A very proper Auditor General

Much of the press coverage about the Auditor General's report on the Lansdowne redevelopment scheme has been highly misleading.

In his report delivered June 17, the City Auditor General was very clear that he had a tightly defined mandate. Put simply, he took the figures provided by the proponents of the project, he accepted their hypotheses about flows of funds, and verified that the numbers could produce the results the proponents claimed. Stated more bluntly, he checked the arithmetic and but was not allowed to question whether the calculations made any sense.

Quoting directly from the AG's report -- "The audit scope was limited to an assessment of the financial information contained in the LPP proposal. The audit did not include generating independent figures, nor was it intended to provide an opinion on the development itself. As such, it does not represent an evaluation of the merits of the underlying concepts for re-development of the Lansdowne Park site as presented in the LPP proposal (e.g., a private-sector partnership, revenue neutrality, the use of property taxes, the optimal site for a stadium, etc.)."

By contrast, we have seen all sorts of press statements such as 24hours which ran the headline "makes sense" with the sub-head "City's AG gives thumbs up to Lansdowne partnership".

The reality of what our cautious City Auditor General said is quite different from the unrestrained boosterism of the local media.