The Canada 150 celebrations were clearly not intended to be a testament to the era of wasteful government spending, but perhaps it’s sadly appropriate that it has become so.
Certainly, Canadians expected the country’s 150th birthday to be widely celebrated, but Canadians also appear quite uneasy about how much this party is costing. And some of the unusual ways politicians have found to spend money — all under the guise of a “celebration” — seem more like the government equivalent of buying a round of shots or throwing stacks of money while partying at the club.
First, it was the $200,000 rubber duck floating around the Toronto waterfront, a costly yellow monstrosity that had no apparent connection to Canada Day or the nation’s 150th birthday. Then there was the $416,000 giant game of snakes and ladders in Calgary.
And while an outdoor skating rink might seem about as Canadian as it gets, the whopping $5.6-million dollar price tag for a temporary rink on Parliament Hill surely takes the cake. Only in the nation’s capital could the act of freezing water in the winter turn into a multimillion-dollar exercise.
And in true Ottawa fashion, there are all sorts of bureaucratic rules in place on how the rink can be used and accessed. Ice time can be booked in 45-minute chunks and must be reserved online at least 48 hours in advance. Oh, and no hockey sticks are allowed. The rink won’t even open until Dec. 7 and was set to close on the 31st. It looks as though its lifespan may be prolonged until the end of February, although that’s bound to drive up the costs even more.
And it’s not as though there aren’t options for outdoor skating in Ottawa, including two obvious candidates mere blocks away from Parliament Hill. There is, of course, the famed Rideau Canal skateway — a popular draw every winter for visitors to the nation’s capital. Additionally, there is the Rink of Dreams at Ottawa city hall — a rink, by the way, that generated controversy over its $2-million price tag. Seems like quite the bargain now, doesn’t it?
In fact, right across the country you can find example upon example of outdoor rinks — and even entire arenas — being built for less than what we’re spending on what’s essentially a party rental for Canada’s birthday celebration.
After a roof collapse two years ago, a Windsor-area arena is being rebuilt at a cost of $5.2-million. That’s a new, permanent hockey arena that rings in at almost half a million dollars less than the Parliament Hill rink. In St. Catharine’s, a permanent outdoor rink raised some eyebrows when it clocked in at a total of $1.2 million. At Sun Peaks Resort in B.C., they managed to build a new open-air rink for just $850,000. In tiny Kingman, Alta., they’re building their own “Rink of Dreams” for less than $100,000.
Or maybe we should call up Calgary’s Norm Price, who personally maintains a massive outdoor public rink every year on the outskirts of Calgary. So far, it’s cost him about $1300.
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So, yes, the Parliament Hill rink cost far more than a temporary outdoor rink should ever cost. And yes, given the proximity of two other popular outdoor skating venues, it is completely superfluous. It takes a special kind of cavalier arrogance to conclude that the project was a good idea anyway.
But given all the communities across Canada struggling to make do with their own aging rinks and arenas, or those trying to find ways of building new ones, why couldn’t we have created a legacy fund to help facilitate such projects, rather throwing the money away on a skating party on Parliament Hill?
Instead, we’re going to wake up in 2018 with a nasty financial hangover — and virtually nothing to show for it. How Canadian.
Rob Breakenridge is host of “Afternoons with Rob Breakenridge” on Calgary’s NewsTalk 770 and a commentator for Global News.
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