City staff recommend against Toronto hosting Expo 2025
Lack of funding and construction timelines are major concerns in feasibility of hosting world fair

thestar.com
By Jennifer Pagliaro
Oct. 21, 2016

City staff say Toronto should not host the estimated $1.9 billion Expo 2025, citing concerns over the lack of government funding and construction timelines for necessary infrastructure.

The report from staff, released Friday and to be tabled at Mayor John Tory's executive committee next week, likely kills a bid by local developers, business and community leaders pushing to host the world fair.

Staff wrote that while a feasibility study prepared and paid for by the Expo 2025 Canada bid corporation speaks of the potential for “considerable economic and other legacy benefits” there are “significant challenges and risks related to staging an event of this scale and complexity in the Port Lands in 2025 that outweigh these advantages.”

The Expo 2025 Canada team pitched to host the months-long event in the industrial Port Lands in the eastern part of the city, which are not yet ready to be developed.

Waterfront Toronto unveiled a detailed plan to flood-protect and revitalize the area on Thursday, a $1.25 billion project that is more than 14 years in the making but still unfunded. That report will also be on the executive agenda next week.

Critically, city and Waterfront Toronto staff said that it is “highly improbable that many major concurrent construction projects which are critical to hosting Expo . . . can be successfully completed in time to host the event in 2025.” Those construction projects include flood-protecting the Port Lands, rebuilding the Gardiner East and new transit plans.

It will take a minimum of seven years, starting in 2017 at the earliest, to flood-protect the Port Lands, reroute the Don River and build a new “Villiers Island” just south of the Keating Channel.

Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, who has pushed for the Expo bid at city hall, said they could build out Expo in a year and a half.

“It was always going to be tight in terms of the delivery and the turn around on the flood protection,” she said Friday after the release of the staff report. “Never once did we get any indication from Waterfront Toronto that it was not going to be doable.”

“This is a vote of non-confidence in Toronto and it’s actually being dictated by bureaucrats.”

Staff said another key concern is that there are currently no funding commitments from the provincial or federal governments.

Council decided in June, at Tory’s urging, that funds for an Expo bid should not come from the existing investments from those governments for transit and housing.

Expo bid hopefuls have argued that hosting a world event would help the city leverage investment in flood-protecting the Port Lands and move ahead with stalled development.

Others say the other governments are now ready to come to the table regardless of Expo.

“This idea that we need Expo to develop some of the most valuable land in North America is completely absurd,” Minnan-Wong said.

Tory had earlier cautioned a “sober, steady, responsible businesslike approach” to studying the feasibility of hosting Expo but has not publicly encouraged or discouraged a bid.

A feasibility study paid for by a group of developers, led by Kilmer Group’s Ken Tanenbaum, and submitted to the city last week claimed that Expo would more than pay for itself, bringing a $4.37 billion boost in the national GDP and $1.26 billion in tax revenues.

An online survey of 1,300 people, just 483 in the GTA, released by Expo 2025 Canada on Friday found 56 per cent of GTA residents and 55 per cent of those polled nationwide support and Expo bid. A third of all respondents were not sure.

The survey, conducted by Hill+Knowlton Strategies at the end of August, did not tell respondents how much it might cost to host Expo. It had a margin of error nationwide of 3.1 percentage points and because of the smaller sample size, a margin of error of 5.1 percentage points in the GTA.