The not so Great Canadian White Elephant Thread
Show us your city's boondoggles.
My hometown of Montreal is no slouch. There is the famously expensive and chronically empty Olympic Stadium (Aka, the Big O, aka the Big Owe). But then there is Mirabel International Airport. The insane distance plus a lack of direct/train access why the latter airport ended up as Canada's biggest ever White Elephant. Downtown Montreal to Montreal Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport: 11 miles (17.7 kms) Downtown Montreal to Montreal Mirabel International Airport: 34.8 miles (!!) (56 kms) It was the largest airport in the world at the time it was opened. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...sportlinks.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...kipedia%29.Jpg wikipedia Quote:
The vision: https://www.airporthistory.org/uploa...ppson_orig.jpg The end of the line: https://assets.skiesmag.com/images/n...5819207950.jpg Airport history https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...e_Montreal.jpg Quote:
Show us your city's Mirabels and Big Owes. |
Toronto's is the Sheppard subway - some stations average as little as 2,500 passengers a day.
https://i.cbc.ca/1.5143589.155845948...ia-commons.jpg https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toron...ning-1.5141013 |
Hamilton's isn't a white elephant so much as it is wasted, fallow land as a result of a failed stadium plan. in the 2000's Hamilton City Council planned for a new CFL stadium closer to downtown and as a result purchased 4 city blocks and demolished them, before later deciding to rebuild a new stadium in the same location as the existing one in the east end of the city.
The land still sits empty nearly a decade after the new stadium's completion: https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.26673.../data=!3m1!1e3 https://i.imgur.com/WrKRSG6.png |
I never passed through it, but I always found Mirabel very fascinating. Perhaps the most over the top "think big" project in a country that is seldom prone to thinking big when it comes to infrastructure.
I wonder if the plan might ever be resurrected? It's not impossible to imagine Montreal's airport traffic someday outgrowing Dorval. Although I guess a lot of the land surrounding Mirabel was sold off so the original vision couldn't be realized without jumping through all of those nasty expropriation hoops all over again. |
The big thing they didn't realize in Montreal was that by shifting the airport from Dorval to Mirabel they would instantly make Montreal 1.5 degrees colder, rendering it an unlivable hellhole, and drop it back several places in the SSP freeze list competition. Maybe this is why they pulled the plug.
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Mirabel will win this thread for sure. Imagine spending the money to build a major international airport only to abandon it a generation later?
Some other Toronto-area white elephants, at least in my opinion: 1. Bloomington GO train station: https://www.gotransit.com/static_fil...20Images_3.jpg Source $82 million was spent to build an enormous GO train station complete with a multistory parkade at the end of the little-used Richmond Hill line. That line only sees 4 trains out in the morning, and 4 trains returning in the evening, and it's never going to become a frequent transit line because it's either sharing tracks with CN's mainline or it takes a very twisty and slow path through the Don River valley that serves absolutely no trip generators. The station itself sits in an undevelopable moraine, so it'll never be a good spot for TOD. The thinking behind this station was that it was near highway 404 and it would be a park-and-ride station for commuters coming in from further away but, if all they wanted was a park-and-ride, they didn't have to build such an elaborate station. 2. Highway 407 subway station. https://www.david-pearl.com/images/H...%20407%202.jpg Source Same as above. A really expensive subway station that almost feels like a small airport terminal, that sits in a very undesirable spot - jammed between a cemetery, two highways and a freight rail line. It can't support any new developments and it has limited use as a park and ride. 3. Ontario Place https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ace_lounge.jpg Source: wikipedia I think that the Ontario government probably had Montreal envy (specifically for Expo 67 and the Olympics in '76) when they built this in the early 70s. They probably thought that they could recreate that "world's fair" atmosphere without having the actual event. It's abandoned now and plans to do something with it come and go, but when I was a kid it was this weird, government-run amusement park with Ontario-themed rides and educational content. The park was too lame for kids to really want to go to - it was the kind of place that schools took you to on a field trip. It had a reasonably fun water park, though. The cool-looking pavilions on stilts in the water (see above) were fun to explore, but even by the early 90s, about 15 years after it opened, they were comically underused. I remember my parents took me to a "Legomania" exhibit in one of those pods, and we had to pass through three other pods that were just sitting empty with chairs stacked in a corner and a musty-smelling carpet. |
I will need to think about Victoria. However up island in Nanaimo there is a cruise ship terminal that rarely sees cruise ships.
Bountiful building: https://www.cparch.ca/nanaimo-cruise-ship-terminal Here is the location: https://goo.gl/maps/n7nXyqU7DYqjvhdu9 Cost $24Million to build starting back in 2011. Today it is used as a heli-port by Helijet for a few flights a day to Vancouver. However large cruise ships don't regularly stop in Nanaimo, not certain why it is an interesting city to visit. |
Ontario Place is kind of interesting, Toronto was a common vacation destination for me and my friends in the 80s and 90s, but I don't remember Ontario Place ever coming up. I never went there once myself. It was always CN Tower, Hockey Hall of Fame, a Blue Jays game, Canada's Wonderland, Eaton Centre, etc. but Ontario Place was never on our radars.
That building in the picture sure looks like it has that Expo/World's Fair vibe. I'd love to go check it out myself next time I'm there. ha. |
Every time I drive by Mirabel I envision, 'World's largest go-kart track'.
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For Winnipeg, the all-time white elephant has to be Portage Place mall. It was developed by the three levels of Government working in partnership with Cadillac Fairview. It is several square blocks long and includes a shopping mall with offices above, several highrise apartments out back, and a massive underground parking garage. There are pad development sites on either end of the mall, but they were never developed.
It was devised in the 80s as a way to rejuvenate Portage Avenue which had fallen on hard times. Portage Place effectively connected the massive Eaton's and Hudson's Bay department stores on Portage Avenue. It opened in 1987 but it never thrived, it started losing tenants quickly. After Eaton's closed in 1999 it really declined fast and now it is a mostly dead mall as COVID killed whatever life it still had remaining. The problem is the place is getting old and in need of major refurbishment, but no one is willing to sink any money into it. So its future is up in the air. https://www.vmcdn.ca/f/files/glacier...lace.jpg;w=960 https://i.cbc.ca/1.5265540.156718067...n-winnipeg.jpg |
Almost no chance of that here. Our preference (excluding hydroelectric dams) is to build infrastructure that barely meets current needs, let alone future ones. It's completely routine here to have brand new schools with trailers outside providing additional, required classrooms, and that takes a especially strong inability to see past one's nose in a province with a declining student population.
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The Toronto white elephants are real white elephants but not major given the scale of the city. And if it had appropriate infrastructure (subway 2-3x larger) the poorly planned stations would feel like less of the overall system. And maybe the Sheppard Line would have been used more if it connected up more meaningfully with a larger system. Around here it's hard to think of white elephants and almost every "error" is in the other direction with undersized infrastructure. If you look for references to white elephants and boondoggles it shows things like "Christy Clark wasted $500k on flights" which may or may not be appropriate but may not have registered in say Illinois (or Quebec). The BC Place roof was sort of sold as a gold-plated boondoggle and maybe some specific Olympic venues are a bit underused but they're not really white elephants in the traditional sense. Halifax also has very few and people scream about extremely small examples of "waste" (right now people complaining about concrete curbs on temporary streets or bike lanes). The biggest may be the Cogswell interchange which served no purpose and is being torn down, but it was meant to connect to an expressway that thankfully was never built. Ideally Cogswell also would have been skipped. If you look at the city you can see how the postwar expressway plan was only half realized (e.g. no third bridge so one end of the Dartmouth circumferential ends at a T with a road). They should have completed the suburban expressways while leaving the inner city alone. |
Not so sure what Edmonton's White Elephant would be... perhaps West Edmonton Mall not being built downtown?
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Although now that I think of it NS is full of rural or small town white elephants. For example the NS government built a heavy water plant in Cape Breton and spent billions to subsidize Sydney Steel. A large portion of the NS provincial debt traces back to these projects.
$718M highway twinning project through 38 km of woods in rural NS: https://mobile.twitter.com/BenMacLeo...23712489340928 (Meanwhile the federal government is threatening to pull funding from the city because the province won't pay for transit improvements.) |
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It's a far cry from situations you see in other countries where you have entirely empty cities and other such extravagant wastes. |
Pretty much every Eaton's Centre foisted on small-city downtowns in Ontario.
Mostly White Elephants are bigger city things. Smaller cities generally don't have the capital/cachet to go bananas on much, so most White Elephants are pretty tame there. Even the Ontario-specific ones are thin on the ground, or ended being more useful than anticipated. The nuclear generating stations at Bruce and Darlington so long derided as wasteful now keep the electricity sector relatively low-carbon emitting. SkyDome's inherent usefulness and solid design has probably saved Ontario from several attempts at conning the province into paying for a new home for the Blue Jays, even if it was expensive. Underused, but overbuilt highways? Not really. Bridges to nowhere? Nah. International airports of tumbleweeds? Nope. Wide-scale propping up the auto industry in 2009? Maybe? When one looks at the decade plus of return on investment keeping those jobs, the province probably did OK on that metric. Anyone else can think of Ontario-specific ones? |
Mirabel is just sad. Not so much for the particulars, which were more just impractical and absurd, but for the way it was a kind of final, abortive embodiment of a certain kind of national/continental ambition.
I am actually pretty convinced by the argument that Montreal has benefitted from its transition to an eccentric, storied regional centre, but Mirabel was maybe the last time that anyone conceived of it as a potential titan. |
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Mirabel failed but it seems that the site has attracted a good number of businesses and has become a somewhat significant employment center now.
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