“Optimism is running so thick at the Canadian Opera Company these days that not even a half-million-dollar deficit can dampen it. The COC announced Monday evening that it spent $476,000 more than it took it in 2002, snapping a five-year string of balanced budgets. Yet, with sod-turning for a Toronto opera house only months away, there was none of the chastened rhetoric usually heard when a company runs deep into the red.”