Back in June 2011 when the Jets’ triumphant return to Winnipeg was announced I wrote an article critical of the team for accepting government homecoming bribes. At the time I pegged the public treasury looting by the NHL, Jets, True North and the fiscally-inept Manitoba NDP at a shameful $4M per annum. Given City Hall’s conspicuous silence at the time I hinted at even darker backroom shenanigans. As we learned recently Winnipeg’s newest, big money, pro-sports cabal will actually end up costing taxpayers an astonishing $218M.
Before I start my usual –albeit thoughtful –rant, I’ll hit you with the accounting. Here is the awful truth as detailed in Bartley Kives’ March 2, 2012 Winnipeg Free Press article Millions to aid True North;
“PUBLIC funding mechanisms that support True North Sports & Entertainment [1]:
- City entertainment tax refund: $5.8 million in 2012
- Provincial gaming revenue: Up to $4 million a year, for 19 more years
- City-provincial property-tax break: $816,140 annually, based on current assessment
- City business-tax refund: $250,000 annually”
Looks like public spending on professional sports blossoms like weeds and mushrooms in spring. Projected out twenty years – in accordance with sweetheart gambling deals the Province made with the thread-bare NHL and True North – this circus is actually going to cost taxpayers almost a quarter of a billion dollars over the long haul. The ballooning $10.9M annual bill will surely rouse local taxpaying plebeians to complain about the soaring prices of gladiators and sports deities.
Seems our only hope is for the Jets to go back to being their old selves, losing games, alienating fans (and their ticket and merchandise revenue), then making a break for the Mexican border when the money dries up. Whether fan enthusiasm will persevere for twenty years is yet to be seen but if the Jets’ early performance in the NHL is any indication, there may be hope for taxpayers. Along with the weeds and mushrooms, golden parachutes are sure to blossom should the financial goings get tough and the Jets threaten to bail. Unfortunately the hundreds of millions of tax dollars that are being flushed down the toilet are non-fundable.
Let me ask all pro hockey followers who wrote the piles of thoughtful and concerned “fan letters” in response to my last Jets article; are you happy with your recent property tax hike? Did you know the city zoned True North’s operations – the MTS Centre – as a recreational facility rather than a commercial one? In other words they’re exempt from most property taxes and you’re not. It’s frustrating since I help out at a local community centre which is also zoned as recreational, and I work with a couple of girl’s ringette teams that could probably take the Jets.
It’s flattering to know, that in the eyes of the nation-building experts at city hall and the legislature, there’s no difference between the tykes that play at our centre and highfalutin millionaire players that skate in spotlights to roaring fans. The Jets may have their rabid, beer-bellied fans but our exuberant hockey moms put up a better show of team spirit. Sickening that an NHL team is assessed for taxes the same way as are struggling, non-profit, volunteer-run community centres in Winnipeg. And all us charitable non-profits have to fight with the Jets for a share of lottery revenues. Guess you have to be a government mastermind or inebriated sports fan to understand the utility and fairness of those policies.
I associate with many business owners in Winnipeg and none can remember the last time they were treated as generously by government. For them it’s forms up the nose, a million permits, variances, telephone books full of regulations, legislation, licenses, inspections, annual audits, remittances, reviews, reports, inquiries, and a gauntlet of procedure-obsessed, apathetic bureaucrats. Guess only masterminds in government can anticipate capitalism’s failings, determining which firms need subsidies and which are punished, discouraged and crushed by government. And the NDP is infinitely qualified to make economic decisions too. Consider the current $1.12B deficit[2] and $37B debt[3] they’ve racked up on behalf of Manitobans, with no end in sight. Government can’t manage their own affairs yet we’re to trust them to meddle in free markets?
One can only assume wildly profitable organizations, those swimming in money like the NHL, qualify for government hand-outs, as long as they provide free tickets, lavish corporate boxes and free booze to public officials who are looking for value for other people’s money. Hats off to the Jets since in spite of city hall and the NDP working hard to chase businesses out of Winnipeg, somehow they managed to launch - with a signing bonus to boot!
Some would argue Winnipegers were lucky since they dodged the body check of having to build a new arena to lure the Jets; this being the usual requirement for NHL teams to move to new markets. Instead that money, $160M, went to another win-averse Winnipeg pro team the Bombers, which we’ll get to in a minute. True the MTS centre was built prior to the Jets’ return, but wasn’t True North an inheritor of $5.2M of Crocus Fund money to aid the MTS Centre[4]? Sadly the Crocus Fund scandal was another murky, backroom deal with government’s finger prints all over it. That deal had as much skating as does the current Jets deal. The pro-sports industrial complex’s two-pronged offense against the taxpayer is becoming clear; sack the citizen deep in their own zone, then hustle aggressively to retrieve the pennies that fumble from their pockets after the flying tackle slams into them.
For us 1.2M Manitobans that aren’t pro hockey fans, who think a Jet is a F-35 fighter, and who will never step foot into the MTS Centre - not even for Justin Bieber concert – our share of the $218M Jets deal is a rip-off. How the government’s mandate has grown to funding professional – and wildly profitable – sports teams is indicative of how grossly off-course we’ve veered. Our roads and schools are crumbling, our public debt and taxes are soaring and downtown Winnipeg is burning in a cesspool of crime, drugs and violence – even when the Jets fans aren’t there. I know, I live a couple of blocks over from the MTS Centre and admittedly I mingle with fellow Romans while they anxiously await the games. Amidst the sweet smell of marijuana and beer burps I hear their arguments first hand as to why I should be paying for their entertainment. And they never believe me when I tell them our national sport is actually Lacrosse – which incidentally is played at our community arena but isn’t played at the “proudly-Canadian” MTS Centre.
Let’s turn to that other national tax-suckled sport, professional football. The Bombers were flush with pride and the media lined up recently to trumpet the vast profit the club made last year – a whole $2M. The story was plastered all over local media, I guess as a constant reminder to apathetic Winnipegers that the Bombers actually matter. Never mind that my Korean friend’s little convenience store made more than the Bombers last year. And if the football club hadn’t bumbled into a free stadium courtesy of taxpayers, they’d actually be down $158M. I haven’t dug into the new stadium’s zoning or the Bombers’ financials, but no doubt the football club is receiving Cinderella property and entertainment tax exemptions as the Jet do. There’s simply no injustice that government accounting can’t paper over. Yet given all the government intervention my Korean friend has to put up with when trying to run his little store, he says Winnipeg is starting to resemble Kim-Jong-Un’s regime – which he fled from in the first place.
One cannot determine what’s more pathetic, the Oliver Twist Bombers masquerading as a profitable enterprise or the millionaire NHL gang feinting poverty to goose taxpayers. So far between the two stinkers taxpayers will be forking out $378M. And you can’t even fill two publicly funded sports venues with the people who directly benefit from the entertainment. Jets co-owner Mark Chipman had the audacity to announce at a recent press conference that the Jets won’t need any of the NHL’s revenue-sharing bail-outs. According to Mr. Chipman the Jets are doing just fine financially thank you very much. And why should the poor, emaciated NHL have to dip into their vast profits to help the Jets anyway we ask, when buffoonish politicians are willingly shoveling corporate welfare into the NHL’s money furnaces?
It’s ironic that the cost of completing the second phase of Winnipeg’s transit corridor is about the same as the Jets’ public hand-out. If the hockey club had a shred of decency they’d refuse sugar-daddy government money and let the rubes have their little transit line. Instead Mayor Sam Katz is proposing a new fuel tax to pay for it. This on top of the new garbage levy, dog licensing fees and our lovely new property tax increases. And we can trust the NDP to be their old tax and spend selves too; I predicted back in 2011 that the NDP would double down Manitoba’s debt and according to recent numbers we’re on our way.
Those who advocate responsible public spending – like most sentient and sober people excluding politicians and pro-sports fans – writhe whenever pro-sports teams settle like locusts in their jurisdictions. As a society our priorities have, over time, become perverted. As long as we drown ourselves in the alcohol-fuelled haze of celebrity sports culture, and ignore the challenge and decay that face our society, we’re doomed as a culture. Our politicians have forgotten that the money they confiscate from us is suppose to be a sacred trust, to pay for things we need, not for professional sports.
Hopefully Manitoba taxpayers will emancipate themselves in the next election and punish the feckless city hall/legislature gang before they bankrupt our city and make for the border with the Jets. Far too many media outlets boost for professional sports, but to close, I’d like to thank the few writers and editors who had the guts to report the seedy public financing underbelly of these rotten, stinking deals.
Sources
- City of Winnipeg, Province of Manitoba
- Manitoba deficit projected to hit $1.12B, Winnipeg Free Press, March 9, 2012
- Canadian Federation of Independent Business, 2012
- Geoff Kirbyson, Arena goes high-tech to feature state-of-the-art communications, Winnipeg Free Press December 11, 2003
