Cities Claim They Can't Act Quickly. Until FIFA Comes Calling Cities Claim They Can't Act Quickly. Until FIFA Comes Calling

Opinion
Residents get excuses for inaction. Powerful outside interests get speedy changes.
Steve Lorteau
16 Jun 2026
16 Jun 2026The Conversation
Steve Lorteau is a long-term appointment law professor at L'Université d'Ottawa/University of Ottawa. This article was originally published in the Conversation.
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Residents get excuses for inaction. Powerful outside interests get speedy changes. … Article written by Steve Lorteau.
As the 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off, millions of soccer fans around the world are following the tournament taking place across 16 host cities in Canada, Mexico and the United States.
Like other mega sporting events, the World Cup requires major public investment and regulatory changes. To meet FIFA's requirements, Toronto, Vancouver and other North American cities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars, suspended bylaws and reorganized infrastructure to stage just a handful of matches each.
Municipal governments are often slow to act on changes residents demand. However, hosting mega-events like the World Cup reveals that it is not always financial and legal constraints that cause municipal inaction, and that the reasons cities routinely cite are often political choices.
It turns out that when municipal governments want to act, they can move quickly.
Bylaw changes for FIFA
Hosting the World Cup is expensive. Toronto has committed $178.6 million, while Vancouver has committed more than $320 million. Both figures come directly from municipal budgets.
Across all levels of Canadian government, public spending works out to over $1 billion, or roughly $82 million per match. These figures, of course, do not include potential cost overruns.
These financial commitments are matched by sweeping bylaw changes.
Toronto city council has authorized temporary exemptions to its plastic water bottle ban, and extended permitted noise hours at Nathan Phillips Square. Vancouver passed a special World Cup bylaw to streamline approvals for temporary structures like tents and shipping containers.
In both cities, municipal bylaw officers will enforce FIFA's commercial trademark protections, including the temporary renaming of BMO Field as Toronto Stadium.
None of this means that hosting the World Cup is inherently problematic. The stated rationale for these changes, be it tourism, public safety or cultural prestige, reflects legitimate civic goals. Attending the World Cup is a dream for many soccer fans and a draw for many local businesses.
The tangible economic benefits, however, tend to be overhyped. The 2015 Women's World Cup, co-hosted by six Canadian cities, did boost national interest in women's soccer. But a post-event economic analysis found that it largely reshuffled existing tourism spending rather than generating substantial new activity.
Political choices
Whether the trade-offs cities make are ultimately worthwhile is for voters to decide. Still, the host cities' displays of governance agility stand in sharp contrast to the usual rhetoric that municipalities cannot address other civic needs with comparable urgency.
Municipalities regularly cite budgetary constraints and limited legal powers as reasons for failing to act on pressing societal problems.
For years, Toronto has pointed to its budgetary and legal constraints to justify its inability to build shelters or expand its transit network. Yet to satisfy FIFA's demands, city hall found the political will to draw millions from city coffers and temporarily reverse its own environmental bylaws.
Vancouver exemplifies the same pattern. City leaders have long cited a $500-million annual infrastructure deficit to justify scaling back its response to the housing and opioid crises. Yet to satisfy FIFA's demands, Vancouver partnered with the provincial government to introduce a special 2.5 per cent hotel tax hike, projected to g...