THE BIGGER PICTURE
Sure, the city can host mega-events, but are building costs tied to them worth it?
New jobs. More tourists. Infrastructure investment. Development of the waterfront. David Peterson.
From the sounds of it, the boosters of hosting Expo 2025 in Toronto are dusting off the Pan Am Games playbook. A quick task, given the Games were less than a year ago.
Pitches to host the world come steeped in the language of legacy, infrastructure improvements and “once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Just as the same language fills the pitch books, the same questions arise from critics. “Legacy for whom, and infrastructure for whom? That’s the key question that has to be asked about these mega-events,” says Matti Siemiatycki, a professor of geography and planning at the University of Toronto.
A large-scale event, such as an Expo, needs infrastructure to move people to and around the site. Beyond that, the footprint demanded for the six-month-long fairs, which attract massive displays from nations and corporations across the world, often means large swaths of land must be developed or redeveloped to house the fair.
In Toronto, proponents have targeted the Port Lands, a 356-hectare patch of industrial waterfront land east of the Don River, as an ideal site. The city and Waterfront Toronto have been working since 2011 to develop the land, but the project is not fully funded.
Bob Rydell, a historian of World’s Fairs (now known as Expos), says virtually all mega-events have resulted in massive upgrades to infrastructure, including transportation and, in the case of St. Louis, the beginnings of its sewage system. “Pick a fair and you’ll find that,” he said.
Siemiatycki says the political reality makes mega-events a powerful catalyst for infrastructure development.
“The politics of getting all the interests on board to build big projects in one city rather than another seem to require some confluence of these firm deadlines, and that’s what helps drive these things forward.”
But mega-events shouldn’t be the only motivation to build.
“If you have an interest in building infrastructure, make a list, figure out how to pay for it and start investing, because it’s an important thing to do.”
Martin Muller, a University of Zurich professor who has closely studied mega-events in 17 cities around the world, maintains that “what’s good for a large event is not necessarily good for the city.”
Seville, host of the 1992 Expo, con- structed cable cars, monorails and huge parking lots to accommodate 40 million visitors. Many of those sites now sit abandoned.
Muller cautions against the tendency to present mega-events as a way to “short-circuit” planning.
“The solution is to clean up your planning rules, or else accept that some projects are just not going to be realized because there is legitimate opposition.”
In a 2015 paper, Muller urged organizers to stop intertwining megaevents with large-scale urban development, a trend that started with the 1992 Olympic Games, he said.
The conflation presents risks such as cost overruns, substandard construction and oversized infrastructure not suited to the city once the event packs up and leaves.
In recent years, organizers of the Olympics, Expo and the World Cup, seen by many as the top tier of megaevents, have been sensitive to the perception that such events leave cities bankrupted and broken, and reforms are being ushered in.
As the ashes from the CN Tower fireworks display were still settling, Pan Am organizers were touting the Games as a massive success for coming in under the $2.4-billion budget, attracting large TV audiences and going off with relatively few hitches.
But less than a year after Kanye’s mike toss at the closing ceremonies, the work of gauging the long-term legacy of the Games has just begun. In December, Queen’s Park ordered an auditor general’s report into Pan Am expenses. No date has been set for its release.
In terms of the legacy of tourism and jobs, numbers from the city show a surge in part-time work in 2015 compared with 2014, with 7.32 per cent more jobs, which Toronto’s economic development division attributes to the hiring of support staff for the Games.
It also credited the Games, along with low oil prices and a robust real estate market, with a 2.6-per-cent increase in GDP.
Going by the “if you build it, they will come,” adage, the legacy is being fulfilled. For 2017, Pan Am venues have been tapped to host the Invictus Games, the World Police and Fire Games, and the North American Indigenous Games.
At the Milton velodrome built for the Games, revenues and participation are higher than expected, said local Councillor Rick Malboeuf.
He attributes that in part to athletes using the track in preparation for the Rio Olympics this summer. And though he was pleased, he retains his pre-Games skepticism about the facility’s long-term use.
“Right now, we’re in the honeymoon phase of it, the novelty of it. But I think as the maintenance and operating costs increase, it’s going to become a burden for Milton taxpayers,” he said.
Montreal’s Olympic Stadium is a classic example for skeptics. According to Olympics researcher Bob Barney at Western University, maintaining the stadium costs $30 million a year, and that’s after revenues are factored in.
Mayor John Tory said he won’t consider an Expo bid without backing from the province and feds to help cover the costs, pegged in an Ernst and Young report at up to $3 billion. The mayor’s executive committee voted this week not to dedicate any public funds to studying the possibility, relying instead on third-party reports.
Toronto’s hangup about investing public funds in an unknown quantity is “par for the course,” says Rydell.
“It usually takes a few people of a certain kind of influence. People who have an ability to move big projects forward, to persuade other people that it’s a good idea.”
But the idea itself can’t just be a fair; it has to be that they are holding a certain kind of exposition, he said.
Abid for Expo 2025 is due Nov. 1. At this point, without a clear theme on the table, Rydell doesn’t see Toronto having a strong chance.
“The main challenge is for them to figure out what they want to be and why people would want to come. . . . Most people are not going to want to come to Toronto to see a fair to help waterfront development.”