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Pique'n'yer interest

The 2008 that might have been

Before Vancouver got the go-ahead to officially bid for the 2010 Winter Games, another Canadian bid was in play. Toronto bid to host the 2008 Summer Games, losing out to Beijing, China for reasons that can best be described as political. Now the International Olympic Committee is threatening to delay some events in 2008 unless Beijing can get its air pollution under control, making Toronto’s smog look pretty good by comparison.

There were plans in Toronto to bid for the 2012 Games, but they were put on the skids after the 2010 bid was successful. It will likely be another 20 years before Toronto will get another chance.

That’s too bad, because Toronto really could have used the Games and all the federal and provincial money that would have been pumped into the city’s decaying infrastructure.

While I have no doubt that the 2010 Games will be hailed as a success, financial or otherwise, I have always felt that they were unnecessary by virtue of the simple fact that Canada just hosted a Winter Games in 1988 — just 15 years before we won the bid to host 2010.

We already have a skating oval, ski jumps, and a sliding centre in Calgary, and really have no need to duplicate those facilities. Also, most national teams will continue to train out of Calgary and Canmore because it’s more expensive to live and train in Vancouver and Whistler, and because Alberta has a lot of oil money these days to invest in sports and athletes. Other than a few new ice sheets for hockey, there’s little in the way of facilities that Vancouver and Sea to Sky actually needed.

Halfway across the country, Toronto is having a tough time making ends meet. The population of Greater Toronto is already more than five million and climbing, as the city absorbs more than half of all immigrants and refugees coming to Canada — along with all the social costs of providing for seniors and the poor that were downloaded onto the GTA by the provincial government.

The city is in desperate need of sports facilities, social housing, new investment in public transportation and roads, and all the things that would have come as a result of hosting the Summer Games. The federal government would have matched funds with the provincial government to take care of a lot of those issues, and the city would have been better off in the long run.

Having just visited the city I was struck by how well Toronto still runs, despite the fact that it has had to do everything on its own in the last few decades without much assistance from the province or the rest of Canada. The buses and subways run on time, the streets are clean, graffiti gets painted over, and millions of people have jobs and homes.

Still, Toronto is facing a $500 million shortfall in its operating budget this year alone, forcing the mayor to take drastic cost-cutting measures that will all but destroy overburdened social programs. Nobody knows what form the cuts will take, but groups that represent sports, seniors, and low-income residents are very worried.

The so-called mega-city doesn’t have the financial tools of similar-sized cities in North America to levy taxes, and as a result local governments have had no choice but to impose some of the highest property taxes on the continent.

Hosting the Olympics in 2008 or 2012 would have solved this issue by giving Toronto leverage against the province to collect new financial tools the same way Whistler was able to demand financial tools to gain a greater share of the hotel tax.

Keep in mind that Toronto has never really hosted much of anything. Both Montreal and Vancouver bid for and won the right to host Expos and Olympics, while Canada’s largest — and most financially strapped city — has been passed over again and again.

I get it. Nobody in Canada outside of Toronto likes Hogtown all that much. Of course, there are never any valid reasons for this attitude, and Toronto certainly doesn’t return the sentiment by hating the rest of Canada.

But it’s there. And this false idea that Toronto gets everything ensures that Toronto gets nothing.

Whistler is my home, but my family lives in Toronto. My grandmother lives in a small seniors housing apartment. My brother works for the City of Toronto upgrading its wastewater and stormwater systems — now so old and decrepit that the city is worried that homeowners will sue the next time a flood takes out a basement. My mother has moved into a small one bedroom to get away from the high price of property taxes. My father is faced with the daunting prospect of moving into seniors housing at a time when hundreds of thousands of other baby boomers are set to retire. My friends are all at the stage where they’re having children, and are forced to book them onto preschool waiting lists the moment they’re born to ensure they get a place. If social service cuts run deep enough, they may not have pools to swim in or soccer fields to play on.

It’s too late for Toronto to get the Olympics. It’s not too late to get the rest of Canada to care about what that means.