The 2010 Olympic Winter Games are scheduled to take place from February 12-17, in Vancouver-Whistler on land that was never given up by indigenous communities. For growing numbers of indigenous people, homeless and poor people, low-income tenants and sex workers the Olympic Games represent a continued history of colonization and “social cleansing” of poor communities. Construction for the Olympics infrastructure is adding to extensive destruction of indigenous peoples’ traditional homelands and contributing to the displacement and criminalization of people living in poor urban neighbourhoods.Visible poverty collides with the property and profit concerns of legitimized business, commercial development and property speculators. Neighbourhoods, like Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, undergo a conflict-ridden process of transformation from local residences and workplaces of the poor to sites for Olympic spectacles. As business owners, landlords and investors vie for position within developing neighbourhoods they often successfully pressure local politicians and police to act against sex trade workers and homeless people. Carolyn Brooks, author of Globalization and a New Underclass of ‘Disposable
People' writes, “Criminalizing the poor becomes a way of cleansing the city, making it a supposedly safe and attractive environment for affluent people.” As global capitalism develops, poor and marginalized people are criminalized and punished. Examples of this agenda have become regular features of social development in Vancouver as part of Olympic preparations. In the lead up to the Games, this has typically taken the form of new bylaws and policies that arm police, business owners and private security companies with a variety of means to harass street prostitutes and remove them from specific neighbourhoods. There has also been an ongoing deployment of repressive policing practices, including “sweeps” of street-involved people and the use of boundary conditions to prohibit prostitutes from even entering neighbourhoods near planned Olympic venues. These policies are not about public safety, but about investment, redevelopment and tourist dollars.One troubling policy initiative in Vancouver has been ‘Project Civil City’, a $300,000 program which targets a range of street activities and extends policing beyond public forces, providing business associations broad leeway to intervene. The program includes hundreds of thousands of dollars for increased private security, in addition to regular city police budgets and the estimated $1 billion for Olympic security. The Civil City initiative was explicitly designed to target street prostitutes, panhandlers and open drug users in specific areas such as the Downtown Eastside. Such policies do nothing to address underlying issues of poverty, precarious housing, drug abuse or unemployment. They are effective only at removing people from the streets and getting them 
into custody.Following the awarding of the Olympics to Vancouver, the city initiated a program in which public money was directed to business improvement associations to hire private security firms to patrol downtown streets and clear areas of street prostitutes and homeless people. The so-called “Downtown Ambassadors” have been given free reign to intimidate and harass people deemed to be “undesirables.” Their activities include compelling people who are sitting or sleeping on the street to move along, regardless of location or circumstances; telling people to stop searching for recyclables in garbage cans; identifying particular individuals as undesirable and telling them that they are not allowed within a particular geographic area, so-called “no go areas”; and following and taking notes and photographs of individuals identified as undesirable. Other Olympic-inspired bylaws target the basic everyday activities of street prostitutes and homeless people. Newly installed benches make it impossible for people to stretch out and many bus shelters have removed benches altogether. New garbage cans make it more difficult for people to gather recyclables. In addition, a newly introduced bylaw removes large garbage bins from the Downtown Eastside.
These measures are part of an overall plan to remove downtown residents from the area. In addition to jail, some have been removed to mental institutions and others to “detox” centres on former military bases. Another measure has removed people from the province entirely through a “fly-back” program in which the B.C. Government pays the costs to return persons wanted on warrants in other provinces.Instead of addressing the roots of growing homelessness, poverty and marginalized people, the criminal justice system is deployed to “cleanse” the human face of the problems of global capitalism from the city. Ironically, the pressure to hide these faces is most intense during festivals of global capital such as the Olympics, international film festivals and the FIFA World Cup. These events serve to exacerbate conditions of suffering, exclusion and desperation for the poorest and most marginalized of local working class people in host cities.
