Blue Jays fans watch the second game of the ALCS at a Toronto bar.Duane Cole/The Globe and Mail
As the Blue Jays prepare for their World Series matchup, bars and hotels in Toronto are preparing for a deluge of customers that will juice the local economy in a major way.
Whether that translates into a lift for Canada’s struggling broader economy, however, is another question.
Even though Canada has a $3.1-trillion economy, sporting events can occasionally move the needle on growth. By looking at the subsector of performing arts, spectator sports and related industries published by Statistics Canada, spikes and valleys emerge in the monthly numbers that were driven by big events.
It’s just that, for the most part, they reflect Canada’s winter pastime, hockey.
When multiple Canadian teams make the NHL playoffs, there is often a jump in that industry’s gross domestic product as additional games are played to packed arenas. Likewise, hockey league lockouts and the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, for which NHL games were paused, led to declines.
Statscan’s industry GDP numbers only go back to the late 1990s, so there isn’t a way to tell if the back-to-back Blue Jays championships in 1992 and 1993 left their mark.
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In October, 2022, Statscan credited a monthly increase in the subsector’s GDP to the Jays’ postseason, in which the team played and lost the American League Wild Card series against the Mariners. But that increase was still relatively small. Likewise, the 2019 NBA championship victory by the Toronto Raptors barely registered.
These numbers only capture the money fans spend attending events, and not what they lay out at bars and restaurants.
But when tallying up the economic payoff from big events like the Blue Jays’ spectacular run, the increased costs of policing and security – no small sum in Toronto’s congested downtown during the games – also need to be taken into account.
Even when there’s a jump in economic activity from sports, it mostly gets washed out by the rest of the economy. The whole sector accounts for just 0.4 per cent of total industry GDP.
Decoder is a weekly feature that unpacks an important economic chart.