Now that it's official – the Toronto Grand Prix (née the Molson Indy) will not be part of the 2008 Indy Racing League schedule and who knows about 2009? – it's time to assess who's to blame for this appalling state of affairs.

Let's start with the guy who owns the race, Kevin Kalkhoven. (Just so you know what's coming up after I finish with him, the City of Toronto is just about as much at fault.)

When Molson ended its ownership and promotion after 20 years – an extraordinarily long time for a promotion, by the way – Kalkhoven, who owned the Champ Car World Series, took it over.

Some will argue the race would have died then if it hadn't been for Kalkhoven, but my take is if you're going to do something, do it correctly or don't do it at all. KK, as he's known, promptly slashed budgets and staff and, you can guess what happened to the marketing and promotion as a result.

That marketing and promotion was sorely needed because everybody knew this race as "the Indy" – "Grand Prix" (the name had to be changed after Molson sold it) just didn't cut it.

In any event, attendance plummeted and Kalkhoven subsequently lost millions of dollars on this race. And he was losing many, many more millions in his futile battle to keep the Champ Car series going.

It was a circle game: as Champ Car became even more irrelevent, Toronto interest in the Grand Prix continued to wane. And vice versa.

At some point Kalkhoven decided to stop losing all this money and made the deal with Tony George.

George found some of the Champ Car properties to be attractive and others not so much. Toronto is in the latter category: it doesn't have a title sponsor (who would want to throw its corporate support behind something that had been allowed to become a shadow of its former self?) and is now, officially, a money-loser. So we're out.

Kalkhoven didn't have to let the situation get to this point but he did, so he gets much of the blame.

Now, Toronto has four big summertime festivals each year: the CNE, Gay Pride, Caribanna and the Grand Prix. The city appears to be firmly behind three of them. Not so much the fourth.

A good indication of the city's disinterest came early in the new millennium when, for several years, it promoted the Toronto Street Festival in direct competition with, first, the Molson Indy and then, afterward, the Grand Prix.

The street festival meant Yonge St. was closed all the way north from Front St. to Eglinton Ave. At every major intersection there was free entertainment and all sorts of other free stuff. Just the sort of thing a race promoter counting on a big walkup crowd didn't need.

Does anybody, for one minute, think that Montreal has anything else going on in that city when the F1 Grand Prix of Canada is being held? Of course not. The entire focus of that city is on that race.

And I wonder: has Mayor David Miller ever been to the Molson Indy/Grand Prix? I don't think so. The mayor of Montreal is front-and-centre at the race there, as is the mayor of Edmonton at that city's round.

But Toronto's mayor? Couldn't care less, it appears.

Where was Miller last weekend when word broke that the race was in dire jeopardy? Some reports said the city stood to lose $50 million in economic activity – a stretch, but it would still be a whack. Didn't hear a word from Miller.

I know that former mayor Mel Lastman would have been bellowing. I also know that Lastman would have been on a plane to Indianapolis to ask Tony George what Toronto could do to save the race. Or he'd have been on the phone, at the very least.

So Toronto is shrugging its shoulders over the Grand Prix's cancellation, which does not bode well for car racing here in the future.

Of course, there is something else to consider. It could be possible that the Indy Racing League, primarily an oval series, is not interested in running in Canada. It's possible that its inclusion of Edmonton in this year's schedule is simply because there is an iron-clad contract in place.

Most of Champ Car's races are/were either owned (Long Beach, Toronto) or promoted (Mexico, Houston, Cleveland, among others) by people who owned that series. They are not going to sue either themselves or their new business partner because their races happened to get dropped in the shuffle of unification.

However, a couple of races (Edmonton, Australia) are independent of Champ Car's ownership. They are locally owned and have healthy corporate and title sponsorship.

So I suggest it's possible – I emphasize possible – that efforts are being made to include them in the short term order to avoid what could become nasty lawsuits.

If Toronto makes a comeback in 2009, I'll have been wrong about this.

NOTES: It was a wonderful Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame induction gala last weekend. TV host Alain de Cadenet gave a great speech. Only five of the seven inductees were on hand; Scott Fraser and Billy Matthews having passed away…

Toronto's 18-year-old super nova Robbie Wickens won Canada's first pole in A1 Grand Prix competition and went on to win the first of two races in South Africa last weekend. He started on the front row of the second race but was caught up in one of the many accidents on the tight, street circuit in Durban.