A group of former politicians are coming together to trumpet the benefits that Expo 2025 could bring to the city as the council’s executive committee meets to mull a possible bid for the event.
Former mayors Barbara Hall and Art Eggleton and former Ontario premier David Peterson spoke alongside Coun. Krystan Wong-Tam and Don Valley East MP Yasmin Ratansi at a news conference Tuesday to express their support for the idea.
“I encourage the mayor and council to support this at this point and move it forward. Bring together the smart people from our community and move it forward,” said Hall, who recalled being inspired by the idea of space travel at the Seattle Expo in 1962.
Calling the chance to host expo 2025 the “opportunity of a lifetime,” Peterson said politicians shouldn’t be afraid to spend the money because of critics.
“This takes enormous political guts,” Peterson said. However he added that the money spent on hosting expo would be spent over many years and should be viewed more as an investment in the city.
Eggleton said hosting Expo 2025 would provide the city a key opportunity to move forward with Port Lands development and in a letter read by Wong-Tam, former mayor David Crombie also lauded possible improvements that would come as part of a bid.
Proponents of an expo bid have said that the event could help speed up the timeline for infrastructure investments that the city will need to make anyhow, particularly around the Port Lands, and have said it could help bring in billions of dollars to the city.
Expo events take place every five years around a particular theme to showcase innovation. Expo 2015 was held in Milan around the theme “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life.” Expo 2020 will take place in Dubai around the theme of “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future.”
Mayor John Tory said Monday that he won’t support a bid unless the federal and provincial governments commit to help funding the venture.
Tory’s statement comes amid a staff report that says that the city should not commit any further funds to a bid until it knows that other levels of government will help share the cost. The report also says that the federal government should be the lead organization in supporting a bid internationally.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said in a letter said that the federal government would be willing to explore ‘next steps’ if Toronto City Council sends a clear message that it would like to go ahead with a bid.
On Monday a group of business leaders announced that they would help fund an exploratory study that would give the city more detailed answers on how much Expo 2025 would actually cost to host, as well as a cost-benefit analysis.
In September, Tory rejected an effort to get the city to bid on the 2024 Olympics, citing a need to focus on transit and housing.
However Wong-Tam told CP24 that those issues would be addressed as part of infrastructure development for Expo 2025.
“I think people want to talk specifically about those issues… What we have not been getting to, which is what I think is exciting about the expo, is ‘how do we do that,’” Wong-Tam told CP24. “One way of doing that is actually making sure that three orders of government come together to commit to a timeline on delivery of funding as well as the actual build and then get it done.”
