The push is on ahead of Calgary 2026 Winter Olympics plebiscite

Cheryl Bernard looks at Calgary’s potential bid for the 2026 Winter Games from both a business and a sport perspective. She built a successful insurance agency in the city before focusing her attention on curling, eventually earning the right to represent Canada at a home Olympics.

“It’s a 10-for-1 return and I just don’t know that you can say no to something like that in a business sense,” Bernard said Thursday, a day after the potential bid survived a city council vote.

Ten votes out of 15 were required to abandon the Nov. 13 plebiscite asking Calgarians if they want to host the Games or not. Only eight voted in favour of the motion, a result that allowed bid supporters to clear a key hurdle. Now both the yea and nay sides will do their best to beat the drum ahead of the non-binding decision, which will influence the next council vote. The International Olympic Committee will accept 2026 bids in January and the host city will be elected in June.

Bernard spent 13 years in the insurance business after founding a brokerage at age 23. She later skipped Canada to a silver medal at the 2010 Vancouver Games and is now president and chief executive officer of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame.

“I look at this as a business deal,” Bernard said from Calgary.

“If I was a corporation and somebody was going to say, ‘Here, you pay me $390 million and I’ll give you $4.4 billion back,’ I don’t know many businesses that would turn that down.”

However, Trevor Tombe, an associate professor with the University of Calgary’s department of economics, said he has a problem with the 10-to-1 talking point.

He said the ratio is not an actual return to the city since a lot of that spending covers expenditures that are not Calgaryspecific, such as imported equipment or salaries for security, police and Games staff who are from out of town.

“The 10-to-1 return is incorrect,” he said. “It makes it seem as though there is no cost for hosting the Games when the costs are real.”