Wayne Boucher with his dog Chewy in Vancouver’s Oppenheimer Park on Wednesday. Mr. Boucher says Vancouver police told him in February he can no longer shelter outdoors within two kilometres of BC Place stadium due to new bylaws mandated for the FIFA World Cup.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
In February, Wayne Boucher was living in a tent under Vancouver’s Cambie Street Bridge. He’d been there for months with his dog Chewy, named for the Star Wars character Chewbacca. Every morning city bylaw officers or police would make him dismantle his tent for the day, something people who sleep outdoors in the city deal with daily.
But one morning, Mr. Boucher says something changed. Instead of insisting he simply pack up for the day, the police told him he couldn’t come back.
“They said we have to go a minimum two kilometres away from the [BC Place] stadium,” Mr. Boucher said. “They’re going to make a no-go zone for homeless or drug users or anything like that around that area.”
With the FIFA World Cup two months away, the tournament’s potential impact on Vancouver’s unhoused populations is driving anxiety in many corners.
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In the city’s downtown core, folks such as Mr. Boucher fear a looming crackdown may sweep them and their belongings from a two-kilometre radius around the BC Place stadium as part of the city’s “beautification” zone mandated by FIFA. That zone extends from Strathcona west to the Burrard bridge, and from the Harbour’s south to about West 12th Ave. It also includes the entire Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood with a high degree of street homelessness.
“I don’t think the city is prepared for it, or ready,” said Athena Pranteau, an outreach worker in the neighbourhood. Unhoused folks are scared, she said, “because they don’t know where they’re going to go. There’s no concrete plan.”
The Globe and Mail asked the Vancouver Police Department whether officers had been told to move unhoused people out of the two-kilometre FIFA zone. The department did not respond to a request for comment.
Athena Pranteau at Vancouver’s Oppenheimer Park.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
Much of the concern stems from a draft human rights plan for the soccer tournament released by the city in February that critics have widely panned as lacking detail. Because Vancouver was a late entrant submitting a bid to host the tournament, it was allowed to bypass a more rigorous consultation and planning process that other would-be host cities underwent.
The draft plan says that existing bylaw enforcement practices will continue to “ensure that parks remain usable by the whole community during the daytime and sidewalks remain safe, clean, and accessible.” City staff have repeatedly said there will be no additional police enforcement during the tournament.
Last week, Vancouver city councillor Pete Fry tabled a motion urging the city to add stronger language and more concrete protections to the document, which will be finalized in May. In particular, he wanted to see a process for monitoring alleged human-rights abuses, and the creation of more emergency shelter space for use during the tournament.
“We currently don’t have [enough] daytime shelters available for folks, and we heard loud and clear that [city] staff were unwilling to support daytime shelters. So where do people go?” Mr. Fry said.
In response, deputy city manager Sandra Singh said the draft plan already addresses many of Mr. Fry’s concerns, and consultation with stakeholder groups is continuing. The motion was defeated by Mayor Ken Sim’s majority ABC party.
In late February, organizations representing the Downtown Eastside held a town-hall meeting, where about 150 residents were given literature on tenant rights, policing and surveillance, and community calls to action.
Chantelle Spicer, co-director of the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition, told the crowd that “displacement is definitely coming.” Promises in the draft human-rights plan to protect against displacement apply only to existing rules around overnight sheltering in parks, not to sidewalks and daytime activity, she said.
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Laura Macintyre, a lawyer with Pivot Legal Society, also spoke to the crowd about the temporary FIFA World Cup 2026 bylaw that amends a number of existing regulations for the duration of the tournament. It limits street vending, noise and the display of advertising materials, among other changes, and increases fines and penalties.
Ms. Macintyre said that when city councillor Mike Klassen asked during a council meeting in November about the risk of the bylaw being used to displace marginalized people, as had happened during the 2010 Winter Olympics, deputy city manager Karen Levitt insisted it never happened during the Games, and there would be no street sweeps associated with the World Cup either. That claim drew boos and laughter from the crowd at the February town-hall meeting.
“The street sweeps are well documented,” Ms. Macintyre said of the 2010 Games. “To suggest otherwise is just completely disingenuous when you’re passing a bylaw that expressly allows for that possibility.”
Worries extend far beyond Vancouver’s borders as well, with residents and politicians as far away as Quesnel and Port Alberni musing in city council meetings about a rumoured influx of unhoused people pushed out by the tournament.
Adding to the pressure, three single-room-occupancy hotels on Granville Street are slated to close, displacing around 300 residents. One of them will shutter in June, just days before the tournament begins, prompting concerns that many of those residents may be sent to neighbouring cities.
Chilliwack Mayor Ken Popove said he’s worried his city could be one of them, despite already having the highest per-capita social housing in the Lower Mainland.
“If this is their plan to clean out Vancouver, Chilliwack is full,” Mr. Popove said. “We’re done. We have no more room at the inn.”
Fears in rural communities of being inundated by unhoused people from Vancouver are common, but almost entirely without evidence, said Natasha Hartson, the manager of housing and community development for the City of Kamloops.
“It’s a pretty common myth,” Ms. Hartson said. “We heard it during the Olympics, with all sorts of different major events that happened in major cities that now all unhoused people are being bussed to different communities.”
Mr. Fry, the Vancouver city councillor, said he doesn’t expect unhoused people to be pushed out of the city, but they will likely be moved from the downtown core.
“It seems inevitable that we will see a displacement of the current street population,” he said.