Understanding Vancouver's 'Hockey
Riot'
How do we understand
the riots that exploded in Vancouver after the beloved
Canucks lost the Stanley Cup Finals? How do we understand the burning
cars, broken glass and injuries that stand as an enduring coda of
their game seven defeat at the hands of the visiting Boston Bruins?
Having communicated with several dozen people in "the most livable
city in the world" I think I have a modest perspective on why the
Canucks 4-0 loss was followed by fire.
One thing was made abundantly clear to me, Please disregard the
"analysis" of TSN's Bob McKenzie aka "The Hockey Insider"
who blamed
"Left wing loons" for the rubble. Mackenzie tweeted that he was sure
responsibility lay with "anarchists and some organized
extremists;
many of the same people and groups who
orchestrated riots in Toronto last summer at the G8". This is
unsupported and profoundly irresponsible garbage with no basis in
fact.
Vancouver activist Harsha Walia said to me "It's ridiculous
that even a hockey riot needs a scapegoat. A deliberately created
media circus of sports fervor, millions of alcohol advertising
dollars, and City-sanctioned street party zones all over downtown will
unsurprisingly lead to a massive street brawl.
Let's also dispense with the fiction that this was the fault of
all "Canucks fans."
The fans on the whole were actually in fine
form after the game. They gave Conn Smythe winner, Bruin goalie Tim
Thomas, a standing ovation and also rose and cheered for every Bruin
from Vancouver British Columbia. Of the millions of Canuck supporters,
this was a miniscule mob. As Shiema Ali of Vancouver wrote to me,
"I live in Vancouver and left the downtown core just before the
game started. There were tons of people coming into the city who were
already drunk and rowdy (in a bad way) -win or lose those people
were ready to riot."
What happened after the game was neither in the spirit of people
at the arena not the spirit of those who bravely protested the G8. As
activist and hockey fan Derrick O'Keefe said to me, "'Sometimes a
riot is the 'language of the unheard', in the words of Martin
Luther King Jr. But sometimes a riot is just an expression of young
male stupidity and violence -this was the case last night in
Vancouver."
Another person said to me, "There were lots of [LGBTQ people]
down there, some got roughed up, some dental care needed. There are
also attempts to pin this on 'black bloc' and references to
'protesters.' There are lots of frustrated young men for sure
lashing out at authority but no analysis of what might be spurring
this."
I did receive this incisive bit of analysis from Dru Oja
Day, an editor at the
Media
Co-op. "If you ask people to pour all of their emotions and
anger into a game, then a major event (Montrealers have rioted after
first round game 7 wins!) is going to occasion some outbursts. Hockey
commentators like Hockey Nights' Don Cherry are constantly
associating hockey with the troops overseas (he went to Afghanistan
and fired a live shell, for chrissakes) and promote fighting and big
open ice hits. We shouldn't be surprised."
John Ward-Leighton also
pointed out on
his blog the role that the liquor lobby placed in turned an entire
area around the arena into a branded "Entertainment Zone"
larded with bars and free-flowing liquor.
"It was clear that a lot of of the participants in last
nights riot and looting were at the very least impaired and looking
for trouble," said Ward-Leighton. "This "zone"
has nothing to do with entertainment and much to do with the almost
criminal profit taking of the proprietors of the establishments who
far from "serving it right" pour drunken idiots into the
streets nightly to brawl and drive drunk....The fault for last nights
idiocy was not about losing a hockey game or the police response, the
bomb had its fuse lit with the myth that the only way you can have fun
is to get stinking drunk."
And yet the action -or inaction of the police is garnering
attention as well. Alex Kerner, a law student and activist said to me,
"How the police dealt with this riot compared to the G20 in
Toronto last summer is instructive. While the destruction of police
cars, property and lighting of fires was much more extensive this
time, the police tended to focus only on those who committed the acts
of vandalism. Some tear gas was used but for the most part the targets
were the actual rioters. Contrast this to the G20, where police used
much more limited property damage by anarchists during the protests to
sweep through the entire protest and arrest a record number of
participants, irrespective of their actions. This sends a pretty sharp
message from police that being around a pointless hockey riot is much
safer than being at a protest with an actual purpose."
It's
also worth noting that of the dozens of people who have needed medical
attention, the overwhelming majority have required treatment for
"exposure to tear gas or pepper spray" from, of course, the police.
In addition, the push from police and the media for people to
"post on Facebook" pictures of rioters so they can be
identified and prosecuted signifies some kind of queasy step toward
"social media as police state" that we should reject. Today
a sports riot, tomorrow a demonstration.
One aspect that's not getting nearly the publicity as the riots
themselves are the people who risked danger, going in the street doing
volunteer cleanup, while the streets still raged. As O'Keefe said to
me, "Here in Canada, we're dealing with a federal government
hell bent on cutting back public services -they're about to
legislate postal workers back to work -but these are exactly the
working people who tended to the wounded and put out the fires that
night. In a way, we could thank the testosterone-laden morons for
reminding a hockey crazed city that the real heroes in society don't
play a game for money; the real heroes fight fires, drive ambulances,
treat the sick, and clean-up garbage." The real heroes are also
those who try to connect with the angst and alienation that leads to
such destruction and channels it into protesting the very people
"hell bent on cutting back" the services we so dearly
need.
As one of those real heroes, Harsha Walia said to me,
"There is a sense that people rioted over a "stupid
apolitical hockey game." While I too wish people were motivated
by social justice issues, the hockey game is NOT apolitical by any
means. The riots were a fundamentalist defense of a type of
nationalism, most evident in the beatings of Bruins fans in Vancouver
last night. NHL hockey is not simply a game, it is representative of
obedience to consumerism and is part of the state's attempt to forge a
false identity -despite vast differences and inequalities across
race, class, and gender, through the spectacle of sport."
The state does reap what the state sows. We should remember that
as the hand-wringing by police and government officials commences in
the wake of Vancouver's Great Hockey Riot.
