Shell Canada’s operations in Alberta’s oil sands are clean and green, and simply the victim of nasty rumours spread by environmentalists trying to tar the company’s reputation. That is, if you believe the “six-week Canwest special information feature on climate change, in partnership with Shell Canada.”

Canada’s largest media company teamed up with the oil giant to produce a series of features that showcase how Shell is tackling energy challenges and environmental responsibility. The full-page, feel-good features ran in six Canwest dailies—the National Post, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal and Vancouver Sun—six Saturdays in a row in January and February 2010. The six-part series also appeared in the Toronto Star as a pullout section.

The series profiles friendly Shell employees who share what motivates them to work in Alberta’s oil sands—Canwest style is to avoid the use of “tar sands”—otherwise known as one of the world’s largest and most destructive industrial projects. There’s the climate change expert (a goateed grandpa clutching walking sticks), the chemist (a longhaired family man who dabbles in acting) and the environmental management systems coordinator (a young woman in a Cowichan sweater who spent countless hours as a child flipping through National Geographic). The features include “myth busters” to clear up so-called misconceptions like the idea that Shell’s oil sands production is too energy-intensive, pollutes the Athabasca River and results in “dirty oil,” among other allegedly tarnishing falsehoods. The only myth, however, is that these features are editorial content. The fact is, they’re paid advertisements for Shell.

While advertorials designed to look like newspaper stories are common, they are usually clearly identified as advertisements as urged by regulatory groups like Advertising Standards Canada. This is essential so readers don’t think the material is subject to the same standards and ethics of journalistic stories: accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and accountability.

Nowhere did the word “advertorial” or “advertising” appear on the Shell ads. Rather, “Canwest special information feature on climate change, in partnership with Shell Canada” was inked across the top of the page, suggesting an editorial partnership between Canwest and Shell, a major newsmaker. Seasoned journalist and outgoing chair of the Ryerson School of Journalism Paul Knox says the wording is euphemistic. “You’re either trying to disguise the advertorials as editorial content or you’re not,” says Knox. “And if you’re not trying to disguise them, what’s to be lost by being reasonably explicit about the terms?”

When asked this question, Canwest director of communications Phyllise Gelfand said: “We feel very strongly that the language was clear enough and that readers will appreciate it.” However, when asked to elaborate on what the language means, she said: “I’m not going to go into semantics with you.”

Gelfand pointed out the information features were presented in a different font, layout and style than the papers’ editorial content. However, the ads ran during the lead-up to the Olympics and during the Games, when many papers were using different layouts. Lifestyle spreads (fashion and homes, for example) also often take more colourful and creative layouts, not unlike the Shell ads. (In the Star, the pullout section was printed on a differently coloured paper.)

Advertorials are often distinguished from editorial copy by not placing a byline on the piece. But in this case, Alberta-based freelancers and Canwest contributors Brian Burton and Shannon Sutherland were credited. Both Burton and Sutherland have covered Shell and the oil industry for Canwest. Burton has 20 years of experience in corporate communications for leading energy corporations, according to his LinkedIn profile, which also states his goal: “to advocate successfully for my clients in the court of public opinion.” For Sutherland’s part, her bio on one magazine site says when she’s not “interrogating industrialists” she’s hanging out with her kids.

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The advertorials also appeared on Canwest papers’ websites—on homepages as top stories and in the news section, with URLs that looked like those of any other news story. Just like regular news, readers could comment on the “stories.” Canwest refused to respond to allegations the campaign included seeded comments, meaning a slew of positive comments about Shell were posted and negative ones deleted in an effort to further sway public opinion. “I am not aware of this,” said Shell spokesperson Ed Greenberg. “I know you appreciate that anyone, whether or not they work for Shell, is entitled to read any newspaper or magazine they want and form their own opinions from what they read.”

When Sierra Club Executive Director John Bennett spotted the features in the Ottawa Citizen, the former newspaper reporter and ad sales rep was shocked by the one-sided nature of the information. “I could not tell they were ads,” Bennett says. “They looked and read like editorial content.” He only learned the features were ads when he contacted the publisher of the Citizen to complain about the unbalanced coverage. The nonprofit environmental advocacy organization promptly filed a complaint with Advertising Standards Canada. However, because Sierra Club went public by issuing a news release, ASC did not accept the complaint: it’s against the rules for special interest groups to generate publicity for their cause through the complaint process. Sierra Club also filed a complaint with the Ontario Press Council, which has not yet adjudicated the matter. The council’s advertising policy states ads that look like ordinary news stories should be clearly labelled as advertising.

Despite dismissing the complaint, ASC Vice-President of Standards Janet Feasby says advertising designed to look like news stories is of growing concern and ASC will be publishing an advisory on the subject to bring the issue to the attention of advertisers, media, and the public. Feasby points to a recent precedent decision, in which the ASC found a “special information supplement” in a newspaper that extolled the virtues of Neuragen, a homeopathic product, was presented in a manner that concealed the advertiser’s commercial intent. “It was clear to council that it was advertising, not information.” Like the Shell features, an ad for the company was included at the bottom of the page.

ASC can force advertisers and publications to remove ads, but often it’s too late: the ads have already run and the damage has been done. The only loser is the reader, who may have read and wrongly interpreted the ad as a news story. Papers that blur the line between advertorial and news content risk their credibility and their relationship with their audience. “The problem with these advertorial exercises is they muddy the waters and you’re placing obstacles in the way of a reader who’s trying to figure out, ‘What is my interest here, and what’s behind what I’m being told?’” says Knox, who teaches media ethics at Ryerson. “It has the potential to undermine the trust that your audience has in you and that’s fatal.”

The seriousness of this matter is magnified when the subject of the advertorial is a controversial one, such as climate change. “[These ads] play on public complacency, they play on the public’s hopes that the environment is being protected,” explained the Sierra Club’s Bennett. “One of the reasons we have so much difficulty advancing the environmental agenda in the face of overwhelming public support is because people can’t imagine there are governments or companies not trying to do the best they can. When you get misleading advertising like this, you play to that inborn need for people to believe that things are being looked after.” You also play into the inborn need people have to trust the media to provide them with honest coverage.

While Shell insists it produced the features to clear up “misconceptions” about climate change and its environmental commitment, the company has a track record for producing misleading, greenwashed advertising. In 2008, the Advertising Standards Authority in the U.K. denounced a Shell newspaper ad that described tar sands projects as sustainable, saying it breached rules on substantiation, truthfulness, and environmental claims. A year earlier, the ASA found another Shell ad guilty of greenwashing—this one featuring refinery chimneys emitting flowers. Still, Shell defends its ads.

“We were getting feedback from Canadians that all they were seeing and hearing was one-sided information [about climate change], so [the feature campaign] was done to try to balance the discussion,” said Greenberg. “Don’t you think that’s fair?” Readers?

Today in Verbatim, This contributing editor Andrew Wallace interviews Dave Zirin, sports editor of U.S. progressive weekly The Nation and host of Edgeofsports.com, a blog and radio show that examines the collision of politics and sports. He’s the author of several canonical books on that topic, most recently of A People’s History of Sports in the United States, and before that wrote What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States and Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports.

As always, this is a transcription of the biweekly This Magazine podcast, “Listen to This.” You can hear the whole audio interview here, but we’d also encourage you to easily subscribe to the podcast through iTunes so you never miss an episode.

Q&A

Andrew Wallace: You were in Vancouver prior to the Olympics and I read your piece in Sports Illustrated. I was wondering if you could elaborate on the sense of discontentment that you experienced there before the Games.

Dave Zirin: I was there just a couple weeks before the start of the Games and what I found, walking around the streets and just talking to people is that it seemed to finally settle in on people just how much the Games were going to cost, how much of an inconvenience it was going to be, and just how shut out of the party a lot of them were going to be.

I spoke to one person who was so excited, and had been saving for a long time to go to one of the hockey games, just to find out that he wasn’t even close to what it would actually cost to get a ticket to go. That sense, you could see it just weighing on people in a really serious way. Also, this is a media term, the optics were just terrible. When I was there it was announced that funding for physical education programs were being cut, letters were going out to 800 teachers because of budget overruns. To have that on the front page of the local newspaper while the top flap was all about Olympics, Olympics, Olympics, happy, happy, joy, joy, it definitely bred a feeling of discontent.

Andrew Wallace: But do you think now, we’ve had the Games for the last two weeks and the hype machine got in motion and with the spectacle and excitement of it do you think that all of that will be forgotten?

Dave Zirin: Well it’s interesting; I think a lot of it was forgotten during the Games because there’s a rush. You’ve got so many people there and it’s such a big party, but if history is any guide, now is when you’re really going to get the second shoe dropping because the bill is going to come due. The amount of money, all the accounting is going to be on the table.

When Vancouver first got the games, one local politician said publicly that according to his figures and his estimates it would be a $10 billion influx of funds into the city. PriceWaterhouseCooper, the independent accounting firm, said right before the games started it would probably be more like less than a billion. That’s a huge drop off, now what are the final figures going to be? Once the dust is cleared and all the accounting tricks and obfuscation has been cleared off the table. That’s usually when you see politicians losing their chops, so we’ll see what happens.

Andrew Wallace: Right, one guy, Christopher Shaw with No2010, he said that he thought it would be the equivalent of the Montreal, maybe not equivalent in scope, but of the Montreal Olympics which everyone calls “the Big O” because I think with all the interest, they were still paying back over $100 billion in debt to the city.

Dave Zirin: Yeah that’s right, in Montreal, the lead up to the Games was similar. I mean it’s so interesting, you go back and you look at previous games and it’s always the same promises and it’s almost always the same results too. Before the Montreal Olympics a local politician said that Olympics cause deficits about as often as men have babies and yet, the Montreal Games of course, it didn’t get paid off until 2006. It took 30 years to pay off the debt. Will Vancouver be that bad? It’s hard to say, but one of the things is that the Olympics, and the financing of the Olympics, is always held hostage to the larger economic forces in society and in the world and I think that’s one of the things that really hurt in Vancouver is that this was the first “post-global recession” games and we’ll see what kind of effect that has in the long run.

Andrew Wallace: What do you think the implications could be for future Olympic events then, because I think what’s really interesting is what happened in Chicago recently, that their was such a backlash to that bid, right? So are we seeing a change in the tide there of how people feel about the Olympics?

Dave Zirin: Yeah, I mean I also think one of the things you’re going to see is the Olympics rely heavily on the BRIC countries and their satellites. By BRIC countries you know: Brazil, China, India (and Russia), and I think that their going to rely on countries where dissent can be smashed with as little publicity as possible and where a lot of these projects can be pushed through with as much hypocrisy as possible. I think that’s going to be the unfortunate future of the Olympic games unless we really do have international solidarity movements for people who want to keep the Olympics out and I think that’s going to be the only thing that leads to what I think is the only sensible solution for the Olympics which is to have a permanent winter and summer site and to eliminate the bid process all together.

Andrew Wallace: That’s interesting, what problems would that solve?

Dave Zirin: Well it would end the bidding process and that’s where you have the root of the IOC’s power and the root of a lot of corruption and lies that surround the Olympics.

See, the best way to understand it is that the IOC is like McDonalds headquarters and what they demand of every city is that they be a franchisee. That means if you’re a city and you decide say, democratically, through your city council that you’re going to have strings attached to the Olympic bid, that you’re going to have civil society at the table, that’s a favourite phrase, but at the end of the day though, if the IOC says “well, actually no,” then that’s just the way it is.

I spoke to a lot of people in Vancouver, very well meaning progressives who were pro-Olympics when they first heard about it, precisely because they got a ton of promises from local politicians about this seat that the table. But it was a mythical seat at the table and they became fierce Olympics opponents precisely because they were shut out of how a lot of the infrastructure spending would happen. And I think that’s the reality of the Olympics and if you had a permanent site it would just eliminate this kabuki theatre all together. Being on the International Olympic Committee would be little more than a ceremonial post, which is what it should be instead of what it is now, which is a position of a frightening power almost like a free-floating state with absolutely no oversight.

Andrew Wallace: And with charitable status right?

Dave Zirin: Yeah exactly, a non-profit that makes billions, I don’t even know how that works.

Andrew Wallace: So what do you think that means for say something like Rio? I mean, how does the progressive movement get in there and start speaking to the issues that could happen in Rio, because you know the things that are exacerbated by the Olympics are things like police corruption, political corruption and those are endemic problems in Rio right?

Dave Zirin: Yeah, huge issues in Rio with police brutality, huge issues of gentrification particularly the clearing of the favelas. I mean there’s already been a very dramatic gun battle where a police helicopter raided one of the favelas and someone in one of the favelas got a lucky shot off and the helicopter hit the ground—huge fire, explosion, right outside of Rio itself. I think the Rio example is going to be really interesting because, on the one hand you have a Brazil of that is ground zero to the World Social Forum movements in Porto Alegre, you’ve got the worker’s party in Brazil, that’s sort of on the one hand. But on the other hand, you also have the World Cup coming to Brazil just two years before the Olympics. They’re going to be able to push through a lot of the infrastructure, spending and policing that they need to do for the World Cup and that’s going to be interesting because it’s one thing to oppose the Olympics in Brazil. It’s another thing to oppose the World Cup. That might be a much tougher political needle to thread.

Andrew Wallace: That all being said, if we look at the Olympics that just happened, do you want to point out what you think your three most significant stories within the Olympics that went beyond the X’s and O’s of the field were?

Dave Zirin: Yeah, one, first and foremost, is the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Georgian luge slider, which really resulted from the fact that he and the other luge sliders had no access to be able to practice at Whistler because of Canada’s Own the Podium campaign. And the fact that the people who were in charge of the International Luge Federation, the FIL, they created this track up there in Whistler that, for a year, people have been warning about, that it’s too fast and it’s too dangerous, it’s too much like trying to turn luge into the X-games, some wacky spectacle of lightening speed.

So people were talking about it for a year, and the predictable happened, somebody died. And the Olympics just go on as if it didn’t happen, including NBC news, issuing a dictate to NBC sports to stop showing footage of Nodar’s death. They didn’t want it ruining the party. But it symbolizes so much of what’s wrong with the Olympics. The Olympics speak about standing for these ideals of ethics and sportsmanship, but in reality it’s “go for the gold all the way and go for network profits all the way,” and it’s an absolute farce. So that’s a big one is Nodar Kumaritashivili.

But there are other stories that complemented the Olympics as well. Not all of them are bad stories by any stretch. The other ones I would say though are like the protest movement that occurred, the fact that for all the debates and discussions about the protest movement, organized largely through the Olympic Resistance Network, I mean it was something that was an Olympic protest movement that was open, and out and on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, so they got a remarkable about of publicity and I think really put a marker in the ground for future cities.

So those are stories that I’m going to remember that took place off the field of play. Beyond that too, I’ll just throw another one out there, It was really quite shocking the amount of homophobia by broadcasters against U.S. skater Johnny Weir and how accepted it was. I mean, like broadcasters saying over the air that he should be gender tested, all kinds of things like that. That he was ruining figure skating. It’s just unbelievable; he wasn’t macho enough for figure skating? Are you kidding me? It’s just ridiculous; to have that amount of homophobia in figure skating just really set my eyes back.

Andrew Wallace: Were you impressed with how Weir came back? I thought his comments in the interviews after the original homophobic comments were made were quite interesting and quite strong.

Dave Zirin: Weir’s never been shy, that’s for sure. He’s never been shy, but I still regret he didn’t make it to the top five. He came in sixth, because Lady Gaga was going to come and perform, and be there in person, so that would have been a lot of fun. So we were denied that.

But I think it’s still an important story because of these issues. Particularly the issue of gender testing in Olympic sports, its something I’ve written a lot about in the last year with South African runner Caster Semenya being a part of that story and it’s something that the International Olympic Committee–you can tell they’re trying to shift away from it in a number of ways, but as of this interview we’re doing right now, I mean they still have a Neanderthal view of gender testing. Although they’re moving it away from having it in their rules that the idea of being a “man” is this inherent advantage in sport, which is at least somewhat of a step forward. They still operate on a very strict gender binary and haven’t quite figured out what to do with people who don’t fit into their little compartments.

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.

Jacques Rogge's bank of Olympic televisions (artist's impression).

When Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, checks into his Vancouver hotel suite a few weeks from now, he will find (as he flops, exhausted, no doubt, from the strain of private jet travel) a “video wall,” paid for by the citizens of British Columbia. The bank of televisions are a requirement of IOC regulations, which state that the president must have enough screens to be able to watch every Olympic event underway at any given time—simultaneously.

The white-glove treatment being extended to Count Rogge of Belgium and the 111 other IOC members—the clutch of industrialists, backwater bureaucrats, tinpot generals, and dissipated royalty who preside over the Olympic “movement”—puts the economic reality of 2010 into sharp and sickening perspective.

Somehow in this country it became perversely more politically viable to spend $1.98 billion widening B.C.’s Sea to Sky Highway for a two-week international event than it is to implement a national housing strategy to aid Canada’s estimated 300,000 homeless (Canada is the only G8 country without such a plan). Today, more than 600,000 Canadian children live in poverty, a number that hasn’t budged since 1989’s doomed Campaign 2000 parliamentary pledge to eradicate child poverty by the turn of the millennium—yet $900 million will be spent on security costs, battle-hardening Vancouver against the Olympic crowds. The opening ceremonies of Vancouver 2010 are budgeted at $58 million, while the B.C. provincial government cut $20 million in arts funding just last summer.

It’s not possible to draw a direct line from the ledger that pays for renovating the Vancouver Convention Centre ($883 million) to the one that dictates that Canada pays among the lowest unemployment insurance rates in the industrialized world. But in a national sense, it is sad to contemplate the collective priorities expressed by these decisions: to choose the splashy over the prosaic; the grand, short-lived gesture over the incremental improvement; the rich and famous over the poor and marginalized. Or to furnish a Belgian count’s plush hotel room with more televisions than one man can watch, while thousands sleep in the street.

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. ]

It’s no doubt that clashes between protesters and police will end up being the big story of the 2010 Olympics. There are new bylaws on the books, the usual International Olympic Committee rules, our own Canadian Charter rights, and official statements from the Vancouver Police Department—and they all contradict each other.

So, how do you know what’s legal and what’s not? We tried to sort out all of the different rule-books for you — but we got stuck, too.

Here’s what you can (Y) and can’t (N) do — depending on which authority figure’s watching at the time.

Click to enlarge:

Vancouver 2010 Do's and Don'ts

“The whole purpose behind Pride House” — actually a conference room at Whistler, B.C.’s Pan Pacific Hotel—“was really to create a dialogue about homophobia within sport,” says organizer Dean Nelson on the phone from his Whistler home. People are definitely talking: Pride House has been on the cover of the Globe and Mail and in the New York Times in the months leading up to the Games. Nelson has been a fixture of the Whistler gay scene for 15 years and knows how to throw a party: he’s been involved with Vancouver Pride for years, has opened six hotels of his own, and works as CEO of GayWhistler, the company hosting Pride House.

Traditional Olympic pavilions like Canada House and France House are invite-only, but Pride House will be open to anyone, gay or straight, Canadian or not. It’s intended to be a haven for anyone who wants to know more about being gay in Canada, needs advice on coming out, or is considering leaving a country with antigay laws. Staff from LEGIT, a group that helps refugees gain immigration status for their same-sex partners, and national lobbyist EGALE will be on hand to offer advice. Now the question is whether anyone will show up to take advantage.

Gay and lesbian athletes are a touchy subject in professional sport. In his book The Metrosexual: Gender, Sexuality, and Sport, Australian academic David Coad describes sport’s silent, generalized homophobia. His 2008 survey revealed the U.S. had only six openly gay professional athletes; Australia and the U.K. each had one; and Canada had a handful of out athletes—but as in other countries, most came out after retirement.

Nelson hopes Pride House will become a permanent Olympic fixture: London is prepping its own version for 2012, but for Russia in 2014—where homosexuality was delisted as a mental illness just 10 years ago—it might be a harder sell. But Pride House’s very existence is aimed at changing attitudes, Nelson says: “If an athlete wants to use it as a forum to make a statement, or find the support and counselling that they need, they have that available to them for the first time in their professional sporting career.”

1. The 2010 Games boast “the greenest medals yet,” the papers clamored following their October unveiling. That’s technically true, since the medals include recycled metal reclaimed from electronic waste. But out of 2,855 kilograms of metal used to manufacture this year’s medals, recycled content is just 12.41 kg, or 0.43 percent by weight. All the silver used to make the medals weighs about the same as a pick-up truck; the quantity of recycled silver weighs about as much as a chihuahua.

2. Vancouver-based Teck Resources supplied the metals, from mines in Canada, Alaska, Chile, and Peru. If that name seems familiar, it should be: Teck has been the target of environmental protest since 1989 for allegedly exceeding permitted waste-dumping limits at Alaska’s Red Dog mine.

3. Both the gold and silver medal contain the same amount of silver. A gold medal is 93 per cent silver—the other seven per cent is the gold plating.

4. The metal in a gold medal is worth about $1,700 on an ounce-for-ounce basis—but an Olympic win can be worth a lot more financially. The Canadian Olympic Committee’s Athlete’s Excellence Fund offers a $20,000 paycheque for bringing home gold.

5. Sponsorship opportunities and speaking engagements can offer even more money for athletes. Runner Donovan Bailey earns about $15,000 for a speaking engagement, and Speedo gave Michael Phelps $1 million for his eight gold wins at Beijing in 2008.

Our guide to some of the sponsors who want their name associated with the biggest, sportiest, Spandex-iest show on earth. Click to enlarge!

Official sponsors of Vancouver 2010

Four First Nations communities overlap Vancouver Olympic Sites from Vancouver to Whistler.

British Columbia’s First Nations are divided in their support for the Olympics. On one side, the chiefs and band councils of four indigenous communities—the Lil’wat, Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh—have endorsed the Games and set up the Four Host First Nations Society, an offi cial Olympic partner and organizer. On the other side, some of the most vociferous and vocal anti-Olympics activists come from within these same groups. Many in leadership positions view the Olympics as an opportunity to share First Nations culture with the world and a source of revenue that will aid their people; others see the Games as a threat to Indigenous culture, including their traditional lands and livelihoods.

With a few small exceptions, British Columbia is legally Indigenous territory. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 states that the Crown must sign treaties with the Indigenous people before land can be ceded to the colony. While many such treaties took place, the Government of the Colony of British Columbia failed to negotiate treaties, which is why B.C. is the only province not covered by them. Therefore, B.C., for the most part, is unceded—stolen—Indigenous territory.

According to Gord Hill, from the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation and editor of No2010.com, the division in Indigenous communities around the Olympics stems from the band council structure itself: “The Indian Act is divisive and was always meant to install a pro-government council that would implement government policies over Native peoples. In the Vancouver area there are over 60,000 Natives, yet the FHFN represent only 6,000 or so members,” he says.

To date, treaty processes are taking place but little progress has been made. The Indigenous people who oppose the Olympics point out that, fi rst and foremost, the Games are taking place on stolen land. Not only that, they are worried that the Olympics will attract even more foreign investment to Vancouver and B.C.—foreign investment that is troublesome because land disputes are still unresolved. Each new dollar that fl ows in from abroad further encourages the government to continue ignoring indigenous land titles, and that investment is also usually detrimental to the natural ecosystem. Many First Nations activists are further concerned about the impact of the Olympics on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where Indigenous people disproportionately live in poverty and have been hit hardest by increasing rent costs and gentrifi cation.

Hill says that he opposes the Olympics “because of the huge social and environmental impacts, including ecological destruction along the Sea-to-Sky Highway, the venues constructed in Whistler, the massive amounts of concrete used in all related construction work, the $6-billion debt, the massive police state being built, the huge increase in homelessness suffered since Vancouver won the bid in 2003, the criminalization of the poor and of anti-Olympic groups, and the erosion of civil liberties. The government also hopes to use the Olympics as a way to increase international investment in mining, oil and gas, and ski resort industries, further threatening indigenous peoples and lands.”

In a recent speech, Tewanee Joseph, executive director and CEO of the Four Host First Nations, painted anti-Olympics protesters as “non-Aboriginal naysayers … [that] want us to remain forever the Dime Store Indian.” “Do these protesters not realize they are forcing, yet again, Aboriginal people into a dreadful mould, a stereotype that takes us back to a shameful chapter in Canadian history? No. No. And no again. We fought to participate in the Games. As full partners. We fought for the jobs. We fought for respect. That is why few Aboriginal people are likely to be swayed by salvoes of warmed-over, anti-corporate rhetoric. That is yesterday’s news for the Aboriginal people of this country.”

But with opposition only likely to grow as the Olympics approaches, those “salvoes of warmed-over, anti-corporate rhetoric” look set to be tomorrow’s news, too.