On the first day of hearings on Halifax’s pullout from the 2014 Commonwealth Games bid, Duff Montgomerie, deputy minister of the Province of Nova Scotia’s Health Promotion and Protection Department, gave a general outline of events leading to the bid’s collapse.
He said consultant’s reports determined the bid’s business plan was too weak, reports CP.
Montgomerie told an all-party committee, “it became increasingly clear the funding gap was only one of the critical issues at hand. The reviews also identified fundamental risks such as uncertain revenue projections…an unprecedented 90 per cent investment of public funding, and insufficient contingency funding that would have left the province vulnerable in the event of cost over-runs”.
Halifax’s 2014 Commonwealth Games bid collapsed March 8 after provincial and municipals officials were concerned about costs that had escalated from $785 million to 1.7 billion.
Unfortunately Montgomerie’s short presentation didn’t impress Halifax deputy Mayor Sue Uteck, who has been criticizing the decision to have Halifax opt out of the bid. According to CP Uteck said she still has questions about time lines, the lobbying effort with the federal government, and why the decision to abort was made without a full cost-benefit analysis, which the province received Monday.
She told reporters later, “the cost-benefit analysis isn’t there, the due diligence report was not there. So how did cabinet base their decision and what did my own mayor base his decision on? A preliminary analysis?”
Meanwhile outside the hearing Montgomerie was asked by reporters why the decision was made without the economic-impact analysis. He said, “we would have preferred to have had it, but quite frankly we didn’t think it would have made much difference”.
