7 hotels in the downtown core providing accommodation

So cool, now the rest of Canada can see the success of our downtown revitalization. Athletes will be able to rub shoulders with the denizens of the streets and alleys.

Maybe not. Maybe there will be another initiative similar to Vancouver's of relocating, masking, and excessive security.

AND the spending begins. Millions of dollars of HARD EARNED tax payer/home owner money going towards sports. What about the poor, seniors and students that are struggling on an everyday bases just to keep a roof over their heads and food on the plate. This is so wrong on so many levels in a TIME OF UNCERTAINTY.

People we really need to reign in all level of governments and their spending sprees and soon.

Read in the paper they would be replacing the "fancy" queen size beds with bunk beds. Never heard a queen bed called "fancy" before.
Stay classy PG!

The Canada Games will be incredible.

They are 100% coming to PG so you can sit back and think about, and make up, all the things that you think could be bad about them or you can contribute and make them the best thing that ever happened to this town.

It's too bad some choose to see negative in everything.

12 million dollars from the city, hey that means out of your and my pockets... i don't want to pay for this crap....
I knew the only people who would gain from this would be hotels, cafes, and the venue areas...

You mean like the theoretical benefits supposedly derived from the owelypics?

Who benefited besides the government members, large corporations, and political donors?

Still waiting for that cheque.

I certainly cannot afford an event ticket and am to old to compete. I am an employee, not a business owner. Tell me again about those benefits. Please, in specific detail outline what benefits I will receive other than higher contributions from my pay and on the products I buy.

Now don't get me wrong. I support amateur sports. I believe they are very important for the physical, mental, and social development of our youth. In fact I believe they could be instrumental in curbing some of our youth risk issues. But really, these games are not and have not been about the athletes for more than a generation.

I have seen these things come and go for years. Still waiting for the benefits to kick in.

The only thing left operating in this town are hotels, cafes and venues areas. The forest industry has had its bailout. Time for tourism and service-oriented business to get their chance.

So I've never really understood how this big event money works. They say the economic impact is 70 to 90 million and no games have ever lost money. Okay, so who get's the let's say 80 mil and where does it come from?

Are what they're really talking about is 80 mil get's spent on hotels, meals, gas, event tickets, t-shirts and other crap. If so, that's gross revenue. That mean's that money will be going to businesses some local and some multinational corps that sell out of here. So not all of it stays here.

And how much of this gross revenue actually comes from elsewhere and how much of it is people who live here spending money on the games. Which means if you deduct what they would have spent, maybe you lose money because if they hadn't of spent it on the games, they would have probably spent it on something else in town.

And how is this profit calculated. It seems to me these games success rely heavily on volunteer labor. So does it really kind of go like this: ticket and souvenir sales minus event costs equals how the city gets it's money back. So if you factor into those event costs, the value of volunteer labour, do we really make money?

Truth might be, is at the end of the day they'll tell the taxpayer they got all his money back, but the only reason they got his money back, is the taxpayer volunteered to help out for free.

It's kind of like your neighbor accidentally knocks down your fence with his tractor, and then next spring shows up with the lumber to rebuild it but you have to help. He then expects you to thank him for the new fence you got cause after all, it didn't cost you anything. Seems the fact I had to help build it, means I paid for it.

I really wonder what motivates politicians to chase these events. Seems to me potholes that should've got filled don't, and stuff that no one asked to be built does. Is it some kind of big ego trip. I'll probably go to my grave never knowing the answer but having the privilege of having paid for some other man/woman's vanity.

Lotta French on that "sticker". Maybe someone put the wrong side out. Lotta French people gonna come? Jest wunderin', mes ami.

Here's hoping that our nation's "bedbug" infestation will bypass us. Delouse every visitor at the airport and city limits? Hmmm?

All I can say about this is that PG has never not once recieved good media coverage in the rest of Canada. The good stories from here are never covered in the national media. All that is ever covered is the most heinous of stories that offend everyone's sensibilities and happen in all other parts of Canada, but its all that is news worthy out of this region it seems.

My hope, is that if we are going to have these games, and pay for them, that at least we might get some good PR out of the national media and begin changing PG's image. Its the best we can hope for and should be the focus IMO.

Look what a city like Calgary or Kelowna did with their image... and rode on it for a lot of what I would consider unwarranted growth based purely on hype. We don't need to go that far, even though we do have far better natural potential then they do (save for our dismal political elites), but to see some balance and our share of good news stories would be nice to see.