Official Bilingualism Charade Travels to Vancouver

Good Grief! MPs worry Olympics will be lost in translation

Gauthier acknowledged things got off to a shaky start following a ceremony marking the one-year countdown to the Games that was criticized because of a lack of French.

"There were some francophone activities that evening but not enough and effectively it has allowed us to increase our monitoring to ensure that it doesn't happen again," Gauthier said after his appearance at the official languages committee of the House of Commons.

MPs from the Liberals, the Bloc Québécois and the New Democrats expressed concerns about whether tourism information, signs and billboards in the city and broadcasting would be offered to francophones in town for the events.

Vancouver is an English city. These directives are from Quebec, which is an officially unilingual French province 3500 km away.

Hat tip: Strack Attack, who adds: Open the wallet and spend a few million to fix this emergency!

Military Surge in Vancouver?

You heard that right. There's going to be a large military contingent for security during the Olympics. Having the Olympics in the post 9-11 world is a real pain. (read)

VANCOUVER — With frigates in the harbour and jets zooming overhead next month during the first active Olympic security exercise, residents here will not need a reminder that Canada's hard-pressed military will play a major role in one of the largest peacetime security operations in the country's history.

An estimated 4,000 members of the armed forces will be seconded to Olympic duties in 2010 – far more than the 2,500 to 2,800 military personnel currently deployed in Afghanistan.

(...)

Two frigates and three maritime coastal defence vessels, some aircraft and a light contingent of troops will participate from the military, sources indicated.

I'm not a defense expert by why do we need five ships, including two firepower heavy frigates? To counter German U-Boats?

Looks like a PR excercise. I hope to get some pictures of the frigates.

Vancouver 2010: Big Owe Revisited

Looks like the yet to be completed Olympic Village Complex is becoming a colossal disaster. (read)

The city is now asking the province for special permission to borrow money in order to finance the remaining $458-million needed to finish construction on the 1,100-unit village by the end of October.

Mr. Andrews dealt mainly with the project's compliance with city planning, design and environmental guidelines, as opposed to overseeing its finances.

Also Thursday, Mayor Robertson revealed in a letter that the city of Vancouver is racking up $87,000 per day in interest costs to bridge the financing for the Olympic Village project.

It took 30 years for Montreal to pay off Olympic Stadium and now it looks like Vancouver is already on the hook. At least Montreal had the more prestigious Summer Games. Did such major metropolitan areas like Lake Placid, Albertville, Lillehammer and Nagano have to pay so much for the Winter Olympics?

I Hate These Plates

I don't feel comfortable crossing the border with these babies.

Countdown to the Olympics

Free heroin!

"It was quite delicious," said Greg Liang, a trial participant who was tracked down by The Globe and Mail's Jane Armstrong. Some of the addicts, he said, competed to see how much they could consume. "They were heroin pigs."

I'm sorry about the eight hour wait at the hospital while you're bleeding to death. We have important spending priorities here in BC.

2010 Olympic Delusions

The Olympics are coming in 2010. I for one, think it’s going to be a waste of time. Right from the outset, the idea was flawed. You’re going to bring people from around the world to Vancouver for two weeks in February. Ummm…. it constantly rains in February! It’s not a Winter Wonderland. People talk about a real estate spike after the Olympics. What folly. It’s no way to advertise Vancouver to outsiders in February. The black clouds hide the view of the mountains, the sea is a baleful grey. Have fun standing in the rain for two hours waiting for your taxi. (Did I mention we have a gigantic taxi shortage?) Oh boy!

I hate to seem mean spirited about this but they haven’t thought things through.

And of course, there are Vancouver’s social problems. Vancouver’s Professional Protestors ™ never ending outrage continues (here)

"Project Civil City" criminalizes the poor and restricts free movement of citizens through red zoning and ticketing, disrupting the basic survival methods of the most vulnerable, such as street-vending, dumpster diving and pan handling. It attempts even to restrict people from building basic structures over their heads to protect themselves from the elements. For these reasons we see Project Civil City as the hate crime that it is. Project Civil City is not a program to decrease homelessness and end poverty, it is a systematic plan to socially cleanse Vancouver and remove all visibility of the homeless for the 2010 Olympic games.

They are calling it a “hate crime.” I looked into Project Civil City and it’s a “Broken Windows” type program. For example, they want constant street and alleyway cleaning in certain areas littered with needles, garbage, glass and (shudder) human waste. (As the theory goes, if you let an area go derelict, you attract derelict behavior.) One basic proposal is to lock down garbage dumpsters. The dumpster divers root through them in search of deposit cans and bottles. The result is piles garbage strewing the street in the aftermath. It’s not an insane proposal. Most private dumpsters, including the one for my building are fenced off or locked. The building manager gets tired of sweeping up and throwing stuff back in the bin. But this group, The Anti-Poverty Committee, call it a Hate Crime because dumpster-diving is considered a livelihood.

Is it such a bad thing to try to do something? I’ve been here for 12 years and every person running for office and every editorial writer proclaim the solution is more shelters, more social housing. Money is poured in. And the homeless statistics still go up. So they propose more of the same. Round and round it goes. The terrible secret, like Field of Dreams, is that you build it and they will come. Would you rather live on the street in Saskatoon during the winter, or Vancouver where it very rarely goes below freezing? Buying a bus ticket is a lot more attractive if you know you going to be welcomed and taken care of when you get there.

Once again, I probably come off as being mean spirited. It is a tragedy for people. There are addictions and mental illness. Nobody wants to grow up and be a bum on the streets. But something has to be done besides “providing more shelters and social housing.”

The situation is bad. Just a few days ago I was paying at the gas station when the cashier stopped a homeless man from shoplifting. The guy went crazy, screamed profanities, challenged him to a fight outside. Does the guy making minimum wage need that? What about him? I live downtown, I see this kind of thing in shops all the time. I see/hear crystal meth addicts screaming every day. Once I got a memo at work, that warned employees that if you’re using the back entrance to the building in the loading dock, watch out for discarded needles.

It’s not a pretty picture. It won’t be for granny Sorensen visiting from Sweden during the Olympics either. Maybe if it rains enough, she’ll stay in her hotel.

Those Wacky Inukshuks

The image on the left is one of Vancouver's more noted landmarks. It's the representation of stone monuments that the Inuits built in the arctic. It's called an inukshuk. There's a craze/fetish for these things and Vancouver used it on their official logo for the 2010 Olympics.

Not to be cynical or a snob, but Europeans were building St. Peter's 400 years ago and native cultures of North America were piling up some rocks that look like a wobbly stickman. The inukshuk is cool in a way, but why do we glorify it? Is it not a wee bit embarrassing?

In related news, International Olympic Committee Chairman Dick Pound was quoted recently:

“We must not forget that 400 years ago, Canada was a land of savages, with scarcely 10,000 inhabitants of European origin, while in China, we’re talking about a 5,000-year-old civilization.” (Story)

A poor choice of words that have people up in arms. He's been called a racist and the IOC has been petitioned to sanction him. This gave Margaret Wente an idea for a column, and now she's getting the same heat at the Globe and Mail.

North American native peoples had a neolithic culture based on subsistence living and small kinship groups. They had not developed broader laws or institutions, a written language, evidence-based science, mathematics or advanced technologies. The kinship groups in which they lived were very small, simply organized and not very productive. Other kinship groups were regarded as enemies, and the homicide rate was probably rather high. Until about 30 years ago, the anthropological term for this developmental stage was “savagery.” (see full column)

What do you think? Were native cultures of the 1600's as advanced as European or Chinese?