Anti-poverty activist coalition Bread Not Circuses is concerned about a chronic social housing shortage and a deepening cash crisis should Toronto get the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.
A city councillor and a chartered accountant say taxpayers would ultimately be the losers if Toronto wins the Games.
Jon Alexander, a member of the Bread Not Circuses (BNC) steering committee, said, “people do often point to us as being the spearhead (of dissent) but I don’t think we are by any means the only people asking critical questions”.
Alexander said, “the Olympic Games would be the single largest publicly funded project we’ve ever undertaken in the city. That’s not money that’s wisely spent in these times”.
The group says that social programs in Ontario have been slashed and many costly services have been transferred to cash-strapped municipalities since the Conservative government took office in 1995.
They say that Toronto — home to some 140,000 people who rely regularly on food banks — needs social housing and financial assistance to help quell a growing homelessness problem, and can’t afford to spend $500 million on Olympic development.
Alexander said this bid is different from the one Toronto lost in 1996. “This bid this time around is more high-powered; it has a lot more powerful and moneyed interests behind it”.
This time around BNC hasn’t made much of an impact on the public or the International Olympic Commission delegates when they were in Toronto to evaluate the city bid.
Meanwhile, Toronto city councillor Michael Walker, the lone dissenter when the city voted to support Toronto’s bid, anticipates that the 2008 Games could lose up to $3-billion, based on the experience of the Sydney Olympics last year.
Walker said his concern “is that if there is public money available there are better uses for it than for a three-week blowout. All it does is create bricks and mortar, not any permanent jobs”.
He said the city’s hotels are already near 100-per-cent occupancy through the summer without any more tourist attractions. Any new hotels built would be constructed anyway, he said.
And Charles Smedmore, a chartered accountant who has been critical of the financial estimates behind the Olympic bid, said, “it’s a heads-we-win-tails-you-lose proposition” for the Olympic organizers. If there is a profit, it is shared by the IOC, the COA and amateur sports, but any deficit goes to the taxpayers, he explained.
Smedmore said the same kind of due diligence companies and governments use for other kinds of purchases doesn’t seem to have been applied to the Toronto bid’s estimates.
