The City of Vancouver passed the FIFA World Cup 2026 Bylaw (the “FWC26 Bylaw”) on November 26, 2025, as it prepares for its role as a host city for the 2026 FIFA games next June and July. The FWC26 Bylaw includes a set of temporary amendments to several existing bylaws that regulate things like noise, graffiti, street vending, signage and truck routes throughout the City, and is set to take effect for a nine-week period from May 13, 2026, to July 20, 2026.

The FCW26 Bylaw, while supposedly crafted to protect FIFA branding and ensure the City presents a “clean and welcoming environment”, imposes sweeping restrictions on daily life for City residents. The normal rules that permit street vending and street performance, for example, are severely restricted. The Bylaw also strictly limits the distribution of commercial advertising materials, signage, and the display of graffiti, all of which “detract from the City’s appearance.” Under the Bylaw, the City is authorized to order that unauthorized advertising materials, signs, and/or graffiti be removed by a property owner within 24 hours (an alarmingly short window) – failing which the City can enter the property and remove it themselves, at the owner’s expense. Violations of the Bylaw are no joke, punishable with a ticket of up to $1000, no doubt disproportionately impacting people who rely on public spaces for their income.

When the Bylaw was before City Council on November 26, 2025, Councillor Fry expressed alarm that a Vancouver resident who displays signs simply to promote a local business or event would technically be in breach of the Bylaw’s signage provisions – and then hit with a $1000 fine. City staff tried to reassure him, indicating that staff will use discretion in enforcing the Bylaw, only issuing tickets for very serious violations. The Bylaw, they said, needs to be broad and expansive, in order to empower the City to take whatever quick and decisive action it needs to in order to live up to its “operations, safety, security, branding, and brand protection obligations to FIFA.” But the City promises that it won’t actually go after all of the activities that the Bylaw explicitly outlaws.

This answer does little to comfort Pivot’s concerns that the Bylaw will be used to curtail residents’ rights both before and during the summer 2026 games. In insisting that the Bylaw will not be used to punish Vancouver residents’ everyday activities, the City is effectively asking us to rely on their own goodwill – that is, to trust that they will not actually do what the Bylaw expressly authorizes them to do. It is a basic principle of Canadian law^[1] that when a law gives the state rights-infringing powers, the state cannot defend that law by promising that it does not actually intend to use those powers to their full extent.

The Bylaw is likely to be selectively enforced in order to “beautify” the City

The FWC26 Bylaw, moreover, will come into force in the context of an already-heightened security and surveillance environment. The Vancouver Police Department (VPD)’s budget is (yet again) ballooning at least in part to increase its capacity in the lead up to FIFA and throughout the games. The City has reportedly also contracted with the Royal Canadian Mountain Police (RCMP) from Saskatchewan to provide reinforcements. The City’s security plans, however, including its safety and security contracts, budget, and deployment plans remain shrouded in secrecy.

Further, the enforcement of this Bylaw, like all laws enacted in our current colonial and racist legal system, is sure to discriminate – that is, to be disproportionately weaponized against black, Indigenous, and otherwise racialized folks, people who rely on public space, and people who use drugs. Its enforcement is also likely to be spatially selective, targeted towards neighbourhoods that the City knows bode poorly for its international reputation.

Most notably, the Bylaw is likely to be weaponized to support the City’s efforts to “clean up” and “beautify” the Downtown Eastside, an area that visibly exposes the City’s blatant failure to manage its ongoing housing and toxic drug crises. If past mega events serve as any kind of reliable playbook, the Bylaw, along with other colonial tools for criminalization and displacement, will disproportionately impact residents who are purposely shut out from FIFA events due to their social condition, and who won’t experience any of the (so-called) downstream “benefits” of Vancouver’s role as host city.

Beyond the Bylaw: What is the City doing to protect rights before and during the FIFA games?

More than the Bylaw itself, Pivot is alarmed by what City Council’s discussion of the Bylaw last week revealed about how it is – and is not – preparing for FIFA more broadly. Speaking before Council, City staff provided no details on the Human Rights Action Plan that it must develop under its contract with FIFA, nor when it is expected to be released. Pressed for details, City staff indicated that it is in the process of conducting “outreach” in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for input on its Plan. Unsurprisingly, Pivot has heard nothing about what this “outreach” entails, including who the City is speaking to and about what.

Perhaps most concerningly, when asked about the “street sweeps” that traditionally intensify in the wake of mega sporting events, City staff erroneously claimed that no such sweeps had occurred when Vancouver hosted the 2010 Winter Olympics, and assured none would accompany the 2026 FIFA Games either. In fact, the displacement associated with the 2010 Games has been well documented, and many residents of the Downtown Eastside continue to live with the memories and effects that came with it. Second, “street sweeps” – the displacement and dispossession of unhoused people – are a daily, omnipresent reality in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. In assuring that it won’t sweep the streets to prepare for FIFA, the City is actively denying the reality that it already carries out these sweeps every day, perpetuating cycles of displacement, dispossession, and harm.

Vancouver is not new to hosting mega events, and those events’ propensity to cause real harm is hardly a complex mystery. Instead of denying, deflecting, and insisting that residents have nothing to worry about, the City could tackle that reality head on. It could start by prioritizing coming up with a comprehensive plan to protect human rights before, during, and after FIFA – rather than pushing through a Bylaw that will punish residents’ ordinary daily activities in an effort to present the “clean and welcoming” environment it so desperately wants to portray.

^[1] British Columbia (Attorney General) v Alberta (Attorney General), 2019 FC 1195 at para 156.