Olympic fantasy clouds the hard reality

Proposed spending on Games fails to address infrastructure priorities

Ever since Olympic fever was first reignited at city hall, it often seems as if city council inhabits two very different worlds. That has been especially apparent in recent months.

Just two months ago, council was presenting Calgarians with some fairly dire warnings about future tax increases and service cuts. Even the tax increases that council approved earlier this year — four years of tax increases that will surpass the rate of inflation — won’t be enough to meet council’s priorities.

Mayor Naheed Nenshi warned, “We can’t invest in the things that we want to invest in, and on the capital side it means we can’t build the things people are asking us to build.” And indeed, council is currently staring at an estimated $4.5 billion in unfunded capital projects without much of a plan for how to address any of it.

Yet, the shiny and colourful rings of the Olympics have quite the hypnotic effect, as these fiscal challenges seem to have been forgotten.

There was clearly hope that an Olympic bid could be a shortcut to addressing these problems. Nenshi himself teased the potential of the Olympic stone killing these two pesky birds when he mused in July that “some of the infrastructure that we need funding for might be funded through an Olympic envelope.” It all sounded nice in theory, but last week’s uninspiring and expensive hosting plan has poured a considerable amount of cold water on that dream.

The supposedly austere vision of the reuse, recycle Olympics still has a whopping price tag of around $5 billion. Of that, $3 billion of public funding (an increase from the $2.4 billion the original bid exploration committee was touting) is required, including at least half-a-billion dollars from the city. Keep in mind, this is all a best-case scenario.

For all of that spending, though, none of Calgary’s top infrastructure priorities are addressed. The only new infrastructure additions will be a field house and a midsized arena. Money will also be spent on upgrading other facilities — including the Saddledome and McMahon Stadium, both of which may not have much of a future.

A field house has at least come up before at city hall, but no one appears to be clamouring for a new midsized arena.

Given aging community rinks across the city that are in dire need of repair or upgrade, it seems like a rather misplaced priority.

So rather than helping to achieve Calgary’s infrastructure needs, this rather bland hosting plan instead puts an Olympic-sized obstacle in the way. The city must now figure out a way of paying for this circus Maximus which will only leave them right back where they were two months ago.

Undeterred, Olympic proponents are spinning all of this as some kind of great deal. Hey, half-a-billion dollars for a field house and a mid-sized arena — pretty fair price, no?

But are these really Calgary’s top priorities? Does it make sense for Calgary to spend the next eight years focused on the IOC’s priorities? Is any or even all of this so impactful and transformative that it justifies such a dramatic reshuffling of priorities?

The grim prospect of spiralling debt lurks, and no Olympic fantasy world can shield city council from it. A report submitted to council in March laid it out in rather stark terms. Between Green Line LRT stage one construction and the idea of hosting an Olympics, “there is concern that debt levels could exceed appropriate amounts” and that “there is no identified debt or interest repayment source should debt be required” to support a bid.

The Olympics are not an answer to the city’s fiscal challenges; they are at best a distraction from them and at worst a considerable exacerbation of them.

Inhabiting a world of fantasy is always preferable than inhabiting a world of cold hard reality. Unfortunately for city council, the latter is waiting for its eventual reckoning.