-Pivot Legal Society
Reposted with permission from Pivot. Access original here along with a sign up for the Legal Observer Program and further resources.
The FIFA 2026 World Cup Games are less than five weeks from descending on Vancouver, sparking much foreboding – and for good reason. Mega sporting events are notorious for inviting a slew of human rights abuses, with the impacts felt first and worst by residents already on the margins of a host city. Vancouver’s own experience hosting the 2010 Olympic Winter Games was coloured by displacement, criminalization, and discrimination, particularly within the City’s Downtown Eastside. Sixteen years later, the legacy of those forces continue to shape the neighbourhood.
The 2026 FIFA Games, moreover, are arriving to our streets at a uniquely painful juncture: amidst a toxic drug poisoning epidemic that was declared an “emergency” more than a decade ago; a housing crisis being exacerbated by the roll-back of tenancy protections for low-income tenants; a renewed political attack on indigenous rights and the walking back of politicians’ so-called commitment to “reconciliation”; and an expansion of BC’s involuntary treatment regime.
Against this backdrop, FIFA brings an additional suite of direct and indirect impacts. The direct, practical consequences of Vancouver’s role as a Host City include tourist surges, the suspension of cultural events, interruptions to front line service provision, and significant strains on our healthcare system. Indirectly, FIFA serves as a convenient justification for an escalating campaign of displacement and criminalization in the name of presenting a “clean” and “welcoming” environment, where visible markers of government failures on the toxic drug poisoning and housing crises are intentionally obscured.
This is Part 1 of Pivot’s blog series on FIFA in Vancouver, which seeks to track the Games’ impacts on the City and its residents in real time. Crucially, the series will honour and give voice to the work of organizations, peoples, and collectives on the ground who are mobilizing in diffuse ways to mitigate FIFA-related harms. Part 1 sets the scene, contextualizing the social and political moment FIFA enters and taking stock of what has been done to prepare our city for its impacts.
In addition, Pivot is answering the inevitable increase in policing by launching a new Legal Observer program to ensure that the public has eyes on the police at major potential enforcement events, such as protests or street sweeps, both during the Games and beyond. We look forward to sharing more information on open trainings (no legal experience required), closer to the start of the Games.
Opportunities to mitigate harm, and the choices made instead
The City of Vancouver has been quietly constructing the legal and policy framework that will accompany the 2026 FIFA Games for months. In November 2025, City Council passed the 2026 FIFA World Cup Bylaw, which imposes restrictions on street performances, food vending, and signage for a nine-week period surrounding the Games (from May 13, 2026 to July 20, 2026). Though the Bylaw is not yet in force, FIFA-related surges in displacement and criminalization are already well underway. Residents have been reporting forced displacement from the “controlled area” – a two-kilometre zone surrounding BC Place – since as early as February. Police Oversight with Evidence and Research (P.O.W.E.R.), a group monitoring policing trends in the DTES, reported in early April that it has already observed an increase in VPD crackdowns on street vendors around Main and Hastings.
Photo by Michael YC Tseng from Anti-FIFA rally on April 30th, 2026
In February 2026, the City’s FIFA Draft Human Rights Plan was released. The Draft Plan was prepared by Vancouver’s FIFA Host City Committee, the body responsible for executing Vancouver’s host duties. For the first time in World Cup history, FIFA is requiring its host cities to publish an Action Plan that outlines concrete measures to mitigate the human rights implications of hosting the Games. The requirement provided a real opportunity for the City to take seriously the human rights risks that FIFA poses for Vancouver residents, and to map out a response plan.
But the Draft Plan released in February falls well short of its promise. The Draft acknowledges the risk of FIFA-related human rights impacts, and even goes so far as to recognize disproportionate risks for certain areas of the City, including the Downtown Eastside. Despite acknowledging these risks, the Plan introduces virtually no new measures to mitigate them, and no promise of additional efforts and/or investments to scale up existing laws and policies to be relied on.
Despite its assurance of “consultation” and “engagement” with affected communities, the Draft Plan clearly lacks meaningful input from the people who stand to be most impacted by FIFA. Pivot, along with a coalition of organizations in the DTES working together to mitigate FIFA-related harms, tried to meet with the Committee to discuss the plan as early as June 2024. Those efforts were refused for over a year and a half. In fact, the Coalition was not invited to meet with the Committee until February 20, 2026 (the day after the Draft Plan was released), at which point the window for meaningful input had no doubt closed.
The final version of the Action Plan is expected by the end of May 2026.
Abandonment over investment
In the months since the Draft Plan’s release, a handful of non-ABC City Councillors have brought motions to Council that have proposed targeted, actionable steps that the City could take to mitigate FIFA-related harms. These include: a motion to formally oppose the deployment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Vancouver for FIFA-related security; a motion to establish a 2026 FIFA World Cup Public Safety and Local Readiness Working Group; a motion to strengthen the Draft Human Rights Action Plan with measurable standards, reporting, and monitoring; and a motion to suspend penalties for individuals sheltering in vehicles during FIFA. The third motion, introduced on April 1, 2026, also proposed to expand low barrier shelter spaces, with Councillor Fry noting that such a commitment would be minuscule in comparison to the City of Seattle’s plan to build 500 new temporary shelter units ahead of FIFA’s kick-off in June. All four motions were either voted down or ruled out of order by the ABC majority in Council.
Instead of undertaking the sort of harm reduction initiatives these motions proposed, the City and the Province alike have continued to abandon Vancouver’s marginalized residents, taking steps that exacerbate rather than remedy the circumstances into which FIFA is arriving. In the last few months alone:
- The VPD approved a $497 million annual budget, up $50 million from last year;
- The Province ended BC’s decriminalization pilot, making it once again illegal to possess any amount of illegal drug(s) under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, including en route to supervised consumption sites and overdose prevention sites;
- City Council passed a rezoning motion that will drive gentrification in the DTES, instead of prioritizing desperately needed housing in the area (the new plan allows developers to build up to 32-storey towers in the area, and reduces the % of new housing that must be made available at shelter rate);
- The City and the Province announced an agreement to close three single room occupancy (SRO) buildings on Granville Street, with residents required to leave their homes by June, precisely the moment when FIFA-related tourist and policing surges are expected;
- The VPD announced a new police training academy in the Woodwards building, further embedding policing rather than meaningful supports in the heart of the DTES;
- The City cut one of two sex worker safety positions, tasked with preventing violence against sex workers;
- The Province introduced Bill 11, amending the Residential Tenancy Act to make it easier for landlords to evict tenants in supportive housing, and lock them out of their homes as they await an eviction hearing;
- The Metro Vancouver Transit Police (MVTP) announced plans to launch drones to surveil crowd surges associated with the Games; and
- The BC Provincial Court announced modified and/or suspended court operations during the FIFA period, to free up police officers for FIFA related security operations (ostensibly to prioritize criminalizing more people, rather than ensuring due process for those who have already been criminalized).
These measures will make life harder for already-marginalized residents when FIFA arrives with its additional burdens. Instead of mitigating FIFA-related human rights risks, the government has made it more likely that people will be displaced from their homes, criminalized through increased policing, and denied procedural fairness after the fact.
Photo by Michael YC Tseng from Anti-FIFA rally on April 30th, 2026
But while FIFA elevates certain harms, it also diverts attention. The Games serve as a convenient smoke screen, obscuring the scale and breadth of the government’s campaign of organized abandonment. For example, many of the questions Pivot has been asked about the BC NDP’s April 2026 amendments to the Residential Tenancy Act have focused on increased risk of displacement during the FIFA period. The amendments, however, would be destructive and worthy of condemnation no matter when they were introduced. And even though it is important to highlight that FIFA will make the Bill’s consequences particularly dire, to fixate on the Bill’s timing vis a vis FIFA also distracts from the inherent harm of the law itself.
Taking a longer view, Vancouver’s experience hosting the 2010 Olympic Games reveals a difficult truth about FIFA’s likely legacy: the genie never goes back in the bottle. Once the police budget balloons (ostensibly to accommodate mega event security demands), the budget never again decreases. Once bylaw officers have more discretion to issue tickets in order to “beautify” city streets, that discretion is never revoked. The barrage of carceral, discriminatory practices activated in the name of FIFA may arrive as the Games do, but they will long outlive the Games themselves.
FIFA and the DTES: Taking control of the narrative
Thankfully, the press has started to pay real attention to the human rights threats FIFA brings, and the degree to which government is failing to take those threats seriously. But a lot of the coverage is rooted in, and thereby implicitly perpetuates, vulnerability discourse – whereby the DTES is a helpless community at FIFA’s mercy, in need of protection that the government is failing to give us.
In fact, Pivot and our allies have known for some time that safety, protection, and care before, during, and after FIFA will come from within. DTES residents, organizations, and collectives have been organizing for months, stepping in to fill the void left by government. This rich, powerful landscape of resistance was made evident at the community Town Hall the Coalition hosted at Carnegie Community Centre in February and has continued to proliferate since.
Our future blog posts in our FIFA on the Block series will highlight various community led efforts to respond to FIFA’s impacts, and continue to hold government to account for its responses. We will also be reporting on our Legal Observer program, and sharing more information about how to become involved. Join us in our fight for dignity, justice and human rights – during FIFA and beyond.