Alberta’s Minister Responsible for Tourism and Sport, Joseph Schow, stated that hosting the Games wouldn’t be advantageous for Alberta’s taxpayers.
Canada’s Alberta province won’t try to host the 2030 Commonwealth Games. This means the chance to bring this big sports event to Canada again is gone. The person in charge of tourism and sports, Joseph Schow, said the Games usually have around 4,000 athletes from 54 Commonwealth countries. But he thinks hosting the Games wouldn’t be what the people in Alberta want. It wouldn’t match what the taxpayers in Alberta want.
Schow revealed that the estimated cost of hosting the event could be as high as CAN$2.68 billion (US$2.01 billion), and the financial burden would mostly fall on taxpayers due to limited broadcast revenues and corporate sponsorships.
The government’s choice shows that they want to be open and make sure that the money they spend benefits the people and communities of Alberta. They decided this because another place, Victoria in Australia, gave up trying to organize the 2026 Commonwealth Games because it was getting too expensive.
In Canada, there’s a group called Commonwealth Sport Canada. They’re the ones who handle getting Canadian teams ready for the Commonwealth Games. They were looking into whether it’s possible for Alberta to put in a bid to host the Games. But it seems that Alberta might not be so interested anymore. This could be because Victoria, another place in Canada, decided not to host the Games in 2026. This might have affected Alberta’s choice.
Canada has organized the Commonwealth Games four times before. The most recent one happened in 2022 in Birmingham, not in Durban, South Africa. Durban couldn’t host it because they didn’t meet deadlines and had money problems.
But now, because Alberta has decided not to be part of the competition to host the 2030 Commonwealth Games, the plans to have the Games in Canada in 2030 are on pause for now.