Well, here we go. Eight years of planning, almost $7 billion-worth of public funds expended, and enough treacly hype about the glory of sport to induce diabetes. There's something deflating about the realization the Games are finally upon us, like the lull after a sugar high.
So now what?
Even at this late date, the idea of the Olympics leaves the B.C. public deeply divided, if polls are correct. The split is stark, with half of us believing the Games will be beneficial to B.C., while the other half are doubtful or convinced they will be disastrous. If the Winter Games were designed to bring us together as a people, they have failed utterly. Ambivalence is the antithesis of consensus.
I am not sure what I would answer on a poll about the Games' effects. I am not a fan of the Olympics, that I know. They are a colossal waste of money. They generate no measurable economic impact, as a series of reports have found. The International Olympic Committee is a global leech.
But what, the supporters of the Olympics argue, of the "legacy" of infrastructure the Games will leave in their wake -- infrastructure, we continually hear, that would have to have been built anyway?
Nonsense. The $2-billion Canada Line, the billion-dollar convention centre and $600-million Sea to Sky upgrade (if that, indeed, is its true cost) were built because our bid committee made it clear to the provincial government that the IOC would want nothing less, not because they were projects already slated to be built.
This was public policy generated by IOC fiat, not local need. So now we have two convention centres in a world crowded with them, and a new highway to a posh ski resort that is flirting with bankruptcy, and a rapid-transit line to the airport that was built at the expense of the Evergreen Line, which Trans-Link and Metro Vancouver have argued for years should be the metropolitan area's transit priority. I don't deny that the highway upgrade is welcome, or that the Canada Line is popular. But let's not kid ourselves why those billions were spent, or ignore what other infrastructure was sacrificed so they could be built.
The effects of those changes, though, are for the future. What we cannot recover is what we have lost to the past, those eight years of distractions that have dominated the public discourse and deflected our energies away from what is really important. According to our very own Progress Board, among all the provinces B.C. ranks ninth in economic growth over the last decade. While other provinces have been outperforming us, we've been trucking in snow from Manning Park to shore up the halfpipe.
As for the argument the Olympics will transform Metro Vancouver, it always leaves me wondering: To what purpose? And into what?
Every index already rates Metro Vancouver as either the most livable city in the world or almost so. We're already cosmopolitan and multicultural. Our environment is as close to paradise as you can get. We have better Chinese food than China. Just what do we hope to transform into? New York? Hong Kong? A metro area where the average house price is not just $750,000 but $1 million?
Vancouver doesn't need the Olympics to chase that mirage of being a world-class city. It already is a world-class city.
For all of my doubts, however, I surely don't identify with the likes of the Olympic Resistance Network, which fatuously proclaims it intends to "confront this two-week circus and the oppression it represents."
The Network's call-to-arms to overthrow the "oppression" of a 17-day jockfest is not only farcical but gratuitous, a lame excuse to feed its insatiable appetite for complaint. The Network plans to marshal its protest forces downtown during the Olympics -- and by all means it should, if its numbers feel the need to do so. But there is that in those plans to protest that is churlish and sophomoric, an adolescent glee in not just wanting to disrupt the Olympics but in having a world stage on which to do so. (Of course, if violence ensues, any public sympathy or patience the Network enjoys will evaporate overnight.)
On the other hand, I do not identify with the camp of Olympic cheerleaders who want only the good news, who insist that to be anti-Olympic is to be un-Canadian. This is as fatuous as, and maybe more dangerous than, the Resistance Network's prattlings. The torch ignites no fire under me: I don't need the Olympics to celebrate my love of place.
But that love of place, that love of Vancouver, overrides all, and with the Olympics here and upon us -- as much as I wish they weren't -- I am going to do my best to enjoy them. This will entail yakking to strangers, dancing in the streets and, plans are, drunkenness. I will also wish mightily for the Olympics' success, which will not be measured in dollars or medals won, but in those who came here and thought:
"Great town. These people are lucky to live here."