Tuesday, January 13, 2009

My response to the Vancouver Olympic budget crisis



Okay, it's a bit cruel of me. It's going to be the taxpayers and the city who will end up paying the costs for this debacle, but I can't help but ask how the hell the last city council (and the provincial Liberals) got voted in in the first place. I love how the natives and the lefties fighting the Olympics and all the accelerated and subsidized development around them were marginalized by the politicians and the media from the get-go as a bunch of negative has-beens who hate progress and economic development on principle. No, instead, let's make deals with developers where they get to reap all the potential economic benefit, but the government is on the hook if things don't work out. How could anyone make such a deal? How are these guys not in the stocks in front of the court house for daily floggings? Oh yeah, it's B.C., where everyone walks around acting all righteous and protestant, until they think there's a chance they might be able to get their snout in the trough. Yes, B.C., wannabe Los Angeles sitting on 200 years of short-term greed, cheapness and and unfettered resource exploitation. Most of you voted for those scumbags and criminals because you thought you might get a job building some piece of shit concrete monstrosity and accrue some false pride for living in a "world-class" city. Clearly nothing was learned from Expo 86.

3 comments:

Jason L said...

But wait! It gets better. Now the city will not be getting paid the $200 million for the land from the developers.

We all win!

Anonymous said...

As a Vancouver resident for the past ten years I can only concur with your comments. Right now I'm aiming to be in Montreal within the year.

The thing about this article that really stands out is your critique of the marginalization of voices against the Olympics. I had always considered Vancouver to be a very open-minded place up until this ideology started to take hold. It was disappointing at best to see it all unfold.

The Tyee ran an article talking about Vancouver eating it's young. Unfortunately I think that is exactly what the economic crisis is doing. Those of us under 40 will simply leave his city.

Anonymous said...

It's high time to cancel the Olympics outright. It stopped being about sport a long time ago. It's a propaganda vehicle, and leaves every city that hosts it worse off. But if we did away with the flags there would be no money for it. The idea of an Olympics to celebrate individual greatness is marvelous, I think some of these great performances deserve celebration. If we put the original modern Olympic events in permanant venues and held them every four years, it would be about the sports, and it would die a slow and ignored death. What is this spectacle REALLY about?