Ask a protester what they were rebelling against that day and you’d almost have to expect Marlon Brando’s answer from the Wild One: “What have you got?” This wasn’t a protest against the Olympics. It was a protest against “the system.” But disaffected oddballs and shadowy loners does not a revolution make.

Accompanied by my friend and fellow National Post contributor Adrian MacNair, I first met a pleasant comrade from the Young Communist League who seemed positively cheerful about the new members his group had signed up. His organization was present to make the point that government ought to be spending more on the housing, students and day care rather than Olympics. Those are actually policies that I’d be happy to get on board with. Still, you don’t have to be a follower of an ideology legitimizing mass murder and gulags to get that done. He seemed awfully polite. I assume he’ll go mainstream at some point an inevitably join up with the NDP.

Then I met the man disguised by a mask imprinted with the words “free speech area”. When I asked him what he actually had to say about the Olympics — or anything, for that matter — he clammed up. Evidently, free speech is a right best reserved for times other than when pretty much everyone in the world wants to know what you have to say.

I met a young Cree woman who carried a sign that claimed “Canada is Illegal”. Her group, “No One is Illegal”, evidently believes that the Olympics organizers ought to have gotten the written consent of every living First Nations person in the country before proceeding with the event. The enthusiastic support of the Four Host First Nations that have actually resided here since before the arrival of the first Europeans evidently wasn’t good enough.

Next up was the lady in town from Sochi to protest having the next Olympics in a region steeped in the memory of the 100-year old genocide of 1.5 million Circassians by Czarist Russia. She seemed earnest enough. But I honestly don’t know if Russians, much less Canadians, will even see a real connection between this historical tragedy and the 2014 Winter Olympics. Besides, if the Russians can’t do anything official on a part of their territory that hasn’t already been steeped in blood or mired in historical injustice, well, the world’s biggest country is going to have an awful time finding anywhere they can hold any sort of international event.

Then there was the group shouting “Shut down the tar sands!” Protest signs indicated that the Olympics were somehow responsible for mass-murder as a result of our odd habit of digging up stuff out of our ground that people all over the world seem to need to run their factories and heat their homes. I have to confess, I never bothered to talk to anyone about this. I’d already gone down enough rabbit holes.

The point is that the protesters against the Olympics are guided by a hundred different agendas. None of them really has much to do with the Olympics. That’s why the event only pulled in a few hundred angry souls, surrounded by a larger number of curious spectators who were not necessarily in sympathy with any of their goals.

The time to disrupt the games was clearly on the first day. But the lunatic fringe seems only to have alienated a wider base by their odd rhetoric. They didn’t pull the numbers and by the time the Olympics opening ceremonies were set to begin, most of the protesters who came out were already sullenly on their way home to plot and plan… and probably do nothing else for the next few weeks. The reinforced lines of police, some on horseback, that came to greet the rally were not pressured as at the “Battle of Seattle” or similar venues. It seems that the Games can safely ignore the divided and not particularly successful protests from here on in.

I decided to find out for myself what these protests were all about

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“I got a call from a guy who was from L.A. and who had expressed interest in buying a unit, and he was in town walking around the [Woodward's] building. While he was there, a woman on the sidewalk dropped her drawers in front of him. So he took a photo of her on his cellphone, sent it to me and asked: ‘Should I be worried?’”

But that was in April of 2006, and the optimists seem to have the upper hand these days.

Read the full article at Granville: Woodward’s Revitalizing Gastown?

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The Vancouver Sun’s Jeff Lee sums up what’s happening:

What’s the point of issuing tickets with fines of up to $350 to people who have no financial means to pay, or if they did would mean they miss next month’s rent? And why would Vancouver police officers go on such a blitz, issuing homeless people with citations for everything from bicycling without a helmet to jaywalking?

But why assume this is accidental or coincidental when the timing of it points to a strategy?

It’s a very simple strategy and it will probably work. Blitz the downtown eastside, giving homeless people $350 tickets for jaywalking or other minor infractions, which they can’t possibly pay. Continue doing this for a few more month. A week or two before the Olympics begin, start jailing everyone for failing to pay their tickets.

It’s legal. It’s practical. And it will ensure that the tens of thousands of tourists coming to Vancouver for the Olympics will never see what residents and visitors to the Downtown Eastside see the rest of the year.

Do you think this is just a theory or is it really happening? Leave a comment.

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Of course the upswing in violence in our Olympic city was too tasty an angle to ignore. On top of our relentless problems in the Downtown Eastside, we’re getting a bit of a black eye, here.

Interesting bit from Raincoaster, who notes that if you don’t want to get shot, you really ought to spend more time in the Downtown Eastside.

I believe an apt punishment for our Lower Mainland gangsta-losers would be to construct a reality show a la the Running Man, based around parachuting them into Brazilian favelas or the sketchier parts of LA County and seeing how they match up against the real deal.

Or perhaps a more old-skool Canadian approach would be appropriate. Off to the stockade with ye armed rascals.

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But I also recognize that the vast majority of Canadians do like sports in general and that there are significant benefits for hosting a sporting event like the Olympics specifically. Nebulous benefits like “putting the city on the map” can actually translate into tourism dollars supporting local workers. Getting the attention of the world puts pressure on higher levels of government to pour money into our area to build infrastructure that otherwise would have no chance of existing. Creating jobs and building venues for sports activities that many people seem to enjoy are not bad things.

There’s a sense amongst anti-Olympics protesters that in a zero-sum game of government spending, any dollar spent on the Olympic oval, for instance, is a dollar that doesn’t go towards, say, feeding the homeless. But that ignores the fact that a lot of this money from higher levels of government wouldn’t have gone to anything if the Olympics wasn’t in town.

Secondly, you could apply the spending argument to anything; why spend dollars on roads and bridges when you’ve got people sleeping in the alleys in the downtown eastside — or Kitsilano? Striking a budget balance where all priorities get what they need is an art, not a science.

Are our priorities wrong on this? Given that we’re not contemplating an Olympics that even comes close to the titanic spending for the Beijing games ($42 billion, in a country where a good proportion of the population still lives in grinding poverty), I don’t know that our spending on the Olympics is a problem. But I’d love to hear from readers.

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But there is an interesting experiment going on in the downtown eastside, Fearless City, bringing new technology and media tools to energize the neighborhood’s artists and other residents. Empowered with donated camera cell phones, other mobile devices, and peer training, the people of the downtown eastside get to tell their own stories and have a greater voice in our fast-changing city. With a camera phoneThe Vancouver blog Raincoaster provides some details on phase 2 of Phones for Fearless.

Excellent overview of what Fearless City is all about on Global TV. If you want to donate a cell phone or get involved, here’s how to contact them.

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Gillian Shaw reports today on a Twitter flash mob assembling in the downtown eastside to distribute warm clothing (Vancouver Sun). An excerpt:

“Here’s a coat,” said Steve Jagger, a Vancouver tech entrepreneur on Twitter as @sjagger, rooting around in the bottom of a bag to come up with something for a homeless man looking to warm up. “No, take this one instead, it’s a better fit and it’s cool.”

Kudos also to John Chow, who has raised over $12,000 for the Union Gospel Mission at a time when Vancouver’s hungry and homeless appear to need our help the most. John is better known for being better known – with 44,203 registered subscribers, his “Make Money Online“-themed site probably beats the readership of most Canadian print publications. Way to give back.

Miss604‘s Best of 604 Awards raised $1,800 for the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society (which included my donation as well).

Meanwhile, Beautynight stuffed 500 Christmas stockings for their clients hoping to make positive lifestyle changes.

I often blather on about social media and Web 2.0 stuff, so for all you out there who were wondering about whether Twitter and social media really matter, here are some great examples of instant successes that have brought about positive change in the community. It actually works. If anyone else has come upon other examples of this kind of social-media making a difference locally in the last while, go ahead and leave a comment with the details.

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The documentary shows their lives intimately, including scenes of them shooting up drugs. The exercise clearly gives them little pleasure, other than deadening their senses to their plight.

The documentary brought to mind a recent Economist article highlighting some experimental research that poked a big hole in the longstanding theory of drug addiction. The research implied environment had far more to do with addiction than the drug itself.

Oft-quoted studies on individual rats in little empty cages showed that when given a choice between cocaine-laced water and regular water, the rats invariably chose the toxic water.

But in the study highlighted in the Economist, rats living amongst their kin in spacious and stimulating environments (essentially Vancouver’s West End for rats) almost always rejected the drugged water.

Even a group of rats fed drugs to create dependency rejected the poison when later given the opportunity, despite the discomfort of withdrawal.

Given the despair of the Downtown Eastside, it’s certainly easy to see how the Economist study would apply.

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Here is a group which has abandoned any effort to protest its legitimate concerns over housing the homeless in favor of shock tactics and thuggery.

The Hell on Earth that is Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has many causes, among them a decision long ago to release all mentally ill Canadians from asylums on to the streets, a thriving drug trade (the bane of any city with a half-decent port) and an extreme climate that makes most other Canadian cities uninhabitable six months out of the year for those without shelter.

But breaking into buildings for illegal squats that will inevitably get broken up by police is becoming a very tired tactic for getting attention, and a useless one in terms of actually getting homeless people indoors. So long as homeless people are represented by such dorks, they are badly served.

By the way, kudos to the Campbell government for providing $41 million in new funding for homeless shelters.

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There are those who say that closing the facility would have amounted to mass murder, given the number of fatal drug overdoses prevented by having Insite around. It’s an odd argument, akin to saying that the elected representatives of virtually every city, regional and national government on Earth outside of Europe ought to be charged for negligent homicide.

It sort of throws out the whole idea of personal responsibility and societal norms.

Ah, well. In this case, the Conservatives have erred on the side of pragmatism, given that the experiment so far is hinting at some concrete benefits, like 800 of the 7,200 people there actually heading into rehab. Fewer people are injecting heroin right on the sidewalk (which shouldn’t be an issue in a Canadian city to begin with, but it seems like progress).

Besides, we don’t seem to have any other options on the table these days. Civil City, anyone?

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