And meanwhile, in Ottawa, where Senators owner Eugene Melnyk promised last year that he’d build a new arena and surrounding development with “no government money” … you know where the rest of this sentence is going already, don’t you?
Mayor Jim Watson isn’t ruling out investing public money into a downtown NHL arena at LeBreton Flats.
“I don’t know if they’re going to come forward and ask for any of those dollars,” the mayor told reporters after Wednesday’s council meeting. “Certainly I want to make sure that whatever happens there is to the benefit of the taxpayers of Ottawa.”…
While the mayor repeated that he wasn’t going “to speculate on something that hasn’t been asked,” it is the first time he has seemed open to the possibility of putting taxpayers money into the arena.
“My bottom line is, whatever is being asked from us, does it make sense and is there a return on our investment whether it be through property or development charges or the increased market value assessment of the property,” Watson said.
Yeah, you know, if you don’t want to speculate about something that hasn’t been asked, maybe openly speculating about it isn’t the best way to go about it. To be fair, Watson was probably asked about this by a reporter, and felt like he had to say something, and so he improvised a line about “return on investment” based on something he vaguely remembered Naheed Nenshi saying, and it ended up as a headline. So cut Mayor Paralipsis a break, okay? This whole talking-while-governing thing is hard.