Montreal City Weblog

Kate 10:16 on 2021-03-30 Permalink Reply  

• Kevin 12:21 on 2021-03-30 Permalink

  La Presse had an article earlier this week (link buried in the above) estimating that the best case in tax revenue for Quebec from a baseball team would be around $4.25 million (and about the same for the Feds). It could easily be nothing.

  That estimate is based on the assumption that players were taxed for the days they lived here during a season split between Mtl and Florida, which in turn is based on the assumption that players would not take advantage of Retirement Compensation Arrangements (conventions de retraite) which is like an RRSP* for super-rich people so they can take their money and run off to a tax haven when their short sports career ends.

  *A player can put millions of dollars in it each year, cutting their income tax by hundreds of thousands annually. As far I can tell, players for a team split between countries could put their entire Canadian-based income in this shelter and pay $0 in Canadian income tax.

• Spi 13:36 on 2021-03-30 Permalink

  @kevin you should specify that $4.25M figure is only for income tax on player salaries. It does not include the income tax for all the related staff, nor business taxes for related entities. It also doesn’t include sales taxes on ticket or concesion sales.

  So to say that $4.25M is the best-case scenario for all tax revenues is very far from the truth.

• Kevin 14:12 on 2021-03-30 Permalink

  @spi
  2 quibbles: Last week Legault was taking about how the government could spend income tax revenue from players on other matters. So we’ve demonstrate the amount is pretty damn low.

  Secondly, the spinoff income from everything else you mentioned is fairly plastic — people who are going to spend money on entertainment will spend it on the entertainment is available. So if there is no baseball team, that money will be spent on other sporting activities, or movies,or videogames, or bars,or restaurants. A sports team doesn’t create new spending in any fashion – it just takes a little bit from everything else and collects it into a pile which is often hoovered out of the community.

  To put it in other terms — Think of what Quebec City could have done with $400 million instead of building a hockey rink.

• Spi 15:50 on 2021-03-30 Permalink

  @Kevin, I usually disagree with pretty much everything Legault has to say but he was using the player salary as an example to demonstrate a point.

  Your second point fails to look beyond local concerns, I’ll give you the business case that was floated by the promoters of the baseball team years ago when it was being discussed more seriously. The idea was that a team in Montreal combined with an often discussed realignment of the NL and AL into more regional divisions would see Montreal in the same division as some of the biggest teams in baseball like the Jays, Red Sox, Mets, Yankees. The rationale being that (when borders reopen) it would be a significant draw to bring American tourists here and their entertainment-related spending, which practically speaking is new spending that wouldn’t happen.

  Whether you buy with the image they are trying to sell us is up to you, a new sports team doesn’t generate more spending it only displaces it from elsewhere. In this case, they would say from south of the border