Halifax CFL franchise would make football a coast-to-coast sport, says commissioner
FRANCIS CAMPBELL THE CHRONICLE HERALD December 30, 2017
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part three of a series on the latest attempt to bring a CFL team to Halifax.
PART 1: CFL in Halifax: A gamble with lots of field to cover
PART 2: Stadium talks dominates CFL expansion discussion
The Canadian Football League has always fallen short of a true national identity.
“Coast to coast — it’s easy to say,” said Randy Ambrosie, named the league’s president in July.
“This is part of our inclusion strategy that has been missing. Not having that final piece of the puzzle, to a degree, makes us kind of incomplete.”
A franchise on the East Coast would complete Ambrosie’s puzzle and the commissioner sees that last piece coming from a bid by a trio of businessmen to bring an expansion team to Halifax.
“Having a chance over the years to visit the Atlantic provinces and to get to know the people, I can say without hesitation that this would be one of the great accomplishments of all times. To see that 10th team, I personally would like to see it happen.”
An ownership group called Maritime Football Ltd., could hold the missing piece.
“We’re paying McInnes Cooper out of the Halifax office to do all of our legal work, a variety of things, incorporating our new holding company into things like trademark searches, working with various government-related people and then, of course, continuing discussions with the city and the province,” said Anthony LeBlanc, the former president and chief executive of the Arizona Coyotes of the National Hockey League and one of the trio of businessmen behind Maritime Football Ltd.
“The other aspect is working very closely with the league itself, going back and forth with commissioner Ambrosie. It’s kind of the first phase of what a conditional expansion franchise would like and allow us to really go out and gauge the market and see what the support is going to be like.”
Ambrosie said there are a series of steps that must be followed.
“Granting of a conditional franchise and ultimately a franchise is part of the process,” Ambrosie said. “What we have done is made it clear that we are going to work with them and them alone. The most important thing we want them to know is that we want to help this group — they’ve shown the initiative, they are gentlemen of high character and great reputation.”
The men who make up the Maritime Football Ltd. ownership group are LeBlanc, Bruce Bowser, a Halifax native who is president of AMJ Campbell Van Lines, and Gary Drummond, a businessman from Regina who was president of hockey operations with the Coyotes during LeBlanc’s tenure there.
“There are all kinds of things relating to the business model that we will be sharing with them as we go through the process,” Ambrosie said. “We’ve given them a high-level overview of what those requirements will be.
“We’ve made it clear that the business model has to be accretive and positive for the other nine CFL teams. We want to build the business and grow our league so we’ve shared that with them at a high level. That includes all kinds of things, including franchise fees and revenue sharing and all these other parts of our business model that we’ve spoken about. We haven’t gotten into such detail with them because, on a very high level, a very important part of this puzzle is the issue of can we get a facility in place, one that would be great for the Canadian Football League but one that would help Maritimers from the entire region to attract major national and international events.”
The stadium puzzle piece is one that the ownership is working on, an approximate 25,000-seat facility that could be built and maintained under some kind of a public-private partnership.
In the meantime, the ownership group knows that the major hurdle of constructing a stadium at a cost of more than $200 million will be accompanied by other significant franchise costs. First, there would be an expansion fee.
“We certainly don’t get in for free,” LeBlanc said.
The expansion fee for the last awarded franchise, the Ottawa RedBlacks, was $7 million, according to the unofficial CFL database. It has been speculated that the next expansion franchise fee would be in the $10-million range.
And the logistics of how to fill out a roster remains a question for down the road. The expansion Ottawa Redblacks took part in a three-round CFL expansion draft in December 2013, which included one round of import player selections and two rounds for non-import players.
“We haven’t had that conversation,” Ambrosie said of an expansion draft. “Obviously, we want to talk to the players association about that in a very thoughtful and respectful way. It’s too early in the process. We obviously are aware of the issue but we haven’t spent any time on it.”
There has also been intermittent speculation that other locations, namely Quebec City and Saskatoon, are interested in a CFL expansion team.
“Right now, we’re having no such discussions,” Ambrosie said. “From my point of view, I’m not going to speculate on what might happen if a group emerged with a proposal for a different part of the country. As it relates to these gentlemen and to this piece of the Canadian Football League story that has been unfulfilled for far too long, we want them to know that we are committed to working with them and them alone for a period of time.”
A 10th team would also give the league divisional balance.
“There are some practical advantages, to be sure,” Ambrosie said. “One of the great benefits of two balanced divisions would be fantastic. There is lots of potential if you have two balanced divisions. There are lots of reasons for us to want it, not the least of which is to make sure that our Maritime countrymen have a team to cheer on as passionately as Canadians cheer on the teams in the rest of the country.”