Price tag revealed for cancellation of Patrick Moore’s speech at city conference

The City of Regina is tallying up the final figures and revealing how much it cost to cancel a speech by Patrick Moore.

Moore was supposed to have been a keynote speaker at the city’s Reimagine Sustainability conference in May, but his talk there was recently cancelled.

There was a public outcry over Moore’s presence at the conference, but Mike O’Donnell — a Regina city councillor and a co-chair of the conference committee — maintains that Moore was cancelled because his talk was going to look at climate change, and organizers wanted to focus the conference on sustainability.

On Wednesday, O’Donnell announced the total cost to the city for the situation would be about $6,200. That includes the $5,700 deposit that had already been given to Moore for the speech and about $500 to $600 in tax on that deposit.

“(The deposit is) non-refundable and we knew that. But because we have terminated at this point in time, there are no further fees to be paid,” explained O’Donnell.

Had he given his talk, Moore would have been paid $10,000.

O’Donnell said there is a price for tickets to the conference, and it’s hoped all the expenses can be paid from those fees.

O’Donnell also made a point of taking responsibility for both signing up Moore to participate in the conference, and for cancelling the talk as well, saying he wanted to be clear that he’s the one who signed off on those things.

Mayor Michael Fougere said this week that he thinks it was a mistake to cancel Moore’s talk and made a point of distancing himself from the decision, pointing to committee co-chairs O’Donnell and Coun. Joel Murray.

When asked about the mayor’s comments, O’Donnell repeated that he’s accepting responsibility for the decisions, but also said: “I won’t tell you that I wasn’t hurt, but I’ll leave it at that.”

There’s now an empty speaking position at the conference, but the spot may not be filled.

“My personal view is that we’re not going to replace (Moore), that we have an awful lot of topics that we may actually give more time to because they were compressed,” said O’Donnell.

The announcements for the other speakers at the conference will be rolled out soon, and O’Donnell said he’s comfortable with their topics of discussion.

Moore will be giving the same talk in Regina that he was going to give, but now it’ll be at a different venue the night before he was to speak at the conference.

O’Donnell said he won’t be attending Moore’s speech because there is a welcome dinner that night for the conference and organizers will be making an announcement that night as well.