Games preparation will include visit to Winnipeg this summer
After more than a year working to bring the 2021 Canada Summer Games to Niagara, the reality is still sinking in for many of the people who made it happen.
Doug Hamilton, who led efforts to bring the games to town, said many of his colleagues were “sort of shaking their heads and saying, ‘We’re moving into a different realm now here. It’s going to actually happen.’”
“I’m not sure if everybody’s fully there yet,” he said. “We woke up over the weekend, and changed our approach from trying to win the bid to now trying to grow the opportunity to the maximum extent we can, and have the best games possible.”
Said Regional Chairman Alan Caslin, “It’s still brand new for us.”
Now, Caslin said, the region needs to “pull together the resources to make it happen.”
Friday — a day after Niagara was announced as the location for Games, beating out competing bids from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ottawa and Sudbury — Hamilton met with representatives from the Canada Games Council to discuss next steps to ensure Niagara is ready when the Games are held in August 2021.
Hamilton said the bid committee he led has now been disbanded, to be replaced by a new council to lead the region through the transition phase.
The transition will take the next several months to complete, and will establish a “host society” which will be responsible for preparing for the games.
Hamilton said the first step will be to select and appoint a board of directors for the host society. Senior staff members will then need to be recruited for the organization, and procedures and policies need to be established.
That non-profit corporation will work alongside the Canada Games Council and the federal, provincial and municipal governments to prepare for the Games and ultimately oversee running the events.
“We go from being a bid group that’s Niagara-centric to a host society that still has a Niagara component,” Hamilton said. “But there’s also a provincial, federal and Canada Games component to it.”
There are also a few loose ends to tie up associated with Niagara’s successful bid documents.
In Niagara’s bid, Hamilton said, it proposed legacy facilities such as a sports ability centre and a training centre.
“But we explained in our bid document that we couldn’t finish off the financial plans for those until we won the bid, because we weren’t in a position to talk to some of the sports groups and we weren’t in a position to talk to provincial and federal governments at that point,” Hamilton said. “But now that we’ve won, we’re in a position to have further discussions and firm up those plans.”
Caslin said local event organizers will be paying close attention to the Games taking place this summer in Winnipeg.
“We’ll be there to have a look at how those Games are prepared, what the logistics behind it are, and what we need to do in Niagara to be ready,” Caslin said.