Question: what does Halifax have on its Commonwealth Games bid checklist that the other cities vying for the 2014 games don’t?
Answer: a blog.
www.Halifaxnoway.com is a Halifax anti-games site with links to local and national news stories and editorials that flip the bird at the Commonwealth Games. Unaudited Halifax bid figures, planning secrecy, nonexistent financial returns and unnecessary legacy projects are but some of the litany of issues the web site documents. A sister site, stopthehrmgames.com, argues the games will cost at least $2 billion—more than double the current estimate—with “no apparent rewards except a long list of facilities that the HRM ratepayer will have to support.”
I’m thinking of launching my own site: bringitthefrigonhalifax!.com.
On my site, I’d offer a link to halifaxno-way.com. The anti- games blog should thrive and I hope it does, right through November 2007 when games members make their 2014 host city pick among Halifax, Abuja, Nigeria, and Glasgow, Scotland; beyond 2007 if Halifax gets the nod. After all, someone’s got to keep an eye on the weaselly windbags and glad-handing dandies putting these games together.
The questions this anti-games blog poses are real ones. And primary among them is this: how much is this really going to cost? But here’s my central query: why does that always have to be the first question?
An obvious answer is that nothing is beyond economics when it comes to politics. I say, some things have to be.
Any anti-gamers who are still reading must be shaking their heads, thinking I’m the Halifax bid team’s dream Haligonian—someone who either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the money and the backroom politics and the secrecy (like the appalling fact that Halifax’s actual bid figures won’t be released until after the host city is chosen).
If you don’t want the Games here (and by polling firm Corporate Research Associates’s last count about 25 per cent of HRM residents don’t) you likely think I’ve been duped —tickled and tricked by the lure of Common-wealth Games bequests like an earlier-than- planned High-Speed Harbour Ferry and sucked in by municipal and provincial politicians presenting the games as an economic boon.
Wrong. And wrong again.
I’m not convinced Halifax needs legacy projects like the proposed vast new transportation routes (though a few honest-to-god bike lanes would be swell) and I’m not counting on athletes bringing suitcases full of money with them from abroad.
I am informed. And here’s what I’m nevertheless arguing: the opportunity to have the Common-wealth Games in Halifax is beyond the issue of money. This is a one-shot chance and we’d be fools to pull out of the race.
Think of it like a vacation, a great, grand, one-time-only offer. Would you take it? Even if you’d have to miss work, have to reschedule a dentist appointment, have to pay money you were planning to spend on something else. Would you take it? Or would you give it up for the boredom of the everyday?
We’re no Calgary (who last September pulled out of the race to become Canada’s host city). But we’re not a poor city. So forget the money. Get past the slimy politics. Overlook the years of construction this will take. And ignore the maybe-it’s-worth-it-and-maybe-it’s-not legacy of these games.
Question: do you want to spend the spring of 2014 having fun? Answer: yes.
Send in your plans for the spring of 2014: [email protected]
