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.

'I've decided your GDP is insufficient for my GWB - so I'm going AWOL!'

Study: U-20 World Cup contributed $114 million to GDP
Canadian Press
OTTAWA — The final bill on hosting the FIFA U-20 World Cup isn't in yet but a sports tourism group says the tournament was an economic success off the field.
The under-20 soccer tournament, held in six Canadian cities, contributed approximately $114 million to Canada's gross domestic product, according to an economic impact assessment by the Canadian Sport Tourism Alliance. The event also contributed an estimated $259.02 million in economic activity in the four host provinces, according to the study.
The figures include $63 million for the construction of BMO Field in Toronto, home to Major League Soccer's Toronto FC.
The 52-game tournament was held June 30 to July 22 in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Victoria, Burnaby, and Edmonton. A tournament-record cumulative audience of 1.2 million took in the competition.
The information for the assessment was gathered by surveying more than 6,700 spectators on site. The spectators were asked about their spending on numerous expenses such as public transit, event tickets, accommodation and merchandise.
Gauging an event's impact is not easy. Some of the spending cited might have been destined to other areas of the economy anyway.
Still, the Canadian Sport Tourism Alliance said the report is reliable within 1.5 per cent — 19 times out of 20.
The total bill for hosting the event has still to be determined. Peter Montopoli, the Canadian Soccer Association's national event director, said he hopes to have final calculations on the cost of the tournament completed within the next month.
The CSA originally pegged the total event budget at between $25 million and $30 million.
In its 27-page report, the Canadian Sport Tourism Alliance found that the under-20 World Cup brought in between $5 million and $10 million in economic benefits in each of the host cities,
Canadian Sport Tourism Alliance was created in 2000 through a partnership with the Canadian Tourism Commission.
The organization has also done economic impact assessments on the 2006 world junior hockey championships, the 2005 Canada Summer Games, and the 2005 world aquatic championships, among other events.

Grapefruit or Cactus: The juice on the value of teams in communities

Spring training always a money-losing business
Brian Milner
Globe and Mail

Just about everyone in and around baseball looks forward to spring training, with its timeless traditions and its new-season promise of success — everyone, that is, except perhaps those responsible for the clubs' finances. For them, spring training is all about juggling costs and reducing expenses. While the business of baseball is booming, the business of spring training is a perennial money-loser for major-league clubs, at least on paper.
"There's a huge cost to operating the organization," Toronto Blue Jays president Paul Godfrey said from his office overlooking the Jays' Knology Park in Dunedin, Fla.
The Jays pocket all the revenue from their 14 home games, including ticket, concession and merchandise sales. But it's not enough to offset the costs of housing dozens of major-league and minor-league players, coaches, trainers, administrators, team doctors and every other staffer associated with the baseball operation — more than 200 people in all.
Godfrey estimates that the net shortfall is about $1.5-million (Canadian), which is in the same ballpark as that of other clubs, depending on how they do their accounting for player development and other expenses. The Jays, for example, do not include the accommodation costs of general manager J.P. Ricciardi and other club officials in their spring training tab. These are paid out of their department budgets.
Not even the Yankees, who sell out every game in a stadium that seats 10,200 (almost double the Jays' capacity) and have a valuable television deal, turn a profit in Tampa. "My guess is that it would be a loss for everybody," Godfrey said.
That includes the communities that play host to the teams in Florida and Arizona. When it comes to operating and maintaining facilities, "most municipalities would say they lose money, particularly if they have debt to service," said David Cardwell, the executive director of the Florida Grapefruit League Association. "You have to look at a broader picture to determine whether or not it's viable for the community."
Baseball's economic impact in major cities is typically overblown by proponents of new stadiums. But it's hard to argue that the sport isn't important to the health of smaller communities that depend heavily on tourism. Cardwell cites Florida studies showing that spring training adds $18-million (U.S.) to $24-million, for each club, to community coffers. If you took all the spring training activity in Florida and treated it as a single attraction, he said, "it's roughly equivalent to having a Super Bowl in Florida every March."
So it should come as no surprise that Arizona, Florida's rival for the spring rites, has been waging a full-court press to draw more teams. The latest catches are the Los Angeles Dodgers, who intend to vacate their legendary 60-year home in Vero Beach after next spring, and the Cleveland Indians, a Cactus League pioneer in 1946, who will be heading back in 2009 after 16 years in Florida.
The pending departure of the Dodgers has struck a nerve with people nostalgic for the old days when trainloads of fans from the chilly north would crowd into small, rickety grandstands to see their heroes up close. But baseball is all about business and the Dodgers can scarcely pass up a deal that will produce higher revenue, help them attract a better TV package and bring them close to their West Coast fan base.
Arizona's big advantage over Florida, apart from better golfing weather and the close proximity to West Coast teams, is that it has had more money to spend, thanks to a surcharge on rental cars and hotel rooms that is earmarked for the construction and upgrading of facilities. Local communities, in turn, have set up non-profit clubs to operate spring training. That gets them an exemption from sales taxes, which amounts to savings of $100,000 or more a team each spring training.
The addition of the Dodgers and Indians would give Arizona a record 14 teams. But Florida doesn't have to worry about more poaching. None of the 16 remaining clubs have leases coming up for renewal before 2016. And there isn't much room left in the sprawling Arizona suburbs, where the teams are located within short distances of each other.
"We do not have any interest in taking teams from Florida," said Jon Richardson, a Cactus League committee member and onetime GM of the Calgary Cannons. "We realize that there's a point of diminishing returns." Shoehorn in more teams, and "we would be cannibalizing each other's gates."