Late last week, Live Nation Canada announced that Toronto would be getting a new outdoor performance venue. Built on a plot of land in the Downsview neighbourhood, the open-air venue would have a seating capacity of 50,000 people, as well as all of the drinking and eating amenities you would expect at such a destination.
The announcement found me affably ambivalent. Sounds great! That was really all I intended to ever think about the matter. But a line in the press release jumped out at me: the intention is to get the facility open by the summer of next year. One of the executives at Live Nation said that the facility, which will be called Rogers Stadium, was something Toronto needed to do because of the huge number of high-profile acts that are touring right now. If Toronto didn’t add another facility of this size, the logic went, we would miss out on some of these opportunities to host some of the biggest shows in the world.
Specifically: “The number of stadium-level acts touring today is unprecedented, with more acts than available nights at existing venues. That’s why we’re making this investment — to ensure Toronto fans don’t miss out on world-class artists.”
This is all true, I’m sure. The SkyDome isn’t a great venue for music. Budweiser Stage has a capacity of only about 16,000. So, sure — a new seasonal, outdoor venue optimized for music and with a capacity of around 50,000 makes sense. We don’t want to miss out on those stadium-level acts!
Here’s the thing, though. There are other things we need more than a decent performance venue!
You might be expecting me to go on some kind of moral tangent here, to write a column about the things our society values versus the things it doesn’t value. I’m not gonna do that. I think it’s boring. You’ve read those before. Besides, a society as rich as ours ought to be able to do things like build new outdoor performance venues while also doing the basic things — like operating a health-care system, building transit lines, and taking care of stuff it already owns for the betterment of the public — at the same time. It really isn’t supposed to be either/or.
But it probably is going to be. Ontario continues to struggle with providing many basic services. A lot of stuff we already own is falling into a state of disrepair because we haven’t planned for its upkeep. We are clearly having trouble getting new transportation and transit projects online.
But I am reasonably confident that Rogers Stadium will indeed be open in time for next summer’s music season.
I’m not going to spend any time lamenting the stadium. I think it’s great we’ll get the stadium open on time. I am hoping, though, that some of the people in positions of power in this province and in this city are looking at what Live Nation is proposing and wondering why every government project costs a quadrillion dollars and can only roll out on a timescale of decades. Why can’t the government do what Live Nation did? The company looked around, said, “Hey, we need a new thing,” and announced one — with a reasonable expectation of having it ready by next summer.
Outdoor music venues and hospitals are not the same thing. The Rogers Stadium facilities will be seasonal, intended for use only in warm months; obviously, it will be built to a different standard than your neighbourhood trauma ward or long-term-care facility. I get it. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.
But I still think it’s worth looking at how quickly we can move to build something like a stadium and then considering the processes we use to design, fund, permit, and then construct public infrastructure. Are there lessons we can learn that would allow us to build things we need even more than we need places for Oasis to rock out — and on a more realistic timeline?
It’s great we’re getting a new venue. We’re also getting an opportunity to ask ourselves why we are so awful at building infrastructure that is intended to be owned by the government. How can we make that better? What workflows can be streamlined? What stages of the review process are redundant and can be eliminated? What role is there for simplification and clear lines of accountability so that the public has reasonable cause to believe the government will actually do what it is pledging to do and generally on the timeline it is pledging to do it?
Because here’s the thing: I have reasonable cause to believe that Toronto will have a new music venue operating by the summer. I would never come close to believing anything the government announced if it included a firm deadline, let alone one that was only months away. I don’t think I’m alone in that. And I think our government leaders should spend some time thinking about why that’s the case — and what they could do to make it better.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the precise location of the planned venue. TVO Today regrets the error.
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