City should Protest Olympic Torch Relay, says Local Activists Promising Resistance

Community group AW@L says Torch Relay supports destruction of Indigenous lands, attack on urban poor, and squandering of public funds—calls for cancelation of Olympic Torch celebration in Kitchener

Sept. 24, Kitchener—Today, local activist group AW@L released a public statement outlining serious negative environmental, social, and economic impacts of the 2010 games. The statement makes connections between those impacts in Vancouver-Whistler to similar issues in the Waterloo region, and across Southern Ontario. The local group vows that there will be protests against the Torch Relay, which has several scheduled stop in the region, including Waterloo and Kitchener.

The statement was sent to all Kitchener and Waterloo City Councillors accompanied by a letter asking them to “advocate for the City’s withdrawal from the torch relay,” which stops in Kitchener-Waterloo from December 27-28.

AW@L’s statement, entitled A Letter of Resistance to the City of Kitchener: In Opposition to the 2010 Olympics, draws links from the environmental destruction taking place in BC for construction of Olympic venues and infrastructure on unceded Indigenous land to the efforts to protect lands on the Haldimand Tract being undertaken by activists from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. Kitchener and Waterloo are on the Haldimand Tract—land which was never legally surrendered by the Six Nations Confederacy.

The statement also makes links between the attack on the urban poor in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side (DTES), where gentrification has resulted in the loss of more than a thousand low income beds in the downtown core and a massive rise in the homeless population there, and similar but smaller scale impacts that have occurred due to the gentrification of downtown Kitchener and the lack of adequate social services in the region.

According to AW@L’s statement, the 2010 Games are “celebratory of a truly unviable economic trajectory, one that is hurting the citizens of Vancouver and taxpayers across Canada, and one that is fundamentally at odds with the needs of both Vancouver and our city of Kitchener.”

“We demand that the City of Kitchener withdraw from hosting the Olympic torch, and not allow the torch on city lands,” says the statement. As explained by representative Dan Kellar, “AW@L has been taking action against the 2010 Olympics since we signed onto the solidarity and unity principles put forward by the Olympic Resistance Network [ORN] last fall.” ORN is a Vancouver-based network of activists and community groups organizing against the 2010 Vancouver-Whistler Olympic Games.

In addition to staging several protests against the two major sponsors of the 2010 Olympics, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and Coca-Cola, members of AW@L worked with activists from Six Nations to blockade the Olympic Spirit Train just outside of Toronto, when it was on its cross country promotional tour. AW@L activist Winnie Small, who was locked to the train tracks during that protest, says that “wherever there are attempts to profit from the destruction wrought by the Olympics, resistance will follow.”

The AW@L statement released today vows that, “this oppression and destruction is something we are not willing to allow in our city and we will resist it.”

AW@L is a group that started on the Wilfrid Laurier campus in late 2006, but has since become unaffiliated and has incorporated many community members and has members from University of Waterloo as well as Laurier. Rooted in Kitchener-Waterloo, AW@L is a direct action group that targets perpetuators of war and environmental destruction, and stands in solidarity with local Indigenous groups who are fighting against colonialism, and all people who struggle against oppression in all its forms.

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Contact: no2010@peaceculture.org