Ian Kaufman
Features Editor

The party’s over. The tourists, athletes, journalists, and members of the International Olympic Committee’s prestigious “Olympic family” have all gone home, weighed down with medals, souvenirs, and other Olympic loot. And with last week’s closing ceremonies bringing the games to a conclusion that would have been laughable, were if not for the colossal squandering of resources it represented (around $40 million, together with the opening ceremonies), it’s generally understood that the media moves on to talk about something else – gender-neutral O Canada lyrics, anyone?
But although the medal count is already etched into the proverbial history books, for Vancouverites – and, to a lesser degree, all Canadians – the story of the 2010 Olympics is still playing itself out. This is something the citizens of Montreal, who finally paid off the debt on their 1976 Olympic stadium in 2006, know all too well: the full effects of holding the games often aren’t clear until long afterwards. It’s still early, but Vancouver’s Olympics look to have cost $6-9 billion. Meanwhile, BC has posted a record deficit and slashed social programs.
But some ask, isn’t hosting the Olympics like throwing a big party? Most of us unbegrudgingly spend money on booze, snacks, and maybe some decorations when holding a party – and we know that a few weeks later, a friend will do the same for us. Olympics boosters point out that two years later, another place bears the cost of holding the event, opening their city up for the world’s biggest party. This reasoning appeals to all the rosiest ideals of global community and reciprocity. But it’s worth asking: who pays for the party, and who pulls a profit?
The first nail in that metaphor’s coffin is that this is one hell of an expensive party: when was the last time you spent six or seven times your annual budget to show some friends a good time? This Magazine recently assessed the total cost of the 2010 games to be over $9.2 billion. To put this in perspective, Vancouver’s annual budget is around $1 billion, while BC’s total spending for this year is estimated at $40 billion. This may have highballed the tab a bit, depending on who’s counting, but it seems certain that the figure is at least $6 billion, and possibly much more – a far cry from the $1.76 billion official budget of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC).
The crucial variable in tabulating the cost of the games is infrastructure, such as the expansion of the Sea-to-Sky Highway connecting Vancouver and Whistler. This Magazine factored the expansion into their estimate, saying the work would not have been undertaken if not for the Olympics. As one of the province’s most dangerous stretches of road, however, it was destined for some kind of renovation. But pressure from the IOC, who made the expansion an unofficial precondition of awarding Vancouver the bid, was related to speeding up the travel time to Whistler, not increasing safety. Without this pressure, work would certainly have proceeded at a more measured pace.
That might have saved the section of Eagleridge Bluffs that was blown up and paved over for the project. The Bluffs are a gorgeous chunk of BC’s coastline, home to a handful of endangered species and rare trees. The decision to build the highway over the Bluffs rather than running a tunnel under them (the lesser of two evils) might have been avoided, had Vancouver followed the twenty-year timeframe proposed for the expansion before the Olympic bid. Perhaps environmental activist Harriet Nahanee would not have had to spend some of her last days in prison after participating in a blockade of construction on the Bluffs. Nahanee, who was in poor health at the time, was sentenced with contempt of court, contracted pneumonia in jail, and died shortly after her release.
A less contentious example of Olympics-related infrastructure spending is the Canada Line, a high-speed rail project connecting Vancouver International Airport with Richmond and downtown Vancouver. The line is touted as a “green” project with the potential to save hundreds of thousands of car trips per day.
Both the Sea-to-Sky expansion and the Canada Line can be generously seen as projects which would have taken place regardless, albeit much more slowly and cheaply. Still, if we completely remove both projects from the Olympic ledger, as BC Premier Gordon Campbell insists, this leaves the total bill at around $6 billion.
The other notable slices in this multi-billion dollar pie are the original bidding process, venue construction and upgrading, the Athletes Village, expenses for government and IOC members, and security. In a remarkable example of teamwork, the three levels of government somehow managed to rack up $1 billion in security costs. Official projections had allotted only $175 million – but that’s the cost of holding the games in the “post-9/11 world”, according to the IOC.
So who pays for all of this? VANOC’s $1.76 billion budget is financed roughly equally by three sources: provincial funding, federal funding, and the %49 of sponsorship and television revenue not claimed by the IOC. Although that budget is technically supposed to cover the full cost of staging the Olympics, the extra four or five billion dollars will be made up by Vancouver, BC, and Canada. Governments must assume legal responsibility for overruns in order to be selected by the IOC, as well as granting the organization tax-exempt status.
While it’s all well and good to talk about the legacy of the Olympics in dollars, all of those zeros can obscure the real effects of holding the games. Government money may increasingly seem to come out of nowhere, but a week after the games wrapped up, some palpable effects of this diversion of funding can already be observed.
BC posted a record $2.8 billion deficit in September. This cash crunch made itself felt in the province’s social programs, while the province spared no expense for the upcoming Olympics. After featuring the arts prominently in the opening and closing ceremonies of the games, the BC Liberals are now reducing arts funding by at least a third. Post-secondary student aid was cut by $17 million, while an anticipated $110 million in school maintenance grants was scrapped. Healthcare funding was cut by $360 million. The province is also set to eliminate more than one tenth of government jobs over the next three years, which adds up to about 3,500 full-time position lost.
These cuts in social programs take place against a backdrop of swelling poverty rates and homelessness, a phenomenon much harder to quantify. The PIVOT Legal Society estimates that homelessness in Vancouver has more than doubled since 2002, largely thanks to evictions and the abandonment of affordable housing programs.
Neither Vancouver’s social issues nor BC’s economic problems are ultimately attributable to the Olympics. But what is certain is that the 2010 Olympic games leave Vancouver’s citizens, and to a lesser extent all Canadians, with a debt that will take years to pay off. As is becoming increasingly clear, this debt manifests itself in the exacerbation of existing problems, thanks to cuts to social programs.
What makes all of this especially infuriating is the culture of corruption that infamously surrounds the IOC. In their expose The Lords of the Rings, Vyv Simpson and Andrew Jennings portray the Olympics as they are experienced by the members of the IOC and their families. “All Olympic gatherings are a constant and glittering round of first-class travel, five-star hotels, champagne receptions, extravagant banquets, mountains of gifts and lavish entertainments. And frequently, not even an athlete in sight.”
With politicians, businessmen, IOC members and their families being wined and dined with Olympic money, citizens paying to attend the events and to use the facilities once the games are over, and our governments picking up the tab, the Olympics are looking increasingly like just another way to transfer public wealth to private hands.