The new Nordiques: just say "non"

Just about everyone who isn't a scorned Quebec City hockey fan says it would be a waste of money for the Conservative government to contribute $180-million to a new arena to bring back the Nordiques.

Rumour has it that Stephen Harper is getting ready to shell out up to $180 million dollars for a hockey arena in Québec City to lure back the NHL’s beloved Nordiques. Now, he hasn’t actually committed the money yet, but that hasn’t stopped the nation’s pundits (none of whom are big hockey fans apparently) from warning him that this is a very, very bad idea.

The optics are very bad for a government looking “to rein in the deficit, and philosophically resistant to federal intrusions into areas best left to other levels of government, or the private sector,” says a Globe and Mail editorial. Given that Regina, Edmonton, and Hamilton have all been refused federal money for new sports facilities, “(w)hatever the gains in Quebec, the Conservative government would pay dearly for ignoring these cities.”

Harper has left the door wide open for Michael Ignatieff to crush him in the next election, according to Kelly McParland in the National Post. The “Tory base has finally reached the limits of its willingness to hold its nose and compromise” after “Ottawa poured money into central Toronto” for the G20 summits, and followed it up with “excessive spending on signs to ensure every single penny spent on stimulus is matched by a penny spent glorifying the government for spending it.”

Building an arena before the NHL has committed to brining a team to Québec is folly, says the Post’s Scott Stinson. “‘Build a stadium and they will come’ is just not how these things work,” he writes, and cities with expensive facilities are “flirted with like drunk teens on prom night” by the NHL, which pits aspiring expansion cities against each other to win concessions.

The “Conservatives have manoeuvred themselves into a lose-lose position,” says Chantal Hébert in the Toronto Star, because is Québec so hockey-crazy that if he balks at funding the arena now “he will almost certainly lose some or all of his five Quebec-area seats in the next election.” And if he does fund it, the formerly fiscally responsible prime minster “will be financing a monument to his conversion to pork-barrel politics.”