Pat and Maggie

Amid all the theatricality and performances of protest attending news of Margaret Thatcher's death in the UK (favourite graffito courtesy of our London friend, Cathy: "The Iron Lady: May She Rust in Peace"), a reminder, via the adjacent photo and accompanying story in the Vancouver Sun, of an important local connection to the neoliberal legacy of Thatcher's neoconservative politics: real estate.

Just as, soon after taking power, Thatcher authorized the private sale of huge swathes of council housing in London, so did BC's Social Credit government, in the wake of Expo 86, eagerly offload much of Vancouver's False Creek North to LeeKa-Shing's Concord Pacific, paving the way (quite literally) for the city's downtown boom in luxury condo development.

In both cases, the short term effect may have been to encourage middle class families to stay in the city rather than flee to the suburbs, and to stimulate economic growth and population density in hitherto depressed or formerly industrial neighbourhoods (though the density issue is debatable in the case of Vancouver, given that so many condo units have off-shore owners who don't live in them); however, in the longer term, it has meant pricing that same class out of the market while at the same time shrinking the amount of available--and affordable--low-income and social housing to ever smaller levels.

Needless to say, that's a narrative we don't hear much about in Pat Carney's reminiscences of Maggie's stamina and their mutual admiration as determined female deregulators having to deal with weak and "wet" male colleagues. Nor, unsurprisingly, is there any discussion of their unfortunate fashion choices.

The 1980s were horrible in so many ways.

P.

Another Olympics Update

Running with my buddies Clint and Jamie this unusually brisk winter morning in our Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, we saw city workers moving concrete pylons and erecting barbed-wire perimeter fencing around the Olympic curling venue at Ontario and 33rd. My first thought was incredulity--who'd want to protest curling, except maybe those who didn't consider it a real sport, or its sometimes older and less-than-toned competitors real athletes? This was soon replaced by anger, as a block-and-a-bit later we ran by what remains of the Little Mountain social housing complex, which is being steadily demolished in advance of proposed redevelopment.

The stark juxtaposition of these two images brought to mind the second Pre-Games Results Report released by researchers at UBC last week. Part of a series of four "Olympic Games Impact Studies" mandated by the IOC (two prior to and two following upon the Games), the report concludes that the Olympics have so far had "a very slight positive impact." Mostly this has been felt in the area of athlete preparedness and competitiveness, with the federal government's "Own the Podium" campaign having successfully positioned Canadian 2010 Olympians to excel in their individual events next February. On the subject of homelessness and affordable housing, however, the report is far less laudatory, noting that reliable data suggests that homelessness in the city has more than doubled in advance of the games, that the legacy of 252 social housing units from the Olympic Village is in jeopardy, and that while statistics suggest the number of social-housing units per 1,000 people in Vancouver increased from 35.6 to 39.4 between 2001 and 2006, in Metro Vancouver it decreased from 22.3 to 21.8.

So much for the Inner-City Inclusivity Statement that all three levels of government signed back in 2002 committing them to a net increase in social housing and an elimination of street homelessness as a concrete legacy of the Games. In the following video posted to YouTube by Am Johal and the folks at the Impact on Community Coalition, we are reminded of just how many promises have been broken in advance of the Olympics (kudos to the IOCC gang for getting in some hard-hitting stats at the end of the video on the arts and culture cuts in BC):

Meanwhile, I read in the paper today that VANOC has signed a deal with Concord Pacific allowing it to use the vacant CP-owned lots on North False Creek between GM Place and Science World for official Olympics-related events. This solves an accessibility and security nightmare for VANOC at the 11th hour, brings CP on board as an "official supplier," and of course gives CP a public relations windfall in being able to do some advance marketing on the final piece (quite literally) of their post-Expo 86 redevelopment of the downtown core of Vancouver.

And who says hallmark events like these don't benefit everyone?

P.