When Vancouver landed the bid for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, you may have been one of the people rubbing your hands with glee, and saying, “there's money to be made here”. Well, yes, there is, but the trend seems to be, not very much money is being made in the Vancouver area, unless you've made plans to rent out your house or condo for a lot of money, and use the money to spend the winter in the south of Spain.
It's no secret that the big guys in this are NBC and their owner General Electric, Visa, Coca-Cola, and MacDonald's will do well for themselves, and if you want to get arrested during the Olympic fortnight, a good way to make this happen is, take a cooler full of Pepsi cans to a Vancouver street corner, and start selling them to passers by.
OK, so you don't own a TV network or a fast food chain, so you're not in competition with the companies mentioned above. You're not out of the woods yet. Say, for example, you own a charter bus company. With buses running from Vancouver to Whistler every minute or two, and thousands of people being transported from everywhere to everywhere else, you could expect your services to be in very strong demand.
Not so fast. It seems that it isn't just the big guys like Visa and Samsung who have an inside track. The “exclusive rights” arrangement includes some not-so-big guys, too. One of them is Gameday Management Group, of Orlando, FL, and their claim to fame is providing a large number of buses for the Super Bowl every year; they also provided buses for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. They have cut a deal with VANOC to provide charter buses for the Olympics, so your expectation of high demand for those buses of yours may have to be revised downward.
This is not a hypothetical situation for the owners of two bus charter companies I've talked to, Brendan McCullough of McCullough Coach Lines in Victoria, and K.D. Dadashzadeh of Seawest Coach Lines in Coquitlam. McCullough says, “Why is VANOC excluding local carriers, and bringing in bus carriers from so far away? It's our tax money that's paying for the games, so why is it being spent outside the country?”
Dadashzadeh put it this way: “We are living in this country, and we are dealing with an organization who is telling us who can work and not work, and that organization is a foreign company. That organization sees itself as above the Canadian government. Are we living in a new age of colonialism?”
And, if you want to make some bucks, and play a role in welcoming visitors to Vancouver for the Olympics, by driving a bus, Gameday Management, under the alias "Edison Transportation", finally got around to advertising for drivers on the Vancouver Craig's List on September 25, after advertising in the US at least a month earlier.
CBC News ran a good story by Kirk Williams about this on September 29, and it includes an interview with McCulloch. It reveals that signed contracts were cancelled to pave the way for Gameday Management. There's also an interview with a VANOC official who says that they might relent and give some Canadian bus owners and drivers “another chance”. Click here to view an MP4 video, or 
here to view a QuickTime movie.
Text story on CBC web site: Pro-U.S. bias alleged in Olympic bus contracts. Lots of Good comments, including this one: "They said the Olympics would create jobs. They just didn't say where."
