ABSTRACT
The capitalist sports-media complex is heavily subsidized in many countries. Teams, leagues and their corporate partners enjoy state-donated land and stadia, favourable tax rates, legislative and judicial relief from antitrust requirements, the player and fan development systems of state-supported playgrounds, schools, colleges and universities, and the legitimation of public ceremonies. They claim these benefits on the basis of the economic spin-offs they generate and the ‘branding’ of cities and regions they headline. But in an earlier political tradition these expectations were reversed. Both sports entrepreneurs and professional athletes were expected to contribute financially to the development of amateur and community sport, on the grounds that it is these programmes that train the players and educate the fans on which capitalist sport depends. One such example was the tax on professional sport levied during the interwar years by the Ontario Athletic Commission (OAC), the subject of this paper. The OAC was the very first state sports body in Canada, and in many ways it set the mould for the state-directed and state-financed programmes of the federal and provincial governments today, although the tax on professional sports no longer exists. The paper was written in 1994, while I was still a member of the board of the publicly owned Stadium Corporation of Ontario, which operated Toronto’s SkyDome.
