The following is a letter from one of our readers. If you have any contributions you’d like to share, send your submission of no more than 400 words to reports@marxist.ca
The powerful Katz Group is suing Boyle Street Community Services due to a supposed “breach of contract”. The Katz Group claims that it should not have to follow through with a conditional $5-million donation it had promised to Boyle Street.
The Katz Group is chaired by its billionaire founder, Daryl Katz, the richest (and almost certainly worst) man in Edmonton and owner of the Edmonton Oilers. Boyle Street is the largest provider of services to homeless people in Edmonton.
Boyle Street had agreed to sell its building to the Katz Group for $5 million in 2021.
As per their agreement, if Boyle Street was unable to meet its fundraising goal of $8.5 million for the initial development of a new facility, the Katz Group would give it an extra $5 million.
However, like all successful landlords, the Katz Group is greedy and psychotically cruel. When development hit a snag, Boyle Street asked the Katz Group for an extension on their $1 lease. The Katz Group agreed, so long as Boyle Street waived the $5 million! Boyle Street instead decided to vacate the property.
They would eventually raise $7.3 million of the desired $8.5 million… Only for the Katz Group to now claim that Boyle Street had not tried hard enough to raise the full amount and had phoned it in with the expectation that Katz’s $5-million handout would do the heavy lifting for them.
In fairness, Katz would know a thing or two about handouts. After all, the Katz Group only put up just over 30 per cent of the money for the construction of Rogers Place, the rest coming from the City of Edmonton and a ticket surcharge! Imagine being so obscenely wealthy that you can afford to make other people pay for your stupid arena where people can pay way too much goddamn money to watch your dumb fucking hockey team flame out in the playoffs for the umpteenth year in a row. Daryl’s got life figured out!
Speaking of that dumb fucking hockey team: At an average home game, the Oilers rake in $4,662,888 million in revenue. Not including sales of plastic cups of the worst beer you’ll ever have in your life. By my count, proceeds from three of those drinks could be repurposed to end world hunger.
Even if Boyle Street had sat on their laurels and waited for a handout (which by all accounts they did not do) any morals imparted by a just society would have compelled Katz to gladly fork over the five million. Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in. Good thing for Daryl Katz, too. Because in that same just society, he would also be ripped away from every single dollar he’s made off the backs of the countless people he’s hurt in his quest to make downtown Edmonton his own personal fiefdom. Maybe one day though! Hopefully sooner than we might think.
