On October 23, 2009, No One Is Illegal Vancouver Coast Salish Territories,organized an anti-Olympics Extravaganza, including an anti-Olympic speakers corners hosted by Vancouver Media Coop. While governments and corporations continue to steal unceded indigenous land, spend billions of dollars in rights repressing security measures, destroy the environment,criminalize poverty, and make a profit out of all this; people all over are resisting! Listen to the diverse voices of over twenty Vancouverites on why they oppose the 2010 Olympic Games and join the struggle!
Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, December 08, 2009, Xtra West
With less than three months to go before the 2010 Olympics open in Whistler, activists are protesting the curtailing of civil liberties and the “cleansing” of poor and homeless people off Vancouver’s streets. It’s not the first time authorities have attempted to suppress “undesirables” in the lead-up to an Olympics held in Canada. With the RCMP’s help, police began cracking down on gays and lesbians a year before the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics.
Mail Online, By Sam Greenhill and Daniel Bates, 5th December 2009
Scores of arrests have been made in a crackdown on illegal immigrants working at the Olympics site in East London. In the past seven months 93 unlawful workers from at least ten nations have been caught, figures showed yesterday. Some of those caught were asylum seekers – who are banned from employment here – while others were migrants who has arrived as ‘tourists’. The wave-shaped Aquatics Centre, which forms part of the Olympic site. Illegal workers were arrested in a crackdown by police, although it is not known on which section of the site they were working.
By Bruce Constantineau, Vancouver Sun, November 20, 2009
VANCOUVER — B.C. residents are more skeptical than average Canadians about the potential benefits of the 2010 Olympics, but a majority still believe the Games will have a positive impact on the province, according to an Angus Reid survey. The online poll found that 57 per cent of British Columbians expect the Olympics will benefit B.C., compared with 76 per cent of all Canadians who feel the province will gain from hosting the Games.
The union representing B.C. paramedics says Olympic organizers put pressure on the provincial government to legislate an end to the emergency responders’ strike. Hundreds of union members held a rally against the legislation Friday in front of the suburban office building housing the Games’ operations. On Thursday, union members disrupted a Winter Olympics security exercise.
