In the movie “Field of Dreams,” Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella — no relation to Stephan — hears a mysterious voice in his cornfield telling him, “If you build it, he will come.” The “it” was a baseball field, which Kinsella built, despite the apparent financial insanity of converting productive farmland into an empty diamond. Of course it wasn’t empty for long. The ghosts of the 1919 Chicago White Sox — banned from baseball for match-fixing — appear, reunite Kinsella with his dead father (the “he” in “he will come”), and at the end of the film a line of cars, with paying believers, come to visit the field and no doubt save the Kinsellas from bankruptcy.
Today in Quebec City, local political oligarchs are staging their own real-life remake of “Field of Dreams.” In this version, they’re building a hockey arena instead of a baseball diamond; they’re leveraging hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars instead of a farmhouse; they’re hoping to revive a long-departed hockey team, which wasn’t banned so much as “moved to Denver”; and the only voice that matters is saying even if you build it, he probably won’t come.
Quebec Premier Jean Charest and Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume are the proverbial farmers in this story. They’ve committed to spend $400 million — including $125 million in new debt over the next 20 years — to build a new “ampitheatre” for the express purpose of luring a National Hockey League team back to Quebec. This despite the following warning from NHL chief executive Gary Bettman:
I don’t want anybody getting excited…in the conversations that I’ve had with a variety of people, including the Mayor and the Premier, we have said we’re not planning on expanding. We’re not planning on relocation. So we cannot promise [Quebec] a franchise….[W]e don’t want people building a building on our account, expecting that there’s going to be a franchise, because we’re not in the position to promise one right now.
That doesn’t sound promising, yet Quebec leaders are undeterred. They’re so intent on building their amphitheater, they publicly broke their own laws to get the project going. Mayor Lebaume and his government awarded a no-bid contract to Quebecor — the province’s largest media conglomerate — to manage the future arena, and no doubt own the hypothetical team that would play there. Quebecor has neither any experience running a hockey team, nor of course any assurance from the NHL that it would even be approved for ownership, but again, let’s not get in the way of Quebec politicians and their blind faith.
The Quebecor contract violates provincial laws that require a public bidding process before awarding any contract. As is usually the case when the state violates its own decrees, the wheels are now in motion to exempt the state from its own misconduct. Surprisingly, it was not Premier Charest’s Liberal government, but the opposition Parti Quebecois — the advocates of secession from Canada — that introduced legislation in the provincial assembly to retroactively immunize Lebaume and the city. The PQ’s bill simply declares the Quebecor contract is “deemed not to contravene” the law that it clearly contravenes.
This was apparently too much for four PQ legislators, who abruptly quit the party rather then obey the leadership’s demand to support the bill. Premier Charest also went running for the hills and decided to shelve further consideration of the measure until the fall. But this is likely not the last we’ll hear of this.
Perhaps this is an inevitable effect of the widening global economic collapse. Local governments are so desperate for the illusion of growth that they’re doubling down on the most ridiculous and speculative projects imaginable. It takes a deeply deluded mind to commit yourself to 20 years of new debt over a project that is unlikely to ever accomplish its stated objective — attracting a NHL team back to Quebec City. If anything, this endeavor will prove self-defeating for the Quebecois. By producing a new arena “on spec,” the NHL now has additional leverage to extract new concessions from other cities who don’t want the shame of seeing their own team relocate to Quebec City. Much like the National Football League has done with the franchise-less Los Angeles for almost two decades, Quebec City is now the proverbial Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of every city government with a money-losing NHL team (and there are a lot of them, trust me).
Events like this are also an important reminder that for all the focus on “big picture” economic debates, such as the future of the Federal Reserve, much of the economic damage inflicted by the proponents of statism occur at a more local and intimate level. Sub-national and municipal politicians don’t need prompting from federal powers to engage in reckless, artificial boom spending. Left to their own devices they come up with plenty of crazy schemes. And as the Quebec situation demonstrates, there are few “legal” remedies to prevent such abuses — as the people who make the laws are also charged with following them, an inherent conflict-of-interest that no amount of elections can remedy. Ultimately, all politicians are slave to the mythical voices in their head that say, “If you build it…well, just build it for the sake of building it.”
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I’m from Québec city and I’m pretty ashamed of my town.
It is with time like this that you can determined if someone is libertarian or statist.
The same thing happened in Omaha, Nebraska. So this insanity is pervasive.
Omaha’s sports claim to fame was the fact that the city was the location of the ‘College World Series’ baseball tournament. For the vast majority of people living in Omaha this meant that for one week out of the year (or so) commuting to work felt like slow suicide due to the increased traffic on the interstate highways that fed the stadiums and hotels.
Rosenblatt stadium housed the “CWS” as well as the minor league baseball team called the ‘Omaha Royals’ or the ‘Omaha Spikes’.
Omaha city planners, which is essentially the last vestiges of ‘small town Omaha’ 1960-era “Good ol’ Boys club”, decided that is was in their best interests to build a huge new stadium downtown. Right next to the huge new ‘Qwest Center’ that was built down there.
(It’s called Qwest center, I guess, because Qwest corporation paid a small part of the seed money that was used to ‘convince’ (ie extort) the tax payers to foot the bill for the conference center)
The new stadium was ‘sold’ (ie: forced upon) to the tax payers saying that if we don’t build it then we would lose the CWS tourney since CWS was displeased with the obsolete Rosenblatt Stadium. (Omaha is still paying off the last major renovation of Rosenblatt, btw, which modernized it) However statements coming from CWS seemed to indicate that this was news to them.
Meanwhile Omaha’s one baseball team announced that the new Stadium was far too large for them. The interest in baseball in Nebraska is so low that the local teams could never hope to fill the stadium with fans to the point were it was economically feasible to use it. Plus the new Stadium would be no fun for the fans since it was so large that it would always seem to be empty regardless of how many people shown up.
So Omaha lost their one baseball team to a nearby town that built a much smaller, much cheaper, and far more useful baseball field to the south of Omaha.
So what they ended up with was a huge new stadium that is only going to be used for one week out of the year.
And what makes it even funner is that during that time the Qwest convention center must be closed to large events.
Since they decided to build it down town and used up some land that was purchased by the city (at huge premium to the land owners, which was largely owned by the same people that owned the local news paper and was empty for decades) there was no room to build any parking.
With no parking area then it’s useless. So it needs to use Qwest’s parking area… which means that nothing can be going on at Qwest Center if you have a event going on in the Stadium.
There was plenty of cheap land out west or north or south that would provide very easy and quick access from the interstates and virtually unlimited parking… but I guess nobody important enough owned the land and thus it was not profitable enough for the city planners to build there.
All of this is a thinly veiled attempt by a rather rich and established family in Omaha to try to court a major league baseball team. None of this was announced publicly, of course, since forcing the local economy to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a new white elephant for the sake of a major league baseball team (which very few in Nebraska gives a shit about since college football and basketball are the big sports obsessions of the local area).would not of sold well at all.
It’s really just stupid beyond belief.
It’s just a bunch of planners destroying the economy of a moderately large midwest town for the sake of land sales and graft from construction contracts.
Oh.. and yeah… I forget this is suppose to make Omaha ‘prideful’ that they have such a large new stadium and should attract tourists(!?! who the fuck wants to come to Omaha for anything? It’s no Kansas City or Chicago and will never be a major city. At least not for another 50-70 years.)
The city planners must think the population is stupid to try and tell them people would fly in from all over the country to look at an empty baseball stadium.
Yikes. To be (a little) fair to the Quebecois, this is probably a reaction to the NHL’s recent decision to move the Atlanta Thrashers to Winnipeg, another Canadian town that’s proven too small in the past to sustain an NHL franchise. So they might be trying to position themselves in case the league chooses to relocate another troubled franchise (e.g., Phoenix, Nashville, the NY Islanders). Not that that makes it a good idea, of course.
Actually, as I read the timeline, Quebec City’s initial decision came several weeks before the Thrashers relocation to Winnipeg became public knowledge.
I would also respectfully suggest that Winnipeg wasn’t “too small” to support an NHL team so much as the NHL made an ill-fated attempt to try and replace its existing customer base with a more lucrative one.
According to Wikipedia, the Winnipeg Jets began to lose money because the Canadian dollar was dropping so fast during the ’90s. The Canadian teams had to pay players in US dollars, while they collected depreciating Loonies at the gate.
In other words, Winnipeg lost the Jets because of socialism.
It looks very much like a cargo cult, so funny yet so sad…
During the recent federal election campaign, Ignatieff actually pledged a robbery of all Canadians to help build a new arena in Quebec City. That was when I realized that he was brought in to throw the election and pave the way for a majority government “mandate” that would involve capitulation to a burgeoning NAU and eventually to a one-world government under the UN.
I want a one world governor, not government, I want privileges for no one, especially not for the elites. A world run by some kind of Komplex, where everybody, even the highest ranking elites and powerful fall under the rule of the governor and are as subject to his authority as the weakest, poorest and wretchest ones.
You are describing a world operating under free markets and private property.
Yes, but that market would have it’s virtual god-like speak person to constantly remind the world who is the “boss”, the market and private property.
Quebec is well known to be the most corrupt province in Canada, with the possible exception of the much smaller and more inconsequential province of Newfoundland. Evidently the culture of corruption in Quebec originated back in the earliest colonial days when New France was operated as a set of royal trading monopolies (fishing, fur trading, etc.) under the control of a military governor. The tendency toward corruption was not helped by the so-called “quiet revolution” of the 1960s which brought practically all of the big business of the province under the tight control of provincial politicians and unionized bureaucrats. One of the leaders of this revolution boasted that it was accomplished by “a handful of bureaucrats and folk singers”, which as near as I can tell are precisely the people who got the most benefit from it.
The only thing that has prevented Quebeckers from suffering the full consequences of their corrupt and inept political and business culture has been the infusion of large amounts of cash from the federal government, both above-board in the form of legislated transfer and equalization payments made directly to the provincial government, and below-board payments in the form of massive government spending on departmental offices and other federal subsidies which are nearly always skewed to funnel the largest amount of money to Quebec with the fewest questions asked. If money in the form of “cultural grants” or some such excuse is made for the federal government helping to subsidize this hockey rink then that would be a prime example of how Quebeckers are paid off through the back door, as it were. Quebeckers historically have repaid the federal politicians by occasionally blessing them with their notoriously fickle swing-votes, and by refraining from seceding from Canada. Quebec is to Canada what PIIGS are to the EU … “Give us money for doing nothing … OR ELSE !! ”
I said that Quebeckers have not suffered the full consequences of their corrupt governance … but they suffer in many small ways. Such as, watching their concrete overpasses collapse right on top of freeway traffic due to grossly incompetent management, which no doubt had passed billions of dollars into cushy, unionized white-collar bureaucrats jobs without bothering to go through the muss and fuss of actually sending someone around to check their bridges for cracks. These humiliations add to Quebeckers’ anger, which the local politicians blame on “Canada” (meaning the Rest of Canada), and lead to more and more shrill demands for federal compensation in the form of cash and other goodies.
None of this is meant to imply that the governments of the rest of Canada are not grossly corrupt and incompetent, but Quebec is always good for a laugh because they are so much more so.
The NHL is of course also a joke, having completely failed at introducing hockey into several very large and wealthy American cities (failing twice in the case of Atlanta), and being reduced to moving teams back into small, poor Canadian cities where professional hockey has already been a failure. Another bubble industry that is overdue for a major haircut.
Yep, too many teams for North America. The NHL, of course, will claim that expansion into Europe is “totally doable.”
“they’re hoping to revive a long-departed hockey team, which wasn’t banned so much as “moved to Denver””
Hillarious!
Why isn’t the business of sports entertainment run by private enterprises to begin with ? Why is it the business of the mayor to start a sports stadium and attract sports teams ?
Shouldn’t that be left to the private enterprise ?
The Gary Bettmans and Bernie Ecclestones of the world would be a lot more humble if they had to deal with independent private enterprises that need a return on their investment than local and state governments that have unlimited tax revenues and can afford to waste that money on non-profitable ventures like this.
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