Surveying a life of writing, motherhood, and activism, Renee Rodin’s prose is both understated and unflinching. When grappling with heartbreaking grief at her father’s cancer or a horrific encounter with violence, there are no grand pronouncements about life—only pain and the recognition that it doesn’t go away, but simply takes on more subtle textures over time.

The collection is also full of the whimsy and fire that follow those who abandon themselves to art and activism: the charmingly blasé way Rodin ran famous Vancouver bookstore R2B2 Books, or the time she ran into former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell and chose to lean in and hiss, “You’re bordering on fascism.”

Not all of it works. Some stories, like “Neighbourhood,” veer too far toward abstract tableau, and the rhetorical excesses of ’60s and ’70s leftism flicker when neighbours who cut down a tree are labelled “Imperialists!”

Rodin ends with an inversion of Hemingway’s famous six-word short story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”). She lists the 31 (and counting) people who have used a wicker basket Rodin herself carried her children in. The piece is titled “Wealth,” as if a life spent writing and struggling for social justice—and extending the fruits of those lessons to others—affords one just that.

One of Pivot Legal Society's Red Tents on the streets of Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Photo by The Blackbird.

The five-ring circus has rolled out of Vancouver, but the tents are still up. Hundreds of red tents, which became as much a symbol of our 2010 Games as those maple leaf mittens, won’t be coming down until we get our housing legacy. That’s the pledge of Pivot Legal Society, the non-profit legal advocacy organization that launched the campaign as some 350,000 visitors descended on Vancouver in February to soak up the so-called first socially sustainable Olympics.

The Red Tent campaign was pitched in response to the predicted shortage of shelter beds in the city during the Games and the failure of the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee (VANOC) and its government partners to deliver on promises related to housing and civil liberties. The distinctive tents bear the statement, “Housing is a Right. This tent is protected by Section 7 of the Charter”—the right to life, liberty and security of person. They will be popping up in urban centres across the country as Pivot expands its action, which was inspired by a landmark constitutional case: last December, the B.C. Court of Appeal upheld the right of homeless people to set up temporary shelters on public property when they have nowhere else to go. The campaign will continue until, Pivot says, the ultimate Olympic legacy is realized: A funded national housing strategy. Canada is the only G8 country without one. In April 2009, NDP MP Libby Davies (Vancouver East) stepped up to the podium with a private member’s bill to push for adequate, accessible and affordable housing for all Canadians, but the Conservatives didn’t support the initiative. There were Olympic dreams that Vancouver would set a golden example of how to tackle homelessness, but when the road to the Games got bumpy, promises were torched. Let’s look at what happened.

During the bid stage in 2002, a coalition of environmental and social activists and academics formed the Games-neutral Impact on Community Coalition with “the purpose of maximizing the opportunities presented by the Games and mitigating the potentially negative impacts on Vancouver’s inner-city neighbourhoods.” The IOCC successfully pushed for a referendum on the Games, and together with the bid committee and its government partners, developed the Inner-City Inclusive Commitment Statement (PDF), a set of promises that was incorporated into Vancouver’s bid book and was considered binding.

The statement addresses 14 areas—including civil liberties and public safety, housing, and input into decision-making—and makes 37 specific promises. It’s been touted as an unprecedented pledge by a mega-event host city to work with low-income communities and promote social sustainability, but it materialized into little more than public relations puffery.

While the city boasted about hiring binners to collect bottles and cans left around town (meeting a commitment under employment and training) and VANOC proudly made 100,000 event tickets available for $25 each (ticking off the box next to affordable Games events), housing and civil liberties promises were glossed over.

After a quarter of Vancouverites cited homelessness as their greatest concern in a 2006 poll, ignoring the housing crisis was a Quatchi-sized gaffe. Worst of all, it broke the promise that no one would be made homeless as a result of the Olympics.

According to the Metro Vancouver Homeless Count, the number of homeless people in Vancouver increased by 135 percent from 670 in 2002 to 1,576 in 2008. The tally is believed to greatly underestimate the reality, given the difficultly in tracking down and interviewing the homeless, and housing advocates estimated there were between 4,000 and 6,000 homeless during the Olympics. (There were an estimated 5,500 athletes and officials.)

There was a promise that no one would be involuntarily displaced, evicted or face unreasonable increases in rent due to the Games. But according to the IOCC, approximately 1,300 low-income single room occupancies (SROs)—many contained in old hotels on East Hastings and considered the last option before homelessness—have been lost since the bid was won and the city is not following its own policy to replace rooms at a one-to-one rate. The city defends its record, making another promise that from 2003 to the end of 2012 it will have nearly 2,000 additional non-market units built, compared to a loss of over 1,400 units. However, these numbers don’t take into consideration rent increases that have made SROs unaffordable for low-income residents, nor does it account for rooms held vacant by landlords. Further, the city counts provincially owned rooms as new social housing, when they are newly social, but not new accommodations.

Before the Games, condos were outpacing social housing in the Downtown Eastside at a rate of three to one, and SRO residents were being booted out of their homes as landlords renovated so they could raise rents and make room for Olympic visitors. The IOCC went so far as to file a human rights complaint with the United Nations in July 2009 (PDF), saying hundreds of renters could be evicted prior to the Olympics because of loopholes in tenancy legislations, which allows for these “renovictions.”

An early version of the Inner-City Inclusive Commitment to provide affordable housing proposed by the city of Vancouver included a three-tier housing model at the Olympic Village: market price, moderate income and core-need. However, when a new city council was elected in 2005, one of its first moves was to play Monopoly with the model and commit only 25 percent of the units to “affordable housing,” and of those 252 units, between 30 and 50 percent for core-need individuals. In February 2009, the city reported that the cost of affordable housing at the village had risen from $65 million in 2006 to $110 million. And as of print time, housing advocates feared the plan would be axed completely (the city said a final decision was yet to be made).

Since they failed on the housing front, in a desperate attempt to clean up the streets before the Games, the B.C. Liberals pushed through the controversial Assistance to Shelter Act in November. Dubbed the “Olympic Kidnapping Act,” the law gives police the power to haul homeless people off the streets, pile them into paddy wagons and deposit them at shelters when there’s an extreme weather alert, which can occur in Vancouver when the temperature hovers around zero and there’s heavy rainfall (read: winter in the city). After activists rallied against the act—housing experts came forward to denounce it and Pivot said it was prepared to challenge its constitutionality in court—the chief of the Vancouver police said his officers will only use “minimal, non-forceful touching” to persuade people to accept a lift to a shelter, and will back off if they are met with resistance.

Another Inner-City Inclusive commitment was to commit to a “timely public consultation that is accessible to inner-city neighbourhoods before any security legislation or regulations are finalized,” but the community only became aware of the draconian act when a document leaked, and hasn’t been involved in any meaningful consultations.

In a last desperate attempt to quell negative media attention, BC Housing and the city teamed up to intercept international journalists at the edge of the Downtown Eastside, before they could get to the gritty stretch. They set up an information centre, Downtown Eastside Connect, at the shiny new Woodward’s site, where they shared their “successes” in tackling homelessness, including the building of social housing on 14 city-owned sites. There’s no mention of the fact that construction of these sites was delayed and not one was ready in time for the Games. The cost of the propaganda kiosk: $150,000.

Inevitably, foreign journalists found their way to the Downtown Eastside and wondered how the world’s first “socially sustainable” Games could look like this: Human wreckage, open drug use, prostitution, crumbling buildings. And a legacy of red tents instead of homes.

How could all of these promises be broken? There was no budget to implement the recommendations, including no funding for an independent watchdog; there was no enforcement mechanism and a lack of accountability; many of the goals were not measurable and the statements were wishywashy and open for interpretation. But perhaps that was the point: Get Vancouverites behind the bid with promises of social sustainability, and then hope we forget about it when the circus comes to town.

Vancouver 2010 Anti-Olympic mascot Bitey the Bedbug. Photo by Lotus Johnson.

[This post has been amended, see note below]

They were told to wear red and white, to cheer loudly and smile. They were handed little Canadian flags and instructed to wave them with gusto. “This is an opportunity of a lifetime,” they were told.

Some 540 students at L’École Victor Brodeur in Esquimalt, B.C., where my partner’s daughter is a Grade 4 student, were among the first children to witness the 2010 Olympic torch relay as it roared past their school on day one of the cross-Canada carnival. Their school was one of the first of an estimated 1,000 communities to receive the message of peace and hope Olympic promoters say flickers in the flame.

But first, a message from the sponsors! Before the torch made its appearance, the captive student audience watched a pair of flashy Coca-Cola party trucks crawl by, complete with dancers hopped up on sugar and caffeine, followed by a Royal Bank-branded gas-guzzler. There were no permission slips sent home asking parents to allow their children to be part of this marketing campaign. And there will likely be no lesson in class on corporate sponsorship of the Games.

The students also witnessed a police presence worthy of Beijing 2008. The roll-call at this Celebration of Sport and Culture included hundreds of officers, a helicopter, bomb-sniffing dogs and, as one little boy with a tear-smudged maple leaf on his cheek put it, “men in black.” Some children were frightened by this display of security, but the lesson on militarization at the Olympics will also have to wait.

Later in the classroom, my partner’s daughter asked about the relay’s connection to Nazi propaganda, which we had discussed over breakfast (anyone remember the torch relay’s introduction by the Nazi regime during the 1936 Berlin Games?). Her teacher dismissed her question: while the word “Nazi” does not appear in the educational materials pushed across teachers’ desks by the B.C. government and VANOC, kids canlearn a whole lot about sports like the Nordic combined (a combination of cross-country skiing and ski jumping, in case you were wondering).

In the three years leading up to the Games, the B.C. Liberals have spent an estimated $550,000 on a pro-Olympics education program. The lesson plans were developed by B.C. teachers and are available on the Ministry of Education’s dedicated “Sharing the Dream” website and through VANOC’s educational portal. The IOC requires host countries to develop formal education programs, so it’s no surprise much of the materials are blatant Olympic propaganda. For example, there’s a variety of “mascot education resources” encouraging students to get to know the fictional, First Nations-inspired characters: Miga, the sea bear who loves snowboarding; Quatchi, the sasquatch who dreams of becoming a world-famous goalie; and Sumi, the animal spirit who flies over the Coast Mountains.

What about Bitey the Bedbug, one of the anti-Olympic mascots? Students certainly aren’t learning about his favourite sport, the Downtown Eastside crawl, or the issues to which he’s drawing attention. Students probably won’t learn that some Vancouver housing advocates expected there to be more homeless people than Olympic athletes and officials in attendance by the time the Games open (some estimates range as high as 6,000, up from 1,000 people before the bid began in 2003), and that the city has been backpedaling on its commitment to include 252 low-income housing units in the Olympic Village.

Meanwhile, the province has cut sports grants by $10 million, among them a $130,000 grant to B.C. School Sports, which organizes high school athletic programs across the province. And while teachers spend valuable class time discussing Quatchi’s home in the mysterious forest, students don’t learn about real animals and forests that have been affected by the Olympics: no mention of the thousands of trees that have been cut down and the mountainsides that have been blasted to make way for Olympic venues, or the record number of black bears struck by vehicles along the expanded Sea to Sky Highway.

Students are being bombarded with positive messages about the Games, but they need to see a more balanced picture. They are the ones who will inherit the Games’ legacies, after all—perhaps including financial burdens, restricted civil liberties, and environmental damage. They need to understand what’s going on behind all the razzle-dazzle.

Enter Teaching 2010 Resistance. This volunteer network of youth workers, teachers, and volunteers provides free teaching resources for educators who wish to bring a critical perspective on the Olympics to their classrooms. The materials explore the social, environmental, and economic issues associated with the Olympics and are appropriate for students of all ages. For example, elementary students can learn about grizzly bears and the development of the Callaghan Valley, while secondary students can explore more complex issues like indigenous rights, title, and sovereignty. You’d think the cash-strapped Liberals would welcome some free teaching resources after cutting funding to B.C. schools by more than $118 million this year, but provincial politicians seem more concerned with the smear to their Olympic spirit campaign.

“I don’t think this was right taking all the enthusiasm for the Games away from the children,” Premier Gordon Campbell was quoted as saying. B.C. Solicitor General Kash Heed also lashed out: “Encouraging teachers to use the classroom to recruit kids to break the law, to commit acts of vandalism or to occupy private property, you know even to the extent of sabotaging children’s food, is absolutely and completely unacceptable.”

While Teaching 2010 Resistance has no plans to sabotage food, it certainly doesn’t plan on promoting Olympic sponsors Coca-Cola and McDonald’s in the classroom. And the materials do not advocate breaking the law; rather, they encourage students to become active citizens and stand up for their civil liberties.

At the end of October, Teaching 2010 Resistance had planned a meeting for educators interested in previewing its workshop at Vancouver’s Lord Strathcona Elementary. The event poster featured Dora the Explorer tossing Miga into a garbage can and was available on the website of the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers’ Association (VESTA).

When the media got wind of the event, the Province and the Vancouver Sun—both Canwest dailies and multi-million-dollar sponsors of the Games—published editorials blasting the meeting. “Resistance Workshop Fails Us All; Teachers’ Association Makes Astonishing Decision to Consider AntiOlympic Zealots’ Case,” wrote the Province. “It’s Elementary, My Dear Children: The Olympics are a Sham,” the Sun wrote, sarcasm intended.

After VESTA was slammed in the corporate media for promoting the event, and the Vancouver School Board was questioned for allowing the group to rent a classroom, both capitulated. Teaching 2010 Resistance relocated the meeting and VESTA said it was distancing itself from the group. Ironically, the negative media attention helped promote Teaching 2010 Resistance, and by the beginning of November the group had been in touch with 18 teachers and had presented its workshop to more than 100 students in five classrooms.

After the torch relay, my partner and I took his daughter to the anti-Olympic events that were planned for the same day. We discussed the issues that have demonstrators upset and the things that have supporters excited. We’ve played the “Which mascot are you?” game on VANOC’s website, and we’ve talked through Teaching 2010’s lesson plans. Some days, this smart little nine-year-old wants to be an environmental activist, other days she wants to be an Olympic snowboarder. In the end, it will be her informed decision.

[In response to a reader letter, we re-examined the figure of 6,000 homeless estimated in Vancouver in early 2010. Some housing advocates do indeed place their estimates that high, but reliable figures do not exist. The most recent homelessness survey in Vancouver was in 2008 and counted fewer than 1,600 homeless people in Vancouver, though the study’s authors state that this is undoubtedly an undercount. To reflect this ambiguity, in the online edition of this article we have moved the figure of 6,000 inside parentheses and indicated that it is at the highest end of the estimates out there. Regardless, Vancouver homelessness increased by a shocking 135 percent between 2002 and 2008. ]

Another B.C. election has passed, and the Liberals under Premier Gordon Campbell were able to hold on to power, but it was hard to tell at times which party stood where on the issues and the political spectrum. The environment was a central issue in this election, but it played out in a way that made no sense based on the historic positioning of political parties in Canada.

The Liberal Party of B.C., which since the demise of the Social Credit has been perceived by some to be more right-wing, was the party that defended the merits of a carbon tax. Meanwhile, the voice of the left, the B.C. New Democrats under Carole James, went all-out under the slogan “axe the tax.” They vowed to eliminate the green tax and, instead, embrace a system of cap-and-trade similar to the one now endorsed by the federal Conservatives.

Environment groups and left-of-centre think tanks, such as ForestEthics, the Pembina Institute, and the David Suzuki Foundation, were put in the awkward position of having to enter the campaign to challenge the NDP.

They were concerned that if the NDP was successful using this strategy it would set the environmental movement back decades, as political parties dropped crucial environmental initiatives from their platforms. While B.C. might be unique in how dramatic its provincial politics tends to be, the NDP across Canada appears to have abandoned the environmental file.

In the last federal election, Jack Layton found himself running against a much more environmentally aggressive Stéphane Dion, and even when the possibility of a coalition government emerged, it was the NDP that insisted the “Green Shift” not be government policy.

So what explains this bizarre policy positioning? The answer is the Green Party. In 1929, American economist Harold Hotelling advanced a model for business based on “spatial location.” Let’s say you want to open a convenience store on a street where there is already one on its eastern end; where would the ideal location be to open your store? As close as possible to your competitor, of course, so as to capture every customer on the street to the west. That way, when someone leaves the house to purchase, say, a carton of milk, they will stop at your store because it is closer, even if just by a few feet.

In 1957, Anthony Downs applied this spatial model of competition to politics and suggested that voters will choose political parties that are closest to them in terms of policy. This explains why, in a two-party system like that of the U.S., the policies of the two political parties end up so similar, as each party tries to grab the maximum number of votes on its side of the left/right spectrum.

The Democrats need to be only slightly left of the GOP to get everyone to their left. Where else can the voters go?

In Canadian elections, we have had a number of what we call “third parties,” such as the NDP. The benefit of this sort of competition should be that these parties can adhere to their core ideological values because they have more room to manoeuvre, while still positioning themselves strategically to capture the greatest share of the electorate.

Enter the Green Party. Now with a new viable political player on the field, the other parties have been repositioning. It doesn’t matter that the Greens have yet to score an actual electoral victory; their simple presence in the campaign has altered the other parties’ strategies. The effect has been most substantive for the NDP, which has tried to stake out new ground on the environment, the deficit, and even law and order.

Political parties, of course, are not convenience stores. Economics is modelled using homo economicus, an incredibly selfish man—a man who considers only what will make his own life better, trying to get the most for the least. That is why economists are always surprised when people walk further to get their milk and even pay a little more. The economic model does not allow for considerations economists call “irrational,” like loyalty to a local neighbourhood store and the people who run it.

But this is not the ideal citizen that democracy is predicated upon. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, argued that the very nature of society would force people to rise above their own selfinterest and make decisions for the common good. It was because he believed in a “general will” greater than the individual—that people believe in democracy.

The NDP needs to ask itself what it believes in. Does the party want voters to walk the extra distance for their policies because they’re the right ones—or do they simply want to offer policies that are convenient?