November 3rd, 2006
JOHN LORINC COLUMN: November surprise?
Posted by John Lorinc
When city council first began mulling over the possibility of bidding for the 2015 World’s Fair, back in July, 2004, TTC chair Howard Moscoe tried his best to dissuade his colleagues from pursuing yet another big circus after previously failing to secure the 1996 and 2008 Olympics, and the 2000 Expo. “I’m tried of being a world-class loser,” he said at the time.
Council pressed ahead in spite of his warnings, and Moscoe’s fears turned out to be prophetic, although sooner than he himself had expected. Yesterday’s news, that the city failed to make the application deadline because Queen’s Park wouldn’t backstop a projected shortfall, is a screw-up of heroic proportion. We should lay the blame squarely at David Miller’s feet. This isn’t the province’s fault. It’s not Stephen Harper’s fault. The fact that the city couldn’t get its act together and pre-negotiate the necessary financial backing is an indictment of the mayor’s inability to track a very important file. After all, Expo ‘67 in Montreal was a coming of age moment for Canada. Expo ‘86 in Vancouver marked a sea-change in that city’s waterfront. This could have been a big deal for our city. And we blew it.
How badly? Remember that Mel Lastman, Mike Harris and Jean Chretien — three men whose affection and respect for one another could fit on the head of a pin — got the 2008 Olympic bid (which faced much tougher odds) out the door, with a $1.5 billion waterfront revitalization kitty thrown in for good measure. In many ways, the 2015 Expo bid made sense because it picked up where the 2008 Olympic bid left off — by providing a renewed framework for spending all that waterfront cash. So the question begs: if Lastman could do it, why couldn’t Miller? Mull that one over for a bit, because we’ve come to a truly surprising place, where the bumbling former mayor clearly outperformed the brainy current one.
In his three years in office, Miller has spent a great deal of effort cajoling the other orders of government, pushing them to think about cities in general, and Toronto in particular, as they make policy and allocate tax dollars. That was important work. Yet somehow, he and his officials let this one fall through the cracks — relegating the bid development process to one of the city’s least impressive agencies (TEDCO) and forgetting altogether about generating the public attention needed to get the province and the feds to come on board. If council was truly indifferent to the bid or feared the economic downside, it should have backed away long ago. Instead, the city and the mayor’s office blithely let the bid stumble along in relative obscurity, and then watched this fall as the whole thing turned into a slow-motion car crash.
Here’s the political angle: during the past two months, voters have been force fed Jane Pitfield’s sour rhetoric about Miller’s record and his character. Now, in the dying days of a dreary race, she’s finally got something real to work with.
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Comments
The fact that the expo bid died made me, for one, very, very happy.
Comment by Paul
November 3, 2006 @ 9:15 am
Completly agree with Paul. Obviously the will to get this done by the city just wasn’t there and I am very happy about that. Most people in Toronto couldn’t even tell you what a world’s fair is. Ironically, For this one time lets be thankful that our city doesn’t work very well and lacks leadership.
Comment by Michael
November 3, 2006 @ 12:05 pm
There was no public interest in this and it failed to get off the ground. Thank God. For some reason it seems really hard for columists, especially Royson James, to get it that it did not happen because the public were not into it. That sounds like democracy to me. Rarely does these mega projects ever really benefit the population as it is always forgotten that in the end it is WE who pay the cost overruns. The World is already here in our culture we dont need a Disney version of it to feel good about ourselves.
Comment by scott d
November 3, 2006 @ 12:20 pm
The Expo is such an attractive event for any city that Toronto’s only competitor was a city in Turkey that nobody can pronounce.
Comment by John
November 3, 2006 @ 2:23 pm
Agreed. What are the expo proponents thinking? Isn’t the bleak wasteland of Ontario Place enough? Do we really need another empty fairground nobody enjoys?
Comment by Steve van Egmond
November 3, 2006 @ 2:47 pm
The question is, if I want to hold David Miller accountable (and I do - this is a screwup for which I cannot forgive), who can I vote for?
Comment by MarkG
November 3, 2006 @ 3:02 pm
The Star has one thing wrong, and one thing very right. This proposal never represented the kind of benefit to the city, the region, or the country they perceived it as. At the same time, it should never have gone down because of intergovernmental squabbling. We should have had a solid debate about the whether a proposal, which would have put six million short tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, would have delivered enough benefits to make it worthwhile. Dysfunctional government sometimes saves us from bad ideas, but it also blocks good ones.
Comment by John Spragge
November 3, 2006 @ 3:08 pm
Well, that Turkish city and Milan, in Italy, which everyone can pronounce and which will almost certainly win.
Comment by Edward Keenan
November 3, 2006 @ 3:52 pm
The feds and provincial goverment wouldn’t pony up because Toronto had a really good chance of winning this one (see comment re:Turkey above).
The 2008 Olympics was a good one to for Harris and Chretien to shill for as Toronto was a longshot and it provided for an excellent photo-op as this article proves. It was a no-lose situation politically for anyone, Lastman included.
Comment by Eric
November 3, 2006 @ 4:07 pm
As I said in a previous post, there are — see above — plenty of sound arguments against grand circuses. My great concern, however, is that big box stores and funhouse operators, like the guy who owns The Docks, will seize on the inevitable lack of urgency and set to work turning the Port Lands into something you’d find in Vaughan or Pickering. The pressure from commercial developers will be significant, especially with the coming residential development slated for the East Bayfront and the West Donlands. We know the city has a regretable tendency to approve big box projects in utterly inappropriate locations — e.g., that bizarre strip mall in the middle of Liberty Village. If you plan to buy a condo on Queen’s Quay East or near the Distillery District, the Port Lands will the natural and obvious shopping destination. Wal-Mart understands that, which is why they wanted in on the land deal involving the film studio.
As for Ontario Place, I may be dating myself, but it used to be a terrific place to hang out and watch live music. But in the 1990s, the province decided to turn it into a massive franchise operation, thus strangling off what was once a pretty neat public space. That’s why it’s bleak.
Comment by John Lorinc
November 3, 2006 @ 6:15 pm
Whatever overtures may have been made by Toronto and whatever else happened during the bid process, there was a snowball’s chance of hell of the federal and provincial governments agreeing on any financial arrangement regarding the bid at this juncture in time, and a slightly greater chance that the provincial/federal governments would not have reneged on any promises they made earlier, anyway. Ontario is determined to demonstrate just how poor the fiscal imbalance has left it and is using any and every opportunity to make the point. The federal government is equally determined to ignore the whining. The World’s Fair bid is just one of many, many victims — both large and very small — of this stalemate.
Remember the Canada-Ontario agreement? The one Flaherty says is fully funded, and Ontario claims hasn’t been upheld? Ontario can’t afford to make any financial commitments that would show it’s not broke. The federal government has backed away from funding it re-committed to shortly after being elected. Ontario has become more strident over time and the federal government, more entrenched. Neither of these positions have to do with David Miller’s ability to play well with others, but the mutual provincial-federal mistrust was the single element that killed the World’s Fair bid.
There’s blame to be laid at someone’s feet, no doubt. But that person is not at City Hall.
Comment by Emma
November 3, 2006 @ 8:41 pm
Why does Toronto have to spend millions to license a World’s Fair anyway? If we want to create something that will draw tourists in grand fashion, why not bring the Canadian National Exhibition into this century and turn it into something worth seeing instead of just 2 weeks of dodgy midway rides at the end of summer?
Comment by djw
November 3, 2006 @ 9:24 pm
YES on the CNE comment!
Comment by andrew
November 4, 2006 @ 6:23 am
The real gauge of everything is that IMO of the top 3 mayoral contenders, the most “World’s Fair cheerleaderesque” is LeDrew–and that’s regardless of whether he is a cheerleader or not, let alone the top cheerleader…
Comment by Adam Sobolak
November 4, 2006 @ 8:30 am
The desire to hold a world fair in Toronto smacks of desperation after the failed olympic bid. If Toronto wants to make a splash on the world stage, it has to foster its unique characteristics. Buying a canned franchise such as the World fair demonstrates little imagination. I am glad it has failed - let’s be creative and build our city the way we want it.
Comment by Adam
November 4, 2006 @ 8:32 am
Mr. Lorinc:
If we don’t want big box stores on the port lands (and I don’t), how about a little half-way rational planning. How about a visioning charette for the port lands the city has some control over? How about Mayor Miller and his allies stop holding their breath until the federal government turns over Toronto City Centre Airport (and the $300 million necessary to build a replacement), and go to the residents of Toronto to work out a plan for a vibrant mixed-use neighbourhood, and get some fire behind it?
I commend you for saying that Mayor Miller can’t use the federal government as an excuse. I think it makes sense to now say our civic politicians can’t use Toronto City Centre Airport as an excuse, either. I believe we can have a vibrant mixed-use neighbourhood on the waterfront with the airport present. I certainly don’t believe any politician who says we can’t without giving the planning process a chance.
Comment by John Spragge
November 4, 2006 @ 10:10 am
There have been plenty of visioning charettes about the Port Lands, and they generate wonderful mirages. I don’t mean to sound excessively cynical, but the problem is that the planning approvals process is so byzantine that such visions are easily forgotten or traded away when a developer willing to invest real cash materializes. With the Port Lands, much of the land is held by TEDCO, which sometimes does strange deals that are at odds with waterfront visions. Of the land in private hands, including a couple of choice quay lots directly north of The Docks, the owners know what they want, and they likely have the wherewithal to obtain approvals for their own plans, whether or not they are consistent with waterfront planning documents. So as I said before, as soon as the condos begin to go up, the big box retailers will be circling. Anyone who thinks that Commissioner Street or Cherry Street will end up looking like The Danforth is dreaming.
Comment by John Lorinc
November 4, 2006 @ 3:51 pm
Other than the incentive-for-possibly-dubious-”infrastructure-improvements” aspect, any combination of TIFF, the AIDS conference, even World Youth Day + all those visiting “relatives abroad” ought to be enough of a draw to make up for the smoke and mirrors of a World’s Fair, right? Keep in mind that back around the time of Expo 67, that combination of preexistent convention/really-big-event/demographic factors barely even existed for Montreal, much less Toronto.
Eerie coincidence that the bid collapsed simuntaneous with “Borat”’s domestic opening; events like this would carry more weight in Almaty these days. (Hmmm, Sasha Baron Cohen in Knoxville; love to see that…)
Comment by Adam Sobolak
November 4, 2006 @ 4:44 pm
John, You should read Jim Coyles comments in the Star about the bid. And I agree, the bid belonged in in the blustery all hype no legacy Lastman years.
Comment by scott d
November 4, 2006 @ 8:28 pm
I completely disagree with scott d’s characterization of Lastman and the 2008 bid as “all hype, no legacy.” Every cent of waterfront money now being spent — you remember, the shovel-in-the-ground initiatives David Miller has been promoting in recent months — comes from the $1.5 billion committed by the three orders during the 2008 bid process. The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. owes its existence to that bid. The new parks, the dragon boat course, the finger piers near Harbourfront, etc., etc. And there will be much more in years to come. We may not have liked Lastman, and it’s easy to sneer at the mega-events. But it wasn’t all just hot air.
Comment by John Lorinc
November 4, 2006 @ 10:50 pm
I wouldn’t rule out Izmir - it’s not a well known place here but Europeans would know where it is and as Milan’s bid was opportunistic it may not be as well grounded. According to Wikipedia Izmir may be bigger than Toronto in population size.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%B0zmir
Comment by Mark Dowling
November 5, 2006 @ 8:52 pm