Boycott the Beijing Games
Canada cannot have its cake and eat it too.
Jacques Marcoux, Volunteer Staff
The big question on everyone’s mind lately is whether or not Canada should boycott the Beijing Olympic Games.
The answer is clear — yes — but with certain conditions.
With the world preparing for the summer Olympic Games hosted by China’s communist regime, the number of public protests have been rising steadily, making headlines worldwide. As the Olympic torch journeys from Greece to Beijing over the next months, there is no doubt that manifestations calling for the boycott of the Olympic Games will follow.
With its booming economic and political presence on the world stage, hosting the Olympic Games was originally supposed to be China’s coming-out-of-its-shell party; instead, it has become a problematic political issue accentuating its ongoing violations of human rights, with Tibet as the centre of attention. There is very little debate over the legitimacy of the claims that China is in grave contravention of basic human rights, yet there seems to be little political desire from participating nations to take an early stance and initiate a boycott based solely on principle.
Although it is still far too early to get a real sense of what position Canada’s government will take come August, I will venture a guess that Canada, and the United States, for that matter, lack the mettle to address the issue with any form of meaningful and significant action.
Should Canada decide on an Olympic boycott, it would not represent the first time. In 1980, 62 countries, including Canada, declined to participate at the Moscow Olympic Games following the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet forces. The difference, however, was that Canada at the time had relatively inexistent economic ties with the Soviet Union, making a boycott easily feasible and relatively harmless from a political perspective on the home front.
Today, when you consider that China is Canada’s second largest trading partner, the economic interdependence between both nations brings all hope of a boycott to a crashing halt. If Canada is serious about its aversions to torture and genocide, then Canada would take full advantage of the Olympics to demonstrate its opposition to China’s crimes on its own citizens.
But simply using the Olympic Games as a principal vehicle to get the message across is both hypocritical and disingenuous. We cannot simply cherry-pick opportunities because they are timely and come with few repercussions. If the Olympics Games were not being hosted by China, would there even be any discussion of a boycott due to China’s encroachments of human rights? The answer is obvious: no. The truth is, regardless of the Beijing Olympics or an existing boycott, at the end of the day, it will be business as usual with our second largest trading partner.
If Canada truly has a desire to pressure China into changing its ways, it will require a further-reaching strategy, which inevitably would include introducing economic sanctions — or, at the very least, threats to do so.
China’s unprecedented economic growth in recent years has spurred the country to initiate negotiations with the Canadian government with the objective of redirecting much needed oil reserves to its country. Given, Canada is ranked second in the world based on crude oil reserves; this provides our government with ample leverage at the negotiation table to pressure the Chinese government to resolve its human rights violations. Canada is the only stable and effectively democratic country in the top 10 countries with the greatest oil reserves — not a partnership China would want to risk compromising as oil reserves grow scarce.
There is, of course, the argument, often originating from the Olympic athletes themselves, that Canada should not boycott Beijing because the Olympics Games are intended to be “pure” and “free of politics.” That is precisely all the more reason to boycott the Games. By turning what is not intended to be political into political activism, your statement effectively reverberate even louder. As an aside, it is interesting to note that the International Olympic Committee charter insists “universal and fundamental ethical principles” as part of the spirit of the Olympic Games — something the self-interested athletes conveniently forgot to mention.
Yes, Canada should boycott the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. However, the boycott should only be enacted if the Canadian government and citizens plan on following their Olympic protest through with further sanctions and maintain their principle-based position even in the wake of potential negative repercussions. Unfortunately for Canada, in this case you cannot have your cake and eat it too.
If this is not something Canada is prepared to fully undertake, then we should continue to sit idly by as our athletes compete in Beijing and the Chinese government carries on with violating human rights.
Jacques Marcoux is a commerce graduate.
