Almost 30 years after Bread Not Circuses, Bay St. is getting behind Toronto’s latest anti-Olympic movement.

Ahead of a potential bid, opponents are gathering under the banner NoTO2024. For many of the group’s core leadership, it’s their first time carrying a banner.

“There’s no full-time activists or anything on this. There’s no professional protester here, this is just, you know, taxpayers and citizens,” said David Wilson, who directs operations for the group.

Wilson, who works in finance (for what he calls a large downtown institution, but declined to offer a name), is one of a dozen volunteers, by his estimate, currently working daily to get the group going and spread their message.

They range from “Bay Street professionals to social welfare advocates to retirees,” he said. “It’s a mix of everybody.”

The big tent approach is a departure from the city’s past anti-Olympic movements.

The Bread Not Circuses Coalition, started in 1988 to oppose Toronto’s bid for the 1996 Summer Games, was led by union leaders, human-rights lawyers, and activists.

They celebrated the failed bid in the Regent Park living room of leader and affordable housing advocate Michael Shapcott.

Then-city councillor Jack Layton also had ties to the group.

“If to win you need a socially irresponsible bid, then perhaps it’s better to lose,” Layton told Royson James after Toronto lost to Atlanta in a 1990 vote.

This time around the opposition is less about social justice, and more about sound business practices.

“It’s not the same argument as 1996,” Wilson said. “We’ve got 20 more years of proof that the Olympics don’t make sense. This is a business deal that’s a bad deal for the cities.”

The group argues that the costs will outweigh the benefits to the city, onerous contracts will leave taxpayers on the hook for any overruns, and the process is being held behind closed doors.

“It’s not a left-right issue. It’s a transparency issue,” he said. “(Council) voted no on this and all of a sudden this is slipping in through the back door. The entire thing is being run in the best interest of bid promoters and not in the best interest of Torontonians.”

The Games would do little for the city’s needs, according to the group.

“It’s right in the contract that not a single penny of Olympic revenue is allowed to be spent on infrastructure,” he said, citing Beijing’s contract for the 2022 Winter Games.

“We shouldn’t be held hostage by saying you can only get money for subways if you host an Olympic Games.”

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Though the current leadership for NoTO2024 doesn’t include vocal anti-Olympics organizers of the past, they are coming into the fold.

Academic Helen Lenskyj counts herself as a Bread Not Circuses activist. She has joined anti-Olympic movements from Toronto to Boston to Vancouver since 1998, and is mobilized for this fight.

For her the social-justice issues still resonate, but the purely economic argument has been gaining steam across the globe, according the researcher and former University of Toronto professor.

Questions started in the early 2000s, she said, and spiked when the budget for Sochi (a record $51 billion in U.S. dollars) was revealed.

“When you see very conservative business sources coming out with these recommendations like ‘Don’t touch the Olympics with a 10-foot pole,’ you know that it’s not the sort of golden egg that it used to be, or that it was perceived to be in the past,” Lenskyj told the Star.

For his part, Mayor John Tory still has not made any decisions about Toronto’s bid ahead of the Sept. 15 deadline to declare interest.

The mayor’s office echoed comments made earlier this week when asked about the progress.

“Toronto just finished hosting the Pan Am and Parapan Am Games, the largest sporting event in Canadian history. We are now in the process of analyzing how the Games went, collecting information on the Olympic bid process, and consulting members of Council, the business community, the public and both levels of government.”

Ultimately a broad base of support is better for a strong opposition, Lenskyj said.

“We had several influential business people who were extremely supportive who moved in their own circles to join in solidarity with the sort of more radical lefties amongst us,” she said.

“Some situations create strange bedfellows.”