Interesting.

Can I take this in a slightly different direction, though? Because I want to push back a bit.

We've been talking about education only for workforce.

And the problem is, is that we need my, I have two jobs.

As I see it, there's a workforce component.

Yes.

I need to get you ready for workforce, but I also need to get you ready to be a good citizen.

So Wayne, how would you like to end?

To what extent are those things being reflected in the decreased numbers as opposed to a travel boycott? Yeah.

Well, I want to put this in two levels.

One is tourism in its heart is a safety and security industry.

People need to feel that they're safe and secure in the places that they're going to.

So when we're talking about this, when I go down the states, are they going to check my phone? Am I going to run into ICE? What issues could I come up with there? Further, you also have the security.

And when I think about security, would you go to a business that totally disagreed with your personal politics, right? So do you go to a business and then you add in on top of it, you know, oh, I'm going to have to pay 35 cents more on every dollar.

In the U.S., if you looked at the average daily rate for hotel rooms have been up significantly, right? You know, travel to the US has gotten really, really expensive right now.

Do you think this economic pain from Canadians not going down there could have an influence on trade negotiations?

W- where do businesses like those two that we heard from fit into the overall trends in tourism?

Well, we're seeing this overall.

People love their devices, but they love even more to get away from them.

And, you know, everyone want, needs to touch grass every now and then, and I think that's what they're seeing.

They're seeing there is an innate desire to get away from the technology, to get away from, you know, constantly being connected, to be able to go and actually disconnect yourself and see a Canada within nature, within the spirituality side of it, to explore this wonderful country.

And it's one of the things that's really fabulous about it.

It's that people do wanna be out, and it's driving the tourism past Toronto and Vancouver.

Who is able to travel in this economy?

Why are they becoming so much harder to maintain? Because a lot of them, I guess, are in danger because of the rage and repair costs.

Well, it's one of those things.

How much value do you put on art? So in a community, when you're looking at this as an economic thing as opposed to a community pride thing, The cost starts becoming low.

You start looking at it and go, oh, this has cost me tens of thousands of dollars a year to maintain.

We're not going to get an direct return on investment, so therefore, why are we doing it, right? So it's just a matter of how you look at it.

And I understand that I'm a business professor.

I understand the business side of it, but I also like the art side of it.

You know, Wayne, I guess in this age of social media, I mean, they do have a certain amount of attraction for people to pull over and stop because everyone wants to take that Instagram photo, right? I got

So in that regard it was back to normal, but that's just one thing in one city over a weekend.

weekend.Yeah, and like you said, the, the auto travel, you know, was up, you know, 15% in May.

So you're talking, yeah, that's... it's a pretty reasonable thing.

People are gonna drive over the border, spend a day.

But that's also return to normalization.

I think what you're seeing is you're, you know, the baseline is still down about 25% from, like, the years previous.

So if we looked at versus 2024, you're still down 20, between 25 and 30% of tourism.

I see.

What's the sentiment in Toronto around these types of issues leading into the World Cup?

This is the real challenge with the World Cup.

Like, Toronto is budgeted $380 million, which is a big chunk of change, right? And they keep moving that amount around a little bit.

But the idea of this is that at the end, you know, when we held the Pan Am Games, which is a much smaller event, you got all the recreational facilities kind of upgraded.

You got the fact is that, you know, a bunch of the transit got upgraded for the Pan Am Games for the World Cup.

I don't know what is the legacy aspect of it.

So that has not been sort of spoken about really in a lot of ways there's a marketing element but even the tourism element this is where you know toronto would have had pride which is one of its biggest events it would have had the jays and the yankees in town which would almost sell the city anyway and then you get the fact is that you have july 1st which is normally a big time tourism thing so you're talking you're going to go from 82 occupancy to maybe 86 87 and then a slightly higher price But are you taking people who would come every year for Pride, every year for the Yankees and Jays? Are you pricing them out of the market and saying, oh, they're going to think next year, oh, Toronto's too expensive because last year was too expensive for me.

But what's it like in Toronto? Yeah.

Mm.

So you have 4% difference plus the, plus the price increase.

So that's really what the economic impact is on an immediate scale.

Now, if this was like a Taylor Swift event where it happened in November, where it was...

Or December in, um, Vancouver, where it was off-season, those rooms wouldn't be filled anyway.

The economic impact for the cities would've been that much higher as a result.

So this c- this gets me into the second part of this, is that, okay, are we looking at this as a short-term thing where we're gonna get immediate return, or are we looking at it like the Vancouver Olympics did, where almost for every year post-Olympics they had a big, they had a bigger boom in tourism till COVID hit? So there was a long-term effect of it, and it depends if you think how much soft power is worth.

Wayne, the former mayor of Toronto, John Tory, who negotiated the agreement for the city of Toronto, has taken a lot of criticism, um, was asked about this and he said, "I think it's gonna be a good investment and we should all get over ourselves and make this thing a big success." Do we need to get over ourselves and not talk about the money?

But it becomes pretty problematic when the default is give me money versus I'm going to work hard to earn a little extra from you, you know?

Well, the thing about it is there's a couple of things that make it really weird.

One is okay.

If I'm working at waffle house versus I'm working at the keg, is the work really that different? So I'm bringing out food to a table.

I'm taking the order.

I'm doing everything very similarly.

Right.

And then do you tip on the 20 bucks or do you tip on the 120 bucks? Some people don't agree with that.

Mm-hmm.

What you gotta look for is this is an opportunity to build a brand that's global.

So for example, you saw in Vancouver after the Olympics, there was a almost about a 10-year span where people were coming because of what they saw at the Olympics.

It, that just gets really, really hard to measure because five years from now, you may have seen Vancouver on the World Cup, but, and you thought, you put that on your bucket list, and this is a place I'd really like to go, but, you know, five years from now you're like, "Oh, I wanna go to Vancouver." You didn't know why the World Cup triggered you to go to Vancouver.

But is this a net benefit in your mind, or just a mistake, the $700 million we're probably going to spend on this in total?

The thing about the World Cup is, is that it's usually probably not the best event to host for a city.

Montreal probably made a wise choice in that case.

However, it's part of being a major world player.

I mean, where does Canada's tipping history really begin?

Tipping has a really kinda odious history.

It actually goes back to the Southern US and Reconstruction.

So after the Civil War, the slaves were released, and they were trying to find jobs off the farms.

Well, n-none of the white owners w- actually wanted to pay them.

So they came up with this thing called tipping.

So what was happening is, for years and years and years, tipping became a way for business owners to not pay minority staff.

I mean, what's the argument here? It, is, is, the, is the customer substi-subsidizing wages so that employers don't have to pay more? Like, what's our solution here? What do you think?

And they're seeing that in Cuba as well, because times are getting even more difficult for those people.

Well, and the thing about it is, is Cuba in particular is a very cash based economy.

So when you're going down there, make sure there's a couple of things.

I always tell tourists, if you're going to Cuba one, make sure you have some us dollars in euros, but get small bills.

Don't carry around big bills, stuff like that.

Second thing makes sure like everyone takes a picture of their passport on their phone, but take a photocopy of it.

So there's a brownouts and you're getting lots of power outage, or if your phone gets stolen, you have a. copy of your passport.

Like it wasn't expensive.

Hmm.

And different people have different levels of safety threshold, right? So some people will walk down a certain street and think, "Oh, this is perfectly fine." And some people say, "Oh, I don't want to go down that street because it's dangerous." You know? So some people look at, you know, for example, crossing the border, if they have a threshold and then they're worried about, you know, going to secondary inspection and all those thing, or worried about the ICE, or worried about the, not following all the rules, the new rules about staying more than 30 days and getting the fingerprinting and stuff like that.

You know, different people will have very different thresholds, and you're seeing that right now.

Hmm

... all of a sudden, all those taxes that they're getting from the accommodations tax, the food preparation tax, the, the different taxes, the admissions taxes, all those revenues, the sales taxes in Buffalo, for example, would be another one.

They take a p- big portion of that to help run those vis- those cities.

So the US tax system is different than the Canadian one, where a lot of those tourism taxes actually fund a lot of local and state services.

So when you take away that tax base, all of a sudden you're looking at, there's been estimates in Orlando, for example, that 29% of the property tax is saved by the tourism taxes.

On a scratchy phone connection, I got ahold of Wayne Smith, a retired San Jose police detective who interviewed Jim that day.

I seem to recall that we did ask him questions before we let him know that she died.

And if my memory serves me, he was a bit upset about that.

He says, quote, "If my memory serves me, he was a bit upset about that."I ask him why he performed death notifications this way.

Inevitably what happens when the police kill somebody is the next of kin sue the police.

They sue the police, they sue the city or the county, I mean, they go after...

And then they want money.

So it- it's important to interview their next of kin as soon as possible to lock them into a story.

Somewhere along the line, Columbus dropped the ball.

After 1983, this case went cold.

I am Wayne Smith.

I'm a lieutenant with the Columbia County Sheriff's Office.

We take some personal pride in not having unsolved homicides in this county, and here we find out there is one, and, and not only is it unsolved, but it's, you know, nearly 30 years old.

Years would turn into decades, and still no answers, until that fateful call.

When I took a look at this case, my question was, "Why didn't he get arrested in 1980?" I made a promise to the victim's family that we will do our best at this, and I believe when we're done, we'll be able to tell you who I believe did it.

Well, that's so important we should...