Grand Prix: the big winner of public money

La Presse has done some good work on how big festivities are sustained with public money, and finds that the biggest winner by far is the Grand Prix, which gets almost as much of a public handout as the city’s seventeen top festivals combined. Paul Journet also reports that while in 2010 the GP’s economic spinoffs were estimated at $100 million, by 2015 this was halved to $48 million. The question of the city’s international profile, he admits, is hard to quantify.