Four Sad Faces and a Smiley': A Political Topology of Civic and Olympic Spaces at the 2010 Winter Games

Going Prorogue for Olympic Security In late December 2009, in the face of a potential vote of no confidence in Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, leader of a conservative minority government, availed himself of a distinctively Canadian aspect of Parliamentary procedure: he prorogued that is, he sought the temporary, but complete suspension of parliamentary work. (1) After a short but pointed delay in her response, (2) the Queen's representative in Canada, governor-general, Michaelle Jean, complied with the prime minister's advice. Harper defended his action by arguing that his government would be better able to pursue its demanding work, if for a time, it remained unburdened by the pressures of Parliamentary interchanges. Among other matters, Harper argued that the government's full attention would have to be devoted to security issues surrounding the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Olympics; (3) the implication obviously was that the magnitudes of these concerns would leave no time for Parliament's day-to-day business. This led The Economist to the somewhat derisive observation that Canadian Parliamentarians cannot, apparently, cope with Parliament's deliberations while dealing with the country's economic troubles and the challenge of hosting the Winter Olympic games. (4) Harper's action met with public expressions of disapproval on an unprecedented scale. (5) This disapproval may have been nurtured by the awareness that even though governments of all political orientations routinely invoke prorogation to terminate the work of Parliament when the session's business has been completed, Harper's government still had 36 unfinished bills on the books, all of which now had to be abandoned. (6) The government's business remained incomplete, and the Canadian public voiced their disapproval in no uncertain terms; the ad-hoc group Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament, formed on the Facebook networking site, attracted over 200,000 members; (7) demonstrations occurred in several cities. It is the Canadian government's reference to matters of Olympic urgency to explain its temporary suspension of parliamentary proceedings that is of interest to my argument. The government vacated the democratic process in the Canadian capital for a time--paying its democratic responsibilities little heed in the process (8)--in order, so the argument had it in part, better to represent the country in the organization of the Olympic event unfolding in Vancouver on the distant west coast. The somewhat ambiguous positioning marking the Canadian government's strategy finds a homology in contestations over the legitimacy of the discursive space that structures the Olympic event itself, when civic traditions are sometimes held in abeyance in order to effect the emplacement of a specific 'Olympic' discursive complex into the civic and public spaces of host country and city. As I will argue subsequently, this is not a discourse driven by the value propositions resoundingly proclaimed in the Olympic Charter, (9) but a mercantile discourse that repositions the Olympics and its 'values' as brand. (10) The constitution and stabilization of this space very much depends on intervention by various levels of government of the host country; the temporary discursive space thus constructed tendentially emerges in juxtaposition to public and civic spaces of discursive practice. The efficacy of such governmental interventions therefore relies on rendering obscure the connections between the IOC's administrative apparatus and the local, regional and national governmental authorities doing its bidding. (11) During the Vancouver Olympics, and due to opposition provided by the BC Civil Liberties Association, Aboriginal groups and their supporters, and a variety of other social groups, some of these connections were rendered visible, creating leakages that made possible the expression of alternative political positions in opposition to measures aimed at regulating and constraining the civic space and the forms of behaviour permissible in it. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.