Am Johal (IOCC), Christine Ackermann (WERA) Janine Fuller (R@RC) and David Eby (BCCL)
WERA Director Christine Ackermann is quoted in an article by West Ender reporter Jackie Wong in regard to a history of evictions of tenants in the West End
Olympic human-rights complaints taken to Switzerland
By Jackie Wong
Civil liberties violations and a lack of legislative protection for renters are the focus of two human-rights complaints filed recently against the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games (VANOC), the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and its government partners. Am Johal, chair of independent Olympic watchdog group Impact on Communities Coalition (IOCC), met with a representative of the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland, on July 31 to deliver the complaints.
While the complaints won’t be heard by the UN until April 2010, two months after the Games end, Johal says the IOCC will be providing monthly updates from Vancouver to the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights. “In our view, both in terms of civil liberties and tenancy, Canada’s not living up to the right to adequate housing and basic democratic civil liberties standards that we’d expect,” he says. “We would like to see a reform on the [Olympic] bidding process, because this has happened in city after city after city. It’s completely preventable.”
The complaints follow a long history of work on the part of the IOCC to mitigate the potentially negative social impacts of the Olympic Games. The group launched in 2002 while Vancouver was in the midst of its Olympic bid process. Since then, Johal has been responsible for bringing the UN Special Rapporteur for Housing, Miloon Kothari, to Vancouver in fall 2007 to look at housing issues and at how the 2010 Games would impact the city. Kothari, who at the time said he was “taken aback” by the housing conditions in the Downtown Eastside, tabled a report in April 2008 which included a push for Canada to meet obligations under voluntary human-rights protocols that it had signed, and to adopt a national system of tenancy standards — something Johal and local tenant advocates have been working to put in place in time for Vancouver 2010, with little success.
In June of this year, B.C. housing minister Rich Coleman wrote a letter to Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson to say that he would not, as per the City’s requests, amend Residential Tenancy legislation during the Olympic period. Even so, West End Residents Association (WERA) director Christine Ackermann says it isn’t too late for the Province to make changes to protect renters. “Implement the right of first refusal, as they have in Ontario. It’s not that hard to do; it would be easily done in September when the legislation meets again,” she says.
As part of the UN human-rights complaint, WERA and tenant advocacy group Renters at Risk produced a housing compendium listing 17 known instances of what they deem unfair mass evictions for renovation (known as ‘renovictions’) that have occurred in Vancouver since 2001. The compendium, while comprehensive, does not list all evictions that have occurred in the city, as Renters at Risk acknowledges that many go unreported. Johal expects the situation to worsen as the Games draw nearer.
In an attempt to strengthen municipal dialogue on housing rights as they pertain to the Olympics, Johal asked the former city council in May 2008 to adopt the recommendations laid out by international housing expert Claire Mahon — but with no success. Mahon is the principal author of a 2007 report on guidelines for hosting mega-events while protecting housing rights, published by the internationally acclaimed Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE). Mahon visited Vancouver in November 2008, during the last week of the municipal election campaign. “VANOC and the city council, the provincial government and Canadian government have nothing to lose by working closely with the community organizations and helping make this Olympics not one that divides communities about how to approach it, but one that unites communities in making Vancouver a truly better place to live,” she told WE at the time.
But strong divisions between civil-liberties advocates and Olympic officials are already in place, according to David Eby, executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA). “Unfortunately, in the lead-up to 2010, we now have bylaws being passed that restrict the ability of people to hold signs in an area of more than 40 city blocks, and the small areas within these perimeters will be set up as protest pens, just as they were in Beijing,” he says. “I think [city councillors] are working to protect civil liberties, but, unfortunately, they’re working to protect civil liberties of the Olympic sponsors and the International Olympic Committee. What we’d like to see them do is protect the civil liberties of Vancouverites.”
As part of the IOCC’s August 9 press conference detailing the human-rights complaints, Johal posted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the Olympic countdown clock in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery. “I want to emphasize the Olympics are not above the law, which is why we posted the [declaration] on the clock,” he said. “And renters are not second-class citizens.”
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