As Olympic torch leaves Victoria, activists promise opposition across the country

October 30

WATERLOO—Activists from AW@L are protesting RBC again today, as the 2010 Corporate Campaign continues nationwide. Today’s local demonstration will take place at noon at the uptown location. The 2010 Corporate Campaign has called for weekly action targeting corporate sponsors of the Games, currently focusing on RBC’s actions as key sponsor of the Olympics and also of the Tar Sands—two projects that are of concern for their devastating environmental and social consequences, specifically, the destruction of Indigenous lands.

This weekend, the Olympic Torch Relay—sponsored by both RBC and Coca-Cola—is set to begin in Victoria where it is expected to meet serious resistance and protest. In Victoria, local activists have planned a major Halloween themed ‘festival of resistance.’

Activists on the West Coast have called for protests and disruptions of the Torch Relay nation wide. There is a high expectation that this year’s torch relay will mirror the relay for the 2008 Beijing Games, which was used by human rights activists to highlight the struggles of the Tibetan people who continue to face serious oppression from the Chinese government.

“People should expect to see as much resistance to this torch relay as they did for the last,” says AW@L representative Alex Hundert. “The historical treatment of Indigenous people by Canadian colonialism has been no better than that from China to the Tibetans,” he says, “Canadians should be ashamed of themselves before the world stage.”
Hundert says that “the 2010 Vancouver-Whistler Olympics plays into the ongoing patterns of colonialism in this country; the continued theft and destruction of Indigenous lands, the federal imposition of the Indian Act which includes the reservation system and imposed Band Council governance, the misrepresentation of historic relationships and treaties, the ongoing use of ‘divide and conquer tactics,’ and the repeated abusive appropriation of culture.”
The opposition within Indigenous communities to the Olympics is demonstrative of the fact that the consultation process with First Nations, for the Games, was severely flawed, and failed to engage meaningfully with all affected communities. Here in Kitchener-Waterloo, these same issues are mirrored in the relationship we have with the Six Nations and all of the Grand River Watershed.

The Olympics resistance movement is not only concerned with Indigenous rights. The impacts of the Winter Olympics have already been felt widely across the Lower Mainland. Vancouver has experienced huge increases in homelessness (over 370 percent since winning the bid in 2003), criminalization of the poor (new by-laws & more police harassment), a massive public debt (estimated at $6 billion), restrictions on civil liberties, and massive environmental destruction (for Olympic projects including the Sea-to-Sky Highway expansion & new venues in Whistler).
Today’s action follows “Fill the Hill”, one of the largest environmental gatherings in Canada, and is part of a massive worldwide environmental movement. RBC has been identified by the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) as the biggest financier of the Tar Sands, and has also sponsored the Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Fort McMurray that serves as a propaganda tool for the industry.
“We will not sit idly while RBC attempts to use the Olympics to ‘greenwash’ their public image when their funding of the Tar Sands really makes them one of the country’s leading climate criminals,” says Hundert. This past Monday, over 100 students shut down an Ottawa RBC branch during a ‘die-in’ demonstration that followed the disruptive protests in Parliament earlier in the day.
The 2010 Corporate Campaign seeks to pressure RBC to stop its funding of the Tar Sands and to “bring awareness of the social and environmental crimes the Royal Bank of Canada is committing as a primary sponsor of the 2010 Olympic circus,” says AW@L representative and local student Alex Hundert.
Resistance to the impacts of the 2010 Olympics has been growing in KW over the past year and a half. Last week, AW@L membersHundert and Dan Kellar were informed by RBC that they have been banned from all Waterloo Region branches, after a protest last week at the King and University location. These actions follow AW@L’s release of a statement directed to the City of Kitchener declaring opposition and promising resistance to the Olympic Torch Relay.

This coming Monday (Nov. 2), AW@L and members of the Ontario Law Union will be attending the Kitchener City Council meeting to speak towards concerns around the right to free expression and the major protest planned to coincide with the City’s Torch Relay Celebration on December 27. [Separate release to follow]

Rooted in KW, comprised of student activists and community organizers, AW@L is a community based direct action group that targets perpetuators of war and environmental destruction, and stands in solidarity with Indigenous activists who are fighting against colonialism, and all people who struggle against oppression in all its forms.