Bidder for Halifax franchise in the CFL says 2018 will be a big year for the group
Tim Baines Postmedia January 12, 2018
What a few years ago seemed more like a pipe dream, a coast-to-coast Canadian Football League could become an on-field reality by 2020.
While the “stars would have to align” and plenty of hurdles would have to be cleared, a strong Maritime bid for the CFL’s 10th franchise could pay off in the next few months, with CFL shovels in the ground on a new stadium in Halifax before year’s end.
“Everything needs to go right, and I’ve never been involved in a project where that happens,” said Anthony LeBlanc, an Ottawa resident and the front man for the Maritime bid. “Sure, we have desires. Then there’s reality.
“We’ll spend the better part of 2018 doing all the approvals and everything that’s necessary in starting to build a stadium. Best case, in the next six to eight months we have everything wrapped up. By best-case scenario, we have a team on the field by 2020, but that’s a real stretch. I think 2021 is more realistic. Just as long as we get it done. I don’t want it to be 2025 and we’re still talking about this. By the end of 2018, if we don’t have some shovels in the ground or at least real strong approvals, I’d be getting concerned. I’m a realist that these things can take time. Look at Ottawa. It took them (six) years before (the Redblacks) were up and playing.
“The stuff we’re working on right now is twofold: finalizing what I would say is an initial agreement with the league, and we’re getting ready to finalize economic impact analysis to go to the city and to the province with a proposal of how we can work together. We hope to have something to both those bodies in the next four to six weeks.”
LeBlanc knows there will be questions. Is it fiscally responsible for the governments involved? Does it make good business sense?
“There are people questioning if this is the right thing to do,” LeBlanc said. “That’s totally fair. If you’re a taxpayer and you think your taxpayer dollars aren’t being used correctly, you should have the ability to question it. The onus is on us to illustrate this is a good economic driver.”
A bit of background on how this thing got going. LeBlanc was part of a group that owned the Arizona Coyotes from 2013 to 2017 before being bought out by another partner, Andrew Barroway. LeBlanc was the Coyotes’ president, CEO and an alternate governor. When it looked like a solid bet that Barroway would take over the Coyotes, LeBlanc and Gary Drummond, the National Hockey League team’s president of hockey operations, started talking about the CFL.
“He’s from Regina and obviously a big fan of the CFL,” LeBlanc said. “We thought, ‘Where do we start?’ I called Bobby Smith, he owns the (Quebec Major Junior Hockey League’s Halifax) Mooseheads and is a former GM of the Coyotes. We got together. I wanted to make sure he was cool with it. I didn’t want to do anything that was offensive to the Mooseheads operation. He said, ‘No, this would be great for the region.’
“I asked if he’d be interested, he said, ‘Probably not, but you should talk to my cousin.’ It turns out his cousin, Richard Butts, was the city manager for Halifax. Richard put together a bunch of meetings for me to fly into Halifax. I met with the chamber of commerce, the local economic development group and the mayor (Mike Savage). The mayor said, ‘We’ve had a lot of people come through our doors over the years and they just don’t seem to understand that we can’t just go out and build a stadium. We want to be part of it, but we can’t lead it.’ ”
The mayor hooked LeBlanc up with another businessman, AMJ Campbell Van Lines CEO Bruce Bowser, who had also shown interest in a CFL team in Atlantic Canada.
“We met with the mayor, we met with the premier,” LeBlanc said. “We were pretty successful with keeping it quiet for four months or so. In that period of time, we probably met with the Halifax regional municipality 10 times, the province a handful of times. We met with a bunch of local organizations, we met with the league multiple times, presented to the board of governors. We did a lot of legwork before it became public. It’s just kind of developed its own inertia. There’s still a lot of work to do. The elephant in the room is the stadium. But we seem to have everything coming together.”
What Ottawa Sports & Entertainment Group has done with Lansdowne Park — with condos, bars and restaurants around the stadium and arena — is something of a model for what the Maritime Football group is pushing toward. While nothing is official, there has been a trademark application made on Atlantic Schooners.
“If I could just pick up Lansdowne and move it to a plot of land in Halifax, that’s definitely what we’d want to do,” LeBlanc said. “These guys have hit it out of the park. But it will depend on which site we end up at. Some of the sites are already relatively built up. We have more opportunity for some of that mixed-use development in a couple of the sites we’re looking at compared to some of the others.”
Will football work in Halifax? Can a CFL team find success and maybe extend itself beyond past the boundaries of Halifax and Nova Scotia into neighbouring provinces?
“If we do things right, if we’re sincere and in for the long haul — all things we plan to be — we do think we can replicate that magic you see out in Regina,” LeBlanc said. “I think this will be an absolute success.”