Toronto is in the race for the 2024 Summer Olympics.
Mayor John Tory met with the head of the Canadian Olympic Committee, Marcel Aubut, at City Hall on Tuesday, August 11.
According to the mayor’s spokesperson, Amanda Galbraith, it was only an information-gathering session. She told the Toronto Sun that a final decision on a Games bid won’t be made until after the Parapan Am Games are over.
It’s time for Tory to ante up and show us the business plan. Arguably, the die was cast as far back as 2012. That’s when the city requested a staff report on the suitability of hosting World Expo 2025 or the 2024 Olympics.
At that point, various MPs and the Toronto Board of Trade were cool to the idea of an Olympic bid, preferring to pursue Expo 2025 instead, because of costs and lack of long-term sustainability. From that request came the Ernst & Young Feasibility Study, completed in November 2013 at a cost of $100,223. It’s a critical document, with various provisos and disclaimers about its limited methodology and its partial review of relevant literature.
Torontonians should read it and call for public discussions with elected officials about its findings. And they should ask how those findings might have been different had a comprehensive review of relevant literature been completed.
And ask why the January 20, 2014, staff report responding to the 2013 feasibility study submitted to city council glossed over nearly all the major risks outlined in the study and focused instead on the supposed benefits for Toronto. Council eventually voted against bidding.
Tory wasn’t mayor then, but two months after he was elected in October 2014, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) approved Agenda 2020, a policy document containing 40 recommendations on how to make it “easier and cheaper” for cities to host the Olympics.
The IOC was responding to concerns about the lack of bid cities, hoping to revive worldwide interest in the Games. It was tacit recognition that no city could host this elite sporting event without siphoning massive amounts of public money away from other areas like health care, education and sustainable employment.
A year and a half later, in June 2015, just before the kickoff to the Pan Am Games, Aubut, who is also a board member of the Toronto Pan Am Games (the COC leads the development of that event, too), announced that Toronto should bid to host the Olympics. He didn’t say which ones but said discussions would resume when the Pan Am Games were over, just like Tory is saying now.
Aubut claimed that Toronto fit Agenda 2020 with 80 per cent of the venues in place post-Pan Am.
Tory reinforced that errant notion by saying a decision would need to be made “very quickly.”
Of course, the facilities will be 10 years old by 2024 and will require major infrastructural changes to be compliant with IOC regulations. The IOC’s Technical Manual on Design Standards for Competition Venues, released in 2005, provides details. The Pan Am facilities won’t do. And that’s only one missing piece of the puzzle. Timing is another.
To say timing is tight is a gross understatement. The deadline for a formal expression of interest is September 15. An entire Olympic lifecycle is about 10 years. Under Agenda 2020, that now includes a three-year prep-and-bid phase before the IOC selects a host city. Much has to be done in three years.
Usually the COC approves a potential bid before it endorses a city. For that to happen, some type of business plan – referred to as the domestic bid – must be developed and shared with the COC.
The Vancouver boosters presented theirs to the COC in 2002 – one year in advance of being named host. Boston, which recently pulled out of the 2024 race, submitted its to the US Olympic Committee in December 2014 – two and half years before a host would be named.
How could Mayor Tory and city council – which is not scheduled to meet until after the September 15 IOC deadline – as well as Aubut and the COC, decide that Toronto is ready to host the 2024 Olympics? Surely it isn’t based primarily on hosting the 2015 Pan Am Games? Did the 2013 feasibility study, with all its qualifications, form the basis for this decision? I hope not.
What’s more, for all the talk of accountability and transparency, the IOC still does what it wants. On August 2, the same day Canadians were abuzz about the calling of a federal election, the IOC decided to “shake up” the bid process for 2024. Now, every applicant city will automatically be a candidate. That’s little comfort, considering all parties will now be automatically funnelled into a process that will likely cost them $50 to $60 million.
The IOC deadline has suddenly taken on new meaning. Along with a payment of $150,000, the city will have to sign a “host city agreement” with the COC that stipulates the funding guarantees to host the Games. It’s critical that bid cities have a business plan prepared well in advance of this deadline, since the city and its residents will bear the cost of any negatives arising from the Games.
Mayor Tory says there will be “extensive consultation” with the public, but let’s face it, most of the deadlines set out in the 2014 staff report have already passed.
And September is just around the corner: how much consultation can take place in a few weeks? How much can be expected of Torontonians, given that this stratagem is being rolled out at the height of summer, when tax-paying parents will be rushing to get their kids ready for school and with an October election on the horizon?
Torontonians, along with the rest of Ontario, the people who will be bankrolling this venture, will be conveniently distracted, paving the way for boosters to secure a “yes” vote, allowing them to spend billions of public tax dollars in one of the worst economic climates Ontario has ever seen. Observers are right to question the promises and timing. Many things have been left unsaid.
Janice Forsyth is a faculty member in the School of Kinesiology and past director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at Western University.
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