A Shameful Track Record

Chris Shaw is a bit of a nebbish, a Woody Allen–esque guy who researches Parkinson’s disease for a living. He has two ex-wives and a fuel-efficient car, but in the winter-of-discontent narrative that has enveloped the Vancouver Olympics, he has a different passion. In 2008, Shaw wrote Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games, a thoughtful book exposing the current Olympic underbelly, from cost overruns to the destruction of pristine Eagle Ridge to make way for a widened Sea-to-Sky Highway, to the death of Tsimshian elder Harriet Nahanee from pneumonia, days after she was released from two weeks in detention for camping on Eagle Ridge and facing down bulldozers.

In his introduction, Shaw acknowledged that he had been opposed to and protesting against the 2010 Winter Olympics ever since 2002. But did he ever imagine that the Integrated Security Unit, a nearly $1 billion combination of 7,000 Vancouver City Police and RCMP, 4,000 military and...