‘USUAL PROPAGANDA’ OR ‘BALANCE’?
Experts weigh in on Calgary’s formative exploration into bid for 2026 Winter Olympics
The committee spending $5 million to explore a potential bid for the 2026 Winter Games launched an online questionnaire earlier this week, asking Calgarians to weigh in.
Results from the survey at ShouldCalgaryBid.com will be incorporated into the Calgary Bid Exploration Committee’s final report to city council. Postmedia’s Annalise Klingbeil spoke to five experts, who completed the detailed questionnaire, about what they thought of the survey.
‘ THE USUAL PROPAGANDA’
Janice Forsyth
Assistant professor, school of kinesiology, at Western University and former director of the school’s International Centre for Olympic Studies “I think it’s kind of the usual propaganda to generate support for an Olympic bid because there’s a lot of unstated things in the questions and even in the little bits of information that the public is given. If you take a look at the data ( given in the survey), in terms of economic impact of the Games, it’s all superficial and very general. There’s some head-nodding towards, ‘oh we need to be really careful in terms of planning,’ but there’s no real explanation for who really benefits from hosting the Games. It’s all done in a way that makes it sound very good for the public. This is very typical of the narrative of bids that are moving forward.”
‘ REMARKABLY BALANCED’
Harry Hiller
Urban sociologist and professor at the University of Calgary who has presented globally on the impact of the Olympics on cities “I found it remarkably balanced, which is not typical at all of efforts to obtain local feedback. Most of the time the question proposed to citizens is a simple type of YesNo with no attention to nuances at all. So this is a vast improvement. ... Since I have seen many of these surveys, I would say that this survey is remarkably fairminded and balanced in terms of the information it provides and the risks it identifies. I think the committee should be commended for this.”
‘ ASSUMING STUFF ... IS NOT GOOD’
Jerry Joynt
Senior vice-president of communications for the 1988 Olympic “When you ask a question and say, ‘ it could cost millions,’ or ‘this might happen,’ or ‘we may,’ you put the person answering the questionnaire into the situation of assuming a whole bunch of stuff. I’ll tell you, assuming stuff in the Olympics these days is not good.
“There’s no big mystery about what people’s concerns are. If we think Calgarians’ concerns are different than those in Budapest, or Switzerland, or Sweden, or Germany, they’re not. All of those five cities dropped out because of fear of costs.”
‘ IT WAS INTERACTIVE’
Robert Livingstone
Sports journalist specializing in the Olympic bid process and founder of GamesBids.com “Some of the key things I notice is the possible negative aspects were discussed, which isn’t usually that typically, usually they mention a lot of the positives. ... Typically it’s just polling, do you support an Olympic bid, making a mathematical response and that kind of thing. What I liked about this is it was interactive, it mentioned the pros and cons, it asked for feedback on those. What was really interesting is it asked the support question and then after telling the pros and cons, it asked again at the end so that it can compare and see what that reaction was. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before in that way.”
‘ QUITE LEADING’
Trevor Tombe University of Calgary economist “The questions were quite leading in the way that they tried to elicit people’s opinions. In particular, on the question about whether or not we should support the Olympic Games on economic grounds, the very first question, presented information that is based on some faulty modelling. It leads people to believe that the Olympics are a way to stimulate the economy. ... It’s unfair and a little misleading.
“The Olympics are not a new thing. There’s a great deal of research showing that the economic effect of hosting them are consistently orders of magnitude smaller than what the initial economic impact studies suggest. In some games, Sydney for example, the estimates are that it shrank the economy. This is not surprising to an economist.”