2010 Winter Olympics

Colby Cosh on who should have lit the flame

Some people think Bramwell Tovey’s protest against letting someone else pretend to conduct music he pre-recorded with the VSO is a blow for artistic integrity and an attack on the Olympics as an institution. Some people think it is a selfish attempt to gain the spotlight, albeit for work that he and the whole of the VSO will actually have done in the studio. I think Maestro Tovey’s motives are irrelevant in the face of a patent fraud, and I am happy to applaud him for all of the foregoing reasons, including the selfish one.

The B.C. Civil Liberties Association is to be applauded for a marginal victory in the seemingly endless fight against homegrown Winter Olympics totalitarianism. But make no mistake: it is a very marginal win, at best. The Vancouver police purchased the American Technology Corp.’s LRAD-500X acoustic beam generator, supposedly for use as a loudhailer at public gatherings and protests. Both the police and American Technology object to media references to the device as a “sound gun”, a “sonic cannon”, or a non-lethal weapon. But it has been used that way in the field, and the VPD has effectively conceded the point by agreeing, under BCCLA pressure, to disable a device setting that allows the LRAD to generate “powerful deterrent tones… to influence behaviour.”

Newsmakers of the week

HBC’s clothing line for the Vancouver Games is better than the disaster it pushed in Beijing. But it’s still a bore—and there’s the whole logo fiasco.

The bad news piles up, and the stimulus cash is slow coming