[browna]

Tax breaks for the next decade and importing foreign currency? Ok, whatever FIFA business is done in Canada that needs to be taxed, and breaks on such tax. I honestly don’t know what that would be. The ability to transfer money in and out of the country, with money laundering rules in Canada still applicable? Makes sense. Basically saying transfer of funds to and from Canada with regards to operating funds can’t be prevented or delayed. Pretty standard. Besides, those are both federal things, not specific to BC or Illinois.

Some of the other things like work visas, basically just making sure that FIFA workers who have to come for Canada in advance don’t have red tape preventing that. Again, federal issues, nothing to do with BC itself.

The security thing and anti money laundering and fraud preventions in place etc appears to be well known as part of the bid, in advance, that hosts have to handle the cost and logistics of it. That’s why the feds and provincial government were already involved.

Not on FIFA’s side here, but none of this sounds like anything new that the bidding committee and hosts didn’t realize long ago, nor standard procedure for large events with a foreign organizer. IMO just sounds like those cities making some scary strawman arguments to justify not hosting and trying to make an easy scapegoat in FIFA, when, in BC’s case, it sounds more like an administrative screw up more then a thought out, concious decision.

I’m sure for the Olympics, the IOC had pretty similar conditions for any host country with regard to security and fraud prevention and visa situations, and for that matter, any major world wide event such as G8 etc would have similar conditions to be able to stage the event without restriction on workers or funds flow.

If they don’t want to host, that’s their prerogative and choice, but it’s hardly the notion of being backed into a corner by unrealistic or unusual demands from FIFA.

Put it this way, I’m sure the exact same FIFA bid conditions were in place for the women’s World Cup for the bid process in 2010 for the 2015 event when Canada and Vancouver hosted games.