Colby Cosh,
THE PROPOSED BUDGET FOR THE GAMES WAS THIN ON DETAIL.— COLBY COSH
In the run-up to Tuesday night’s Calgary city plebiscite on hosting the 2026 Winter Olympics, the CEO of the corporation organizing the bid was asked what kind of outcome she would like to see. Mary Moran told the CBC’s Jamie Strashin that she would be content with a simple majority of the votes but added optimistically that “the stretch goal for me would be closer to 60 (per cent).” There was general agreement among observers that a Yes vote of less than 55 per cent might be a problem for Calgary Olympics 2.0, which a majority of city council had already turned against.
As you have probably heard by now, the actual figure ended up being 43.6 per cent. So much for stretch goals. This number does not, I am afraid, leave much room for further discussion and interpretation. Calgary has spoken, and the time machine that was going to whisk us all back to the salad days of 1988 shall go unbuilt.
This result adds to the dire recent track record of urban plebiscites on Olympic bids. Indeed, the 2026 winter games were already chased out of Innsbruck, Austria, in October 2017, with Ja losing a referendum to Nein 53-47, and were rejected by the Swiss city of Sion in June, with Oui losing 54-46. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Austrian hometown tried to assemble a Hail Mary bid after the Innsbruck failure, but when state and national governments grumbled about the treasury and asked for another local referendum, Graz abandoned the sinking ship.
One can’t help thinking it might have been smarter for Calgary not to hold an Olympics plebiscite at all. It seems like an appropriate time to remind everyone that this was the original plan: when Coun. Sean Chu originally demanded a plebiscite one year ago, the idea was voted down by his colleagues 13-2. At the time, some of the councillors who opposed Chu said they were open to the idea in principle, and that it might be appropriate once the public had better information about the costs of the Games. But the government of Alberta ended up twisting the city’s arm, making its hypothetical $700-million contribution — itself a disappointment to bid organizers — contingent on the outcome of a vote.
It cannot be said that the goal of creating a fully informed public was ever met. The proposed budget for the Games was thin on detail, was very late in being made available for scrutiny, and was still being revised as November 2018 began. The bid committee, desperate to make the numbers look healthier, deducted random multimillions from an already-implausible estimate of security costs. It also factored in an imaginary insurance policy for cost overruns, which higher levels of government had refused to backstop on Calgary’s behalf. If there was still anybody in town perched on the fence when it came to the Olympics issue, and they possessed an ounce of sense, this 11th-hour shuffling must have knocked them right off onto the grass of the No side.
But the 44 per cent Yes vote — in the spirit of reconciliation, we’ll round up — must still be regarded as a remarkable disaster. Let’s revisit the fantasies of Mary Moran and imagine that the number had been 60 per cent. What kind of monster disrupts life in a big city for a year and spends $3 billion in public money on a party (taking the bid committee’s wild-ass guess at face value for the sake of argument) with the support of only three-fifths of the voting public? I don’t know how you feel about it, but I would be more comfortable in the neighbourhood of two-thirds. (Through some weird oversight, taxpayers elsewhere in Alberta and Canada weren’t sent a ballot.)
The project should not have gone ahead at all if there were any doubt that a plebiscite would win overwhelmingly. Of course, maybe the bid committee, its celebrity supporters, and the pro-Olympics contingent on council weren’t in any doubt. Maybe they just made an enormous, humiliating mistake.
Unfortunately for a city that seems perpetually uncertain whether to meet a bulging municipal budget by crushing homeowners or businesses, it was not an inexpensive error. Calgary’s Bid Exploration Committee spent close to $5 million on its preliminary planning, but apparently not much on polling of local public opinion. Council approved another $5 million for “due diligence” and “public engagement” in advance of the plebiscite.
The vote itself used up $2 million in funding from the Alberta government, although since it ending up saving the province $700 million, it is hard to complain about the return on investment there. But Lord knows how to evaluate the time that councillors and other city staff spent on the whole shebang. (The Assessment Committee of the council had a City Secretariat helping it out and double-checking the Bid Exploration Committee’s conclusions: that hoovered up $3.3 million.) And a privately funded Yes Calgary lobby group spent untold but undoubtedly large amounts on plebiscite propaganda. One trusts that its donors will have a little left over for indisputably philanthropic purposes now that the nostalgia trip is over.