Edmonton is still licking its wounds after the city’s aspirations for a global coming-out party were callously flushed away this past autumn when the federal government pulled the chain on Edmonton’s plans to stage Expo 2017, a combined world’s fair and Canada’s 150th birthday celebration all rolled into one.

It was particularly galling, given that Ottawa had originated the idea five years earlier to promote an Edmonton bid for the world’s fair, a move that sent the city into full launch mode. An organizing committee was struck, money was raised, sponsors were signed up and a delegation went to the 2010 World’s Fair in Shanghai to host a week of Alberta celebrations as a prelude to the formal bid application. A Canadian win was almost a lock, given the competition of Astana, Kazakhstan, and Liege, Belgium, with a European Expo already scheduled for 2015 in Milan, Italy.

But it was all for naught when Alberta’s 26 Tory members of Parliament sheepishly failed to support Expo 2017 — a $2.3-billion economic driver that was expected to vault Edmonton onto the world stage the way the 1988 Winter Olympics did for Calgary and that Expo 86 and the 2010 Winter Olympics did for Vancouver.

The feds piously pleaded empty pockets and fiscal belt-tightening in sounding the funereal peal by refusing to commit their $950-million share for Expo 2017. However, insiders say, it was Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s intense dislike for Alberta’s capital city — after all, he is from rival Calgary — and the fact that a noisy contingent of Ontario and Quebec MPs decided that Canada’s sesquicentennial celebration of nationhood will not be rooted in the West as the real reasons. Heck, Alberta’s provincial government was prepared to cover the entire Expo bill itself; but without federal blessing, it didn’t matter.

Now that the coffin has been firmly nailed shut on Edmonton’s Expo, the jilted host city is examining matters of business at hand. First on the agenda is the ambitious $1.5-billion proposal for Edmonton’s arena and entertainment district. With city council armed with a survey showing widespread citizen support for drugstore billionaire Darryl Katz’s grandiose scheme for a new home for the Edmonton Oilers and a glitzy entertainment district, the hard work begins.

Katz has committed $100 million each to the arena and to the private real estate project that will surround it on a five-hectare site on the northern edge of Edmonton’s downtown. Cost of the arena itself is pegged between $450 million and $500 million.

Hard negotiations over terms are now underway between the city and Katz’s Rexall Sports. Although all three levels of government have ruled out subsidies for the arena, the door may be open a crack for the Harper Tories to do something of a “make good” in light of the Expo debacle.

Rumours about federal support for a new football stadium in Regina and a new hockey arena for Quebec City were floating in January as federal officials puzzled over whether they could repurpose more than $1 billion in unspent infrastructure stimulus funding from 2008-09. But given the federal cold shoulder to date, nobody in Edmonton is holding their breath for a share of that pie. IE