New Media

I wandered among the costumed weirdos and black-masked anarchists at the protest. This was the big anti-Olympics event in Vancouver on the opening day of the Games. I soon came to the conclusion that the Olympics and our city’s politicians have nothing to worry about for the duration of the games and probably for some time to come.

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

There’s politically incorrect and then there’s just dumb. You’d think a “New York-based political and media strategist” would have the smarts to avoid comments like this:

Forget the 2016 Rio Olympics – there’s a more pressing issue to address: Who is fighting to ensure that the immigrants of European descent are adequately represented at next year’s Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games?

I’m talking about the people who can be credited for turning the city from a giant wilderness into the budding metropolis of today. The place, and indeed the whole of my country, Canada, was pretty third-worldish until the English, French, and various other Europeans arrived and started planning and building infrastructure and government, and teaching the natives discipline, order, and capitalism…

It’s no coincidence that the best countries in the world are either European or founded by Europeans. Everywhere they go, European immigrants make things better – until they’re asked to leave, at which point everything usually descends back into chaos. Not that they ever get any thanks for it.

(For that matter, you’d think the Telegraph would know better than to print it).

I don’t know if Rachel Marsden is racist, as some have said. From what I can tell, she seems to simply lack knowledge of the history of how Canada and other former European colonies developed. For the millions of aboriginals in the Americas and Australia who were wiped out, mostly by disease (in many places, death rates approached 100 per cent), European immigrants did not “make things better”. Natives did not need to be taught “discipline” and “order”, as they already had these things in measures that were practical for tiny populations spread out over wide territory (police stations and legislatures don’t make much sense when most population centers are no bigger than villages). Certainly, Native economies were disrupted by the arrival of Europeans as well — though it should be noted here that in the early phase of colonialism, capitalism was not even practiced — European societies in North America could not have existed without generous subsidies from the heart of empire. And building cities out of wilderness isn’t a particularly European trait (has Marsden ever been to Beijing? Tokyo? Mumbai? Does she even know about the ancient cities of the Americas?) I could go much further into just how far off Marsden’s premise is, but fortunately, Jared Diamond already wrote that book in 1997.

Of course, today, we do have a prosperous, technologically-advanced democracy in Canada. But we have this in part because of the active participation of First Nations people in the development of this country, from the fur trade through Confederation to the present day. Our Native heritage and culture is also something that helps make Canada unique, which is why these symbols are so instantly recognizable internationally.

Certainly, European colonizers brought technology and their own culture to Canada (as have immigrants from the rest of the world in more recent decades), from which we’ve benefited. But would Canada really be better represented at the Olympics by a statue of a British soldier or French voyageur than by a piece of Native sculpture?

Granted, I was never that happy about the Inukshuk. Given that the Olympics are taking place on the west coast, a totem pole seems far more appropriate. Before the introduction of European metal tools, there were very few totem poles on the west coast and they were much smaller than the ones we see today. Now, these majestic artworks are distinct symbols of this region and our country’s heritage.

Canada isn’t all Inukshuks and totem poles. Maybe the graphic artist who came up with Miga the Sea Bear and Quatchi the Sasquatch could have thrown in Dudley Do-Right or Yvon of the Yukon. But picking at this as a sign that European culture is somehow being slighted at the Olympics seems a stretch. It’s not like the tourists coming to Vancouver are going to be unaware of Canada’s European heritage. Heck, unlike many North American cities, Vancouver is actually named for one of the first Europeans to visit the west coast. Thanks for dropping by, George.

The totem poles in Vancouver’s Stanley Park tell the stories of the Northwest Coast First Nations. You can read the written interpretations of these stories here. I happened by this spot recently and took some images to remember it by.

In a democracy, elected representatives are supposed to get props for talking to the people so they can build goodwill and obtain grassroots ideas about how to improve things. But when it comes to Canada’s discussions with First Nations people, it gets complicated.

Most Canadian Aboriginals live off-reserve, so the governing party in Canada has decided that we ought to be talking with their representatives, not just the First Nations people living on reserves (Vancouver Sun). This seems to be in keeping with our political system, which takes into account not only the population as a whole but also regional and municipal groupings. Nothing wrong there.

But members of Canada’s loyal opposition don’t like what they’re seeing. They’ve trotted out a number of wince-inducing quotes from Conservatives in a press release, mostly spoken with extremely poor timing, to boot, claiming that Canadians “won’t be fooled”.

But aside from the perhaps ungenerous timing of the very first quote tossed into the press release, from a Conservative on the day of the Residential Schools Apology, I’m not sure what’s terribly bad about Pierre Poilievre’s statement about Native Reserves:

“There’s too much power concentrated in the hands of the leadership and it makes you wonder where all of this money is going. …Now along with this apology comes another four billion dollars in compensation… Some of us are starting to ask are we really getting value for all of this money and is more money really going to solve the problem.”

Why is this statement considered beyond the pale by the opposition? Canadian First Nations reserves are ground-zero zones for unemployment, poor education outcomes, suicide, substance abuse and near-pervasive corruption by band councils. Why is it unfair to point out that Canadian taxpayer dollars have been subsidizing this mess, or that it’s high time we asked for better results?

Canadians do want better results. Talking with First Nations representatives living off-reserve seems like a good way to get some momentum going on improving the status of First Nations people in this country.