While major baseball has just plunged into a lockout that promises to be long and painful, the government of François Legault begins to throw political balloons to test its idea of financing a baseball stadium in downtown Montreal .
Tuesday morning, Press published two very interesting articles in which, it was argued, the Quebec government has not yet decided whether public funds will be used to finance part of the construction of a baseball stadium that would host, on a half-time basis , the Tampa Bay Rays.
However, the weather balloon quickly appeared in the background. If the government were to decide to throw hundreds of millions into this project, it would be at zero cost to taxpayers.
, we reassured.
Phew! Here is the population reassured.
The catch is that public investments in stadiums and amphitheatres never come at zero cost to taxpayers. It just doesn’t happen. Even if we claim, as is the case now, that we would use the taxes paid by the players to finance the stadium, or that the economic fallout from abroad (tourism) will eventually wipe out the hundreds of millions swallowed up In the stadium.
The keenest observers will therefore have noticed that if the decision to finance a stadium has not yet been taken, the calculations justifying the signing of a possible check seem quite completed.
For originality, the image makers of the government will therefore have to go back. Because the theory of zero cost is an argument invoked by all promoters who want to build a stadium or an arena at the expense of taxpayers. Except that over the years, these claims have been demolished a thousand times by countless studies carried out by renowned economists.
Last March, when the Prime Minister himself argued that the economic spinoffs of half a baseball team would justify government funding, I published this column. This text reminded us to what extent the repercussions generated by the presence of a professional sports team are negligible. And at the end of the day, taxpayers never come out on top from this kind of maneuver.
One of the economists cited, Professor Allen Sanderson of the University of Chicago, wrote in 2011: baseball","text":"Si vous souhaitez injecter de l’argent dans une économie locale, il est plus efficace de survoler la ville à bord d’un hélicoptère en lançant cet argent dans les airs plutôt que d’investir dans un nouveau stade de baseball"}}">If you want to inject money into a local economy, it is more efficient to fly over the city in a helicopter and toss that money into the air than to invest in a new baseball stadium.
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Reading this, many taxpayers will probably think they would prefer the helicopter option. Especially since in the present case, a baseball half-team would generate only half of the negligible fallout.
All of this brings us back to the premise of this text.
If the Legault government is keen on helping Stephen Bronfman and some of Quebec’s greatest fortunes (such as Mitch Garber, Stéphan Crétier, Alain Bouchard and Eric Boyko) to become minority shareholders in an American-owned baseball team, why not do we not say it clearly?
It could go something like this:
baseball majeur. C’est une décision politique. C’est aussi simple que cela. On a donc décidé de donner 300 ou 400 millions de vos taxes pour aider à la construction d’un stade. En tant que contribuable, votre seul avantage consistera à pouvoir payer pour aller voir des matchs de baseball si vous aimez ce sport. Par contre, ces fonds publics donneront une valeur supplémentaire aux nombreux immeubles que les propriétaires du club de baseball vont construire autour du stade. Ces derniers seront donc doublement avantagés, mais nous aurons une équipe.","text":"Écoutez, on sait que ça ne rapportera pas grand-chose d’un point de vue économique, mais on pense que ce serait bien que Montréal retrouve ne serait-ce qu’une demi-place parmi les villes du baseball majeur. C’est une décision politique. C’est aussi simple que cela. On a donc décidé de donner 300 ou 400 millions de vos taxes pour aider à la construction d’un stade. En tant que contribuable, votre seul avantage consistera à pouvoir payer pour aller voir des matchs de baseball si vous aimez ce sport. Par contre, ces fonds publics donneront une valeur supplémentaire aux nombreux immeubles que les propriétaires du club de baseball vont construire autour du stade. Ces derniers seront donc doublement avantagés, mais nous aurons une équipe."}}">Look, we know it’s not going to pay off much economically, but we think it would be good if Montreal got even half a place among major baseball cities. It is a political decision. It’s as simple as that. We therefore decided to donate 300 or 400 million of your taxes to help build a stadium. As a taxpayer, your only benefit will be that you can pay to go to baseball games if you like the sport. However, these public funds will give additional value to the many buildings that the owners of the baseball club will build around the stadium. They will therefore have a double advantage, but we will have a team.
This position would undoubtedly provoke thunderous protests. But it would at least have the merit of being clear and not misleading citizens with questionable economic concepts.
Finally, before embarking on calculations of economic benefits to justify possible subsidies, it would also be interesting for the government to consider what would be the worst-case scenario likely to occur if the concept of a two-headed team were to see the day.
This is what serious investors do before committing such huge sums of money to projects that have not been tested anywhere before.
And the worst-case scenario imaginable – which is far from being science fiction – would be for this idea to be rejected by the populations of the two cities. And that in the medium term, the existence of the Expos-Rays will become one of the worst circuses ever seen in the history of North American professional sport.
Here too, the zero cost theory would take it for granted.
