Subsidies = bad???
Yesterday in the Vancouver Sun, the headline story was about how the
2010 Olympics would cost at least $2.5 billion. The auditor-general
arrived at that figure by adding the cost of Olympic-related programs
(such as the RAV line and Sea-to-Sky highway expansion) to the direct
costs of the Olympics themselves, despite the BC Liberal's insistence
that such projects were technically not related. (This figure is still
higher than it used to be thanks to cost overruns and other mistakes.)
OK, so, $2.5 billion. Or rather: the governments -- federal,
provincial, and municipal together -- are on the hook for north of
four billion dollars, but revenues from the Games are expected to
bring in around 1.8 billion, thus leaving us all $2.5B in the hole.
Today, columnist Michael Campbell railed against subsidies. Wow, you
might say.
Ah, not so -- he's just talking about the Toronto International Film
Festival. It'll be subsidized at least by several governments for a
few million dollars -- last year, the TIFF took $3.7M in "direct subsidies".
Moreover, Campbell is outraged that the subsidies come from multiple agencies
and multiple levels of government.
It seems to me that every argument he makes could be made about the
2010 Games, only, you know, around 675 times as strongly.
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