Who Is This World Cup For?
As Vancouver gears up for the World Cup, Downtown Eastside residents are being displaced from their homes, and the city is deploying its largest police force ever.
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Kirsten Lebrun has worked at the Pan Pacific Hotel in downtown Vancouver for thirteen years. She has served guests through a pandemic, labour disputes, and the slow, grinding process of negotiating the first union contract. Since February 2021, Lebrun and her colleagues have been part of UNITE HERE Local 40, which represents workers in the hotel, food service, and airport industries throughout British Columbia.
“Our last [interim] contract ended in June of last year. It’s been almost a year with no contract and almost two years with no raise,” said Lebrun.
She was one of dozens of workers who marched outside the hotel, across from the Vancouver Convention Centre, where football officials were gathered for the 76th annual FIFA Congress on April 30. Pan Pacific was one of the three hotels where delegates were staying for the event, considered the kickoff to this summer’s World Cup. According to Lebrun, the hotel is projected to bring in around $45 million from pre-bookings alone, driven by a record-breaking cruise season and the upcoming FIFA World Cup, which features seven matches in Vancouver.
Yet, Lebrun and her colleagues are still fighting for an agreement with fair wages and working conditions that allow them to afford the city they live in.
“With the price of gas, food, rent, mortgage rate and everything that’s going on. It’s just not sustainable to be left behind,” she said. Their dispute is part of a broader movement in the province’s hospitality sector, marked by a recent wave of unionization, strikes and pressure campaigns.
In the last nine months alone, five new Metro Vancouver hotels have voted to join the union. After months of organizing, workers at the Hyatt Alberni secured an agreement in December 2025 that included a pension, job security provisions, and wages up to $40 an hour. In Victoria, Coast Victoria Hotel workers struck for 77 days, in what became the longest hotel strike and lockout in the city’s history, before winning wage increases of up to 21 per cent in November 2025.
The last two times that Lebrun and her colleagues rallied, their employer called them immediately after and set up negotiations. But talks largely stalled.
“We just want to be at the same level as the other hotels,” she said. “We’re far behind, and they have not kept up with inflation.”
The rally outside the Pan Pacific was one of two protests that converged on the FIFA Congress in late April. Steps away, a coalition of Downtown Eastside advocates, including housing lawyers, harm reduction workers, and police oversight groups, held a press conference outlining their concerns.
The Downtown Eastside is one of Vancouver’s oldest and poorest neighbourhoods, sitting in the shadow of BC Place Stadium, where the games will be played. Home to generations of low-income residents, Indigenous people, and people experiencing homelessness, it is also one of the most overpoliced and surveilled communities in Canada. Residents are subjected to frequent “street sweeps,” during which city workers, often accompanied by police officers, move through the neighbourhood, clearing people’s tents, makeshift homes, and personal belongings, and throwing them into garbage bins or trucks. Many lose essential items, including medications, ID, clothing and even irreplaceable items like Indigenous art and the ashes of deceased loved ones. While the city insists it has no plans to displace people for the World Cup, critics see it otherwise.
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