Body checks and chequebooks: Who'll pay for Nordiques 2.0?

The Nordiques might return to Québec City, but commentators are calling offside on Harper and Charest's funding of a multi-million dollar arena.

Québec Premier Jean Charest has announced the province will chip in $175-million to build a new $400-million arena in Québec City in an attempt to lure back an NHL franchise. If this not-so-subtle photo-op is any indication, Stephen Harper is about to kick in some cash as well. So good news for hockey fans, right? Unless those fans also happen to pay taxes, according to the pundits.

Harper’s support for a new arena is “blatant chequebook politics,” according to the National Post’s Don Martin, an attempt to buy Québec votes that will end up “pitting West against East, fiscal prudence against profligacy, vote buying in Quebec against voter backlash everywhere else.” Martin speculates “this could be Mr. Harper’s CF-18 moment,” a nod to “that dark Prairie day in 1986” when Brian Mulroney relocated a jet fighter maintenance contract from Winnipeg to Montreal. The resulting political backlash spawned the Reform Party.

A Montreal Gazette editorial says given the amount of debt both the province and country are in, the “promise appears surreal, not to say insane.” Even if the arena is built there’s no guarantee the NHL will grant the city a franchise, and “taxpayers, at any level, will have little interest in buying a $400 million ticket in (NHL commissioner) Gary Bettman's win-an-NHL-team-someday-maybe lottery.” They do really, really want the Nordiques to come back though. They’re planning a les bleus march through the city on October 2.

If the Nordiques 2.0 do ever hit the ice, it will be after all the politicians currently throwing money at Québec are long gone. Charest and Harper “are spending $400 million to score points in what could very well be their last respective election campaigns,” says Philipe Gohier in Maclean’s, “for gains that will be temporary if they materialize at all.” Both would have to win at least one more election to be around once the arena’s finished, and given his massive unpopularity “it’s unlikely Charest could win power again even if he were running against Satan himself dressed up in a Maple Leafs jersey.”

Satan was last seen playing for the Boston Bruins.