Toronto mulls bid for World Expo 2025
As talk of a bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics gets louder, Toronto is expressing its interest in hosting World Expo 2025 as well.
And organizers behind the two bids are counting on the euphoria sparked by the TO2014 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games to win over the city's residents. Held every five years, Expo is a six-month long showcase of trade, innovation and products from around the world. Milan is currently hosting Expo and the next one will be held in Dubai.
"Expo 25 has to be in the mix if you're exhilarated by what happened at Pan Am," Councillor Shelley Carroll told CBC News Wednesday. "All of the groundwork's been done, it's been worked over since 2013."
Claire Hopkinson, the CEO of the Toronto Arts Foundation, agrees with Carroll.
"We now have the energy from the Pan Am Games to show Toronto we're ready for bigger and better things," she said.
Hopkinson, who has been working on the 2025 bid, says Expo is "about new ideas, it's about the future, it allows Toronto to take its place in the world as a leader and as a wonderful city."
She believes the event, which is also called the World's Fair, will allow Toronto to showcase "the amazing talents we have, not only in the arts and cultural scene but in our architecture, in our academics and in many facets of Toronto life."
Hopkinson calls Expo a force for economic development, claiming it will create 190,000 jobs over the eight years leading up to the event.
According to the city's economic development committee, the cost of a competitive Expo bid will be at least $10 million and it will cost at least $1 million to get through some of the initial pre-bid preparation work alone.
Carroll says it's worth exploring the 2024 Olympics and Expo 2025 bids.
"We have to keep an open mind," she said. "You can't say no to either one until you've done that exploration. We can't drop that work because of the Olympic bid."
Canada has hosted two world expositions, one in Montreal in 1967 and the second in Vancouver in 1986.
