Living the Olympic Dream

Destination: Vancouver, B.C.

by Craille Maguire Gillies

Before the madding crowds descend on Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics, shutting down roads and driving locals off to the mountains to wait out the insanity, the city operated as smoothly as ever. Last fall, it was practically sleepy – and not in that fleece-loving, granola-crunching, tree-hugging way that has become a West Coast cliché. (Though Vancouverites do love trees. While promoting his plan to make it the greenest city in North America by 2020, boyish Mayor Gregor Robertson promised to expand the city’s foliage – to passionate applause.)

Along the waterfront path that hugs English Bay, a place the Coast Salish called Ayyulshun or “soft under feet,” there was hardly anyone in sight. And on a Thursday night in Gastown, it was locals, not tourists, that crowded the cobblestone street. Teens wearing matching red outfits, like crazy soccer players tarted up for Halloween, trundled into the SkyTrain station as a cool, damp air blew in off Vancouver Harbour. Over on Dunsmuir Street, business people and the occasional sweethearts passed the night at the Shore Club as live jazz guitar reverberated through the ship-like interior. Overall, the city had the feeling of a place on the cusp of massive change, but in the meantime, everyone might as well relax.

Metro Vancouver, which comprises 22 municipalities including Burnaby, New Westminster and Richmond as well as an electoral area and a treaty First Nation, has long had Olympic ambitions. But it was already a thriving gateway to Asia and the financial hub for the province. Almost half of British Columbia’s economic production is generated here and the size of its financial sector, focused on mining and real estate, is second in Canada only to that of Toronto. Its leaders, however, are looking beyond the Games to foster the area’s growth not only in tourism, but also in engineering, sustainability and especially transportation, as traffic through the Asia-Pacific corridor increases. To expand this supply chain there are the road, port and railway connections of the Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative, which Prime Minister Stephen Harper has called one of the biggest infrastructure projects in half a century.

Long after the athletes and Olympic-sized crowds leave town, when the temporary staff are gone and the last of the Vanoc souvenirs are sold – hurry to get an official Vancouver 2010 canine raincoat – the positive and negative legacy of the Games will remain. The festivities this month won’t make the one-time mill town a destination for international travellers, at least no more so than it already was, but they will elevate the city to historical stature alongside the other Canadian Olympic capitals, Montreal and Calgary.

It will also bequeath the province a debt expected to be in the billions. (Montreal, for example, has only recently paid off its debt from the 1976 Summer Olympics.) Which begs the question: What is the long-term economic impact of the Games? Are they better for business or do they simply saddle a city with fancy but impractical sports venues and a groaning financial obligation? “A country could spend $10 billion on a Games, but only get back $8 billion for its economy,” Simon Chadwick, a professor of sport business strategy at Coventry University in Britain told the BBC recently.

Supporters would argue that the Games are as much about the global stature of a place as they are about economic development. But when you walk the affluent neighbourhoods like Shaughnessy, or dine at trendy Chambar next to local TV personality Terry David Mulligan and Blue Rodeo frontman Jim Cuddy, or stroll through cultural spots like Commercial Drive, with its restaurants and boutiques, a future brighter than the present is difficult to imagine. The region needs no help in securing its world-class status and its long-term plans for growth are right on track.

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