As I said below, I hold these sort of things suspect:
…the IIHF men’s world hockey championship is bringing lots of business to Halifax.
“It’s an incredible event for downtown Halifax,” Paul MacKinnon, executive director of the Downtown Halifax Business Commission, said Tuesday in an interview.
Mr. MacKinnon said the 12-day tournament, which began May 2, has a broader reach than many other events that come to the city. He noted that many hockey fans have bought ticket packages for multiple-game days that are keeping them downtown for longer than usual.
Although he had no definitive figures, he said the $23 million in direct economic benefits and another $7 million in related activities cited by Scott Ferguson, executive vice-president of local tournament host Trade Centre Ltd., seemed plausible.
“The hotels are full,” Mr. MacKinnon said. “Typically, May is pretty good, but business is up from a typical May.”
I hold them suspect because numbers are usually just pulled out of somebody’s ass, and then repeated as gospel truth. Economic impact studies get into impossible issues— if 40,000 locals went to the Rolling Stones concert, isn’t the 200 bucks or so each they spent on tix, cab fare, drinks, etc., $200 they aren’t spending somewhere else? Most people have a entertainment budget, so they spend $200 for the concert, downtown businesses get a boost on that day, but they do less in sales on other days. Or, bars in Sackville (or wherever) do less in business on other days. Maybe people are borrowing to go the show, or maybe they work longer hours to pay for it, but lets not pretend that you can parse all this foggy calculus and put an exact figure on increased economic activity. You can’t.
That said, in this particular case, it’s obvious that indeed there are lots of tourists in town for the tourney and they’re spending lots of money that wouldn’t have otherwise be spent here. Halifax fit into a nice niche here, that other towns didn’t pursue.
All of which raises the question: why didn’t other cities pursue the tournament? It cost us taxpayers $2 million– $1 million from provincial coffers, $1 million from HRM– to host the tournament (that’s over and above the usual subsidies for Trade Centre Limited). Was that too rich for other cities?
This article appears in May 8-14, 2008.
http://www.gov.sk.ca/news?newsId=f29c1f9f-6103-42dd-a562-45016782a002You see tim, i have called you on this bullshit reporting that you are doing. There was 4 bids. Dude, you are polluting people’s minds with lack of research and bias reporting.”if 40k locals went to the stones” Dude, are you for real? First off, there was at least 5000 people from new brunswick that made the trip and 1000 from other outlets. If you did your research, you could find this information. Where the tickets were sold is easy knowledge to obtain. To assume that the concert was attended by locals and locals only, shows you are stirring up crap without having to back it up. Did you forget the bus trips from the Northern US states that came up for the show? Where did they stay? Did the money those 40 or so bus trips generated not spend any money in the local economy? Or are you still stuck thinking that only the locals went to the show and the money that they would have spend elsewhere was spent on that concert? If you actually went out to the games or any of the events after the games, you would see the hotels and clubs are packed with people THAT DONT SPEAK ENGLISH but are here for the championships. I assure you the packs of people floating around the city with a Latvia shirt, or a finland hockey jersey and dont speak a lick of English, they arent from Spryfield or Sackville. So really, please do not write stuff like this when you are in such an influential position. Do not write it, unless you are willing to write the comments and critiquing of your posts. You have been called to the table a few times now. You have not once addressed any of my questions and you are hung up thinking that i wanted commonwealth games. I am simply calling your reporting out. You havent tried to reply to teh questions actually asked. How about this time…. are you going to address this one? Why are you putting potentially biased shit like this out there, when clearly you arent looking hard enough to see the positives or the fruits of these people’s labor? Quick to toss our your few cents again are ya? Lets back it up with some fact this time.