Enough with the pro sports handouts
Dave Perkins
Thestar.com

Don't envy Peter Fonseca his job in the coming stuttering economy. As Ontario's tourism minister, he juggles the reeling U.S. dollar, $4-a-gallon gas down below and necessity to run ads reminding the locals to be nice to visitors. When you need to tell people that, you're in tough long before the first $9.50 glass of beer is sold to a disbelieving tourist.
The gang at Queen's Park has commissioned yet another tourism study, this time naming Greg Sorbara chair of the Ontario Tourism Competitiveness Study and Action Plan. Fonseca couldn't say how much the study would cost or exactly who would pay for it. We can guess.
Anyway, a particular old hobby horse here has been the willingness of our governments to subsidize professional sports with taxpayer funds and let's ride it again: Fonseca's ministry is open about its grants to events, some of extremely dubious value (it says here), owned or administered by wealthy corporations and individuals. There's a nearby chart that indicates, for instance, $150,000 a year and $550,000 in the past four years granted to the Rogers Cup tennis toona-mint for "marketing" purposes. This is Rogers as in Ted Rogers, the laughing billionaire who loves to publicly rub everyone's nose in the fact that he scooped the SkyDome, for which taxpayers covered the majority of the $620 million cost, for $25 million.
Do we feel good about this, knowing Uncle Ted's tennis division nuzzles up for a small taste every year?
Fonseca indicated that Ted and Larry Tanenbaum will be eligible to apply for "marketing" funds when they bring in the Buffalo Bills. Great. So we can put our tax dollars into helping kill off the CFL.
We learned recently about the now-gone auto race at the CNE sucking up $850,000 of our money over the years. How about the Tim Hortons Brier getting $125,000, $50,000 to Telus for golf's Skins Game, or the Grey Cup, which reaped a sizeable profit this year for Messrs. Cynamon and Sokolowski, getting $200,000?
It's happening in a province whose biggest city, this one, required a $160,000 donation from MasterCard, run by an American, to keep 41 public skating rinks open in December. (Those 41 rinks are closed now; it would have cost a reported $266,000 to keep them open and, yes, the province is one pocket and the city is another, but didn't all money come out of our pocket in the first place?)
All these funds come out of the tourism ministry's TEMPP fund, which stands for Tourism Event Marketing Partnership Program.
"Our ministry looks at all partnerships and how they are able to impact our economy in terms of tourism," said Fonseca, once a marathon runner of note. "Something like a judo tournament in my riding that attracted over 800 participants, many from all parts of the world. So that was great."
Maybe so. And doubtless the event needed the handout the way some enterprises don't.
"We'll also look at other partnerships, at things like the Indy, as well as with professional sports and amateur sports. What we are there to do is to really be the glue and the strategic partner to help develop and invest in a product that will attract tourists with it," Fonseca said.
If his ministry was serious, it would cease handouts to pro sports, which don't need them, and join the health people in supporting something like the 2015 Pan Am Games bid, which might draw a few tourists, in a pre-Olympic year, and also would leave behind a legacy of badly needed sports facilities.
Long term, giving kids places to play is a better idea here than spending $21 million on surveillance cameras to identify the swarmers on the TTC.

Overview of Ontario's Tourism Event Marketing Partnership Program funding for major sporting events:
Rogers Cup tennis
2004-05: $50,000
2005-06: $200,000
2006-07: $150,000
2007-08: $150,000
Canadian PGA Champ.
2004-05: $15,000
2005-06: $8,000
Grey Cup
2004-05: $200,000
2007-08: $200,000
Tim Hortons Brier
2006-07: $125,000
Telus Skins golf
2007-08: $50,000
x-Toronto Grand Prix
2006-07: $333,000
x-Grand Prix was allotted a total of $850,000 from 2003 to 2007.