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Was surveillance of a Vancouver anti-Olympic activist justified by the RCMP?

The RCMP had an officer watch Chris Shaw of No Games 2010

A reporter covering the run-up to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games couldn't help but bump into Chris Shaw, likely more than once.

The University of British Columbia neuroscientist was an outspoken opponent of the Games for almost a decade. He thought the event was a huge waste of taxpayer dollars at the expense of the poor and B.C. First Nations.

Shaw haunted pre-Olympic events, leavening the hoopla with his contrarian view and, if he could, crashing media scrums in hopes of getting in a question.

Shaw was a leader of the Olympic Resistance Network, a loosely organized coalition of Games opponents, which put him on the radar of the vast RCMP-led Olympic security apparatus.

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A strange postscript to Shaw's activities surfaced this week when CBC News reported that an RCMP officer's notebook contained details of surveillance of Shaw in in 2009, despite the Mounties claims they weren't following Games opponents.

The 200-page notebook belonging to Const. Shane Busch, an undercover surveillance officer, was discovered by his ex-wife as she was moving out of their home during a bitter divorce last year, CBC News said.

The notebook, which chronicled several assignments Busch undertook as a member of the Mounties "Special O" team, recorded that he followed Shaw and a woman friend for much of the day on May 27, 2009. It included notations that he walked his dog with an "unidentified female," a "black dog" and a "small child," CBC News said.

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It's unknown if Busch was the only officer tailing Shaw before the Games. The RCMP's Olympics Integrated Security Unit denied at the time that it was monitoring Games opponents.

“There is nothing covert or surreptitious about what we are doing," an RCMP spokesperson was quoted as saying. "We are not tailing or following anyone. This is not surveillance."

The Olympic Resistance Network complained in 2009 the Mounties were using intimidation to try and tamp down opposition to the Games.

Officers interviewed friends of people involved in the anti-Olympic movement, presumably hoping to discover whether they planned to disrupt the Games.

One of those questioned was Langara College student Danika Surm, a friend of Shaw. She told CBC News in 2009 that two plainclothes officers approached her on campus as she was going to write a biology quiz. When she emerged, they quizzed her about Shaw's place to protest the Games.

She was spooked that the Mounties knew her cellphone number and class schedule.

"I just think it shows the degree of paranoia that the police and the City of Vancouver are reaching about the Olympics, and also the breach in civil rights and privacy that is going on," she told CBC News.

Some network members also claimed they were under surveillance.

"What we seek to do is either confirm or disregard individuals as potential threats to the safety and security of Canadians and visitors to Canada who will be here during the Games," Cpl. Bert Paquette told CBC News at the time.

Shaw was not surprised by revelations undercover Mounties were dogging him, adding he always suspected he was being watched.

"We weren't paranoid, we weren't conspiracy theorists, we weren't making this stuff up,” Shaw told CBC News.

Shaw remained a staunch, principled opponent of Games right to the end, calling it a waste of taxpayer dollars despite its feel-good execution. In his eyes, it was a public-relations juggernaut that rolled over opponents.

"We don't have a billion dollars to organize ourselves and keep ourselves going for two solid weeks," Shaw told me during a final protest march hours before the closing ceremonies. "VANOC [the Olympic organizing committee] did."

The small group of demonstrators was far outnumbered by Olympic revellers who were spilled out of bars to heckle them.

"One commentator before the Games began noted that the Olympics had divided the city," he wrote in the Vancouver Observer after the Olympics wrapped up. "This was true. All the subsequent partying didn’t change the underlying division and the city remains divided in many ways."

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The announced cost of security for the Olympics was about $900 million, involving hundreds of police and military personnel. Most of it was justified by the threat of terrorism but officials were also concerned disruptions by anti-Olympic could give the Games a black eye.

As it turned out, the main demonstration during the Games opening ceremonies, which drew about 1,500 people, was largely peaceful, as were most other protests. The only real trouble came a few days into the Games later when a group of Black Bloc anarchists vandalized some downtown stores, which took the giant security umbrella by surprise.

It's likely Shaw's leadership role in the larger movement, which ranged from longstanding Downtown Eastside anti-poverty groups to the hard-core Black Bloc, earned him an unjustified spot on the RCMP's surveillance list.

"This really does smack, I hate to use the phrase, smack of a police state," criminologist Rob Gordon of Simon Fraser University told CBC News.

"British Columbians should be disturbed to think that those engaged in legitimate political opposition or who are organizing it or deemed to be organizing it are going to be subject to RCMP surveillance."