The Star is reporting that Toronto’s Expo bid did not get off the ground in time for the noon deadline today, despite a high level of support for the bid and the promise of long-term benefits for the city and province. Said a Toronto Star source:
“Unfortunately, the letter (of support for the bid) was not sent to the BIE (Bureau International des Expositions) and unfortunately a great opportunity for the city of Toronto has been lost.”
It will be interesting to see how blame for the failure of the three levels of government to come together for Toronto’s bid will be spread out. Certainly all three share responsibility. Contrary to the opinions of Expo boosters, it looks like it was not, in fact, “Toronto’s turn.”
7 comments
Unfortunate. Another opportunity for Toronto to shine lost. I wish the Feds and Provincial government would wake up and understand how important culture and tourism is to the health and vitality of any “world-class” city … which I’m afraid we won’t be able to call ourselves anymore if we can’t get our act together soon.
Shame.
First Income Trusts taxed.
Now this.
So. … … how about a soccer franchise?
We’re thinking about this Expo business the wrong way. Instead of using Expo to build a great city – which is highly dubious – why don’t we make Toronto into a city that the world wants to see and then throw the big party (Expo) as a capstone.
If this expo thing is worth doing then it should be done. I’m not convinced either way as I didn’t have a chance to go to any of the public meetings.
However, if Toronto is to bid for the next Expo period things have got to be different.
1. The preconception of the Expo site has got to be removed – it should not be waterfront or bust. Downsview and perhaps a site in Scarborough should be considered.
2. The environmental sustainability of Expo should be a primary consideration and projects to reclaim some of the millions of tonnes of pollutants construction and visitors will generate should be a central feature of Expo – by 2019 that should be a no-brainer.
3. The Feds and the Province should appoint a Expo “ambassador” who would have a term of office until the end of Expo unless they resigned rather than being changed with each change of government. The Province and the Feds should thus be given direct input into Expo. In return, the Feds and Province should come up with a formula to ensure the financial viability of the project including direct funding in the construction phase. Toronto should never again embark on a project of this nature without the prior support of the feds and Queen’s Park.
I am not usually supportive of these massive endeavors, but like I have said before, any chance to make people realize Toronto exists is a good one. Many Americans still believe Montréal is Canada’s largest city, and would never think of visiting here.
Sorry – kind of long for a comment but…
Thank God. When I was a kid, Montreal was the most important city in Canada. Expo 67 was a fantastic party, but it hooked the city on grand schemes that led to the Olympic bid. At the end, Montreal is running third or fourth, somewhere ahead of Edmonton. These schemes are a giant turning away from dealing with the basics of running a city. They distort housing prices and availability. They impose planning requirements in transportation for instance that the city has to live with for generations – Seattle’s ludicrous monorail is a good example. Heritage and landmarks are more likely to be lost than saved. And the burden on the poor is unspeakable. The legacies they leave, if they leave one at all – Expo is basically invisible, and the Crystal Palace was destroyed – are just as likely to be white elephants like the Atomium.
I remember Montreal in 67 very well, and not as something that I visited on my second day in Canada, as our nostalgic mayor does. I saw historic neighbourhoods destroyed for expressways — they didn’t just build the Metro, you know. I was in Calgary before and during the Olympics, and saw how that megaproject promoted urban sprawl, precisely because they built sites outside of the core, as Mark Dowling suggests. I worked in design and exhibits at Expo 86, and I saw the insane cost overruns that basically pumped money out of the economy, and I dealt with rents that doubled in some cases. I left there before the recession and massive unemployment that followed the fair, but i returned to see the huge landgrab for developers that turfed the artists and marginal galleries out of areas like Yaletown. I worked in Sevilla in the run up to 92 in several exhibits, and there I saw the security apparatus and disregard for privacy that put the city under surveillance, out of fear of ETA bombings: I can’t even imagine the level of intrusion that would be normalized in the current climate of fear. I also worked in Taejon, Korea the next year and saw the slipshod construction, the inspectors turning the other way in the face of flaunting of the rules o meet deadlines. I personally saw people taken out, dead, on stretchers because of this.
The one thing I didn’t see in any of these places was poor people, because they were made to go away, with methods more or less brutal, but always in the interests of tourists comfort level. That means the woman with two kids, who panhandles outside my subway station, not just the crackheads.
World’s Fairs are vanity projects for politicians. They belong to an era that ended decades ago, when people travelled to see ‘wonders’. There’s an internet now. The things I saw at Expo 67 were great, but that was a different time. There was a reason for a party: it was the national centenary, in the (at the time) greatest city in the country. Sevillle was to ‘celebrate’ the beginning of colonialism and slavery. Expo 86 was about Vancouver and BC’s centenary. Fairs without an occasion tend to fail: New York in 65 for instance. What’s the occasion? And plenty are failures, in that no-one but the people stuck paying for them remembers them: Brisbane, Knoxville, Hanover, Spokane, Lisbon, for starters. How many of these did you go to? Hear of?
The World’s Fair is a dying institution, and the international body that administers and grants them is every bit as cynical and self interested as the IOC.
Time to grow up, and start dealing with real issues. The hundreds of millions we’ll lose, spent on making things like transit and social housing work here, will create a better city, hire construction workers, stimulate the economy and give people dignity.
I agree with most of what omnivore wrote, though I think s/he’s a little too hard on expos. Expos can still be fun, exciting, fascinating, and many other great things. But they’re not an economic panacea for cities, despite what that idiot Royson James would have you believe. As omnivore notes, most expos are financial failures, and most fail to put their host cities on the map in any significant, long-term way.
On another level, it’s really depressing that our culture is so overrun with philistinism that the only legitimate way to justify something like an expo is to shout, “it’ll help tourism! it’ll boost the tax rolls! there will be countless contrsuction jobs!” In most of the coverage of the expo bid, no one even bothered to make a case for the cultural or intellectual value of hosting an expo on the theme of “Sharing Our Planet.” The focus was always on the alleged economic benefits for Toronto. That’s a sad commentary on our culture and our values.