Vancouver Refuses to Regulate Mixed Martial Arts

Ozzz can comment more fully than I, but it’s a BS decision through and through. The council is basically passing the buck like it was a salt shaker at a french fry convention. The Province of BC is not and has not been for years set up to do that sort of regulation – it’s municipal (or regional, when a bunch of municipalities get together) across the province – and as I mentioned in the other thread, there’s about to be an election which will shut the provincial government down for much of the spring and summer. It’s a stall, and the reasoning is crap because what they are asking for is exactly what they’ve had forever and a day: report after report after report on the safety and acceptability of risk associated with professional MMA. It’s a crock, and any Canadian/resident of BC/resident of Cascadia (I hate that term) should be really, really pissed.

AJB,

Your vote is your voice. Start a grassroots effort to evict those who don’t support MMA.

Jay K.

In early 2007, the Vancouver Athletic Commission, which had been regulating MMA just fine (including a nice big Bodog show in a city run arena, no less), asked the city to give it some resources as they were getting a lot of MMA requests. The city, in turn, threw it to their city staff to figure out.

The staff came forward with a report in September stating (erroneously) that they thought there might be a liability issue to be concerned with, should a fighter get injured and sue the regulators for allowing it.

So council suspended MMA regulation and gave it back to the staff to do more thinking about, to figure out whether there should be MMA or not.

That left the sport in an eighteen month limbo – until today, when staff gave council a report that, in reality, leaned towards regulating the sport and bringing in da cash.

But the council wasn’t going to ever vote for regulation – in fact, after hearing a cavalcade of good people petition for the sport and nobody at all against it, they brought out a motion that had clearly been prepared ahead of time, to not vote on the issue and instead send their staff back to do yet another report to answer questions they have already answered – today.

The council’s own athletic commission doctor was on hand saying it was safer than boxing and should be cleared, but the council ragged on him because he has promoted events in the past and has a conflict of interest.

Basically, they weren’t going to, under any circumstances, approve MMA. But they went through the motions, got people interested, drew a big media scrum and then punted it aside.

The two big issues for council were:

1) That MMA has no governing body (though they regulate wrestling which has no governing body, and ignored the fact that the American Boxing Commission, which their own athletic commission is a part of, has encouraged all AC’s to embrace and regulate MMA).

2) That they were going to incur expense in regulating events. This, of course, completely ignores the fact that they could tax seats and pay-per-view so as to cover all their expenses.

The real problem here is not that we won’t get a UFC show for a long time. It’s that the sport has been pushed underground in Vancouver by the lack of oversight, leading to events on native reserves, no medical standards, no drug screening, and an alarming level of peripheral gang involvement.

Vancouver council has the ability to regulate the sport and make a large profit. They’d just much rather pass bylaws allowing people to put chickens in their backyards and grow onions on the city hall lawn than get involved in an issue that would take actual thought.

I guess every city/state that has regulated MMA has gone through this nightmare, but when you know people who are preparing to leave the city and move elsewhere because they can’t find training partners, and see the number of kids taking up the sport all over town and know that they’ll never achieve their dream unless they had to Montreal or Florida, it really pisses you off.

In most cases like this, you can point to the media and complain that they haven’t done their job and haven’t presented the pro-MMA case (or worse, have actively hurt it), but in this city, all the media is pro-MMA. Nobody is clamoring for it to be banned at all… it’s just the goofballs in council who can’t let themselves approve something they wouldn’t personally take part in.

The door is wide open for one of the other local councils to take the lead on this and encourage MMA ten minutes down the road, but all the big arenas are in Vancouver proper, so the best they could hope for would be regional events, which are hardly the cash cow a UFC show would be.

Can’t tell you how gutted the local MMA community is right now. This is just a horrible evasion of the councils’ responsibility.

Next Friday I’m headed out to a Musqueam reserve to take in an underground MMA show. I’ve already written the headline for our front page… “Vancouver council: This is what you have wrought.”

I actually somewhat disagree with the reasoning behind all this. I live in Vancouver, and would obviously love MMA here – there is no question about that. All the attention has been focused on the city because they put the ban in place. Their point all along was that it should be a provincial decision, and not something a city should regulate or de-regulate. They did contridict that somewhat by enacting the ban, but it was to prevent any liability UNTIL the province made up it’s mind. Obviously, the province continues to duck the issue because it’s such a tiny issue in an election cycle that they feel it deserves no attention.

Where I feel we’ve all gone wrong for the last 18 months – media, fans, even the UFC – was focusing all their attention on lifting the city ban, instead of going over their heads and focusing all their attention on the PROVINCE. The ones that truly hold the power. Rogan shouldn’t be traveling here and speaking to the casinos and their reps – he should be in Victoria speaking to a government official. Province-wide regulation is the key, like Quebec has. The CMMMA should also be stepping up their efforts to regulate pro MMA, as they’ve done nationwide with amateur MMA.

Finally, Ratner’s op-ed piece was great PR, but ultimately fruitless. Focusing on the economic benefits to the city or province is completely pointless right now with the Olympics coming here within a year. He would have been better served actually educating the masses about the sport with that piece.

/rant

This is crazy, in most cases the city/province/feds go nuts to regulate anything they can. In Calgary our douchebag mayor is constantly fighting the province over the exact spending of provincial/federal money that is spent on highways and other projects that pass through Calgary. I have never heard of a branch of government trying to give more authority to another.
It seems like even though no one reasonable can make a real argument against regulating MMA, that man politicians live in fear of the small, ignorant, loud minority of people who chime in with their “HUMAN COCKFIGHTING” every time anyone mentions MMA.
I am so sick of hearing stupid things like “did you know that in MMA they punch and kick each other on the ground?”
Did you know that in football you can tackle someone from behind?
Did you know in boxing they hit each other in the face 100s of times in a night?

I suppose the good thing is this likely improves the odds of a UFC show in Calgary.

It doesn’t really matter whether the Olympics are headed that way or not, a committee should be formed to understand the gang problem and then table it for an additional two years.

Tragic and sick!

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-canada-vancouver-gangs,0,6710478.story

Most notable quotes are “It’s terrifying,” says Doris Luong, who lives near the scene of a double murder on March 10. “This used to be the best city in the world… I fear for my children.” At a nearby elementary school, students’ movements were immediately restricted as word of the killings spread.

The root of the problem seems to be drugs, or rather a shortage of them.

The ever reliable disparaging America quote

“I’m really apprehensive about going out in the evening,” Hamilton says. “We’ve turned into an American city.”

Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan recently called Vancouver the country’s gang capital, and said the violence is the worst in Canada. Canada’s largest city, Toronto, has seen only 11 murders this year in a population of 5.1 million, almost double that of the Vancouver region.

On a visit to Vancouver earlier this month where he met with family members of victims, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper proposed a new law that would label gang killings as first-degree murder with a sentence of at least 25 years and no parole. The law would also create a new offense with a minimum four-year jail term for drive-by shootings.

Harper has said people planning to attend the Winter Games should not worry about violence, with 15,000 police officers, private security and military personnel expected to provide security.

But shopkeeper Nandal Oad disagrees. He says nobody should feel safe coming to the Games.

Oad’s suburban convenience store is just across the street from where shots were fired over morning rush-hour traffic March 10, leaving two brothers aged 19 and 22 dead. The violence has spread far beyond the city’s notoriously drug-infested Downtown Eastside.