Seven Oaks Magazine.

Some forms of constructed nostalgia have great value. Human beings are natural storytellers and we are always building stories and weaving narratives in the urban jungles we call home. They are the mythology of everyday living that give texture to human existence and have the capacity to tell us about ourselves and the way we live.

Meeting Gary Jobin at the Potluck Cafe in the ground floor of the Portland Hotel Society on Hastings Street, you get the sense that he's a one man dynamo. This morning, over breakfast, he's talking about the dunking ability of Lebron James, the Cleveland Cavaliers’ new, 19-year-old star.

When Jobin isn't organizing basketball tournaments, getting sponsorships for school supplies for the neighbourhood kids or getting people out of trouble, he's the Coordinator of the award-winning Bladerunners program, which places First Nations youth on to construction sites to get valuable work experience and leave some of the issues associated with the street behind. It was formerly funded by the provincial government and is now partnered with the Aboriginal Community Career Employment Services Society (ACCESS).

Jobin's been known to motivate a few stragglers, get in the face of landlords trying to evict one of his participants or vouch for them as they try to overcome the maze of government authorities, parole officers and other legal obstacles that stand in their way.

Armed with a cell phone, Jobin is on call 24 hours a day, ready to deal with any impediment, professional or personal, that stands in the way of one of his participants’ ability to succeed.

Jobin doesn't have a masters; degree in Social Work; he learned his skills on the street with a clever, street-wise banter that gets in people's faces -- in another life, he would have been a motivational speaker. He's walked this neighbourhood for well over a decade, and he's seen that the street can be vicious in the ways it can dehumanize people, how quickly lives can unravel and the various ways in which those who don't have certain advantages or social supports are the ones who can most easily fall prey to the dangers that afflict this neighbourhood.

The story of Bladerunners is a long one, and one that requires an understanding of Vancouver’s history in order to be properly contextualized. It is named after the 1982 Ridley Scott film starring Harrison Ford which examines the impact of technology on human society, existence, and the very nature of humanity itself.

Leafing through the Special Collections archives at the library, you get a different sense of Vancouver than the one we've inherited today. Nat Bailey opening his White Spot on Granville and 67th, the original Commodore Ballroom, the Smiling Buddha Cabaret, legendary newspaperman Jack Wasserman at the Lotus Gardens Restaurant, Dal Richards at the Sunday concert at Malkin Bowl, the Woodwards food floor where people used to dress up to go shopping, Reid's Meats with the neon sign that read "we have meat that ye can eat," how the rice bowl with the chopsticks under the Ho Ho's Restaurant sign was stolen, KVOS-TV and Artray Commercial photographers with their dapper hats and cigarettes.

You see the stories of how the authorities had banned political rallies in the 30s except for Oppenheimer Park, where the organizers still had to seek the permission of the Parks Board. There is the old Cambie Yards site, where the pictures show the Communist rallies, later becoming a park, then the Greyhound bus station that now sits as a city-owned parking lot. Nat Bailey Stadium, the grand dame of North American ballparks with a capacity of 6,000, could possibly meet the fate of the wrecking ball to make way for a speed-skating oval for the Olympics, which would be a great tragedy for Vancouver.

Expo 86, the World's Fair, changed the Vancouver skyline forever and turned Expo Ernie, the official mascot, into an immediate underground pop culture icon. Everybody wanted a Big Mac from McBarge. We all knew it was Gracie’s necklace adorning the Lion’s Gate Bridge. It was a musical montage moment akin to Tony Montana buying the tiger in Scarface; the money was rolling in, everybody was shopping at Overwaitea, it was goodbye Bill Bennet, hello Zalm!, all set to a cheesy David Foster soundtrack.

It was the BC government’s attempt to expand our collective weltanschauung with public dollars. Every British Columbian longs for the day you could buy Lilian Vander Zalm’s headband at a Socred auction for dirt cheap. Vancouverites were turning their backs on logger sports at the PNE for a shot at the big time and the chance for international notoriety even if it meant building the world’s biggest hockey stick and cross country skiis.

In the process, the waterfront lands around False Creek were sold off for a fraction of their worth and condiminiums were all the rage through the nineties while an unprecedented exodus from Hong Kong and further immigration from Vietnam, the Phillipines and Latin America was changing the face of Vancouver.

Divestment from the urban core and the closing down of Woodwards and related businesses on Hastings Street choked off the economic lifeblood of the inner city. Through a process of governmental planning and policy blunders, an urban ghetto was created by design and institutional inertia.

The drug trade left the bars and went to the street. Over 2,000 British Columbians died of overdoses from 1990 to the present, which is one of the great tragedies of recent memory in this province and which has not sufficiently been investigated through Royal Commissions, House of Commons Committees or a public inquiry with the kind of thoroughness that a human disaster of this nature warrants -- a kind of working loophole that continues to dehumanize these lives.

Somewhere along the way, Vancouver made the decision to have more people live downtown beyond the established communities in the West End, the Downtown Eastside and Downtown South. Yaletown and other neighbourhoods sprang up and Vancouver became the North American model for downtown living and sustainable urban development. The old economy of lumber yards, manufacturing, fisheries and mining shifted with all the hype surrounding the arrival of high tech and the spin off companies that were rolling off the campuses of UBC and SFU. Fortunes were won and lost in the grand old days of the Vancouver Stock Exchange, the suppository of notorious schemers, dreamers, pickpockets and petty thieves inadvertently becoming a locus for urban legends. Everybody wanted a 1970s Murray Pezim shirt with big collars.

Expo 86 may have been brought here to internationalize Vancouver and make it a city of the world, perhaps trying to shake off that "San Francisco on Uppers" label it had been tagged with since the 60s where earnest and idealistic, Birkenstock-wearing university students set up their enclaves in trendy Kitsilano and where Greenpeace was launched years later. As much as Vancouver tried to deny its provincialism, its lack of urban polish, it was still the noble sanctuary of rural Pilsner drinkers with mullets looking for a good time in the Big Smoke.

As Expo 86 did much to transform the economy and landscape of Vancouver, it also served as a lesson in how publicly funded hallmark events can disproportionately impact low-income people. Hundreds were evicted in single resident occupancy hotel rooms and nine deaths resulted from it as hotel owners working under few regulations looked to make a quick dollar. First Nations employment programs for urban Aboriginals were virtually non-existent.

The lesson of Expo 86 was that when large amounts of capital roll into a city in a short period of time, it comes like a tidal wave. Not only does it have the ability to transform, but it can be ruthless in how it discriminates against those who have the least ability to defend themselves.

When GM Place was being built on the edges of the Downtown Eastside, there was the desire not to repeat the mistakes of Expo 86 and to extend the economic opportunities to people who lived in the neighbourhood. Jim Green, the former head of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association and then provincial government employee worked out a deal with Canucks and Grizzlies owner Arthur Griffiths to get inner city youth on construction sites and into apprenticeship programs. It was in this environment that Bladerunners was developed in 1994.

As the construction cranes dot the landscape through downtown today, building the new Vancouver, there is the likelihood of a different kind of Olympic Games here in the city -- one that has the possibility to extend the economic opportunities to a broader part of the community.

As we walk past the Costco development near BC Place, Jobin introduces me to Cliff Johnston, a 28-year-old Bladerunner who is grabbing a sandwich on his lunch break. Before joining the program, he had been through the Drug Court in Vancouver.

The Bladerunners program, by placing people on construction sites and putting people in a position to join apprenticeship programs, has an 80% success rate in keeping people off welfare and has over 90% Aboriginal participation. They are working towards having at least 20% female participation. The personal attention that each person in the program can receive due to its small intake is one of the successful aspects of the program. In 1999, Bladerunners won a Pepnet Award from the National Youth Employment Coalition in Washington, DC.

While arriving on site at a Concord Pacific site being built by Eltex Enterprises and other contractors, we travel up the hoist to the 8th floor with an incredible view of False Creek. There are no 4th and 14th floors here, like in many new Vancouver high rises, because the number 4 is considered unlucky in the Asian culture.

The people who work here get the best view in Vancouver. Mark Dowbaniuk, a foreman onsite and a former Bladerunners Coordinator is critical of the new trades training program which chops up the trades into different components rather than looking at the holistic aspect of the trade. Dowbaniuk tries to ensure that his trainees get a sense of the broad range of skills required to be productive on site. He has them training on windowsills, drywall, ceilings, curbs and shooting guns. He is adamant that a trade cannot be learned in a classroom alone and that it takes years of practise on site to build the necessary skills. He tries to instill in them the Zen of Construction.

There are two Bladerunners on this site. Brian Montour is 28, a cook and a former volunteer at Union Gospel Mission who met Jobin through his brother. He says he’s enjoying the work and wants to get his apprenticeship. Gord McMillan, 23, says it’s great to be working and not getting into trouble like when he was selling drugs near Hastings Street. Through a drop-in basketball program, he met Jobin, who coaches at the Carnegie Centre on the corner of Main and Hastings on Monday nights.

Wayne Peppard, Executive Director of the BC and Yukon Territory Building and Construction Trades Council says that there will be $16 billion worth of major projects over the next 10 years in BC resulting in a trades shortage. He sees this as an opportunity for new people to enter into the construction industry and create skills for life, which would enable them to have an opportunity that does not come often.

“It’s an opportunity to set themselves up for life,” he says.

Peppard sees this as a great opportunity for equity hiring, and that labour and business have to step up to the plate. He wants the health of the industry to get better beyond the Olympics. He also sees the change in trades training and the “Fair Wage” policy of the province as one that breaks up the trades to the detriment of the industry in the long term.

Sam Corea, the spokesperson of the 2010 Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, says that they support training opportunities for construction projects and are looking at using the Sydney Collaborative Model which was successfully used in the 2000 Games and the Made in BC program to support local industry.

Late in November, the Four Host First Nations – the Lil'wat, Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh -- signed an agreement with the Organizing Committee to ensure that the protocols and traditions of their Nations are acknowledged and respected throughout the planning, staging and hosting of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

Bladerunners is part of the story of Vancouver, part of its fabric of everyday life and a working critique of the new economy of BC.

Vancouver after 2010 will be a different city. Hopefully, it will wear its shades of history well and it will no longer need to spend billions in search of international attention. I imagine a Vancouver that’s a place of ideas, where you can afford your rent, where we address the social needs of the city rather than sweep them aside, and where we build an economy that works for everyone and doesn't leave collateral damage in its wake.