Quote:
Originally Posted by Erick Estrada
People are so weird when it comes to this stuff. A few years ago we found out that the federal government couldn't account for 20,000 projects and double digit billions of taxpayer money that just went up in smoke and it's barely a blip on the radar for the average Canadian. The province and the city kick in a hundreds of millions for a project that Calgarians will absolutely be able to see and use whether it be for sports, music, stampede, etc and people get all angry like that money came right out of their personal bank accounts. People need to realize that even if they don't plan on using the facilities, at least there's tangible evidence of taxpayer money spent as there's a good chance if used for something else we will never see any evidence of it being spent.
|
People don't like it because important social and programmatic issues are falling by the wayside as the province grows as rapidly as it has been. Say you may never see the benefit if money went elsewhere all you want, but it isn't true. $300M from the province could build 6-7 new schools, or improve services across major cities for years. What's likely is that now this even gets worse as less is available from the larger pot for funding these projects.
The benefit of this arena, as other have said, is very hard to pinpoint for the city and is vastly overstated. I can tell you the #1 benefactor is Murray Edwards and CSEC as they go to the top of the food chain in terms of NHL value and earning power and they somehow got the city and province to pay for 2/3rds of this.