My heart sank last month when it was revealed the head of the agency that awards world fairs was in town at the invitation of Mayor John Tory.

Vicente Loscertales, secretary general of the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), was in Toronto to discuss whether this city should host the World Fair in 2025.

I groaned because it brought back horrid memories I’ve tried to suppress. I covered two bids for Expos for this city. We came second to Lisbon to host a smaller Expo in 1998 and lost to Hanover for the 2000 World Fair.

I came away from both those bids shaking my head at the convoluted system for awarding expos. There’s a reason why Canada withdrew from the BIE. Quite apart from the $25,000 we saved, the one-country-one-ballot voting system is totally skewed towards Europe. They control everything.

North America gets three votes — Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. The European Union countries, while a union, still enjoy one vote per nation, and can freeze out the whole of North America with their voting strength.

The U.S. is also not part of the BIE.

And the bidding process is expensive. There are BIE bigwigs to wine and dine. There are civil servants, bureaucrats, politicians and assorted hangers-on at all three political levels who will perk up and take great interest in the bidding process.

Why? Because they get all-expense paid trips to Paris on the public dime.

The Champs Elysees will spill over with Canadian pork-troughers all claiming to be essential to the bid.

A 2014 City of Toronto report noted that just submitting a bid would cost between $10 million and $15 million.

“The costs to bid, while not nearly as expensive as a Summer Olympics, are still significant with a degree of uncertainty of success,” a report prepared by Ernst and Young said.

If the bid’s successful, the report says the net cost to host the 2025 World Expo is in the range of $1 billion to $3 billion, spread over three levels of government.

Two Canadian cities have hosted World Expos in the past 47 years — Montreal in 1967 and Vancouver in 1986.

While the report says major infrastructure was built as a result, I question the value of building for an Expo. If we really need new transit, parks and public spaces, let’s not be dictated to by an off-shore organization. Let’s choose for ourselves where to build and what transit we need.

I visited the Montreal Expo. Apart from Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome that was the U.S. pavilion and is now the Montreal Biosphere, what I remember most was catching a glimpse of Jackie Kennedy.

If Tory and other city councillors are convinced that Toronto needs an Expo, he should get a commitment upfront from the BIE that this will be a transparent process.

And I’m waiting for the first person to say we need an Expo to prove we’re a “World Class City” — whatever that is. Toronto has all the class we need. We’re first class. We don’t need to go beret in hand to Paris to be told that.

If BIE wants us to host a fair, we’ll consider their offer.

If we’re going to be used and abused by jet-setting flunkies in yet another failed wild goose chase, then we should say, “Thanks, but no.”

christina.blizzard@sumedia.ca