By Justin Ling, Opinions Contributor
An authentic Olympic gold medal: $133.
Hosting the world’s biggest sporting event: $6 billion.
Cutting the department that investigates children’s deaths: priceless.
As we sprint toward this year’s Olympic games, it’s worth looking at the social cost Canadians are paying to host the festivities. Many were quick to decry China’s human rights abuses in the lead-up to the Beijing summer Olympics, but what makes Canada so much better?
When the Chinese government sent bulldozers into low-income neighbourhoods to destroy dozens of homes, the world recoiled in horror.
Much in the same way that China forcibly relocated its low-income and transient populations, some of Vancouver’s homeless have recently been forced onto buses and given one-way tickets out of town. In a 2008 pre-Games study, the International Olympics Committee found 2,660 homeless people living in Vancouver. That number had more than doubled since 2002. For those people, this isn’t good news.
Of the Canadian provinces, B.C. was cited in a recent report as having the most unaffordable housing of the six countries surveyed, including the U.S., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. In recent years the B.C. government has actually demolished affordable housing in Vancouver.
It would seem less painful, however, if the government followed through on its pledge to allocate some parts of the Olympic village to low-income Canadians, a promise that will likely go unfulfilled.
These problems are not endemic to Vancouver, although they have become worse since Gordon Campbell’s Liberals took over in 2001. Since then, and the subsequent Olympic announcement, funding has been slashed left and right for vital services within the province.
Take, for example, the Children’s Commission. This department was responsible for investigating children’s deaths, but was nixed in 2002. The damage done by such a move is incomprehensible. The cut led to 700 cases being orphaned and forgotten in a warehouse, leaving the parents without answers into the death of their children.
The government was further remiss by failing to have the proper oversight in, or subsequent improvements to, its child protection services. This is the service that should have protected five children who died while under government supervision over the past decade. One three-year-old child was suffocated to death, and while it was ruled a homicide, no arrests were ever made. Another toddler was beaten to death by her uncle.
Considering the systemic failure of B.C.’s under-funded child welfare programs, and the fact that it has had the highest rates of child poverty in Canada for six years in a row, shouldn’t these issues have priority over any multi-billion dollar sporting event?
These cuts are not an anomaly, either. Healthcare has also taken a serious blow in the name of cost-cutting to finance the Olympic games. As $720 million was shelled out for a new convention center, 1,400 operating rooms were closed, 5,800 surgeries were postponed and 125 full-time hospital staff were let go.
But we all know where spend-thrift governments bring their cleaver down first: the arts. The B.C. Council for the Arts was cut by a staggering 82 per cent, which works out to $16 million dollars in lost funding. As if that weren’t enough, Gordon Campbell’s new harmonized sales tax will add seven per cent to services such as Internet, phone, TV and gym memberships. When Darrell Dexter speaks about raising taxes and cutting services, let’s hope he finds a better way than this.
Perhaps these cuts would sting a little less if the budget for the over-the-top Olympics were hit with the same red pen. This, however, has rarely been the historical precedent. In fact, the operational costs of the Olympics ballooned by 26 per cent while the government bulldozed affordable housing complexes and locked hospital room doors.
The $16.6 million for the Cypress Mountain ski resort, $110 million for the Olympic Village, $600 million for the sea-to-sky highway, $900 million security and $7 million for ‘paid volunteers’, amongst many other lavish costs, are cold comfort to Vancouver’s homeless and the families of the dead children who are still waiting for answers.
The B.C. government is quick to hold up the fact that the Olympics are primarily financed by corporations, yet they neglect to mention that $37 million of that cash put forward has been from crown corporations.
While it’s unclear exactly how much the Olympics will cost the taxpayer, both in B.C. and throughout Canada, it will undoubtedly be a pretty big figure. Considering the B.C. government just posted a $2.8 billion deficit, you can bet that the cuts aren’t over, either.
So when you tune into the Olympics, keep in mind from whose pockets those games were financed and at what cost Canadians are made to suffer so that the world can watch figure skating and downhill skiing.
This article was originally published on Justin Ling’s blog, Demarchy.
Recent Comments