Politics

Vancouver learned to stop worrying and love mega-events

Published

1 hour ago

June 21, 2026

VANCOUVER — On the opening day of the 2010 Winter Olympics, protesters marched to BC Place, the culmination of a decade-long tug-of-war over whether Vancouver had room for a global sports mega-event. Activists first tried to block the Olympics from coming to town, then tried to use it to extract social commitments from organizers, and finally to shame anyone involved.

On Thursday, when Canada was preparing to play the most important match in the country’s soccer history, the streets around BC Place appeared to be free of protesters, filled only with gleeful fans swathed in patriotic red and the occasional dishdasha preferred by the Qatar Football Association’s traveling contingent.

“It’s kind of a nothing-burger,” observed Am Johal, who as the chair of the Impact on Communities Coalition had been a leader of the city’s anti-Olympics movement, hours before kickoff on the World Cup’s second match day.

Johal was walking through the Downtown Eastside, a scruffy neighborhood that had been the site of the greatest pre-Olympic friction, along the lines of conflict that define the modern North American city — between new transplants and existing residents, tourists and locals, police and civil-rights activists, global capital and local resistance.

Now, however, Johal was carrying a fiscal conservative’s laments rather than those of the community organizer. Canada’s governments were projected to spend over $1 billion to host World Cup matches in Vancouver and Toronto, with a roughly even split between funds coming from the federal budget as opposed to provincial and local ones. More than 70 percent of voters in both cities told pollster Angus Reid that it was not worth the public cost.

“I think if the government is looking to spend a billion of public funding related to economic and social benefit, it should really do a proper opportunity cost,” said Johal. “If there’s a massive public subsidy being done to groups that are unaccountable to the broader city — if these things are going to go ahead — why is public money going into them?”

Those were arguments Johal made when Vancouver voters were asked in November 2002 to weigh in on the merits of an Olympic bid. Almost two-thirds of those casting ballots in the municipal plebiscite voted to proceed. But over the course of the decade, as the games grew near, the coalition of skeptics appeared to grow. (The Vancouver Sun dismissed them as “whiners and grumble-bunnies.”)

There were anti-gentrification activists who feared that an Olympic Village and other new developments would price out renters and displace property owners. Anti-consumerist radicals, many with ties to the Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters, saw it as a corporate spectacle. Civil libertarians anticipated heavy-handed police measures to clear streets of the homeless and drug users. (Vancouver is home to North America’s first supervised injection facility.) Environmental activists and tribal groups, who hold disproportionate sway in British Columbia’s politics, sought to protect what they said was unceded aboriginal land.

As the anti-Olympic coalition grew, it split along the lines that often fracture protest moments. Johal’s community coalition sought to extract 37 specific policy commitments to ensure what one City Council resolution described as a “transparent, inclusive and socially sustainable” games.

The Anti-Poverty Committee took a more militant approach, threatening to “evict” members of the local Olympics organizing committee from their homes, attacking branches of games sponsor Royal Bank of Canada with rocks, and vandalizing the office of British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell, a leading Olympic booster. The militants also took aim at those on their own side, even if more playfully: David Eby, who as executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association had been the anti-Olympics’ movement most prominent spokesman, received a pie to the face after arguing for non-violence at a community meeting.

Despite the irreconcilable “diversity of tactics,” as activists politely described it, the rebellion attracted notice beyond Vancouver, inspiring a new era of local resistance to global mega-events. Veterans of the Vancouver campaign shared lessons with activists in Boston, who in 2015 forced then-Mayor Tom Menino to withdraw plans to bid for the 2024 Summer Games due to civic opposition. Two European cities, Hamburg and Budapest, subsequently killed their bids once voters expressed their disapproval in referenda. The NOlympics LA movement, currently attempting to rally political opposition to the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, draws from the lessons of Vancouver.

Evidence of that legacy has been scarce on the streets of Vancouver this month, even after the city enacted “FIFA Bylaws” designed to give police specific tools to use against street vendors and buskers and remove advertising that interferes with the World Cup sponsorship deals. The Pivot Legal Society deployed crews of “legal observers” who chased law-enforcement officials through the Downtown Eastside, and activists shared Vancouver Police Department press releases boasting of new drone surveillance capacities.

“These are always moments where policing gets new tactics and technologies,” observed Johal, “and they oftentimes get deployed during mega events as a way of moving forward.”

But the Downtown Eastside did not feel like a neighborhood under siege, as it had in 2010. Even if it competes with the Olympics in cultural and geopolitical salience, the World Cup is a more logistically diffuse experience. Rather than being consolidated within a single metropolitan area for two jam-packed weeks, this year’s World Cup lasts for more than five weeks and is spread across 16 cities in three countries.

In 2022, the same year that Vancouver offered itself up to host World Cup matches, Eby was elected British Columbia’s premier. Now instead of using his words to inspire the activists who massed outside BC Place, he was inside. Inside a luxury box, Eby greeted sports executives who lobbied him to make a new commitment to the Vancouver Whitecaps franchise that joined Major League Soccer the year after the Olympics. (Eby’s office did not make him available for an interview.)

“We’re so excited to be hosting,” Eby said in one social-media video. “And we’re so excited to have a win under our belts.”

Politics

‘Don’t count on me to say bad words’

Published

16 minutes ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The French minister for sports, Marina Ferrari, was in New York City to support her national team, which will play its second match tomorrow against Iraq. On Monday, she dropped by the French consulate across from Central Park for an event organized by Business France to discuss the opportunities this year’s three-country World Cup represents for French and American companies.

Panelists included French Football Federation President Philippe Diallo, New York City Economic Development Corporation interim CEO Jeanny Pak and representatives from the NFL and the New Orleans Saints, which are playing the first ever professional (American) football game in France this fall at a stadium in the Paris suburbs.

In prepared remarks, Ferrari talked about Franco-American cooperation, not just for major sporting events, but also for America’s 250th anniversary.

“France will be, as it always has been, at your side,” she said.

In an interview afterwards, Ferrari answered questions in English about politically outspoken French footballers, Qatari influence in French sports and the beautiful game being divided into quarters by TV commercials during World Cup “hydration breaks.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you think of football becoming a four-quarter sport instead of a sport of halves? Are the Europeans concerned that this World Cup has made it into a four-quarter sport?

In France, we have been working with the broadcaster and they took the engagement not to put advertising during those pauses. For us, it’s important. When we organize in the future such a competition — with the weather and with the climate change — we will have to adapt the competition. So I understand clearly why those times now exist, but in France we take care about not pushing so much advertising during this time.

You talked about sports uniting. What do you think of Kylian Mbappé and others on the team taking stances against the far right?

I think a player is a citizen like anyone, so they can express their feelings, their political views, or their opinions. It is not forbidden — but, while playing, stop when you are wearing the shirt of France. But I think they are free to do that.

Paris 2024 was such a successful Olympics. What have you talked to Americans about to pull off a World Cup and an Olympics? And how are you meeting that same level for the Winter Olympics in 2030?

I think that we’ve got to think together about the future of these Olympic Games in winter, because you know, with the climate change, having snow in the future is more and more uncertain. So we’ve got to think, how do we produce snow in the future without taking water from the consumption of the citizens. So we have a lot to do on that, because in the future I think that only a few countries will be able to organize again [Winter] Olympics and Paralympics, so we’ve got really to create a new model, a sober model for the future and for the next generation.

Are you concerned about Qatari dominance of French domestic football, given the country’s sovereign wealth funds ownership of champion club Paris Saint-Germain?

We are proud of having Paris Saint Germain. I hear this bad buzz, blah blah blah, the investors, etc. I think we are lucky to have such a club, so don’t count on me to say bad words.