Why are we missing out on the CFL party?
By CHRIS COCHRANE - Chronicle Herald
Tue. Dec 1 - 4:46 AM
AS I WATCHED the Grey Cup game Sunday night — the entertaining football action, the party atmosphere and all the other positives associated with this annual offering of Canadiana — I couldn’t help but wonder why this end of the country must remain relegated to a back-seat view.
C’mon, we were once awarded a CFL franchise almost three decades ago! Various screw-ups, some financial and some political, blocked the Atlantic Schooners from becoming a reality. And it added to a local sense of defeatism. Since the Schooners went down, there hasn’t been a single serious attempt to revive the project.
I’m not looking at the potential for the CFL in this region through rose-coloured glasses. I appreciate the reasons why we don’t have a franchise in Halifax.
Obviously, we don’t have a suitable stadium.
We also don’t have potential private owners showing enthusiasm to head funding efforts for a new franchise or to promote CFL expansion.
We haven’t had politicians, at any level, who have publicly shown the necessary resolve to lobby hard with those holding the federal purse strings concerning sports infrastructure spending.
And there’s generally been a sense of public complacency whenever a stadium and the CFL are discussed.
Maybe our biggest problem is that construction of a stadium and entry into the CFL require a level of political leadership that we simply don’t have. The lack of political will combined with effective scare tactics by stadium opponents feed the feeling of defeatism.
OK, so bidding for the 2014 Commonwealth Games was a bad experience. Mistakes were made. Does that mean Halifax should never again try to get what every other major city in Canada already has? Surely, one defeat isn’t reason enough to quit trying.
Remember, the federal government was prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on sports infrastructure for this region when there was a chance that Halifax might host the 2014 Games. There’s still money earmarked for projects such as this. So why isn’t Halifax trying harder, and making public noise about the effort, to get a portion of that funding?
Apparently, Moncton doesn’t have similar motivational problems. It’s the early favourite to land a CFL franchise at this end of the country.
Moncton’s power brokers have followed an aggressive plan. The city chased, and won, the 2010 world junior track championships, attracting enough federal money to help build a modest stadium, one that could eventually be expanded to meet CFL requirements.
Why couldn’t the same thing have happened long ago in Halifax? Why can’t it still happen in Halifax?
The best reason I can think of is, as a city, we’ve become too timid to take on this challenge.
That’s unfortunate. Because anyone watching the Grey Cup game Sunday night, whether motivated by a desire to see a title football game or to share in a great Canadian sports and social event, had to appreciate the pride that the hosts must have felt.
Maybe in this small part of the country, that pride is now overshadowed by a misguided post-Commonwealth Games fear of reaching too high.
Chris Cochrane is a sports columnist with The Chronicle Herald.
(
ccochrane@herald.ca)
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Me too, I mostly watch NFL but do little to follow the CFL except for the Grey Cup once in awhile. And if a team came to Halifax, I would become a huge fan for sure! Fortunately i wont have to fly from Toronto. 
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