Like Mama always said, Calgary… ‘stupid is as stupid does’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/06/2017 (3218 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Of all the stupid things Calgary Flames president Brian Burke said this week — and it is a long, long list — perhaps the stupidest of all was Burke’s decision to include Manitoba’s experience as evidence of the wisdom of investing huge sums of public money in private stadiums and arenas.

“It’s discouraging when other (cities) cheerfully, willingly construct venues: hockey rinks in Manitoba, football stadiums in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, hockey arenas in Alberta, but our little city is a little smarter than all those people and we’re not going to do it,” Burke said Wednesday during a talk with local business leaders at the Canadian Club of Calgary.

Wow, there’s a lot of stupid to unpack there — and we’ll get to that. But first some background.

Burke made headlines Wednesday when he threw a public tantrum and suggested the Flames may just pack up and move — and do it without warning — unless governments in Alberta pony up what could turn out to be well over a billion dollars to build CalgaryNEXT, a delusional stadium/arena project dreamed up by the owners of the Flames and Calgary Stampeders as a way to enrich themselves while simultaneously draining the pockets of taxpayers.

Civic leaders in Calgary subsequently declared the project dead on arrival after they did some due diligence and found the $890-million price tag the teams’ owners had attached to the project was wildly under-inflated, with the actual cost of the project potentially as much as twice that, with most of it to be funded by taxpayers in a province reeling from the collapse of oil prices.

That answer, suffice to say, didn’t sit well with Burke, whose fuse is as short as the list of winning hockey teams he has presided over during the last decade of running first the Toronto Maple Leafs and now Calgary.

“We’re not going to make the threat to leave — we’ll just leave,” Burke told the Canadian Club audience.

Now, all of this is just part of the same old tried-and-tested formula sports teams have been using for decades to successfully convince governments to build new stadiums and arenas for them.

Step one: make the case your current facility is too old/dilapidated/doesn’t have enough luxury boxes to allow your team to be competitive.

Step two: propose a “public-private partnership” to build a new facility, where the public part is taxpayers putting up the money to build the facility and the private part is you raking in the profits that result.

Step three: threaten to move your team when governments balk at building a new sports palace for you.

Step four: light a cigar with a $100 bill when craven politicians eventually capitulate under pressure from fans.

Step five: erect a crane.

All Burke did in Calgary this week was advance the process to Step 3, but it caused a furor that saw Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi lash out, followed by a statement from the Flames’ owners distancing themselves from Burke’s comments. But they didn’t retract the threat to move the team.

See how that works?

But back to Burke’s comments on how he wishes Calgary was more like Winnipeg when it comes to pumping public money into facilities for professional sports teams.

Let’s start at the start: “It’s discouraging when other (cities) cheerfully, willingly construct venues…”

Cheerfully? Willingly? In Winnipeg?

Maybe Burke was busy trying — and failing — to figure out how to knot a tie back when the flat-earthers in Winnipeg dragged Mark Chipman all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada before he was finally allowed to tear down the derelict Eaton’s building and build the MTS Centre.

And I’ve heard a lot of adverbs used to describe the public investment of $185 million in the debacle that has been the construction of Investors Group Field, but “cheerfully” and “willingly” have not been among them.

But even leaving aside the willingness of taxpayers in this province to donate money to pro sports teams, Burke’s invocation of Manitoba’s experience with IGF and what is now called Bell MTS Place is really an argument against public funding for stadiums and arenas, not one in favour of it.

For starters, there was very little public funding in the construction of Bell MTS Place; just $40 million of the original $133.5-million cost came from taxpayers.

If Burke is suggesting the Flames want the same deal to build a new arena in Calgary that Chipman got to build one in Winnipeg, there’s not a politician in Alberta who wouldn’t leap at that arrangement.

But Burke and the Flames don’t want that, of course. On the contrary, Nenshi told reporters this week that taxpayers would be on the hook for — wait for it — at least $1.4 billion in the CalgaryNEXT proposal.

So why would Burke invoke Winnipeg’s arena in making the case for Albertans to fund a new arena for Calgary? Like I said, there was a whole lot of stupid floating around in his speech Wednesday.

Just as curious — and dumb — was Burke’s mention of taxpayer funding at Investors Group Field, which in many ways has become a poster child for precisely why governments shouldn’t be getting involved in building megaprojects for pro sports franchises.

The project was irredeemably flawed from the moment the decision was made to build it on a cul de sac. And the stadium has turned into a giant money pit, with governments throwing good money after bad to try and fix a seemingly never-ending list of construction problems.

On top of that, there are legitimate questions now being asked about the ability of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers to pay back the “loan” the province gave them to build IGF; attendance declines the last three years in a row have forced the club to dip into its savings just to make the $4.5-million annual mortgage payment.

But yeah, Calgary — do it exactly like we did, only with more zeros attached.

If Burke, the Flames and the Stampeders want to find someone to blame for the fact their teams are playing in two of the oldest buildings in hockey and football, they need only find a mirror.

If you’re going to blackmail governments, you do it like the Edmonton Oilers did — when those governments are flush with cash.

The reason Edmonton got a brand-new taxpayer-funded Rogers Place arena last season is that Oilers owner Daryl Katz had the good sense to threaten to move the Oilers back when oil prices were hovering around $100 a barrel.

As oil goes, so goes Alberta, and Katz now has one of the most lavish hockey arenas in existence because of it.

And the Flames? Well, with oil prices now under $50 a barrel and a worldwide glut persisting despite the best efforts of OPEC to curb production and restart the party, Burke, the Flames and the Stamps are trying to tap a dry well.

“If only we were more like Winnipeg,” said nobody in Calgary ever. Until this week.

Careful what you wish for.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek