It shouldn't take a national awards show to get us to clean up things properly, but I will be glad if it it does. Hopefully it will
I think the city is quite blind to the reputational damage caused by all the downtown problems and neglect. A lots of people visit downtown, expecting all the things you might see in a normal downtown, like lots of people and stores, not terribly empty malls. I shudder to think what they say about Edmonton when they go back to where they came from.
If they are on the ball (and that is a big if), they could at least temporarily fill some of that empty space for a week or two around the awards show for performances or other things related to the Juno's so it doesn't quite seem so awful when all the visitors are here.