Greed

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Today is January 23, 2005.

In the National Hockey League, 699 league games have been cancelled due to a player lockout. Everybody knows by now that the key to the dispute is cost certainty; the owners want to know how much running their clubs will cost them on an annual basis.

I find it interesting how many people side with the owners on this issue. Most couldn’t care less about the cost certainty or the morality of the owners’ position though – it’s about, “the players make too much. Screw them.” Simple human envy of millionaire hockey players is the source of the support that the club owners are publicly drawing upon. If you have any doubt about that, just read newspaper quotes anytime there is a labour dispute between any union and the establishment business here in Canada:

“Teachers? They’re soft. They get summers off. I don’t get summers off – they don’t deserve a raise.”

“Government workers? They don’t work at all. Why do they deserve a raise? I never got one.”

“GM workers? These guys have a grade 12 education – they are lucky to be employed. All they do is put stickers in doorframes for $30 an hour. Sign me up!”

Too many people refuse to wrap their mind around the idea that anybody should make more money than them – because surely, they are more deserving of that money themselves. Especially grown men playing a kid’s game, living out a dream that died for them ages ago.

Think about this: a few years ago, recognizing the fiscal plight of Canadian hockey clubs, the federal government came up with a plan to subsidize NHL teams across Canada in an effort to compete with American teams. See, at the time, the Canadian dollar was floundering by comparison to the U.S. greenback, two clubs had recently left their parent cities to start up again in the United States, and most of the remaining Canadian teams were barely solvent, publicly musing about moving themselves. The aid package for the six Canadian hockey teams amounted to about $20 million a year, total – about $3 million per club. $20 million; peanuts compared to what other programs cost, yet would have made a meaningful difference to the teams.

Predictably, the motion was a public relations disaster. The general public saw the funding as millions of public tax dollars as lining the pockets of rich hockey players and richer owners. In a stunning reversal, the plan was pulled off the table only 72 hours after it was proposed thanks to massive public outcry.

None of the critics of the plan thought about how much money an NHL team brings to a community. Selfishly, all they thought about was how much money hockey players earn, and how little they do by comparison. These guys are lucky to have their jobs, right? Why, some people would pay to play on an NHL team.

If a city is lucky enough to have an NHL hockey team, these are but a few of the benefits as a consequence of having it there:

Property tax dollars from having an arena in town.

Taxes gained from the owner of the team – millions of dollars going to the government that wouldn’t be there otherwise. Hell, in Ottawa, the city charged the Senators something like $88 million dollars to install a highway overpass to the arena location. Ask yourself: Is having all that money going into the system a good thing or bad?

The tax dollars from the NHL players. Literally hundreds of millions over time.

Peripheral businesses that inevitably spring up around hockey arenas. Restaurants, taverns, souvenir stores, housing complexes, shopping malls, for people spending money at all of them.

Jobs for people working at the arena, at all those places mentioned above.

Equipment sales. Pucks, sticks, jerseys. It might not be made in the same city where the team is, but do you think hockey pucks are made in Hong Kong? Hockey jerseys? It’s all in Canada somewhere, and people are making a living producing it.

In case you didn’t notice, the unifying theme throughout the above examples is that all of those things produce money for the government. Nobody likes paying taxes, sure – but indirectly, having an NHL club in a city is helping to cover things like the costs of hospitals, our children’s education, or new roads to drive on. In a big way. Millions of dollars that wouldn’t be there otherwise. And if people are paying taxes, that means they have jobs. Not just NHL players, but everyday people in the community. Nobody can argue that this is a bad thing. These jobs do not arrive at the expense of other ones.

Why doesn’t anybody complain when political parties pledge monetary support to businesses in Canada? Why isn’t there public outcry whenever a multi-million dollar grant is given to Bombardier in Quebec? Probably because that money appears to be going to the average Joe working at the plant. In terms of "worthiness", there is no distinction between Joe at the plant and a player at the rink. But in terms of the big picture, the player at the rink is actually providing far more to the country overall than the guy at the plant is. That's why players are given multi-million dollar salaries. They earn them, every penny.

So now - thousands of people are now laid off across Canada, entertainment spending is down, and sales of all kinds of hockey merchandise are down. The impact on entertainment spending is already tangible - Statistics Canada revealed information showing that entertainment spending alone in Canada is down $17 million per month as a direct consequence of the NHL lockout. Over the course of an approximate 9-month season, that's $153 million, gone. CBC is expected to lose $20 in profits as a consequence of a lost season...and even beer sales are down 3% over last year.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/sports/10662008.htm

Let's say there was no more hockey, ever: in order for the government to fund necessary programs, where do you think that shortfall of cash is going to come from? What about decreased spending in other, as-yet-undiscovered places?

This isn’t about supporting players over the owners. This isn't about me saying that hockey is part of our national fabric or any other sentimental argument.

We all suffer for the absense of NHL hockey, directly or indirectly, in the only place everyone can understand: in our bank accounts.