Even if it might have just been something as simple as a smart business decision, it’s hard not to feel like one side just blinked.

With Live Nation putting an official cloak of silence around the decision to cancel its marquee Squamish Valley Music Festival, it looks like the Pemberton Music Festival just won.

First, a quick recap of the week’s headlines. On Wednesday morning U.S.-based Live Nation abruptly announced the cancellation of the Squamish Valley Music Festival. As much as that comes completely out-of-the-blue, it wouldn’t have been nearly as suprising if you follow Toronto-based Front Row Center on Twitter.

Do some back-sleuthing on the social-media account, and you’ll find the following tweet on Tuesday.

We just received word the @squamishfest has been laid to rest. RIP Squamish. Who's up for @Pemberton_Fest

— Front Row Center (@FRCmarketing) March 1, 2016

The next morning Live Nation announced the official cancellation, not with a news release or press conference, but by posting an announcement on its Squamish Valley Music Festival home page:

"We have made the extremely difficult decision to not proceed with the 2016 festival, due to take place in August. This decision was not made lightly and we sincerely apologize to all the people this decision affects: the fans, artists, industry partners, corporate partners, suppliers and all of our supporters within the community of Squamish."

No one at the company is talking beyond that, with requests for interviews denied.

So after a three-year battle for the concert-going dollars of British Columbians, it looks like the Pemberton Music Festival—run by New Orleans-based Huka Entertainment—has won. However the accountants will have the final word.

This summer there will be, by all present accounts, a Pemberton Music Festival a couple of hours up the Sea-to-Sky highway. Meanwhile, in Squamish, after a string of boom years that pumped millions into the local community, the Hendrickson Fields & Logger Sports Ground will once again be hosting axe-throwing and tree-climbing competitions instead of Mumford & Sons and A$AP Rocky.

Because no one’s talking, there’s been nothing but theories as to why the Squamish Valley Music Festival was cancelled. The big one is the Canadian dollar, which, as anyone who’s gone to Seattle for the weekend recently knows, is in the dumper.

One Canadian dollar currently buys US$0.75 US cents. Given that the American acts who dominate the festival circuit are paid in U.S. dollars, that creates a massive problem for the bottom line.

Say a past headliner like Eminem commands US$750,000. In devalued Canadian money, that translates to writing a cheque worth $999,000.

Factor in two additional headliners at, say, $500,000 each, and you’re at $1,332,000. Add up the additional exchange dollars for the three headliners, and you’re at over half a million dollars over what it would have cost to bring them across the border a couple of years back.

(Keep in mind, all figures are pure speculation; for all we know Eminem might want nothing more than a bag of weed and two strippers dressed up as the Insane Clown Posse to play a festival like Squamish or Pemberton.)

Do that same rough math for the 50 or so acts that end up playing each day of a big festival, and the money starts to pile up.

To pay for what’s suddenly become an inflated price for talent thanks to the weak Canadian dollar, there are a couple of options. One is that Live Nation (which has deep pockets thanks to its status as the biggest player in the global concert business) takes a financial bath. And, in doing so, hopes that the Pemberton Music Festival and Huka also bleed red ink in 2016.

The second option is that it passes the price of paying more for talent onto the consumer. Given that tickets for last year’s Squamish Festival started at $300 for the early bird rate, one can imagine how popular that would have been, knowing there are also transportation, food, drink, and camping costs to be piled on top of a $400 or $450 weekend ticket.

The appeal to Live Nation of keeping Squamish Valley Music Festival seems obvious. By cancelling it, the optics are that the company just lost the unofficial pissing contest that started when the Pemberton Music Festival suddenly arrived in the market.

It also has industry players asking another question, namely how is Huka making its festival work this year. Like Live Nation would have, it will be paying its acts in U.S. dollars.

Unlike the Squamish Valley Music Festival, Pemberton has the added challenges of seeming to be a more grassroots affair.

To attend Squamish last year was to marvel how far the festival had come since being founded by smaller Vancouver concert promoter BRANDLIVE at the beginning of this decade. As Live Nation’s involvement grew, so did the festival and its sponsors. In 2015 you couldn’t swing a shirtless frat boy without hitting a Perrier, Virgin Mobile, or Bacardi tent. Squamish was big business with major corporations no doubt paying big dollars to set up kiosks on its site at Hendrickson Fields & Logger Sports Ground.

The Pemberton Music Festival, meanwhile, seemed like a return to a simpler time when people were there for the music. The presence of companies there to improve their branding was almost nonexistent. To buy food or booze you didn’t need to preload a cashless wristband that cost money to activate (and to get your remaining dollars returned post-festival), you simply pulled out your wallet.

If Squamish felt corporate, Pemberton felt like the wild west. The very setup of the Pemberton Music Festival trumped Squamish, in that Pemba set up its stages in a giant open-grass field.

The downside of that open concept was that Pemberton acts sometimes bled into the sets of others; try watching the acoustic folk of the Violent Femmes while TV on the Radio is making a sound like Apocalypse Now nearby. The upside was that getting from stage to stage was easy. Squamish last year felt like a cattle farm where you were herded through gates and fences on the 15-minute hike from main stage to main stage.

The very fact that Pemberton Music Festival not only worked, but was fun was a triumph for Huka.

Live Nation was the first to stage a major festival on the Pemberton site, launching an ambitious three-day event, Pemberton Festival, in 2008 featuring headliners Tom Petty, Nine Inch Nails, and Coldplay. While the lineup left few complaining, the event was marked by major traffic problems, sanitiation complaints, and delays getting on a site where dust blew up in clouds not seen since the Dust Bowl year. 

The Pemberton Festival was declared a smashing success by Live Nation, much like last year’s Squamish Valley Music Festival. But Pemberton Festival would prove a one-and-done deal. And it no doubt rankled many in the Live Nation upper echelon when Huka not only announced plans to stage a yearly festival on the Pemberton site three years ago, but to also call the event the Pemberton Music Festival. No doubt because Huka was able to analyze what went right and wrong in 2008, its Pemberton fests would have none of the traffic or dust problems that marred Live Nation's Pemberton Festival.

That would up the feeling that there as a sense of competition between the two events. Right from the point New Orleans-based Huka Entertainment arrived on the scene in B.C. three years ago, there was a belief that the province couldn’t support two major summer tests. It doesn’t help that there are countless other festivals within a few hours drive of Vancouver, from Sasquatch and Bumbershoot across the line to Rifflandia and Bass Coast on this side of the border.

For three years the province’s concertgoers did. And during that time, there were many who felt that the Pemberton Music Festival scored more wins than losses with both its headliners and support talent.

Unapologetically mainstream headliners like Bruno Mars and Sam Smith left some scratching their heads when it came to Squamish.

But if Pemberton never managed to land epic Squamish scores like Eminen and Drake, it consistently earned cool points with the beyond-cool likes of Missy Elliot, Skrillex, a reunited OutKast, Justice, Kendrick Lamar, and Hozier. Christ, look at the bill for last year’s event, where critically adored heavy-hitters like Father John Misty, Galactic, and Dan Mangan are relegated to small type, that speaking volumes about the depth of the lineup.

So where are we at today? Well, Huka, which was seen by some as an American company with no local ties parachuting into B.C., is by all indicators proceeding with the Pemberton Music Festival.

Live Nation, which has long maintained a Vancouver branch, has taken a strange PR approach to the cancellation of its signature festival. It’s offered no explanation to the thousands and thousands of concertgoers loyal to the Squamish Valley Music Festival. There’s also no indication if those who’ve made the festival part of a yearly ritual can look forward to future Squamish fests; instead, by shutting down its social-media accounts for the festival, Live Nation has left many wondering—including the people of Squamish—whether the event is gone for good

The official reason is that it was the vague “extremely difficult decision”.

Unoffically—while this might again simply have been a smart business decision—it looks like someone blinked.