Daily BrewExpo historian urges Toronto to host the world
[Vancouver’s New Year’s Eve 2015 celebration at Canada Place approved/CBC News]
The Eiffel Tower. The Atomium in Brussels. Seattle’s Space Needle. Montreal’s Biosphere and Habitat 67. Canada Place and the SkyTrain in Vancouver.
Since the first one held in London in 1851, World’s Fairs have left behind a long list of monuments still recognizable today.
But it is the more intangible benefits of hosting a World Fair that should convince Toronto to go ahead with a bid for Expo 2025, says an Expo historian and curator of the online Expo Museum.
“It’s going to be about Toronto… it’s not like the Olympics in that respect,” Urso Chappell tells Yahoo Canada News.
“People will forever think of Toronto differently.”
There hasn’t been a World Fair in North America since Vancouver played host to Expo 86.
“The medium has been wildly successful in Asia and in Europe and we’re about to have the first one in the Middle East [Dubai 2020] but it’s been largely forgotten in the United States,” he says.
“I think North America should get to see it again.”
Fresh off the success of the Pan Am Games last summer, Toronto officials are openly pondering a try for Expo 2025.
Mayor John Tory met with two officials from the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) on Monday to discuss a bid. The Toronto Region Board of Trade held a panel discussion Monday with a keynote speech from Dr. Vincente Gonzalez Loscertales, secretary general of the Paris-based BIE.
Though there hasn’t been an expo in North America in three decades, large world fairs are still held every five years and smaller events are hosted annually in the intervening years.
The most successful ever took place in Shanghai in 2010, an extravagant affair that drew more than 73 million visitors.
Milan hosted a World Expo in 2015 and Dubai will become the first Middle Eastern city to play host in 2020.
Like the Olympics or World Cup, World Fairs are huge international events that bring the world to your doorstep, but Expo is not aimed at elite athletes and their fans, Chappell says.
“Unlike the Olympics, which can bring maybe a million people to your city, world’s fairs can bring anywhere from 20-60 million people,” he says.
“The analogy I like to use it that it’s kind of like sending your city to college… it’s really, in many ways, an educational exercise.”
Vancouver and Montreal both hosted extremely successful events.
“Expo 67 closed nearly 50 years ago but when you go to Montreal it’s still very much in the minds of the people who live there, both its tangible legacy and its intangible legacy,” Chappell says. “You can see how Montreal was forever changed with its experience with Expo 67.”
“There’s that aspect to it where the city goes through the process and comes out the other side being a very different city, much in the same way your kid would when they go to college.”
Each World Expo is its own unique event,” says Chappell.
Cheaper than hosting the Olympics
The cost is also substantially less than hosting an Olympics, according to a feasibility study completed by Ernst and Young for the City of Toronto two years ago.
Hosting Expo 2025 in Toronto would cost between $5.4 billion and $13.5 billion, it found. The net costs, with revenues and taxes taken into account, would be in the range of $1 billion to $3.1 billion.
That compares to a cost of between $8.7 billion and $17.1 billion to host a summer Olympics, with a net cost of $3.3 billlion to $6.9 billion.
The report noted that Toronto has more than 78 million potential Expo visitors within an 800-kilometre radius and Canada has an “excellent track record” in hosting such events.
“The BIE may expect a successful Toronto 2025 World’s Fair,” it says.
The greatest hurdle for Toronto may not be Toronto, or the bureau that decides who will host.
The federal government let the country’s membership in the BIE expire in 2013, after refusing to support a bid by Edmonton to host a World Fair in 2017 marking Canada’s 150th birthday.
“The main weakness of a Toronto bid is the difficulty that may be encountered in gaining the complete and unified support of the three orders of government,” the report says. “This support is critically necessary to the success of the bid in terms of financial guarantees and diplomatic resources for intelligence gathering and assistance in the lobbying campaign.”
Edmonton had a strong proposal, Chappell says.
“They were all set to go and they had all the goodwill in the world. Everyone was expecting them to win and the federal government, under the Tories, would not support Edmonton bidding,” says Chappell, who lived in Toronto for two years and has been in contact with bid organizers.
The federal government went so far as to let Canada’s membership in the BIE lapse, even as Toronto floated the idea of its own bid.
“They had pretty much given up the bid under the Harper administration,” he says.
