Critics are questioning Toronto’s Olympic bid in light of the fact that Sydney’s anticipated profit of as much as $60 million was transformed into long-term debt after the Games. Sydney taxpayers will face a new sales tax for at least 10 years to pay off $1.5 billion (Can.) in loans needed to build the Olympic Stadium and improve the transit system.
Gord Garland, a consultant who served on a 1993 Royal Commission on the future of Toronto’s waterfront, says “I think of the Toronto bid committee as a bunch of centurians pulling a Trojan hourse to the taxpayers. There is a lot of back slapping but there are no internal critics asking what might be hidden inside”.
Garland said that since the Montreal Games handed taxpayers a debt of $1-billion in 1976, the IOC has deliberately left some things off the ledger. The IOC doesn’t consider such costs as cleaning up polluted land, making road or transit improvements or building extra parking lots as Olympic expenses.
But Joe Halstead, Toronto’s commissioner of economic development say “what we can learn from Sydney is how to do it right”.
The Globe and Mail said the Olympic plan envisions as much as $2.8 billion in additional investment, above the $687-million in the Olympic bid budget, to clean up and redevelop waterfront sites, as proposed by a task force headed by Robert Fung last spring.
Halstead says city economic analysts have reviewed the Olympic bid estimates and have concluded they are reasonable.
Gary McNeil, managing director of GO Transit, was in Sydney during the Games and said that while the Toronto bid does not include paying for improvements in transportation needed for the Olympics, the $1.5 billion worth of improvements and additional equipment required is part of GO’s plan for the next 10 years with or without the Games.
