Quote:
Originally Posted by ericmacm
Nova Scotia and Halifax have had much bigger fish to fry for a long time. The past 30-ish years have been particularly tough for the province, up until relatively recently. A lot of the increased tax revenues from the boom have been going where it matters (expanding transportation infrastructure, new schools, transit planning, bridge rehabilitation, etc), but I suspect if they remain on a good trajectory, we will see more interest in funding a stadium.
I hope that the CFL is trying to get involved with the new Wanderers stadium project, since accommodating for both the CFL and CPL is going to be significantly easier now.
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I would say that 1990-2005 or so was grim but then 2005-2015 was okay and 2015-2025 was pretty good, with part of that period being boom times when Halifax had some of the highest growth in the country. NS finances today are probably not much worse than Ontario or Quebec although that's still with taxes that are somewhat punishing and uncompetitive.
There was funding secured for a CFL-ready stadium for the Halifax Commonwealth Games bid in the late 2000's, but costs ballooned (let's build a velodrome, etc. etc.) and the province pulled the plug. I think the CFL-related promoters have done a lot of damage to the project for many years by proposing ill-conceived complicated schemes in bad locations. I believe the project could have been completed by now if it had been promoted more like the Wanderers, with a community stadium for diverse users built on common land. Actually now that I think of it, the municipality also offered something like $70M in stadium funding plus the potential of free land in the 2010's and it went nowhere in part because the CFL people wanted a large mixed-use complex in Shannon Park, to be served by a new ferry and so on.
Another factor is that football and the CFL just aren't as high a priority or as culturally relevant in NS/Halifax as in Western Canada or, say, Regina, as one example. Hockey is far more popular. I believe projects like parks and bike lanes are inherently more popular, although Halifax should have some kind of large-ish stadium at this point. As a city grows it makes sense to have larger facilities even if they only appeal to 50% or 20%.
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