Juno News - November 15, 2018Calgary 2026 may be done, but that doesn't mean Olympic fever for politicians is
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Summary
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
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This week, Calgarians voted very decisively to say no to the Calgary 2026 Olympic bid that has become the greatest thing in the world,
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if you look at politicians who want nothing other than to carve out a legacy for themselves.
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And in defeat of this Olympic proposal, it's actually Calgarians and all Albertans that win.
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The Olympics are costly, disruptive, and never give people what it is that they think they're going to get out of it.
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The only real takeaway is some really obscure sense of regional pride.
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But Canadians, not just Albertans, people from across the country need to be very wary of this right now,
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In Calgary, in a couple of years, someone's going to brush it off and blow the dust off of it and say,
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Cities like Toronto are perennially interested in Olympic bids, especially people like John Tory.
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Vancouver, Montreal, they've already had their shot.
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But, you know, in this climate and culture, they would surely want to do it again.
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So the importance of standing up and having people in a plebiscite, like they did in Calgary,
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say, by a significant enough margin, we don't want this, is important.
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Even though it's non-binding, City Council and the Mayor of Calgary had no choice but to say,
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And what was very interesting about this is that Montreal hosted the Olympics in 1976.
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The debt it lost in $76, nearly a billion dollars, was only paid off in 2006.
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All of the Olympic bids that happen have debt along with hosting the Games.
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And even the cost of putting the bid itself together is typically monumental,
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even though there's no guarantee of a positive or favorable outcome on the other side of it.
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You know, it's an interesting thing because everyone loves the idea of the Olympics,
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but the reality is always a lot less promising and a lot less charming.
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You have the economic benefit that people tout that is actually very limited in scope.
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In fact, an Olympic study found that all of the money that's spent,
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but it doesn't even really go to the local economy
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because everything and everyone needs to be imported because of the size and scale of this.
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You've got a lot of these facilities that cost a great deal to maintain.
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And more importantly, you have politicians that stick infrastructure projects
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that have nothing to do with the Olympics into the Olympic packages
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just because they think it's an excuse to get their money.
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And if you can look around your city and see a single pothole in the streets,
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a single traffic light that needs to be upgraded,
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For the True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lawton.