Expo 86

Trade Fair held in Vancouver, B.C. to celebrate the city’s ascension to “world class” status. After four months of ridiculously expensive nightly fireworks displays, promises of real estate and industrial profits and an entrepreneurial nirvana, the fair closed without coming through on a single one of its promises. Most of the site ended up in the hands of offshore real estate warlords after a cleanup of toxins that cost far more than the government got for the land; the B.C. economy (once the fog of prosperity created by injections of capital brought in from immigrant entrepreneurs and the drug trade lifts) is a third world-type shambles; most of Vancouver’s serious real estate is owned by Hong Kong interests; and the only new jobs the fair produced involved mopping up the red ink.

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