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2010 Olympics will cost the taxpayer plenty - Lenskyj

An expert on the social and economic costs of hosting Olympic Games offers warning on price tag and effects on the poor Legacies are not free.

An expert on the social and economic costs of hosting Olympic Games offers warning on price tag and effects on the poor

Legacies are not free.

They are paid for out of taxpayers’ money Helen Lenskyj, author of Inside the Olympic Industry: Power Politics and Activism, told a score of interested Whistler residents last week at a special Olympic information session put on by AWARE.

Lenskyj, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, has studied the social impact of Olympic Games on communities for the last several years.

She is about to produce her second book, an in-depth look at the Sydney Summer Olympic Games of 2000.

Lenskyj takes issue with the use of the word legacy, which she believes implies it is free.

"It is not," she said.

It is instead code for infrastructure paid for by the taxpayer which organizations pushing for an Olympics need to host the Games.

The Whistler area is in line to get several "legacies" should the Games be awarded to Vancouver.

They include: The Callaghan Nordic centre, an athlete's village, a multipurpose complex and a bobsleigh run.

As well as partially or completely funding these facilities, endowments will also be put in place to ensure they do not burden the municipality or the province. The endowments are funded by all levels of government as part of the $620 million cost of the must-have facilities for the Winter Games.

Lenskyj also warned that the cost to the taxpayer does not stop there. She described the boosters of Olympics as placing a "firewall" between the cost of mounting the event and the building of the facilities and the infrastructure.

That way the cost of improving the Sea to Sky Highway, or building a new Vancouver Convention Centre or a rapid transit link between Richmond and Vancouver are not included.

In Sydney, said Lenskyj, the total cost of the Games was $2.36 billion and 50 per cent or more of that was paid for by the taxpayer.

She doesn't expect the situation to be any different in British Columbia.

She also warned the audience of being wooed by the powerful media messaging from the organizations which push to host Olympics.

"The Olympics is not a religious experience," said Lenskyj, who believes the Olympics should be dismantled.

"It is not a lifestyle. It is not extended family. It is an industry and it is about profit making.

"The Olympic industry is about profit and widening the gap between the rich and the poor."

She also believes the Olympics is a "threat to our understanding of democracy."

For example protests are often controlled through new laws enacted for the Games.

In Sydney, said Lenskyj, there were vast areas of the city which were covered by a raft of legislation that made political protests, sitting for an extended length of time in one place, and other activities criminal.

This basically criminalized homelessness, she said, by making it against the law for these people to spend any length of time in the areas covered by the legislation.

It wasn't just the host city which took steps to protect itself against protest. So did the multinational corporations which sponsored the Games.

"If I wore an anti-Nike T-shirt at an Olympic venue I would be thrown out," said Lenskyj of the Sydney Games.

This is not information everyone wants discussed said Lenskyj, who was on the steering committee for an anti-Olympic activist group when Toronto was bidding for the 2008 Games.

She said it was impossible for anyone from Bread Not Circuses to get any media coverage of their points of view or even letters to the editor published while Toronto was bidding for the Games.

Another argument often touted by Olympic boosters is that the Games will put the host cities on the "international map."

But Lenskyj questioned whom really benefits from this exposure. The Games do not put host venues on a map which reveres social justice, she said. Rather the Games make the host cities more attractive for international investment and big business.

And when it comes to accountability and transparency Lenskyj said the protocol followed to host a Games calls into question the freedom Canadians have come to expect. She pointed to the decision by the Vancouver 2010 Bid Corporation not to release its mini-bid book for competitive reasons as an example.

"This rigid structure prohibits the kind of openness that Canadian citizens take for granted," she said.

"That kind of transparency and openness is in jeopardy."

One of the most worrying aspects of hosting a Games is the impact on the poor and vulnerable.

"The lives of the most vulnerable are made worse," she Lenskyj, who was brought out to the West Coast by the Vancouver-based group Society Promoting Environmental Conservation to discuss her research with the media, Vancouver city councillors, and other interested groups. She cited many examples of how the poor have been affected by Olympic Games in different cities.

In one she described how the owner of a Sydney rooming house for people with some form of mental or physical disability evicted his tenants so he could make more money by renting it out during the Summer Games of 2000.

Some of the residents had lived in the run-down building for years.

"He put new mattresses in each room and called it a backpackers hotel," said Lenskyj.

Not only did his vulnerable tenants suffer at the time, the building remains a hostel for backpackers so this social housing was removed from the housing poor forever by the Summer Games.

Sam Corea, spokesman for the 2010 Bid Corporation, said social issues are taken very seriously by the organization.

Two companies have just been contracted by the Bid Corporation to provide a preliminary social impact assessment study on many of the issues raised by Lenskyj and others. ReWerx and Hardy Stevenson and Associates will complete their report by August at the latest.

Vancouver based ReWerx is a management consulting firm specializing in strategy formation, facilitation, mediation and survey measurement and metrics.

Hardy Stevenson, out of Toronto, is best known for its work on social assessment.

The companies will be doing literature reviews, profiling communities, investigating the experience of previous Games and holding focus groups on key social issues.

The Bid Corporation has also met with a 2010 watchdog group, the Impact of the Olympics on the Community Coalition, 22 times to discuss issues such as homelessness and social housing.

Said Corea: "This is part of what has been going on all along."