Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland.
Speaker: On the podcast today, we talk with Laura McIntyre about why downtown Eastside organizations are sounding the alarm about the upcoming FIFA World Cup.
Speaker: An informal coalition of organizations in the downtown Eastside and Chinatown are sounding the alarm about what they call the massive human rights implications of the upcoming FIFA World Cup 2026.
Speaker: The World Cup is set to come to Vancouver first through the 2026 FIFA Congress in April, and then for seven matches at BC Place, scheduled between June 11th and July seventh Laura McIntyre is a staff lawyer at Pivot Legal Society, one of the members of the coalition, along with the BC Civil Liberties Association and the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition, amongst others. And Laura joins me today to talk about their concerns. Hello, Laura.
Speaker: Hi there. So what if some of the impacts of an event like FIFA on the low-income residents of a host city? So mega events in general, and especially mega sporting events, bring a host of human rights implications that are felt first and worst by folks who are already marginalized within a host city.
Speaker: And often, that means folks who rely on public space and who shelter outside. So people who shelter outside both during the daytime, in the nighttime,
Speaker: are subject to the increased policing that mega events such as FIFA bring with it, increased presence of bylaw officers enforcing extraordinary bylaw rules and allowances that don't normally apply. They are subject to routine displacement, which is justified in the name of beautifying the city and creating a clean and welcoming environment for tourists.
Speaker: They are at risk of experiencing you know negative interactions with either the tourists themselves or with various agents of the state who are more likely to be present to control the influx of tourists. But by and large, it is the displacement that they experience as a result of efforts to to clean up the city and present the sort of clean and welcoming image that Vancouver would like to present for its international reputation. Usually FIFA World Cup host cities have to submit an initial consideration of human rights and and plans to involve stakeholders. But Vancouver didn't have to do that.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right. So under FIFA's ordinary bidding process, cities have to submit a draft human rights plan, and that's part of the bid that is assessed by FIFA before the city is even chosen. So Vancouver submitted a very late bid for the FIFA 2026 World Games, and FIFA effectively waived that part of the process because of the late timing of their bid. Instead, they pretty much asked Vancouver to sign on to what is a fairly empty agreement indicating that it is committed to upholding human rights and making them promise that a robust draft plan would follow. And that is what was released at the beginning of February.
Speaker: I'll just say the reason that that's important is from the beginning, Vancouver as a host city has been operating under the impression that it can simply coast on its existing human rights framework and reputation without doing much additional work at all.
Speaker: You mentioned Vancouver's FIFA host city committee released its draft human rights action plan at the beginning of February. What are your concerns with that plan as it stands right now?
Speaker: Yeah, so the purpose of this action plan is to do two things. One, it is supposed to identify FIFA-related human rights risks, and then two, introduce specific and targeted measures to address those risks.
Speaker: In our view, the plan does basically half its job. So it acknowledges that FIFA imposes human rights risks for certain populations, but then does almost nothing to mitigate those risks. Instead, it basically provides a list of already existing policies and procedures that we know don't work and certainly don't do enough to protect against the additional risks that FIFA brings with it.
Speaker: So what kind of policies and procedures are they referring to as an example? So the draft plan outlines existing city policies, provincial laws, and federal laws. And FIFA has designated a number of categories that the host city committee has to respond to. So one example is they have to respond to rights of folks who they call them unsheltered populations in FIFA's framework. So in the section of the draft plan that addresses this obligation, the committee refers to provincial and municipal tenant protections that will continue to apply throughout the games. One of those laws is BC's Residential Tenancies Act, and another is the Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act, both provincial laws that apply to tenants in BC.
Speaker: Obviously, Tenancy protections do absolutely nothing to protect people who shelter outside or who rely on public space because they are not legally categorized as tenants. And yet the host city committee is relying on those laws in the draft plan as a measure to protect against human rights abuses for people who rely on public space.
Speaker: Does the draft action plan make any provision to address the rights of people who rely on public space? I mean, I guess it also applies to daytime public space as well as sheltering outside at night. Does it make any provision?
Speaker: It doesn't, and that's one of our biggest concerns with the plan. So the furthest that the plan goes to address the rights of people who rely on public space is to say that ordinary allowances for sheltering outside overnight will continue to apply. but because the current bylaw infrastructure in Vancouver prevents people from sheltering outside during the daytime, there is effectively no place for them to go during the day.
Speaker: where they can be safe from over-policing and the influx of tourists. The plan does say that the city is discussing further potential actions to provide daytime spaces for people, but it's not struggling language. I don't have a lot of confidence when they say they're discussing further potential actions. And I will just say that in our coalition's meeting with the committee, they told us They didn't want to get our hopes up that daytime shelter spaces would be provided during the games.
Speaker: I mean, you just have to wonder, here's Vancouver, it's going to be absolutely full of people. And there are people who need to use those streets to conduct their regular lives. it just seems like it's inevitable there's going to be major human rights impacts.
Speaker: Absolutely. And I mean, I'll also say that the games are coming in June and July, where we're likely to experience very hot temperatures. The last few summers, we've had extreme heat in Vancouver during both of those months. And so the influx of tourists, over-policing, and people who rely on public space being forced to constantly be displaced and dismantle their equipment that they may be using to shelter outside and to cool themselves from hot temperatures. It's a recipe for disaster.
Speaker: Is there any recognition in the plan that Vancouver is actually in a crisis right now? There's a lack of affordable housing, the toxic drug epidemic, there's displacement, as you mentioned.
Speaker: There isn't, and that is the reason that we know that the existing laws and policies that they are rattling off in this plan don't work and are failing us. If if those policies did enough to protect people, we wouldn't be in the moment that we're in, in terms of the housing crisis, the rollback of tenancy rights, the toxic drug poisoning epidemic. So those laws are doing nothing to protect us in the ordinary course without FIFA. And yet we're being told to rely on them in the face of the additional burdens that FIFA will bring with it.
Speaker: What does the plan offer people in terms of reporting human rights violations or offering some kind of redress for people? So this is another place where the plan pretty much rattles off existing mechanisms without providing anything extra.
Speaker: One channel that is mentioned throughout the plan is that people can file a complaint at the BC Human Rights Tribunal My understanding is that current wait times at the BC Human Rights Tribunal are between five and seven years, meaning that someone who reports a violation this coming summer in conjunction with FIFA 2026 might not hear an answer until On the other hand, 311 is mentioned several times throughout the plan as a place where people can report their violations. My understanding is that 311 right now does not have a specific targeted stream for human rights complaints, nor do we have any information about how those
Speaker: complaints will be handled, who will be evaluating them, what the notice it requirements will be like, what investigation looks like. So I don't think either of those mechanisms have really the capacity to handle the weight of the complaints that are not just possible, but likely to come with FIFA.
Speaker: It's almost laughable, really, that they're directing people to 311 and to the BC Human Rights Tribunal. Yeah. It is. It is. And, you know, most people, including people in the downtown east side who rely on public space, don't even know what 311 is or or that it exists and have been given no information on how to report a violation, nor do they often have access to the technology that would be required to do so. And so I agree. It's an absolutely empty promise of a redress mechanism. The coalition you're part of met with the committee the day after the plan and was released. Was that the first meeting you'd had with them?
Speaker: It was the first meeting we'd had with them, although our coalition had made attempts to meet with them as early as June 2024. And we were told again and again that a meeting wasn't necessary because the committee's job was primarily one of reviewing and collecting existing city policies and bylaws and provincial and federal laws. So They didn't want to be duplicating existing human rights frameworks, but rather just collating existing processes. And so as a result, they didn't seem to feel that our input was necessary. So this made clear to us quite early on that the committee was not planning on working to create any additional mechanisms and that they were not prioritizing the voices of the people and communities with lived and living experience of the human rights issues that are likely to come with FIFA and who stand to be most impacted. so because of that just complete lack of engagement, I have to say, although we were quite disappointed by the plan that we received on the 19th, we weren't surprised.
Speaker: The city did actually pass a FIFA bylaw back in November last year to take effect mid-May. What does that bylaw focus on? The bylaw primarily addresses the branding and security obligations that the city has to FIFA. So it provides rules for advertising and signage and graffiti, and it gives the city pretty broad power and discretion to issue tickets and to impose actions to clean up things like graffiti and street advertising where necessary, but all of those actions are targeted towards the city maintaining its advertising, branding, and commercial obligations to FIFA.
Speaker: Although the bylaw is intended to be used only in cases where FIFA branding or Advertising is at risk. The language of the bylaw is actually quite broad and it affords bylaw officers lots of discretion. And there's a big risk that the bylaw could be sort of weaponized in this broader project of the city beautifying and cleaning up public space for the games. And this human rights plan does absolutely nothing to protect against the risk that the bylaw becomes used in that way.
Speaker: The press release that the coalition released was to sound the alarm about the human rights implications of FIFA World Cup. What would you like to see happen at this point?
Speaker: I think that our coalition believes that since the host city committee has made clear so far that it is not interested in taking a leading role to educate the public about the human rights related implications of FIFA. And then second, to introduce measures to protect against those risks.
Speaker: Our coalition is trying to step in to fill the void and to tell people, look, these games are coming with a real potential cost and real potential risk to people in Vancouver, especially people in the downtown east side and people who rely on public space. And our coalition really now sees it as a necessity for us to step in and both raise awareness about it and then do what we can to mitigate against the potential impacts. We're sort of taking a harm reduction approach. We know that FIFA is coming and we know that at this point we can't do anything to stop it, but our focus is on mitigating harm and displacement when it does come.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today, Laura. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. I've been speaking with Laura McIntyre, staff lawyer at Pivot Legal Society, one of the members of a coalition of organizations in the downtown Eastside and Chinatown communities.
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Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
