This is not exactly breaking news but there are, in this world, lots of Taylor Swift fans, and many of them live in Canada. Canadians were willing to pay substantial sums of money to see Swift perform when the Eras tour came to town: nearly a quarter of a million people spent a cumulative $282 million in Toronto over the course of her six performances. Three levels of government collected nearly $40 million in tax revenue — albeit with only $8 million going to Toronto itself. And yet Toronto was a relatively late addition to Swift’s global tour, which led to the incongruous sight of the then-prime minister publicly asking to be included in Swift’s enterprise.
Trudeau’s critics were quick to pounce on that as an example of his fundamental lack of seriousness. There’s a reasonable argument that Taylor Swift’s concert schedule is not a federal matter and, for that matter, something no government should be weighing in on. But here’s the thing: neither is the presence or absence of the auto show, boat show, home show, or garden shows that populate the event calendar for Toronto’s convention centres. Just because something appeals to the business class in this city, that doesn’t make it inherently more serious or important than whether a crowd gets to sing along to “Shake It Off.”
And yet, Premier Doug Ford says that Toronto is “missing out” on large conferences because the current offerings in the city — the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, whose operations are overseen by a provincial agency, and the Enercare Centre, owned by the City of Toronto — are too small, with too little space to hold the largest conferences in North America. To that end, he wants to build a centre with 2 million square feet of floor space, with the Toronto Star reporting that the province is eyeing the Enercare Centre at Exhibition Place for redevelopment.
Redoing the Enercare Centre might be the more cost-efficient option before Ford’s Cabinet: the Metro Convention Centre has been floating a redevelopment plan on and off for a decade to expand its floor space. There was once (during the debate over a possible casino in downtown Toronto last decade) a proposal to dig a massive new space underneath the train tracks near Union Station. That plan never went forward, but the costs of a major redevelopment around the province’s busiest transit hub would only ever be huge, so casting the government’s eyes west to the terminus-for-now of the Ontario Line might make better use of scarce public dollars.
The catch is that when you’re talking about convention centres there’s no such thing as the efficient use of public money. Regional governments around North America shovel ungodly sums into these developments with only the barest fig leaf of a cost-benefit analysis: Seattle spent $2 billion demolishing and rebuilding its convention centre, and even with higher attendance the higher-still operating costs mean the new centre has burned through its reserves and is in a financially “fragile” state, according to the Seattle Times. Similar tales abound across the continent, because convention centres are second only to pro sports arenas for structures that make governments forget about fiscal discipline.
We don’t even have to look elsewhere for evidence of the shell game here: to build the MTCC’s south building the Ontario government issued a loan of $145 million in 1997 ($266 million in today’s money). Six years later the province forgave the loan in exchange for regular annual payments; all told by 2023 the Auditor General found the MTCC had paid back only $127 million to provincial taxpayers, not even close to repaying the initial sum and honestly no realistic observer should hold their breath while they wait.
Meanwhile, other cities are plowing even more money into their own convention centres, and if they want to impoverish themselves in a negative-sum race to the bottom, Ontario’s position should be “please, go ahead.” In at least some of these cases there’s literally no sum the province could spend that would make us competitive: I can’t help but note that the same government that believes Toronto’s winters are an insurmountable obstacle to accommodating cyclists in bike lanes is nevertheless prepared to burn an objectively large amount of money on the premise that this city can compete with Orlando and Las Vegas in attracting business conferences in the winter months.
These conferences and conventions are no doubt a pleasant diversion for business travellers, but they’re far less important than what ought to be other pressing government priorities. The nominal economic benefits that come from them are largely accounting fictions, depending entirely on everyone agreeing to ignore massive sunk costs from previous rounds of subsidy or bailout. If the province weren’t already in the convention centre business there would be no reason to get into it today. All of this, alas, is likely to fall on deaf ears, but when the deadlines start to slip and the cost overruns are quietly disclosed to the public, don’t say we weren’t warned.