Toronto — Toronto's tourism industry is cautiously optimistic that Mick Jagger has provided an economic cure for SARS as the city basks in the blissful afterglow of a colossal concert that went astonishingly right.
Hotel bookings are up; the Rolling Stones lead singer's pronouncement that Toronto "is back and it's booming" has been heard across the United States; and the image of Torontonians as peaceful, fun-loving folk has been distributed worldwide via the Internet.
"We're looking in U.S. dailies and on Web sites and all they are talking about is the great concert that happened," Bruce MacMillan, president of Tourism Toronto, said yesterday.
"And the quote that Mick Jagger gave, that is precisely the message that needed to be told to the world."
Although the write-ups were not long, stories about the 11-hour event were printed in several major U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.
There was little coverage in Britain. And China, which had its own SARS crisis, basically ignored the marijuana-infused music party for 500,000.
But the official concert Web site was shut down for a while Wednesday because it received so many visits from fans. It came back up when the the servers were expanded and logged an estimated eight million to 10 million hits over the course of the day.
Mr. MacMillan said the buildup alone pushed hotel reservations back to where they were before fears of severe acute respiratory syndrome cost millions of dollars to Toronto's hotel and restaurant trade.
"We are averaging in our call centre [which makes hotel bookings] every day for the last five to seven days over 1,000 calls a day," he said.
During the four-month run of SARS, the calls numbered about 200 a day.
"Right now, we're ahead of where we were a year ago at this time," said Mr. MacMillan, who foresees the prosperity continuing thanks to an aggressive advertising campaign by the Ontario government.
"We needed a big event, and this proved to be that event, to show the world that Toronto is back."
Sean Comey, a spokesman for the American Automobile Association, one of the largest travel organizations in the United States, said he heard about the concert on National Public Radio as he was jogging through San Francisco yesterday morning.
"Anything that's got the demographic appeal, that goes all the way from people like me who listen to the Rolling Stones to the younger generation who would be fans of Justin Timberlake — and AC/DC in between — is bound to get a lot of attention," Mr. Comey said.
"Plus just the sheer volume of the people who showed up, I mean it practically rivalled Woodstock. Mick Jagger said it was the biggest concert crowd they had ever had."
Mr. Comey said U.S. travellers are looking for safe vacation destinations. "Now that it seems that the [SARS] problems are over, events like the big concert you just had will hopefully do a lot to restore the confidence of anybody who had any questions about whether it is safe to make a trip to Canada."
Organizers of the event said the exemplary behaviour of the nearly 500,000 concert-goers will also add to Toronto's reputation as a safe city.
Because they turned a blind eye to the copious amount of marijuana smoked within the Downsview Park grounds, Toronto police ended up laying just 21 charges during the 11-hour concert.
Nine of the offences were so minor, the alleged perpetrators were released immediately. Half of the remainder were charged with intoxication and were let go after they had slept off the booze. Four people were charged with assault, one was charged with theft, and the last person was charged with theft of a golf cart and driving the golf cart while impaired.
Police Chief Julian Fantino said his officers would normally make more arrests in downtown Toronto on a Saturday night.
"I think the real win yesterday was just how wonderful the fans were and what great ambassadors they were for Canada," said Jo-Ann McArthur, president of Molson Sports and Entertainment, which helped organize the concert.
"It was totally uneventful off of the stage, which was incredible. Only a Canadian crowd could do that . . . it will go a long way in relaunching Canada on the world stage as a tourism destination and Toronto as a safe, vibrant city."
Rick Ducharme, chief general manager of the Toronto Transit Commission, echoed those thoughts. There had been major concerns about getting 500,000 people home after the concert, but Mr. Ducharme said the park area was cleared by 2:30 a.m. — less than three hours after the music ended.
The success "has to go to the concert-goers," he said. "We had no problems at all [and] any incidents could have really scuttled our plans."
Liberal Senator Jerry Grafstein, one of the lead organizers of the concert, said: "I think that we made history, we made music history, we made media history, and I think we made economic history."
There may have been scant coverage on the U.S. television networks, but Mr. Grafstein said the primary tourism market that lies within 500 kilometres of the border was able to watch the spillover broadcast from the two Canadian networks that covered the event.
"All in all, the thing, I think, it worked like a charm and the cost effectiveness of this is peanuts compared to the magnificent explosion of media that we've had around the world," he said.
"It hit the targets that we were aiming for."
