(ATR) Calgary voters decide against the city’s bid to host the 2026 Olympics and Paralympics.
The unofficial results of the plebiscite held on Tuesday found 56.4 percent against the bid and the remaining 43.6 percent in favor. The city of Calgary, which released the numbers about two hours after the polls closed, also revealed that 304,774 ballots were cast. The official results are expected to be released later this week.
The result is non-binding but with a clear majority against the project, it would seem that an official vote by city council to dissolve the bid corporation is just a formality. Evan Woolley was one of several councillors to take to social media in the minutes after the results were released. "Calgarians have spoken. It's time to get on to other priorities for our city," said Woolley in a tweet that reflected the sentiment of the others.
The Calgary City Council voted 8-7 in favor of a motion seeking to end the bid late last month, two votes short of the two-thirds majority needed. The decision came after an 11th-hour funding agreement was reached on how to pay for the public portion of the bid cost.
The federal government agreed to put in $1.423 billion in cash and the province of Alberta $700 million. Calgary is supposed to provide $370 million in cash, along with an additional $20 million to pay for $200 million in insurance to cover potential cost overruns. The province said its part of the funding was dependent on the bid being approved by voters in the plebiscite.
The effort to convince voters to back a bid was hampered by a process timeline that has lagged well behind the schedule set forth by the IOC for potential 2026 bid candidates.
The Calgary 2026 bid chair Scott Hutcheson was appointed only five months ago. The chief executive officer Mary Moran was brought on board a month later.
Calgary is the fourth 2026 bid to have failed to win a public vote on the Olympics. A bid from Innsbruck, Austria was torpedoed in a referendum last October. The 2026 bid cycle has also featured bids from Graubünden and Sion in Switzerland being ended by voters in referendums.
The last successful Olympic referendum came in 2013 when Oslo voters backed a 2022 Winter Games bid. However, the country dropped the bid midway through the process.
Vancouver 2010 passed a public referendum during its bid process, before winning the right to host the Olympics at the 2003 IOC Session.
The other two bidders for 2026, Milan-Cortina d'Ampezzo and Stockholm, do not face a public vote but neither has secured full government backing.
The IOC last week gave its approval for the joint Milan-Cortina bid to move forward without financial support from the Italian federal government, saying the current financial support from the regional governments involved in the bid was enough.
A new center-right government in the city of Stockholm has said it opposes the Olympic project, although Stockholm 2026 says it intends to convince them of the merits of the bid.
Note: Monetary figures in Canadian dollars
Written by Gerard Farek
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