olympics-related expenses and you might be surprised at the actual cost.
Factor in the Sea to Sky Highway upgrade, the Vancouver-Richmond rapid
transit link, the expansion of the Convention Centre, and the Richmond
International Broadcast Centre, not to mention two villages for
international athletes, Olympic-sized hockey rinks at UBC and SFU and a
speed skating surface at SFU.  Add to this, advertising and security, and
taxpayers are on the hook for close to $6 billion.   We can expect the usual
massive cost overruns, as the corporations line up at the trough, and social
programs to be slashed to pay for costs carefully hidden in the budgets of
various ministries.

This financial extravaganza is sold to Vancouverites through an aggressive
glittery media campaign that hides the facts.  And it is being pressed
forward in the wake of devastating cuts to basic public services, social
housing, and badly needed social assistance to the most vulnerable residents
of our province.

We are told the economy will benefit.  Whose economy?

Olympic games are the kind of event that privatizes the profits and
socializes the losses.  Olympic games are for private gain.  It is not an
accident that the local Games committee is dominated by the same
corporations angling to privatize government services (Accenture) and to
destroy unions (Telus).  Montrealers are still paying for 1976 Olympics.
Expo 86 was a financial disaster.  In the end, the prime public land that
constituted the Expo site was sold for peanuts to a Hong Kong corporation.
Most Olympic games result in enormous losses.

Billions of public money are spent, but the money goes mostly to powerful
corporate sponsors, multinational hotel chains, and construction firms.  The
crowds of visitors will be mostly in the downtown area of Vancouver and
Whistler, will be of little benefit to small local stores throughout the
Lower Mainland, not to mention the rest of BC.

If the government wants to create jobs, why not do something that is truly
needed?  A small fraction of the Olympic costs would produce many thousands
of units of social housing.  Fixing Vancouver's infrastructure, including
the sewers, would cost a mere fraction of even the official projected
Olympic expense.

The wasteful, exhorbitant Olympic expense will saddle us, a province that is
already being literally skinned by corporate capital, with enormous losses.
The rich will party for two weeks, and we will get the hangover.

[Sources for the figures:  Wayne Strelioff, the Auditor General's Report;
Marvin Shaffer, the Centre for Policy Alternatives; Charlie Smith, the
Georgia Straight; Vaughan Palmer, Daphne Braham, the Vancouver Sun]