Public the loser in stadium game

By FRED WILSON

What’s in a stadium?

Football, soccer and baseball
players, popcorn, peanuts and
60,000 cheering spectators .. .
perhaps, someday.

Intense debate and media hype
about what kind of stadium, who
will build it and where it will be
located . . . yes. Keen public in-

terest . . . it follows.
_ But the interests of the
public . . . that has yet to be

found in the high powered political
games being played out around the
proposed Lower Mainland stadium.

In fact if you rip the dome off
this elusive arena, what is revealed
is a less than Olympian competition
between two political-financial
groups for political and financial
gain. At stake is the possible
political demise of the mayor of
Vancouver, or the resurgence of
TEAM. But the real prizes are an
enormous subsidy from the public
purse to professional sports in-
terests and a multi-million dollar
land swindle for the benefit of
Marathon Realty.

When premier Bennett entered
the match last week with the ap-
pointment of Liberal Party hack
Paul Manning to the position of
‘‘expediter’’ and investigator of the
various stadium proposals, it was
like naming a head office official of |
one team to referee the champion-
ship game.

The choice of Manning was so
obviously a nod to the Downtown
Stadium — TEAM - Marathon
Realty crowd. And it was so clearly
a political knife in the back of
mayor Volrich who had staked so
much on the PNE > Multi-
plex/stadium proposal.

__Bennett’s move left Volrich and
PNE president Erwin Swangard
isolated and humiliated, reduced to
second stringers lined up at Mann-

behind the Downtown Stadium
group which they had so arrogantly
spurned for more than a year. Also
waiting in line are very vague pro-
posals from Burnaby, Surrey,
Maple Ridge and Langley.

For the next six weeks Manning
will hear each group plead its
special interest case, each attemp-
ting to proclaim louder than the
other that their project is in the
public interest.

It would be well to remember that
there was very little, if any, public
demand for a stadium until one was
proposed, and subsequently made
an election issue. In fact when Er-
win Swangard was elected president
of the PNE in 1977, Empire
Stadium hadn’t had-a capacity
crowd in years, and although the
stadium was in need of repairs,

Not unexpectedly, the Hamilton
and Doyle concept went nowhere
and little was heard for eight mon-
ths until in August of 1978
Swangard gathered together 200
politicians, businessmen and media
people to unveil Multiplex: a 60,000
seat stadium to replace almost every
building on the PNE grounds. The
only major buildings which would
be left standing were to be the
racetrack, the. Coliseum, the
Agrodome and, ironically, Empire
Stadium.

Multiplex emerged from a small
huddle of Swangard and his PNE
board, hired consultants and a
group of powerful backers with
overlapping interests. The backers
included Herb Capozzi, owner of
the Vancouver Whitecaps, Jack
Farley, president of the B.C. Lions,

Once set in motion, however,
Multiplex became a political foot-
ball thrown right into the middle of
the 1978 Vancouver election,
primarily by mayor Jack Volrich
who made a major commitment to
the project. Volrich scored where he
wanted to and in unprecidented ac-
tions, both the Whitecaps’ and the
Lions sent letters to season’s ticket
holders endorsing his election.
From that point on Multiplex had a
new quarterback, and Volrich made
Swangard’s obsession his own.

The election was almost over
before any competition entered the
field, apparently prompted by the
mayoralty campaign of May Brown
who attempted to defuse Volrich’s
Multiplex issue by counterposing”
the north shore of False Creek as an
alternate site. It is clear now that

The two contenders: left, the F

plans were in place to fix it up and
add seats between the goal lines.
But Swangard had bigger plans,
no less than the complete redevelop-
ment of the PNE grounds. A con-
sultant’s firm, Hamilton and
Doyle, were commissioned to bring
in plans to transform the PNE into
a Canadian Disneyland, the cen-
trepiece of which would be a new

‘alse Creek Stadium adjacent to the Granville Bridge at right, right;
Multiplex, situated just off Hastings St. to left.

Don Hamilton, B.C. Lions, Conser-
vative Party shaker and Swangard’s
former associate at CJOR, Ted
Loftus, developer with Webb and
Knapp, and Jack Diamond, whose
Jockey Club, as always, would be a
main beneficiary of the PNE’s
plans. Ernest Richardson, chairman
of MacMillan Bloedel, was in
charge of raising money from the

ing’s door in Robson Square,

4

=

emories of an epic campaign waged more than 25
years ago — and as yet unfinished — were rekindl-
-ed last Saturday with the brief visit to Vancouver of
Morton Sobell, the man who, on April 5, 1951 stood in
the New York courtroom together with Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg to hear Judge Irving Kaufman pass
sentence upon them — for the Rosenbergs, the death
sentence; for Morton Sobell, 30 years in a federal peni-
tentiary. Yet all three had steadfastly maintained their
~ innocence and around the world millions echoed the
demand for their release.

The cold war hysteria out of which the monstrous
charge against them was contrived — they were .ac-
cused of giving the secret of the atomic bomb to ‘the
‘*Russians’” — waned in subsequent years but even at
that Sobell was repeatedly denied parole. He only won
his release on January 14, 1969, after serving nearly 18
years of his sentence.

On his way from Calgary where he had been giving a
series of lectures on electronics engineering, he stopped
in Vancouver to spend an evening with these people —
among them Harry and Jonnie Rankin, Abe Smith,
Columba Rush, Elsie Dean and Polly Weinsten —
who had led the campaign to demand his and Rosen-
berg’s release.

And that work — at least in the U.S. — still con-
tinues. Sobell is one of the key figures along with Mi-
chael and Robert Meeropol, the Rosenberg’s sons, in a
campaign to expose the conspiratoriai role of the FBI,
a role which is now beginning to emerge bit by bit with
the court-ordered release of the Bureau’s documents
and files.

* * * * *

2 example of what we could expect if Tory
and Socred governments were to allow private
insurance companies into the health insurance field —
as the right-wing Fraser Institute and some doctors
have advocated — comes to us in the Dispatcher, pub-
lished: by the International Longshoremen and Ware-
housemen’s Union. It shows what has happened to
senior citizens’ Medicare in the U.S. after private in-
surers have had a field day selling policies to make up
for deductible clauses and omissions in the federal pro-
gram. : :
Readers may remember a recent Tribune article on
our own medicare program, which drew attention to a
new publication by the Fraser Institute which called
for an end to the present system of public health in-

PACIFIC TRIBUNE— OCTOBER 5, 1979— Page 2

45,000 seat stadium.

“PEOPLE AND ISSUES

private sector.

surance and its replacement by a combined public and
private system where private insurance companies
could sell health insurance policies — just as in the
GS:

But that’s just it. The U.S. experience is a night-
mare. According to the Dispatcher account, senior
citizens are ‘‘falling victim to unscrupulous insurance
operators’’ in their attempt to get coverage for the
many gaps in the medicare legislation.

Private insurers have done an estimated $1 billion
worth of business selling the coverage but in hundreds
of cases, the insurance sold is useless.

The paper cites the testimony of one former insur-
ance salesman who related the case of an 84-year-old
woman who had been pressured into buying 17 dif-
ferent policies. But when she entered the hospital for a
cataract operation, the policies were so full of loop-
holes that ‘‘not one of them paid her any benefits.”’

Just as ominous are the gaps in the U.S. Medicare
coverage which leave 72 per cent of health care costs
up to the individual to pay. Ominous, because that is
the direction in which chiselling provincial govern-
ments and ‘‘opting out’’ and ‘‘extra billing’’ by doc-
tors are moving our own health care system. And
private insurance companies are just waiting to get
back into the action.

pee ae ae we”

‘

H‘ vigorous campaigning on issues throughout the
east side of Vancouver, his candidacy in several
civic elections and his frequent media exposure have
made Bruce Eriksen a familiar figure to thousands of
people — but apparently not to those obtuse people at
the Unemployment Insurance Commission.

After the last of the Downtown Eastside Residents’
Association’s grant money ran out some weeks ago,
president Eriksen was compelled to apply for UIC.
Now, six weeks after his application, the Commission
has called him up for an ‘‘ID check’’ and has in-
structed him to bring two pieces of identification with
him — presumably to establish that he really is Bruce
Eriksen. :

This time, the UIC may get more than it bargained
for since, as is his bent, he may bring along with him
several reporters and cameramen. But, of course, as
Eriksen’s case demonstrates the UIC is concerned not
with identity, but with harassing claimants. In fact, the
Commission said that some 600-700 ID cheques a
month are ordered — from that one office alone.

Brown was merely the message-boy
for another group which recognized
in the stadium issue a solution to an
old problem at False Creek.

Shortly after the election the
Downtown Stadium Committee
was quietly formed. Its .members
read like a Liberal Party — TEAM
roster. The chairman and main
public spokesman is Frank Rigney,
football player, media personality
and stockbroker with Pemberton
Securities. The secretary is Martin
Zlotnick, Liberal lawyer and cur-
rent president of TEAM. The
honorary chairman is C. W. Wood-
ward, the department store tycoon
whose family has been a mainstay
of the Liberal Party in B.C. for
years. Woodward’s corporate con-
nections run through the Royal
Bank to the CPR and Marathon
Realty, his former partner in the ill-
fated Project 200 to redevelop the
Vancouver waterfront.

The other key member of the
committee is Gordon Campbell,
former executive assistant to
TEAM mayor Art Phillips, and

who since 1974 has been on the staff

of Marathon Realty.

There are others: on the
Downtown Stadium Committee: ar-
chitects Rand Iredale, Neil Pelman
and Richard Mann, and former
TEAM parks commissioner Bill
DuMoulin, to name a few.

But the organizers and driving
forces are Woodward, Rigney,
Zlotnick and Campbell. ‘‘Those
three and myself,’’ organized the
Downtown group, Campbell admit-
ted in an interview this week.

Asked what the connection is bet-
ween Marathon Realty and the
Downtown Stadium group, Camp-
bell would say only that he is a
member of the committee ‘‘with the
permission of Marathon.”’

The connection, of course, has
nothing to do with sport. It is pure
real estate, 170 acres of it on the
north shore of False Creek owned
by Marathon. :

False Creek has been a frustra-
tion for Marathon for five years, a
gold mine they have been unable to
exploit. Marathon’s ‘‘problem’”’
began in 1974 when the TEAM
dominated city council voted to

rezone the industrial land on the.

north shore of. the creek to
industrial-commercial-residential.
The estimated land values jumped
from about $5 million to nearly

tensive holdings.

_edge to the Marathon ,team ¥

_ tunately we are still without
_in this league.

$100 million, just with the rezoning
In return, Marathon agreed that i
would provide a housing mix int
planned development of lux
apartments, shopping areas
recreational facilities, so that
least some moderate or low incom!
people could live there.
Since that time, however,
bottom has fallen out of the lux
housing market. There just isn
any demand for the high pri
apartments Marathon wanted
build. And then Marathon deci
to renege on its. previous deal w
the city to provide a housing m
After all, this was business, -
charity.
The economics of the project
the haggle with the city |
Marathon’s plans about the sam
place as the PNE’s Disneyland
sion — nowhere.
Until, that is, that Gordo
Campbell, Charles Woodward 4
friends discovered that what Va
couver really needs is a massi¥
stadium smack in its downtoV
core. . r
It was only.a matter of tif
before Marathoncame out from
shadows, and two weeks 4a
Marathon’s general manager DO
Murray (Campbell’s boss) went #
see Volrich and offered to sell
city 40 acres of False Creek for
stadium. A price of $20 million wé
bandied about, but that wé
Volrich’s figure, not Marathon’s-
What Marathon wants is to S@
the city 40 acres of undevelo
land which had been vastly inflate
by rezoning, on the understandi
that Marathon would develop
Then it will expect public money
build a stadium which will start t
ball rolling for the development °
the entire north shore of the Cri
and Yaletown, where it also has

And if in the process its politic
hanger-ons in TEAM can m
Volrich, the renegade from TEAM:
who made his first mark on ™
political scene in a conflict
Marathon, lose face so much #
better.

One large question emerges
which there is no clear answer
Why did premier Bennett give ©

designating Manning? One 20
guess would trace that back to
high level meetings with CPR UG
lan Sinclair over the MacMili@
Bloedel takeover bid. 3

Manning is anything but the ?
dependent, objective site study 4”
ed for by Harry ‘Rankin when
Multiplex was first presented.
any politician he is subject
pressure, but the pressure is 00
for a stadium.

Marathon’s False Creek
clearly have the inside track,
they will praise their downtow?
as the city’s salvation. But
hypocrisy is tissue thin, and inad
tion to the blood money deman
by Marathon, it makes no senms>
build a massive regional facility
downtown Vancouver. That is ¥™
the GVRD’s liveable region p!
all about.

The PNE will likely argue
economics of a stadium an
mise ‘‘free land’’, but they ca? ©
argue around the fact that P
don’t want a stadium at the
which already has too many ™
facilities.

Burnaby, Surrey, Coquitlam -__.
Any of them would be 4
reasonable site, but these are
proposals for sites, not “stadi
as such, at least so far. Ae

As for the Lions, White
Canadians, rock concert pro
and so on. . . at False creek
the PNE they are guarant
seats with higher prices
without contributing 4 —
themselves. :

And the public .. -