Juno News - November 15, 2018


Calgary 2026 may be done, but that doesn't mean Olympic fever for politicians is


Episode Stats

Length

2 minutes

Words per Minute

175.71582

Word Count

493

Sentence Count

25


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Calgary voted overwhelmingly against hosting the Winter Olympics in the 2026 Winter Games. Andrew Lawton explains why this is bad news for the city, and why other cities across the country should be worried about hosting the Games in the future.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 This week, Calgarians voted very decisively to say no to the Calgary 2026 Olympic bid that has become the greatest thing in the world,
00:00:09.640 if you look at politicians who want nothing other than to carve out a legacy for themselves.
00:00:14.780 And in defeat of this Olympic proposal, it's actually Calgarians and all Albertans that win.
00:00:20.700 The Olympics are costly, disruptive, and never give people what it is that they think they're going to get out of it.
00:00:27.200 The only real takeaway is some really obscure sense of regional pride.
00:00:32.220 But Canadians, not just Albertans, people from across the country need to be very wary of this right now,
00:00:37.760 because Olympic bids are never dead for long.
00:00:41.320 In Calgary, in a couple of years, someone's going to brush it off and blow the dust off of it and say,
00:00:46.060 hey, we should think about doing this again.
00:00:48.160 Cities like Toronto are perennially interested in Olympic bids, especially people like John Tory.
00:00:54.200 Vancouver, Montreal, they've already had their shot.
00:00:56.700 But, you know, in this climate and culture, they would surely want to do it again.
00:01:01.780 So the importance of standing up and having people in a plebiscite, like they did in Calgary,
00:01:06.900 say, by a significant enough margin, we don't want this, is important.
00:01:11.420 Even though it's non-binding, City Council and the Mayor of Calgary had no choice but to say,
00:01:16.500 okay, we're done.
00:01:17.260 And what was very interesting about this is that Montreal hosted the Olympics in 1976.
00:01:23.540 The debt it lost in $76, nearly a billion dollars, was only paid off in 2006.
00:01:30.840 30 years.
00:01:32.240 Calgary had debt.
00:01:33.960 Vancouver had debt.
00:01:35.580 All of the Olympic bids that happen have debt along with hosting the Games.
00:01:41.140 And even the cost of putting the bid itself together is typically monumental,
00:01:46.240 even though there's no guarantee of a positive or favorable outcome on the other side of it.
00:01:51.960 You know, it's an interesting thing because everyone loves the idea of the Olympics,
00:01:56.100 but the reality is always a lot less promising and a lot less charming.
00:02:01.180 You have the economic benefit that people tout that is actually very limited in scope.
00:02:06.780 In fact, an Olympic study found that all of the money that's spent,
00:02:11.280 most of it is hospitality and construction,
00:02:13.840 but it doesn't even really go to the local economy
00:02:16.620 because everything and everyone needs to be imported because of the size and scale of this.
00:02:21.660 You've got a lot of these facilities that cost a great deal to maintain.
00:02:25.900 And more importantly, you have politicians that stick infrastructure projects
00:02:29.720 that have nothing to do with the Olympics into the Olympic packages
00:02:33.320 just because they think it's an excuse to get their money.
00:02:36.640 And if you can look around your city and see a single pothole in the streets,
00:02:40.240 a single traffic light that needs to be upgraded,
00:02:43.020 the Olympics are just not worth it.
00:02:45.900 For the True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lawton.