ABSTRACT
In the mid-1980s, the Ontario government partnered with some of the most powerful corporations in Ontario to build a stadium for Major League Baseball (MLB) and the Canadian Football League. I opposed the creation of the SkyDome (so named because of its retractable roof) on the grounds that corporate sport did not need public subsidy and that a publicly enabled showcase for men’s-only sport would further the marginalization of women. Then in 1990, with a change in government, I was appointed to the stadium board with instructions to limit or end the public financial risk from the facility. ‘Sometimes poachers make the best gamekeepers’, said Ontario treasurer Floyd Laughren. During the next four years, working closely with labour leader Bob White and others, I helped sell off the stadium to the corporate interests that most benefited from it, while contributing to its management. It was a heady time: the negotiations for the sale were constantly in the media spotlight, and in 1992 and 1993, the stadium’s principal tenant, the Toronto Blue Jays baseball club, won back-to-back MLB championships. I learned a lot that subsequently stood me in good stead when I became responsible for the management of the University of Toronto’s athletic facilities. This chapter, written in 1994, places the development and sale of the SkyDome in the history of Toronto urban development and North American commercial sport and shares the thinking that led us to initiate and complete the sale. To the best of my knowledge, it constitutes the only time in North America when a money-losing, publicly subsidized facility has ever been sold to the corporations that use it.
