Category — 2010 Olympic Games

News that South Korea’s Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympic Games will ring up a numbing $8.4 billion construction bill suggests that Vancouver’s efforts to embed environmental sustainability in the Games was a failure.

During the bid preparation phase in 2002, Vancouver made a virtue out of our efforts to use existing facilities and reduce environmental impacts. International Olympic Committee experts demanded the Games be “greened up” and the Vancouver Bid Committee did everything it could to comply. The result: Vancouver narrowly edged out Pyeongchang to host the 2010 Games.

The London Games, to be held next year, did much to build on the Vancouver philosophy, but there was little of the recycling spirit obvious in Russia’s successful Sochi 2014 bid, which is carving an entirely new resort out of the landscape.

Now, here comes Pyeongchang, using the Olympics as economic stimulus for the construction sector. Sure, there’s a high speed rail line thrown in, but $1.4 billion is earmarked for new venues, villages and much more. Bulldozer drivers, start your engines!

The city’s 252 units at the Olympic Village are filling more quickly than similar units did in the Woodward’s project, according to a new council update from City Manager Penny Ballem. Full occupancy is expected by summer.

One parcel sits at 84 percent occupancy already  and the first residents are moving into 151 East 1st Ave., the first co-op to open in the city in many years.

With the success of the receiver’s February sales program, commercial tenants are also signing leases. A new Terra Breads cafe on the main plaza is also promising a summer opening.

Tweeters and editorial writers, operating largely in a fact-free zone,  went ballistic this week on hearing reports that the City of Vancouver had “put a price on free speech” by proposing to charge “$1,200 to protesters who want to erect tables or banners to express their points of view.”

Missing was the fact that the staff report under consideration was actually proposing to expand the right of protesters to use structures, as Falun Gong did outside the Chinese consulate on Granville for nearly a decade. Use of structures would still be prohibited in residential zones, where other forms of protest remain wide open, as they always have. Everywhere else in the city, structures would be allowed with a permit.

(The residential restriction has drawn little criticism so far, although it irritates Falun Gong, which wants to camp outside the Chinese consulate, located in a residential district. The Chinese visa office downtown would not be immune to a “structure” protest.)

That demonstration came to an end when Mayor Sam Sullivan convinced council to enforce an obscure bylaw that bans structures on city property. With Sullivan’s intervention, long sought by the Chinese government, the issue became an all-out legal battle as documented in Saturday morning’s Sun by Pete McMartin

The bylaw was upheld in one court hearing but failed on appeal. The city must now change the law to ensure that its regulations do not unduly impact free speech. The deadline to do so is April 19.

Before, during and after the legal action initiated by Sullivan,  anyone who wanted to protest anywhere, including outside the Chinese consulate, could do so with banners, flags, petitions or whatever. That right remains. [Read more →]

Port Metro Vancouver, which has the costly and repetitive job of dredging the main navigation channel of the Fraser River, reports that silt loads in the river are rising steadily, driving multi-million dollar dredging costs up with them.

Why?

Port CEO Robin Silvester said March 31 that the most likely explanation is more run-off on the Fraser’s vast watershed resulting from the ravages of mountain pine beetle.

(He was addressing a joint gathering March 31 of Metro Vancouver’s Port Committee and the board of Port Metro Vancouver. The two boards, sometimes at odds over taxes but aligned in their determination to protect the economic benefits of the port, were meeting on a sternwheeler cruise of the port’s facilities between New Westminster and Richmond.)

Silvester said the Fraser’s side channels, which are dredged by other organizations, are constantly at risk of silting up because of the increased load.

It was a fascinating insight into the enormous and widespread economic impacts climate change and the pine beetle infestation, a disaster often forgotten by city dwellers.

But the devastation in BC will be the focus of an upcoming global conference in Spain focussed on global disease threats to forests. Wells artist Claire Kujundzic, whose pine beetle work was installed at the Salt Building during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, is preparing a special exhibit for the conference called Cariboo: Message from the Beetle.

You can contribute to Kujundzic’s travel costs and receive an example of her work by donating here.