Quote:
Originally Posted by Waye Mason
Winnipeg's CMA has very nearly double Halifax CMA's population. You can't count on thousands of people driving from Fredericton, Sydney and Moncton for all regular season games.
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This is pretty misleading. According to Google Maps, it takes 28 minutes to drive from City Hall to the northern edge of the Halifax CMA on the 101. The regional market for a team in Halifax is a bit over 600,000; this is the CMA plus people who would travel 30-60 minutes, not people in Fredericton. This total is about 2/3 the size of Winnipeg.
If you say that the people who have to drive 1-2 hours are worth, say, 5%, you might be looking at the 75% market. People in Halifax earn a bit more money on average too (
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/famil107a-eng.htm).
To be honest I don't care about the NHL really, but I just don't think it's true that Halifax should be considered beyond the pale (particularly over a longer term time frame) when Winnipeg has a team and Quebec City might get one (and actually there was talk of bringing a team to Kitchener-Waterloo). In fact unless the NHL shifts away from the smaller cities and some of those teams fold again we will probably see this as a local issue in the future, particularly when Metro Centre upgrades are considered.
As an aside, it's important to understand that the CMA substantially understates the size of Halifax as a metropolitan and commuter region. In the closer parts of Hants and Colchester, 30%+ of people work in the Halifax CMA. Towns like Lunenburg, Windsor, and Wolfville are considered "moderately influenced" by the Halifax metro area, which means that 5-30% of their workers actually work in Halifax. This phenomenon does not necessarily exist in all other metropolitan areas to the same degree, because some CMAs, like Winnipeg or St. John's, have less population nearby, and in others like Hamilton people might actually work in another CMA like Toronto.
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