On a dark, dripping, dank, downcast January day, I am contemplating on the rich, the richer, and how the rich get richer still.

As I look up from my blue thoughts I see, on a postcard, a familiar and not unfriendly sight: the SkyDome! Not even this looming, massive concrete pile, or its gross grinning gargoyles, can cheer me up this drear’ January day: the Blue Jays’ spring training has yet to commence (in Florida, sigh!), that being my earliest herald to the end of an Ontarian winter.

And, dismally, the SkyDome is not even our “SkyDome” any more to cheer me up with now fading memories of ’93 & ’94. As fewer and fewer media super-jumbo-conglomerates – “media convergence” it’s called, until there won’t be a single independent newspaper or, indeed, thought without the permission of the editorial board at the Toronto Star or from the HQ at Rogers Corp. on its very own street in the city – come to own or control just about everything info-, media-, entertainment- and sport-wise, greyly, boringly, ‘safely’, creating rather an intellectual “Pottersville” (Cf., It’s a Wonderful Life) across Ontario. In this tightly controlled universe, SkyDome is now the “Rogers Centre”, privately owned.

But it wasn’t always.

SkyDome was what I would term a meta-project (“meta” from the ancient Greek for “halfway”). Recently (January 7), there was a fine John Bentley Mays obituary in The Globe and Mail for the SkyDome’s lead architect. Rod Robbie. Born in Poole, England, and Westminster-trained, he was one of that wave of intensively creative – even brilliant – people who emigrated here from the British Isles during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, until our immigration patterns and policies were hijacked by, amongst others, Pierre Trudeau.

Mr. Robbie collaborated on the Canadian Government Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, which is a little upside-down for my tastes; nevertheless, in Toronto, where Mr. Robbie set up his small office, he ran off with the prize of designing the SkyDome, with its signature, massive, eight-acre, innovative retractableroof, very much upsetting the Toronto elite and architectural establishment, who doubtless said it would never work! But it did; and, it still does, proudly. Mr. Robbie was quietly successful throughout his architectural career in Ontario and, afterward, he thoughtfully described SkyDome as a “secular cathedral.”

However, SkyDome’s fiscal story is a useful plank for supporting Bredin’s first (iron) economic law, especially when it comes to government spending and, further, getting (any) return for public investment, or taxpayers’ involvement. The three levels of government contributed $90 million to the 1985-estimated total cost (originally in the range of $150 million) for this multi-use stadium to be sited on the then-CNR Spadina Roundhouse. When completed in 1989 the final cost was approximately $570 million, or close $1 billion at today’s values. However, its opening, and the roof’s proper functioning, was a big event in Ontario. So big, in fact, the inevitable-andubiquitous Alan Thicke was brought in to perform an epic Sixth Act(!) of the SkyDome’s opening ceremonies.

The stadium proved almost immediately to be a financial “white-elephant”, $400 million in debt by 1993, and a sorry financial albatross for the hapless NDP government of the day. In 1994, the government paid off $250 million of SkyDome’s debt, and sold the stadium to Labatts (Interbrew). By 2004, the ever-richer Rogers Communications scooped up the “Dome” for a paltry $25 million.

And as it has gone in Ontario, so it goes, even up to today with this present Liberal Government’s wind turbine program. With public or provincial (or “state”) intervention, costs usually prove a minimum of three times what was originally estimated, or projected, and potential returns can quickly be diminishing ones, down even to notional or nominal values – if not sizeable losses – when government enters an industrial sector. It will prove thus with the wind turbines cluttering rural Ontario, especially as they’re now about to be sued down to their, seeming, concrete ‘launchpads’.

In an outstanding piece of letter-writing entitled “Good Intentions, but Bad Outcomes” (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 23) a private letter-writer, a Gerald

Ontario Cauthen, wrote: “’Massive

Matters investment subsidies failed (in

Buffalo/Western New York

State) because officials were illsuited to select the right projects and often instead gave money to favoured insiders.’” (This appears to have been close to the heart of the matter when the McGuinty Government squandered over $1 billion on eHealth false-starts and false-promises recently, for example, or ORNGE now, in Ontario).

Cauthen continued cogently: “This problem is not unique to Buffalo. All over the country money is being lavished on (ultra-expensive) ill-conceived projects promoted by influential insiders who are often in a position to personally benefit from the project. Such projects tend to have more to do with ‘bringing new money to town’ than solving the many ... infrastructure problems in need of attention.”

Government cannot “get it done” in either industry or manufacturing: even the Dufferin County Manufacturers Association (DCMA) has had to shut up shop, so to speak, so difficult, pressing, and down-and-dirty, are the prevailing economic conditions in Ontario, a “Great Recession” of sorts.

Mr. McGuinty is going to be caught like a nude guy going through a Tim Hortons “drivethru”, economically-speaking, if he hangs around at Queen’s Park too much longer, despite his bona fides as a ‘sincere’ “Friend-of- Suzuki” while, in Ontario, our workers – as a whole – need greatly the other Suzuki, Suzuki Automotive Corporation, to set up a manufacturing plant here.

I’ll give the final economic word herein to a worthy Scot, ’though he wrote prior to the invention of the ‘science’ of economics, but “a man's a man for a’ that.” In his original and outstanding work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the great Scots thinker and professor of moral philosophy, Adam Smith, reflected on how gross, misdirected, profligate, spendthrift public ‘leadership’ – he had in mind particularly the ill-governing of Louis XIV, known as the “Sun King”, in France – can bring polities (or provinces) to the very brink of financial ruination. Smith wrote: “(N)ations are never impoverished by private (enterprises), though they sometimes are by public prodigality....”

The Republic of Ireland, Greece, Italy ... Ontario: not too terribly select economic company these intensely economically-riven days.

However, this is where our “Wind King”, Premier McGuinty, has delivered us.