Pro sports can't, and shouldn't, depend on government ticket sales
Joanne Chianello, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: September 17, 2014, Last Updated: September 17, 2014 7:42 PM EDT
When Eugene Melnyk bought the bankrupt Ottawa Senators in 2003, senior public servants regularly dined at some of the region’s finest restaurants, expensing tabs for hundreds of dollars. Provincial government agencies bought golf club memberships, and Hydro Ottawa had its own Senators’ corporate box.
Those were the days, my friend!
Well, not for you and me — we just footed the bills — but for many already bringing in comfortable salaries in the bureaucracy, luxe lunches and gratis sporting events were par for the course. Thankfully, however, our concept of the responsible uses of public funds and appropriate behaviour of public servants has changed dramatically over the past decade.
The demand for more transparency and accountability at every level of government has resulted in a culture shift for the better. No one can honestly believe federal bureaucrats needed to spend $140 of taxpayers’ money to do their jobs. But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been collateral damage from the changes in practice.
Clair de Lune and Café Henry Burger closed in the mid-2000s partly due to an expense-account scandal that ignited closer examination of how some senior federal public servants spent tax dollars.
Also hurt by our demands for more responsible spending of public money is the Ottawa Senators.
Or so says Melnyk, who this week told Toronto radio station Sportsnet 590 that “selling tickets is particularly difficult in Ottawa because the city’s two biggest employers — the federal and municipal government — are not permitted to purchase tickets … or give tickets.”
Nor, he should have added, can the employees of the city’s two largest employers accept tickets from the few corporations who do buy tickets.
Indeed, the City of Ottawa’s auditor general launched an investigation in 2007 after it was reported that a waste-management company looking to make controversial changes to a landfill gave Stanley Cup playoff tickets to senior bureaucrats.
To be fair to Melnyk, he wasn’t arguing that governments should start buying tickets. But he’s right.
Consider that in 2011, Mayor Jim Watson was “very unhappy” with the revelation that Hydro Ottawa — which is wholly owned by the city — had purchased $28,450 worth of Senators tickets in 2010-11 even while it was trying to hike hydro rates to cover what it said were increasing business costs. Watson ordered the practice stopped immediately.
It’s not that a city such as Ottawa can’t carry professional sports. Glen Hodgson, the chief economist for the Conference Board of Canada and co-author of the sports-economy book Power Play, believes the capital is large enough to support the Sens and the Redblacks, but only if you factor in the 1.3 million people in the entire Ottawa-Gatineau region.
But making it work is really hard — and we haven’t exactly helped the situation by not locating two professional sports venues on our rapid transit system.
And, let’s be honest, we’re not very loyal sports fans, which is a hallmark of a smaller market that can’t rely on the corporate sector to fill seats. Strong corporate ticket sales is why Toronto’s AC Centre is regularly sold out for Leafs games, despite the outrageously priced tickets and the team’s ability to make the playoffs about once a decade.
The Ottawa sports market, on the other hand, “has a smaller corporate sector and many fewer head offices than a city of comparable size like Calgary,” Hodgson said earlier this year. “This puts added pressure on team ownership and management to put a quality product on the rink or field.”
That’s a nice way of saying that if our teams don’t win, we don’t go. It’s also a way of saying that Melnyk should shell out for a more successful team.
Whether Melnyk’s pointed comments this week are an excuse for lower-than-average player salaries, or a veiled threat to move the team, is for others to speculate. But he reminds us of the key realities of the Ottawa market.
We don’t have the luxury in Ottawa. We have to rely on individual ticket sales more than most cities, and those sales are fickle. So why do we keep pretending we’re a different kind of town?
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