Sean Bickerton

Click on the image below for a photo essay of Vancouver as a Olympic Village:

Four years ago, Tom and I were still living in New York, and we watched in amazement as the Mayor we had been reading about in the New York Times rolled up onto the stage in Turino, Italy and accepted the Olympic flag on behalf of all Vancouver. Watching Mayor Sullivan parade that flag across that Olympic stage for the City of Vancouver made us so proud of my hometown city. It literally brought tears of joy to my eyes.

It was a great moment for Vancouver, and he became an instant international icon of a progressive city where anything was possible. So it will be with great pride that we watch this morning as he carries the torch in Vancouver as that great symbol of peaceful international competition makes its final journey to the torch-lighting ceremony tonight.

As with all human endeavour, there are things to criticize. With something this big, it would be impossible to avoid in fact.

But now that the Opening Ceremonies are upon us this evening, it is time for all Vancouverites that love their city and all Canadians to cheer our athletes and give our enthusiasm and support for the most peaceful, successful games in the history of the Olympics. Here’s to Owning the Podium!

Go Canada! Go!

We took a walk around the False Creek Seawall on Saturday, eager to see the now-completed Athlete’s Village and how they’ve fixed everything up along the seawall to welcome the world.

But the condition of the seawall in North East False Creek hasn’t improved. It’s still a small strip of dilapidated asphalt bordered by sections of rusty chain link fence at each end, and there is a lot of litter along the way.

Instead of the new landscaping we expected to see, Concord has sprayed a soylent green all over the bordering dirt and grass. God only knows what it’s leaching into False Creek. That plastic spray-lawn may be green in colour, but it’s anything but a green welcome to the world’s athletes and media.

(More photographs available here.)

Concord has had twenty years to complete that section of the seawall, yet it still isn’t finished. It’s very narrow compared to the rest of the wall, and there’s no separate bike lane despite repeated requests. The large crowds spread across the entire width of the walkway are clearly frustrating the cyclists that usually tear past.

Is this really the best we can do to welcome the world to our city? Is this the best we can do for the residents who live in this community? It’s not that Concord has done nothing. They have. They took away everything in their storage yard adjacent to BC Place referred to by many as an industrial junkyard. It was removed at taxpayer expense, mind you, and they’ve vowed to bring it all back again after the Olympics are gone, but still, they did do that.

And they’ve sprayed seawall borders with that green, lawn-like substance, and put up large, bright, colourful banners advertising condo towers on the very site they promised to develop into Creekside Park. They’ve also done that.

But the rest of the city looks great. It’s a shame that this is the section of seawall the world’s athletes, their families and media have to walk past every day.

My New Years Resolution for 2010 is to try and be more temperate.

I’m passionate about the issues I care deeply about, and while diplomatic by nature, sometimes I get a bit heated in pursuit of those causes, particularly when I feel there is an underdog in need of defense.

I feel I erred in this regard in my recent post – A Potemkin Olympics – (since amended) regarding the contretemps that erupted between VANOC and organizers of the Opening Ceremonies on one side, and the Vancouver Symphony and Vancouvery Youth Symphony on the other. I regret the way I characterized those involved on the Olympics organizing side and the lack of respect I exhibited for the producers of the Opening Ceremonies.

More particularly, I wish to apologize – in Memoriam, as Bob Ransford points out – to Jack Poole, head of VANOC in this regard. I never criticized him, but having criticized the organization he ran so successfully, i feel compelled to also note on the same page that he is universally praised by those I look up to as someone who was one of the great Vancouverites, with highly admirable values and deeply committed to this city.

And to acknowledge, as Rod Mickleburg pointed out recently in The Globe & Mail, that many of the events tarnishing the Olympic image were out of VANOC’s control.

While I disagree with some of the decisions taken by VANOC and the Opening Ceremonies, I wish to state categorically that I do so with full respect for the internationally-celebrated team chosen to showcase our city to the world. We are all looking forward to a unique spectacular that magical day.

I give the organizers of the Olympics and Paralympics, and the producers of the Opening Ceremonies full respect for their extraordinary achievements so far, and my full support for their efforts to bring honour to our city, province and nation next month. We will all be watching with pride. And in the year to come, if ever disagree I must, I will endeavour to disagree more respectfully.

Here are ten heartfelt wishes for our city in 2010:

1. That we host one of the most successful Olympics & Paralympics in history; that credit is shared with everyone that did the heavy lifting to make it happen; and that Canada owns the podium throughout!

2. That the city recognizes its mistake and restores the decades-old Vancouver minimum standard of 2.75 acres of parkland for every 1000 residents for all new development.

3. That we take simple steps to make Vancouver a more pedestrian-friendly city.

4. That the Mayor releases a comprehensive and credible plan to match his promise to end homelessness in the next five years.

5. That the entire city comes together in order to develop the badly missing infrastructure necessary to sustain the vibrant arts sector of our economy.

6. An end to STIR-type corporate giveaways with no public benefit just to build market-rental housing instead of subsidized or stabilized rentals.

7. The restoration of regular order, courtesy and an atmosphere of respect in City Hall.

8. That the viaducts come down, a thousand parks bloom in their place, and Chinatown is completely revitalized.

9. That the City of Vancouver starts to play its expected role in leading Metro Vancouver  into the future and begins by repairing damaged ties with the UBC Endowment Lands.

10. That the Blue Moon that ushered in 2010 heralds a booming, broad-based economic recovery lifting all boats!

UPDATE 1/2/10:  (Revised)

NEWS UPDATE ADDED 12/21/09 2:01 pm

I’m pleased to report that VANOC has issued a formal apology to Maestro Bramwell Tovey and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra for “putting it in an ‘untenable’ position” according to today’s report from The Globe and Mail by David Ebner.

Nonetheless, it remains deeply troubling that our own grammy-award winning orchestra and internationally celebrated Music Director Bramwell Tovey will not be featured during the Opening Ceremonies seen around the world.

We were told the Olympics would showcase our city and province to the entire planet. So why are they missing this opportunity to showcase one of our greatest cultural crown jewels, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra?

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(POSTSCRIPT ADDED BELOW ON 12/21/09 11:01 AM)

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE 12/19/09

Today The Globe and Mail published an article by Marsha Lederman and Rod Mickleburgh entitled The Day The Music Died, which begins:

As the Winter Olympics near, the Games are being hit by defections from the opening and closing ceremonies.

The Grammy-winning Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and its celebrated conductor Bramwell Tovey walked away from the opening ceremonies this week after being asked to prerecord music that would then be mimed by others during the live, lavish spectacle. Yesterday, Mr. Tovey called the plan fraudulent, likening it to Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson’s “faux gold medal” at the 1988 Summer Olympics. Mr. Johnson was stripped of his medal when he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. “In our field, for you to plagiarize somebody else’s recording – to mime it and pretend that it’s you – is absolutely on a par with Ben Johnson’s fraud. … It’s non-Olympian in spirit and VANOC really should have known better.”

Mr. Tovey, meanwhile, said VANOC’s plan to have an orchestral segment mimed during the opening ceremonies reminded him of the furor over lip-synching by a young girl at the 2008 Summer Olympics. “I said ‘no’ to VANOC, because I felt it was dishonest. I thought it was fraudulent. It’s promoted with public money, and I didn’t want anything to do with this kind of dishonest practice.” After the Beijing lip-synching controversy, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell vowed there would be no lip-synching during Vancouver’s opening ceremonies.

But that was then. Now we learn that instead of setting a new low, the 2008 Olympics set a new Olympic standard for muzzling dissent and the Milli Vanilli-style faux-performance embraced by those producing Vancouver’s opening ceremonies.

UPDATED 9/25/09 (see related articles below)

In just five months, thousands of the world’s greatest athletes will be gathered inside BC Place from every corner of the globe, all of the world’s nations standing together, waiting to compete peacefully on a global Vancouver stage.

Imagine, if you will, the opening ceremonies for those 2010 Olympic Winter Games, with tens of thousands of spectators from more than a hundred countries waiting expectantly in the stands for those first electrifying strains of the Olympic fanfare. Picture the sight of that massive crowd, packed to the rafters. Think about the billion-plus viewers watching on TV and online for the lighting of that ancient torch, symbol of Athens, cradle of democracy.

Now imagine that … but without any music. Without any musicians. Without any lighting or choreography or dance or movement. Without costumes, sets or decorations. Without performance of any kind – no one to entertain or enlighten us. No text or symbolic meaning, no poetry, no actor’s soaring rhetoric  … nothing.

What are we left with? A cold, dark stadium of athletes standing in silence listening to politicians give speeches. As much as I love politics, that has to be one of the more depressing and Orwellian sights one could imagine.

Yet that is the world we seem to be contemplating as we start to face the real costs of a worldwide financial crisis triggered by the profligate greed of financiers not satisfied with just fleecing the world’s consumers.

Here in Vancouver, the effects are just starting to be felt as governments at all levels slash support for the arts.

To give credit where it’s due, the federal government got into the act first, demeaning the arts and its contribution to Canadian culture during the last election campaign. According to The Toronto Star:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has sparked a culture war in the federal election campaign with a claim that “ordinary people” don’t care about arts funding.

Under fire for his government’s $45 million in cuts to arts and culture funding, the Conservative leader yesterday said average Canadians have no sympathy for “rich” artists who gather at galas to whine about their grants.

“I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up – I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people,” Harper said in Saskatoon, where he was campaigning for the Oct. 14 election.

These comments caused a great hue and outcry, and audiences jammed all-candidate forums to discuss the arts and their importance to a country overwhelmed by a commercial culture to the south that is oblivious to our values, history and our place in the world.

Some went so far as to question how it’s even possible to assert Canadian sovereignty without a unifying culture that makes us that very thing – Canadian. Compounding irony upon irony, this question is actually inscribed on our Twenty-Dollar bill, in the words of Gabrielle Roy, one of Canada’s many internationally-celebrated writers: “Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?” Nonetheless, Mr. Harper’s government was re-elected, and the cuts went ahead.

Surprisingly, the City of Vancouver joined in. As a longtime advocate for the arts, I was proud to take part in a civic election which confirmed the broad and unanimous agreement among all three major parties of the centrality of the arts to a healthy, vibrant society, and the unique importance of the arts to Vancouver’s emerging economy.

The party I ran for, the NPA,  has a long history of strong support for the arts. The last council increased arts funding significantly and undertook a number of creative new initiatives. These include a new program of cultural tourism, the new post of Vancouver’s own Poet Laureate, public art programs, the international Vancouver Art Biennale now underway and Vancouver 125 – a cultural celebration of Vancouver’s 125th birthday in 2011.

The NPA also conducted a highly-successful, inclusive and consultative city-wide review of arts programs to streamline and reduce administration costs for granting programs while increasing funding. The NPA also approved a $150,000 study in an effort to help save the Pantages Theatre project.

Our main opponents during that election, Vision, agreed with our assessment of the arts’ centrality to a liveable, economically-vibrant, creative city. According to Gregor Robertson:

A world-class city needs to foster artistic creativity, and attract innovators from all sectors around the world. It’s time we ditched the red-tape, ‘no-fun city’ label and embraced a culture of creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation, to help our artistic and small-business sectors thrive in a competitive economy. Together, we will make Vancouver a creative capital in North America.

Vision campaign literature stated: “A successful city … invests in talent. It has the courage to reward creativity and celebrate innovation.”

Yet the first act of the new Vision council after the campaign was to cut arts funding by 8%. No increase. Not even the status quo. An 8% cut.

Now, it wouldn’t really be fair to say they’ve done nothing for the arts. As their campaign literature proudly notes:  ”Vision openly opposed arts funding cuts in the 2008 federal budget.” And I suspect they’ll make a show next week by ‘openly opposing’ the arts funding cuts in the new provincial budget as well.

But the motion we’re sure to see passing the next council criticizing the province will accomplish nothing more than reducing the arts to a political football useful only to those interested in scoring points against the BC Liberals. It will do nothing to provide leadership on the arts sector now so sadly lacking, and worse, it won’t do anything to put their money back where their mouth was during the campaign.

Incredibly, the Mayoral debate sponsored by the Alliance for the Arts between Peter Ladner and Gregor Robertson was actually billed as a debate about Gregor Robertson’s new plan for the arts. Unfortunately, we now know what his real plan was. But before the election, here’s what the Mayor promised:

Based in part on those campaign promises, Vision won a resounding political victory which presented a unique opportunity to bring the entire city together in a united effort to address the many challenges our city now confronts.

Instead, the Mayor appears to have emulated the Pythonesque political lunacy of Yes Minister, adopting Sir Humphrey’s motto: “In Defeat, Malice. In Victory, Revenge.” He could have dealt with the international financial crisis now rocking our world by seeking a broad consensus on the best way forward. But our Mayor chose to use the crisis and its impact on the Athlete’s Village to launch an attack on the already-defeated NPA, politicizing a situation resulting from mandates imposed by three different administrations. As a result of tactics like these, our City remains divided at the very time we face some of the most serious challenges in decades.

How do those challenges affect the Arts sector of our economy? That brings us to the Province. Last in, but taking the biggest kick at the can. I’m completely sympathetic to those elected officials handling our Province’s finances at a time of financial crisis and fin-de-siecle, epochal global change. Their first obligation has to be ensuring the province’s families have healthcare and education along with the other crucial services relied on by all.

But in recent years, we have spent billions of taxpayer dollars on infrastructure projects, including the spectacular new Conference Centre which was, ironically, built on land long promised for a public concert hall. Businesses have received millions more in tax reductions and direct subsidies. Hundreds of millions more are scheduled to pay for the new roof of the soccer stadium, a subsidy to benefit the private owners of the BC soccer franchise.

Yet once visitors get here for their conference, won’t they want to take in a play or a concert, the way tourists do in every other major city on earth? Who will be left to perform in our new retractable-roof stadium?

In general, tourism to Canada is sadly crashing, dashing our fond hopes for all those green, tourism-related service jobs. The aquarium I love is not enough. What will attract the tourists of the future to come here?

In the past two and half years, I’ve seen great artists perform in Vancouver that I was never able to afford in New York. During a recent performance by the Jerusalem String Quartet, I spoke to a woman who had flown all the way from Japan just to hear that performance! A friend who operates cultural tours in Europe tells me that business is booming. Why can’t we bring those tourists here?

Our vibrant arts economy has made Vancouver an international leader in film, music, game design and other related fields. Yet, according to the Globe and Mail, the provincial Arts Council budget is being reduced from a paltry $22 million – already one of the lowest per-capita in Canada – to some $2.2 million over the next two years. A 90% reduction.

I’m sorry, but that’s not a budget cut. It is a knife-edge applied to the throat of the arts in this province and inimical to the kind of province I want to live in.

In addition, two factors have combined to make the impact of what amounts to an all-out assault on arts funding even worse. The first is the way it’s been done, in what I can only describe as an irresponsible ‘now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t’ funding debacle:

• Arts groups may get grants from two sources provincially – the BC Arts Council, and the Gaming / Lottery fund. There are strict conditions and they are reviewed by experts in each field.
• Last March, the  BC Arts Council announced it’s budget had been cut nearly in half, from $19 million to 11 million.
• Within a month however, grant recipients were then told that they would get a supplemental grant from the Provincial budget surplus to make up most of the lost arts council funding.
• Then all the Gaming funds were frozen, leaving many staff working unpaid over the dry summer months and hoping for a reprieve this fall.
• In late August, arts groups then received three different letters – from the Arts Council, the Minister of Culture and from the Gaming Commission saying that they would receive their grants, but the monies would be paid through the Gaming accounts with restrictions making it harder to use the funds.
• Then, recipients of the usual annual Gaming grants, who had been waiting since May to learn their fate, were told that they would receive no funds this year from Gaming grants.
• A few days later, 534 groups who had previously received letters from the Gaming fund advising them of a multi-year commitment of funding, were told that, despite the freeze, they would actually receive their Gaming funds this year as promised.
• That still left the majority of arts groups, those with no multi-year commitments, with no Lottery funds this year.

Confused? Consider how difficult it is for these cultural institutions to plan for the next week, let alone their usual five-year window.

Where does this leave the arts groups in Vancouver? Internationally-celebrated gems like the Vancouver Art Gallery or the Grammy-award winning Vancouver Symphony Orchestra? This year, now that the dust has settled, many are OK. But next year, they face the prospect of a 92% cut in Provincial funding in the very year the world will be coming to our doors expecting to celebrate our cultural diversity.

The second factor aggravating this crisis is the timing. On top of severe government cutbacks, Arts groups are already taking it on the chin thanks to our new Great Recession:

• Individual donations are holding, but trends are worrying because of the economic environment.
• Business sponsorships for the Olympics are dropping like flies. Can you imagine what business support for the arts is like in this environment?
• Ticket subscriptions – the financial lifeline of all arts organizations – for the largest institutions are doing OK, but are a challenge for smaller groups. People are buying tickets, but to fewer events and buying cheaper seats, so overall revenues are down.
• The foundations where most well-run organizations keep their endowments have taken a severe hit, facing arts groups with the devil’s choice of going without endowment income this year or having to dip into principal to maintain their budget.

And finally, the fact that the province waited until after the election to tell these groups they weren’t getting anything this year leaves many arts organizations in the red with no time to balance their budget before the end of their fiscal year – for most, the end of August. That unavoidable deficit will now make them ineligible for funding from the Canada Council and other granting agencies this coming year, setting in motion a cascading devastation to the arts sector that will unfold for years to come.

Where is the leadership we need? Our core arts institutions in the City of Vancouver are in crisis. To preserve their viability and badly-needed contribution to our economy and the city’s livability, there must be a non-partisan arts summit that brings together the Arts Alliance, the Vancouver Board of Trade, all three levels of government, arts organizations, granting bodies and foundations to work out a plan to help these core cultural assets survive until the economy recovers. Above all they need predictability and stability.

The Enlightenment happened centuries ago, but it is not, as some think, a fixed event in history that automatically innoculates all subsequent societies forever more. The commitment to Reason and Science, the Arts and Democratic ideals, to the Enlightenment itself, must be renewed by every civilization, each generation, by every person in fact, one individual at a time.

At the moment, those prospects appear to be dimming in the City of Vancouver.

UPDATE I (9/26/09)   RELATED ARTICLES:

Arts-cuts website paints gov’t as ‘disastrous’

B.C. government Report On Socio-economic Impact of the Arts Removed from Arts Ministry Website

Vancouver politicians must unite to fight arts cuts

Twenty three years ago, when I left Vancouver for New York, EXPO 86 was just about to begin. A year later, Concord Pacific began the transformation of False Creek North from an industrial wasteland into a modern, vibrant, award-winning community – one of the largest urban redevelopment projects in North American history. In the process, their pedestal-style buildings helped redefine urban planning around the globe and garnered wide-spread praise for our livable urban core.

If you visit the City of Vancouver online, you can see page after page of bright, glossy photographs of pristine seawall and fulsome praise for the noteworthy development. They also list all of the amenities promised by the developer in return for the opportunity of developing the Expo lands as one contiguous project.

Fast forward twenty-two years to today, unfortunately, and the story starts to lose its lustre, because many of the promised amenities have not been delivered. The promised 35-foot-wide contiguous seawall is still not complete. Instead

of the long-promised Creekside Park, we have a Concorde Pacific showroom and acres of asphalt rented out to the highest bidder. Adding insult to injury, Concorde has operated an illegal junkyard right on the water’s edge, with acres of wire fencing and razor wire surrounding rusting metal forms, filthy shipping containers stacked two high, and junk and debris as far as the eye can see.

It’s hiding in plain sight, right next to BC Place and GM Place – two of the most important Olympic venues. Is this really the view that Concord Pacific wants visitors to take away with them? Do they really want their brand associated with a junk heap? The False Creek Residents Association has been trying for years to get them to clean up the area, but it remains covered in garbage decades later.

Regardless of whether the developer cares about the damage done to their brand every day people run, walk and cycle past this eyesore, the City and VANOC should care greatly because it will become one of the iconic images of Vancouver the world round if it’s not taken down soon.

If news reports are to be believed, the police are handing out an unprecedented number of tickets on the Downtown Eastside, in what critics allege is an effort to “clean up” the area before tourists arrive and see the squalid living conditions of some of the city’s less fortunate.

Perhaps they should turn their attention towards the illegal junkyard destroying views, polluting the water and blocking waterfront access right at the gates to the Olympics themselves. People have been asking nicely for years.

It seems there is plenty of blame to go around regarding the finances of the Athlete’s Village. And there is no question that voters were misled on both the costs and risks.

It is also clear that rather than seeking to unite the city following an overwhelming victory in the last election, our new Mayor has instead chosen to politicize the Olympics and divide the city further. This is not the Happy Planet His Worship promised Vancouver voters.

This politicization of the Olympics is all the more remarkable because both (then-Mayor) Larry Campbell and his colleague (now-Councillor) Geogg Meggs knew at the time they ran the public referendum on the Games that Vancouver was completely on the hook for the Athlete’s Village and all cost overruns. Yet they never told the voters!

As Charlie Smith warned taxpayers six years ago, in a Georgia Straight article published January 30, 2003:

“Vancouver taxpayers—and not the provincial and federal governments—could be liable for cost overruns on some of the facilities.

Last year, the City signed four separate contracts with the Vancouver 2010 Bid Corporation concerning the construction of an athletes’ village on city land at southeast False Creek …

Phil Le Good, a spokesperson for the No Games 2010 Coalition, alleged that this clause means city taxpayers, and not other levels of government, will be liable for all risks …

“Vancouverites were led to believe they wouldn’t have to pay a cent, that the province would cover all the costs,” Le Good said.   “There is some deliberate stuff going on to hide the costs that are going to be borne by the residents of Vancouver,” Le Good alleged. “Where are they getting the money to pay for this?”

Were voters misled? Yes. But the dissembling started under Vision/COPEs watch, and it hasn’t stopped yet.

That’s not what the current dispute is all about, though. Mayor Robertson wasn’t satisfied with crushing the NPA at the polls. Instead, he seems determined to destroy his opposition entirely.

If permanently dividing the city was Vision’s goal, they’re doing a great job. Likewise with politicizing the Games.

What kind of Olympic legacy is that?