Halifax Mayor Mike Savage confirms he has met with CFL Commissioner Mark Cohon n June, in Toronto, to discuss the possible expansion of the CFL into the Maritimes. A new CFL team starting in Halifax would require a government-financed stadium, says Savage.
“We just chatted about the CFL,” continues Savage. “[Cohon] explained, as I already knew, that he sees the CFL, which is now a nine-team league with the resurgence of Ottawa, as being a 10-team league. They want to be coast-to-coast, and they think it’s not likely to be St. John’s—it’s going to be Moncton or Halifax, and there’s a lot of advantages to Halifax, and what did I think?”
Cohon told Savage that a Halifax CFL would require a stadium of 20-25,000 seats.
Last year, after spending about $500,000 studying it, Halifax council aborted an attempt to build such a stadium for the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2015. But Savage is still a stadium advocate. Besides the 10 home games that a CFL team would have, a stadium could be used for “the Indigenous Games, the Senior Games, the Gay Games, there’s all kinds of games, that you could have opening ceremonies that would require a large amount of capacity,” says Savage. “Not just games, but also concerts. There are a lot of uses for a stadium. It wouldn’t be just for a CFL team.”
Savage sees a local team being started by a “number of locally owned companies and maybe a couple of national companies,” sharing ownership.
Would the CFL pay anything for construction of a stadium? “I don’t think so,” says Savage. He points at the Saskatchewan Roughriders as a model for a Halifax team. Regina is now constructing a 33,000-seat stadium for the Roughriders, costing $278 million. Of that, the Roughriders are contributing $25 million, the city of Regina $73 million, the province of Saskatchewan $80 million. The remaining $100 million comes via a provincial loan to the city, paid off over 30 years by a $8-12 ticket surcharge. Additionally, the city has earmarked another $200 million in maintenance and rehab costs for the stadium, over 30 years
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This article appears in Jul 25-31, 2013.
HRM will raid the reserves they have been stashing away for the past few years. Last year the surplus according to staff was $25,000,000 so the staff stashed a big chunk in various reserves before presenting the accounts for approval and showing a smaller surplus.
HRM will keep sticking us with higher water bills and higher property taxes until they have enough money in several reserves to be transferred into a capital budget for a stadium.
And none of this was talked about during the 2012 election.
I’ve either been on the fence about this stadium idea, or flat-out opposed to it. But at this point I say the hell with it: let’s build a proper stadium. It’s embarrassing that we don’t have one, in my opinion.
And the money is there. We just tend to waste a lot of it…unnecessary highway and road construction comes to mind.
Yea if we didn’t build a stadium we’d just waste our vast untapped reserves of money on education, clean drinking water, public safety, transportation, food self-sufficiency and building production capacity.
Halifax and the province of Nova Scotia need to understand that they have an obligation to it’s young people to provide them the same things that are offered in other major centres. Or we can continue to see our youth migrate to other parts of the country where they have invested for the long term in things such as stadiums etc.
We can no longer afford to sit by while the rest of Canada use attractions such as nation and international events to enhance their lifestyles.
We all talk about things that are more important such as health car and education which I totally agree but..we need a up and coming generation to pay taxes to ensure we can afford these vital services in the future. Our tax base is not getting younger it’s getting older and that’s something we need to be focusing on now.
We have spent our tax money in the past on ventures with little or no return on investment.
We need to become forward thinkers and we owe the new mayor a big hand for showing he has a vision and courage to lead us into the next decade.
Maritime people need a link to the national stage and the ability to show the rest of the country that we are a progressive region and that will help attract prosperity in the long term.
The province will not survive on a diet of lobsters and tourism without the proper long-term infrastructure.
John Ryerson
Business Consultant
Yarmouth, Nova Scotia
I’m sure people bitched about the construction of the Metro Centre as well. And the Halifax Forum before that. I couldn’t imagine Halifax with nothing but the Forum to host events.