James Moore

The memory legacies are obviously good.

The sporting legacies are important and all that.

The economic bump is good, but it's typically overstated and it kind of comes and goes, but whatever.

But one of the things that it did for the city of Calgary is that it separated the winners from the whiners.

It brought to the surface the people who had a can-do attitude, and we can host the world, and we can do something big and make not only Calgary and Alberta, but make the country proud.

It can bring us together and show that we can do good, big things.

And boy, did Vancouver need that in 2010.

Coming out of Expo 86, we had a sag, bad economy, all that.

And then we needed the shot in the arm.

And Vancouver has lived off that pride for a long time.

And the country got a real shot in the arm.

So people said, there's a political, and there are people in the Mulroney government who said that the 88 Olympics were probably worth about three or four, maybe five points in the polls nationally as a consequence of people feeling good about the country.

I don't know what the politics that was for 2011 was for Harper and 10 and all that.

But for sure, coming out of the global recession, 2010 was really important for the country and the city of Vancouver.

Will that be the same thing with Montreal Canadians?

I don't know, but it feels pretty damn good, I think, for Montrealers to come to at a time when politics is, you know, we're going into a provincial campaign, very divisive, Trump, all that, to have people come together and to put on La Shandai, to paddle on the Zabitown, to paddle on the Cananzian, to talk about hockey and all that.

It's a brilliant distraction from a lot of really ugly, sticky stuff out there.

Albertans have rightly complained that their place in Confederation has been challenged by the disorder and the messiness of Confederation itself, by the nature of the structure of our constitution, that they want to get their products to global markets, that their voice isn't heard in Ottawa.

And there's lots of uncertainty.

You know, why is it that a province of 900,000 people has 10 senators in New Brunswick and