True Patriot Love - May 29, 2026


Canada’s $1B World Cup Bill： Pride Or Waste？


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

171.89

Word count

1,839

Sentence count

12


Summary

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

On June 12th, Canada will host their first ever World Cup soccer match taking place at Toronto s toronto stadium against Bosnia and Herzegovina. But how much will it cost to stage the World Cup in Canada?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Canada would have more if we had proper stadium to host these kind of events.
00:00:05.200 But right now, as a country, you have a minimum seating requirement as per FIFA
00:00:11.080 to host these events. We don't have the facilities.
00:00:18.960 As I'm proudly wearing our new True Patriot Love Media polo shirts, I'm also thinking about True
00:00:24.160 Patriot Love and Canadian Pride going to be on display Friday, June 12th, History Made is Canada.
00:00:29.900 will host their first ever people world cup soccer match taking place at toronto stadium not bimo
00:00:35.340 field during the world cup as canada will take on bosnia herzegovina but at what cost do you and i
00:00:41.340 the taxpayer to talk more about it is always thrilled to be joined by the the world cup of
00:00:46.460 managers and host paul micucci paul how are you hey jim how you doing good a lot of money for this
00:00:51.820 one a lot of money so in 2018 john tory is the mayor of toronto and it was the the three-headed
00:00:58.300 monster of canada mexico united states host the world cup yeah and everyone was told the media
00:01:03.580 and the skeptics and the city fathers and everyone involved in the city hey it'll probably cost
00:01:09.900 somewhere between 30 and 45 million dollars to stage the world cup games at toronto stadium
00:01:15.500 slash b will field i was like okay that's okay yep now olivia chow and the city of toronto are
00:01:21.420 stuck with a bill that is at least 380 million dollars and by the time the smoke clears could
00:01:27.340 be more than that oh yeah it could top half a billion easy easy easy easy so now you know the
00:01:33.660 uh pbo the uh office of the parliamentary budget officer came out with a report
00:01:38.780 and it was on the news but you know it's amazing you get 30 second sound bite in the news right i
00:01:44.380 think they tried to bury it and call me i guess oh no they did they said it's going to cost
00:01:51.020 estimated this is an estimate one billion dollars for all levels of government yeah
00:01:55.900 now you remember we did a bunch of budget shows yes yeah you and you and i talked about the cost
00:02:00.300 of this in a show way way back before christmas when the announcement was made and and we were
00:02:05.420 going through it and we said it would never come in on budget so we are like we're like uh swamis
00:02:10.060 right yeah actually nostradamus we knew we knew we knew but did i think it was going to come in
00:02:16.060 in a billion dollars i don't think i have if you would have asked me an over under i don't think i
00:02:20.300 would have got this but a billion dollars so um here we are and it looks like the federal support
00:02:27.500 for this is 473 billion a million um and then other levels of government come in at 593 million
00:02:36.300 right so provincial and municipal right that's what you're talking about yeah and we're talking
00:02:40.940 about vancouver and toronto so we're doing both because because you have hosting the games well
00:02:46.140 you have uh six games in toronto seven games in vancouver um and you know a billion dollars is
00:02:53.340 what we talked about uh eight which it's kind of funny because they actually are saying it's a good
00:03:00.540 deal at 82 million a game now that i think we should take that with a grain of salt when you
00:03:05.660 say good deal not everyone feels that 82 million dollars a game is a good deal but they're trying
00:03:11.180 to sell it as a good deal well they you know they said basically mexico because mexico had to do a
00:03:16.300 lot of infrastructure changes guadalajara monterey they had to go in and build a ton of transit so
00:03:21.740 mexico dumped massive amount of money so their infrastructure costs added on to the fifa the
00:03:28.380 soccer cost ended up being about 269 million a game right now they only have 13 matches also yes
00:03:36.060 uh the us who has 78 matches still a high number at 142 million a game absolutely and that's think
00:03:43.820 about it it's transportation security oh yeah the levels of security you have local state or
00:03:51.420 provincial yeah and federal security just to protect not just the matches the stadium the
00:03:58.700 players of both teams and the fans the fans inside note the stadium i'm not sure if people in vancouver
00:04:05.820 in toronto understand the level of security we're talking about in some cases this is even more
00:04:11.100 intense than an olympic game at a people world cup back so they are going to see not only an
00:04:17.100 intense display of security but a lot of paramilitary military with automatic weapons
00:04:22.860 and body armor that will be a bit of a culture shock for a lot of canadians when they witness
00:04:26.860 it around the stadiums oh yeah the toronto police it was in the news a few weeks ago they got a
00:04:32.140 whole new drone package a mobile drone package and they were showing it it looked wild oh state
00:04:37.980 of the art state-of-the-art drones from the from their unit that travels around the stadium um so
00:04:44.140 i pulled out some numbers so safety numbers because i wanted to go through them because
00:04:47.660 again when you get these 30 second sound bites you don't get all this but from a safety percent
00:04:52.860 public safety of canada um this is uh on the federal side is about 145 million the rcmp
00:05:02.140 is 79 million of security costs for this so that's additional monies that are going to it
00:05:08.140 it's interesting the ircc so immigration yes is putting in 6.4 more million so they're getting
00:05:15.760 an increase in their budget that's what they're getting and then border security is 4.3 million
00:05:20.820 uh internal reallocation of public safety canada is 3.6 million air air transport security is 3.4
00:05:29.980 million like these are all the numbers that go in like these are just security numbers
00:05:35.020 to the point of when you get direct uh security allocations for this event out of the billion
00:05:43.260 dollars you're more than a quarter is just on safety paul i was just at pearson airport this
00:05:49.740 weekend flying back from nova scotia seeing some family hi mom and um and so this was a may weekend
00:05:57.180 yeah not the world cup no fans or officials or teams coming in yet and it was a little gong show
00:06:03.740 when my partner tried to pick me up and the security trying to manage the tsunami of cars and
00:06:10.700 you know hired it's crazy at pearson at the best of times so vancouver airport which is extremely
00:06:15.900 busy in pearson which is the busiest airport in canada will now have double and triple capacity
00:06:22.300 on certain days as fans and media and officials fly in for different matches and that is part of
00:06:29.260 it is the the extra police at the airport extra border security trying to process the customs all
00:06:35.580 the people that's it's a staggering undertaking paul well there was a lot of complaints you know
00:06:40.220 and mike was complaining about it on a show last week about the motorcades practicing around the
00:06:45.660 city yeah so they had these motorcades like of like you know uh uh motorcycles and uh different
00:06:53.100 uh suvs and they and they make like a phalanx around the buses yeah and they were blocking
00:06:58.540 off lights and everything going on hives and they were practicing because they have to practice as
00:07:02.620 a group to shut things down and move them along yeah and they were practicing so all the the
00:07:07.660 basically traffic jams that were occurring because of these happening across the city
00:07:11.900 and that's what we're we're going to be up against now i don't have a lot of faith i'll be truthful
00:07:17.580 jim you know this weekend bruno mars concert you know and caught a little bit of a break because
00:07:23.760 quite frankly did you know we shut down the go train i i did know that yeah so on the barry line
00:07:29.920 so anyone from barry in western york region could not take the go train when you were told to take
00:07:35.640 the go train to the brusher stadium so i wasn't feeling so great i gotta i gotta be true to with
00:07:43.320 it so now we spent a lot of money right so we not only spent a lot of money on or gonna spend a lot
00:07:49.000 of money on the the public safety but we spent a lot of money to get uh bmo field and bc place
00:07:54.040 ready so well especially bmo field they had to add 20 000 seats right to the tune of 130 million
00:08:01.240 dollars so so that was a big capital expenditure to get them ready but that's not even close to
00:08:07.320 what these other countries i was looking now the u.s has a little bit of a leg up on us they've
00:08:12.600 have dozens of huge stadiums exactly 65 75 80 000 seats exactly and uh mexico did also the challenge
00:08:23.240 with mexico was the roads and the infrastructure the the number of people there right so you know
00:08:27.640 hundred and what i'm probably going to get the number of 135 million people mexico city still
00:08:32.600 i believe still one of the biggest cities on the planet right up there with mumbai correct it's
00:08:36.680 crazy right busy so um they had to figure out their infrastructure but stadium cost for us
00:08:42.840 per number of games was exorbitantly high now uh you know the u.s still spent a lot of money
00:08:50.200 they still did a lot of upgrades and of course like americans do you know donald trump is is
00:08:55.160 really geared up to make this his event right because he did get 78 games um and the rest of
00:09:00.360 us you know the rest of us north americans you know were put into the smaller zone we would
00:09:06.680 just real quick canada would have more if we had proper stadium to host these kind of events
00:09:12.680 but right now as as a country yeah you have a minimum seating requirement as per fifa to host
00:09:19.240 these events we we don't have the facilities with vancouver and toronto that's it yeah well we don't
00:09:26.520 and you know we don't have but but jim to be fair right we don't also have the population
00:09:32.360 like i think and that that was kind of the knock on i think a lot of experts that i heard
00:09:36.920 right and you know this is you know it's hard to speculate because it's hard to figure out
00:09:41.960 uh how many fans are are actually uh in toronto or in canada right now and are gonna watch it's
00:09:51.000 really hard to get a fix on that that that will come so the first match is june 12th right and
00:09:55.960 it's a friday at 3 p.m eastern time toronto time
00:10:11.960 Thank you.