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There are winners and losers in most games.

Now that Calgary voters have ended the city's Olympic Games bid, the final score is up on the board.

The worst plebiscite outcome would be a close vote and low turnout, Mayor Naheed Nenshi said before the vote.

Tuesday night's 56.4 per cent no vote on a quite decent 304,774 votes cast was therefore not the worst outcome.

But for Nenshi, who, in the final days of the bid campaign became the biggest Olympics booster of all, the vote was certainly not the best result.

Nenshi's final push was an appeal to voters that the Olympic funding agreement hammered out with the provincial and federal government and the IOC would be a terrific deal for Calgary.  The city would get a couple of new pieces of recreational infrastructure — a mid size arena and a new fieldhouse, for far less than it would otherwise have had to pay, he argued.

"Calgary will receive about $4 billion in investment for under $400 million — a 10:1 return.  It's important to remember that, while there is only one taxpayer, Calgary taxpayers have long sent far more in taxes we pay to Edmonton and Ottawa than we receive back in investments from those governments," the mayor wrote in an oped in the Calgary Herald.

The city would have paid $390 million toward the bid, while the province anted up $700 million and the federal government contributing $1.423 billion.

Canny Calgarians apparently figured out that they would also be contributing taxes toward the provincial and federal portions of the bid.  And the question of cost overruns also weighed heavily on taxpayers' minds.

While Nenshi led with his heart on this issue, the majority of his fellow councillors likely heaved a sigh of relief after the vote.  The palpable fear they felt about committing to the undertaking was clearly revealed in an Oct. 31 vote on whether to proceed.  A vote to abandon the bid actually passed with an 8 to 7 vote, but the motion required a "super majority" of 10 council members so the plebiscite process continued.

The IOC was also a big loser on Tuesday night.  Competing bids from Stockholm and Milan lack major government support, so Calgary had looked like a great possibility, especially with its favourable timezone for major television coverage.

The committee's response to the rejection on Wednesday was muted.

"It comes as no surprise following the political discussions and uncertainties right up until the last few days," an IOC spokesperson said.

Certainly some voters shied from the bid because of increasing distrust of the IOC and its murky reputation.

The provincial government is both a winner and a loser after the Tuesday vote.

If the vote had been overwhelmingly positive, the NDP government's $700 million bone would have been a good thing to throw a city which has weak support for the current governing party.  It could have been one nice promise to make before the spring election.

However, the flip side is also true — if the bid continued on its course it would have been a political liability in NDP's basecamp in Edmonton, where no solid benefit would accrue from the Games based on the initial details of the bid.

And UCP Leader Jason Kenney came out a winner in the process.  Kenney had declared his skepticism over the bid early on, pointing out bluntly that the province is broke and can't afford an Olympics.  He claimed he could afford to be gracious if Calgary's bid did proceed, however, since it would be the Notley government taking the blame if the Games turned into a nasty liability down the road.

Realistically, however, voters and taxpayers blame the government in power at the time when their tax bills start to mount to cover things like sporting event overruns.  And Kenney remains confident it will be the UCP in power come 2026.

So he was very fast off the mark after the vote results came in Tuesday night to applaud the decision.

"With today's vote, Calgarians told governments to focus on key priorities, and to keep taxes down.  Calgarians understand this and have decided to get our fiscal house in order before embarking on such a large and expensive undertaking," said Kenney's response.

He might as well have said: With that pesky Olympic extravagance off the table, let the belt tightening commence."

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The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


There's a cruel sort of irony in the way Justin Trudeau's proclamation in support of press freedom went over this week.

The prime minister was in Paris at a Reporters Without Borders event, there to affirm his belief in a free press, perhaps to contrast himself with the U.S. president.

"If a democracy is to function you need an educated populace, and you need to have an informed populace, ready to make judicious decisions about who to grant power to and when to take it away," Trudeau told the crowd.  "When citizens cannot have rigorous analysis of the exercise of the power that is in their name and they have granted, the rest of the foundation of our democracies start to erode at the same time as cynicism arises."

The awkward shoe dropped the next day in Beijing.  Finance Minister Bill Morneau was in the Chinese capital to give a speech at a Canada China Business Council.  Unfortunately some Chinese officials objected to a free press bearing witness to the event, so reporters were barred from the room.  The minister's office fobbed the responsibility for the barring of journalists off on the business council.

Not great, Bill.  Not great.

Bowing to the demands of the representatives of a (quite brutal!) communist dictatorship crudely illustrates the gap between the Liberal government's willingness to speak to lofty free-press ideals and its actions.

There are less dramatic, and longer-running ways in which this gap manifests.

Take, for example the ongoing disgrace of the government's access to information reforms.

Now, yes, I realize ATIPs are perhaps a bit of an inside-basebally journalism thing to complain about.  But what this lack of action shows is what they really mean by all their rhetoric when offered the opportunity to do something — and do something without any resistance.

It would be quite simple for the government to follow through on the spirit of its ATIP promises and cut down on redactions.  It would have been easy to include the prime minister's office in the government departments that the public can request information from.  But, instead the government decided to not do any of that.  It implemented a system where the PMO would voluntarily disclose some records, as it saw fit.  By all accounts, redactions in documents that are released have not got better, they've got much worse.

It would have created some awkward moments, surely.  Making the government's dirty laundry more accessible will have that effect.  But a government as committed as this one said it was to transparency and openness would have the guts to bite that bullet and move on.

And so, the gap yawns wider.

Then, of course there's the matter of Saudi Arabia, a kingdom that's deeply oppressive of its people, particularly its women.  It doesn't take kindly to journalists, and the government knows this quite well.  Trudeau himself announced this week his government had heard the recording of Jamal Khashoggi's brutal murder and dismemberment in a Saudi embassy last month.

Meanwhile, this country is shipping out light armoured vehicles — which is to say light tanks with wheels — to the Saudis.  The kingdom is prosecuting an ongoing and brutal war in Yemen, where those who aren't killed by Saudi munitions are being starved to death in a months-long siege.  They've also shown themselves quite willing to use similar LAVs against its own people in one of its periodic crackdowns.  And still the Canadian government has shown no willingness to cancel the deal, for fear of incurring a $1-billion penalty.

A government truly committed to press freedom might say, "Hey, you know what, murdering journalists critical of your regime then trying to cover that up is something.

What good are principles if you aren't willing to sacrifice for them?  Not much, I'd say.

Which brings us back around to China.

The Liberal government have made clear for some time they'd like to complete a trade deal with the Chinese government.  It's the world's second largest economy and having a free trade deal of some sort would likely have many positive effects on the economy.

But what might it do to the soul of a country willing to do a deal with a country like China?  The government in Beijing has shown little acceptance of criticism of its ongoing and numerous human rights abuses.  What moral price might they expect to extract when negotiating with Canada?

It's about time the government started seriously grappling with questions such as this.  At some point talking a good game isn't enough.  One hopes they figure this out before it's too late.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.