" It’s hard to tell if Canadian Football League commissioner Randy Ambrosie was being deliberately provocative or just plain careless when he floated the idea of a new football stadium in Calgary during Grey Cup weekend in late November.
“I’d like to say this is the last time we’ll have a Grey Cup at McMahon,” he said, referring to the venue the Stampeders have called home since 1960. “Looking into the future, we’ll play the next one in a big, beautiful new stadium.”
The unstated assumption here: It won’t be Calgary Sports and Entertainment, the owner of the Stampeders, who will pay for most of that stadium. And while it’s hard to imagine that Calgarians will be enthusiastic about more corporate welfare for an ownership group that just received a $275-million handout for its National Hockey League team, the Flames, it’s harder to imagine them saying no to it. "
" Regardless of whether the unit of analysis is a local neighbourhood, a city, or an entire metropolitan area," they wrote, "the economic benefits of sports facilities are de minimus.”
That’s because rather than creating new economic activity, they simply reallocate existing entertainment spending – usually to the detriment of other businesses. “Most spending inside a stadium is a substitute for other local recreational spending, such as movies and restaurants,” they said. “Similarly, most tax collections inside a stadium are substitutes: as other entertainment businesses decline, tax collections from them fall.”
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