More than a few torch-bearers in the recent weeks months of the torch run across the country have been people who got their spots through corporate sponsors. Others have been heroes in their communities.

It’s so wonderful to see that some of the people who carried the torch today or will carry it tomorrow are really good people from the community. If there’s anything that makes me feel better about this sometimes overwhelming event, this is it.

Among them:

-Ken Lyotier, the Downtown Eastside resident and one-time alcoholic binner who founded United We Can. That’s the bottle-recycling building on East Hastings that has provided a way for hundreds of people in the Downtown Eastside to make a little money and, in some cases, get full-time jobs. Lyotier, now retired, is a soft-spoken guy who epitomizes humble. But he built the recycling depot into a $2-million business and has time and again been an inspirational and thoughtful spokesman for his neighbourhood and the people in it. He carried the torch to LiveCity Yaletown and lit the cauldron there around 8 p.m.

– Matthew Lee, who has lived at the Portland Hotel for years. I met Matt 10 years ago, when I first started writing about housing. He is one of the sweetest guys in the Downtown Eastside, the kind of person who deserves all the help he gets. I wrote a story about him for a special project I did in 1999, which is here on pages 44-45 of the report. It has just thrilled many people in the Downtown Eastside that Matthew was chosen.

– Rob Wynen. Rob is a huge cycling advocate. Here’s the message he sent out earlier today. Many of you will know that tomorrow is the final leg of the Torch Relay as it makes its way to BC Place Stadium.  I was honoured to be asked by the city to cycle with the torch for a portion of the relay.  One of the goals of the city of Vancouver is to ensure that a green legacy is left from these winter games.  With the unseasonably warm temperatures we are experiencing I hope that by cycling with the torch I can in some small  way play a role in ensuring that our Olympic Winter Games have a future that will last for future generations to enjoy.  Reducing our use of the automobile and increasing sustainable modes of transportation such as cycling will play a big part in dealing with Global Warming.  For many of us who have worked over the past couple of decades to encourage cycling in the city it is an exciting time to promote cycling.  Bicycle usage is slowly increasing and it looks like we will have our first separated bicycle facility in downtown Vancouver in late April.  Hopefully we will see some significant changes in the next couple of years and we as a city can meet the challenges ahead so that young Vancouverites will inherit a beautiful city, one we have been so blessed to live in.
 
If you wish to come out and see the flame, show your support or even cycle with me, it would be great to see you come out.  I will depart with the flame at 10:38am from the corner of Adanac and Rupert, cycling east on the Adanac bike route (the city’s oldest bike route).

– Sam Sullivan, Vancouver’s former mayor, will be wheeling along Commercial Drive tomorrow, as many of his supporters have let us know. Love him or not, Sam pushed the boundaries on a lot of agendas important in this city, from drug addiction to housing density. Here’s the info on where he’ll be and when: Sam Sullivan will be carrying the torch on Friday at 9:58 AM, starting at Shopper’s Drug Mart on Commercial and 1st (by Il Mercato) and heading to 1st and Salsbury – 300 metres

I heard the cheering and shouting near my house this afternoon so I, like many others in the neighbourhood, ran out to watch the torch-runner go by. It was weepiness-inducing to see school kids and little old ladies and people being pushed in wheelchairs hustle along our NDP-voting eastside streets to wave flags and cheer as the torch-runner, some young girl, jogged past us.

But in spite of that — and in spite of the fact that I finally went online this week and bought a ticket at five times the list price to see a figure-skating practice, something I’ll be going to by myself because I couldn’t talk anyone else into it — I feel it’s important to say that it’s okay to feel grumpy, whiny, cranky or any other negative emotion about the Games.

Yes, I love the enthusiasm and the sense of fun and the people roaming around town in all their multi-coloured uniforms, which I got to see when I walked downtown to do my regular CKNW appearance this week. But I really don’t enjoy all the hyper-ventilating boosters who think that you have to LOOOOVE everything about this mega-event or you’re a bad Canadian.

More than one person I’ve talked to has commented to me how happy they will be when the Games are over — not because of the traffic issues or the media madness or any of the other negatives — but because we won’t have to listen to all these Chamber of Commerce types constantly telling how how great the Games are and how they’ll salvage our limping economy and how awful it is that anyone would complain or protest against them. Some days, I feel like I’m in McCarthy’s America (“Do you have now or have you ever had any negative thoughts about the Olympics?”).

The reality is that many of us are ambivalent. There are parts we like and parts that make us feel like we’re being taken for suckers or that some weird group of hostile aliens (aka VANOC) has taken over my city.

My feelings were validated this afternoon when Angus Reid came out with a poll, which you can read here, saying that people have mixed feelings. They like the athletes; they can’t stand the people who are running the Games. They see some benefits, but they also worry about the long-term costs — and not just how many years it will take to pay off the Olympic village condos. They agree with Olympics opponents that money is being wasted, but they don’t want protesters disrupting the Games.

And that’s fine. It’s mindless to think the Games are all good or all bad. They’re complex events and we’re right to enjoy what’s enjoyable and be critical of what’s been badly done. Maybe our whining and griping will have an influence on the next Games that are put on or the ones after. That would would be a pretty good outcome actually.

As some of you may know, I got to visit Bologna this past summer to go to part of Vancity’s summer school on the co-operative culture there. Here’s a story of mine that just appeared in BCBusiness on the attraction of the Bologna model for a surprisingly wide variety of Vancouverites.

It’s hard to focus on anything else besides the Olympics, I know, but here’s a small bulletin from the real economy of Vancouver: Port Metro Vancouver’s efforts to buy up industrial land in the region to preserve it from municipal conversions to residential.

Mayor Gregor is about to open Vancouver’s alternative-media centre Wednesday morning, one of the buildings opposite Woodward’s on Hastings that will be run by W2 for the blogger/non-accredited media/citizen journalist crowd to post their assessment of the Games. (Look for the building with televised flames in the windows, making it look like the whole thing is on fire.)

I, for one, can hardly wait to see what this crowd produces and if it does indeed change the coverage of the Games. (And I plan to go down to do a couple of posts from there, just for the fun of it.) In the meantime, here is one assessment of what their impact is going to be.

For those who want more details or to go to the opening party for the community on Feb. 11, 4-7, here’s their news release below.

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In case anyone missed it, the NY Times Magazine had an all-Olympics issue and featured the two Canadians they know best to talk about the Olympics: Michael Ignatieff and Douglas Coupland.

Here’s the link to Ignatieff’s column, all about how we’re going to rise to the occasion. Stunning picture of the village to go with it. As Bob Rennie would say, you just can’t buy that kind of advertising.

In defiance of VANOC rules, an Olympic volunteer has decided to set up a blog and post comments about the volunteer experience.

He’s sent me a link to his blog and his first post here, for anyone who is interested in following this kind of thing.

http://olympicvolunteer2010.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/on-my-training-my-drive-to-the-olympics-and-no-sleep/

On my training .. my drive to the Olympics and no sleep

I have come to the conclusion that getting trained to be an Olympic volunteer has been truly a unique once in a lifetime experience. As someone who has coordinated volunteers, I came into this process very interested in how VANOC was going to manage 25,000 people. When working with volunteers the first concern often goes to issues of safety. For example, I know that the provision of a safe workplace is one of the first steps one must take. And, with all the collective experience of the Olympics, it goes without saying that VANOC would provide a safe workplace for its “workforce” of volunteers … right?

The Olympic volunteer manual states clearly that “as part of our commitment to a safe work environment we have established certain rules and procedures for everyone to follow to maintain a health and safe workplace for everyone – especially you.” In regards to insurance, such as is mandatory for workers under Workers Compensation Act, the FAQ section of the manual states that “all volunteers are covered under the event that they sustain injury or illness”. Unfortunately we are  volunteers (and not volunteer firefighters), so we don’t get WCB. We were as well not informed in any way and at any time during our volunteer orientation on what our insurance coverage is.

One key component of a safe workplace is the need to be alert and awake, especially if one is responsible for others safety, or if one is operating machinery. So, when i was in my training, and someone asked the question “what is our time commitment as a volunteer”, I was  shocked to hear the response “up to six days a week, 8-10 hours a day”. What was even more interesting was that no one even batted an eye at the time. I immediately started going through my volunteer binder, thinking there is no way that they would WRITE that down now, but yet, there the hours were confirmed in black and white – “A normal volunteer day will be around 8-10 hours, including breaks.” Now as the Olympics is upon us, i can confirm that the other time factor, being how many days a week, is as well true – we are scheduled for 6 days a week, with about 4-5 days off in 30.

I know that many of these volunteers (not me unfortunately) are doing things like driving cars .. to Whistler .. along the sea to sky highway – what is known more affectionately as the  “ski to die” highway. Now, yes, there have been upgrades to this highway, but is the Olympics really trying to say that volunteers who are working 6 days a week, 8 to 10 hours a day, (NOT including transportation to and getting through security on the site), driving Olympians from Vancouver to Whistler, are in a “safe” workplace? Me thinks not!

Anyways, i am reserving judgement on this one. More on how this works out as we move forward.

If you have any stories or things to share please send an email to [email protected].

I feel as though I’m in one of those ambitious liberal-arts programs put on by progressive colleges where, for an entire term, there’s a grand theme and all of life’s questions are filtered through that. I heard about one recently, where for the entire term they studied the literature, art, political science, economics and more of  war.

For all of us in the city, the grand theme is the Olympics. Love them or hate them or sort of half and half, they’re dominating our lives. Either you feel the physical impacts — hordes of people asking for directions or getting their pictures taken in front of the time clock downtown, work places shut down, streets barricaded — or you feel the psychological impacts, as your dinnertime conversations are taken over by contemplations of what the Games mean.

I was out for dinner last night with five friends and, over the wailing of ‘It’s Amore’ at Osteria Napoli on Renfrew, we went though the gamut of emotions and reactions. Three of us are looking forward to going to some events and are sort of excited about it, partly because we’re media/PR types who will get to hang around the periphery of the buzz. One is too busy with kids to care. Two others were distinctly unenthused. But even among those of us who are taking some pleasure in the Games, there are all kinds of troubling questions that we shared with our anti-Olympics friends.

It is hard to take unalloyed pleasure in hosting this expensive party when, for example, your eastside kids’ soccer fees are being doubled because there’s less government money or when your entire soccer team is dominated by refugee and immigrant kids whose families can’t afford any fees at all. That’s not much of an investment in sports for children. It’s also hard to party hearty when other services are being cut: in ESL services, for instance.

And then there’s the cost of the tickets. I finally got around to trying to buy some and — okay, call me naive and stunningly uninformed — but I was actually shocked to see that tickets for figure-skating are going for $150 to $450 at the regular prices, not even thinking about the current Craigslist price. The opera seems positively democratic in contrast. Who can afford to buy tickets at that price? (Even the tickets for the figure-skating training sessions have ballooned up to $100 a seat.) It makes me feel as though we all agreed to pay for a yacht so that Paris Hilton and her friends could have a really swell time.

And if it actually went to the athletes, I might feel better about it. But it doesn’t. My physio, who has worked with sports teams, said she couldn’t bear to go to the Games because she gets so angry about how little money trickles down to all those people who actually train for years. While VANOC is pulling in $150-$1100 a seat for various events, the athletes are, for the most part, living and training on peanuts.

In the end, as we went round and round these topics, I ended with the same ambivalent feeling I have every time I think about the Olympics too long. Oh, I forget it sometimes in the excitement of the moment. I was down at Robson Square today, where hordes of people had clustered to watch Katarina Witt and Elizabeth Manley do a few circles on the ice, while more hordes were bombarding the media centre for their accreditations. It’s fun to see your city dressed up, filled with people and activities. Whee! It’s like being in a truly big city.

But back home, I continue to have the odd bad taste in my mouth about how all of this is organizing and who benefits. I’ll see how I feel in three weeks: Better? Or worse?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s going to be a battle for public opinion in the next three weeks about homelessness in Vancouver as the 2010 Olympics media descend on the city.

You would think that just telling the plain truth about homelessness in this province would be compelling enough for even the most radical housing advocates. Apparently not, though.

The facts are: In 2001, the new Liberal provincial government cancelled all social-housing projects and, except for a few special deals, didn’t get back into putting money into real social housing for another five years. Then they made welfare a lot harder to get, especially for anyone whose cognitive/mental health/drug problems made it a challenge for them to jump through multiple hoops.

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Apparently council today added to the existing staff recommendation by voting in favour of a plan to try out a downtown bike lane by the end of the year.

Here’s the motion that Geoff Meggs brought to council.

1. THAT a separated bike lane be constructed on the Dunsmuir Viaduct at a cost not exceeding $300,000; source of funds being the 2009 Streets Basic Capital Budget (Bike Network), including a monitoring and evaluation program with a report back to Council regarding the results ;   
2. THAT separated bike lanes, connecting the Burrard Bridge and Dunsmuir Viaduct to the central business district, be approved in principle with a report back to Council in the spring regarding the results of public consultation on the design and alignment as well as options for a trial of separated lanes in the central business district this year; 
3. That staff report on options in 2010 to conduct a trial of a fully separated bike lane or lanes on part of the city’s existing local street bikeways.