Monday, February 15, 2010

Vancouver Faces Olympian Burden Thanks to Swallen Budget

With all the Winter Olympics madness going around, I thought this would be a perfect article to take a look at the actual financial costs of the Vancouver events.

This article talks about the failed attempt by the Canadian government to boost the economy by making a large profit, creating new jobs and improving the tourism sector. In reality, however, this year’s host ended up with only $1 billion in profits as compared to the previously estimated $9.6 billion. Many experts seem to agree that this negative outcome is due to a financial crisis and miscalculations by the government, but representatives of the city administration “continue to maintain that the Olympics will have positive long-term effects”.

2 comments:

aemiller said...

It is definitely interesting that an event that is typically seen as such an honor has and will most likely have negative effects on the city of Vancouver's spending in the future. It is a shame that the financial crisis occurred shortly before the Olympics came to Vancouver because the it could have been much more profitable and generated much more short- and long-term effects for the city. The Olympics is certainly a an amazing world event, and it will be interesting to see its profitability unfold in the coming weeks and if the benefits of hosting the Olympics will outweigh the costs.

Charles Y said...

After reading this article, one can only expect that Vancouver will follow the path of Athens and Montreal. With the $6 billion price tag to build the event's venues and only $1 billion in revenue shows that debt will crush this city for some time. Sure the financial crisis had something to do with it but we shouldn't blame everything on that. The pride of being a host city will be the only positive for some time for the citizens of Vancouver.