By Philip Moscovitch
This item originally appeared as News #5 in Morning File, April 10, 2024.
A colleague brought a story in the PEI Guardian to my attention. It’s about a proposal to bring a CFL team and stadium to Charlottetown. That’s right. When efforts have failed to secure a stadium in Moncton or Halifax, you keep going down on the sucker list. Who knows? Maybe Charlottetown will bite.
Logan MacLean reports on a presentation to Charlottetown’s committee for economic, tourism and cultural development, by Raymond Samuels, a team/stadium proponent. Of course, Samuels doesn’t say he hopes Islanders will be bigger suckers than mainlanders. Rather, the stalled efforts in Halifax and Moncton leave the door open for PEI.
Yeah, OK. That’s one way to look at it.
From MacLean’s story:
This is a great initiative for the Island,” [Samuels] said. “It is a multifaceted proposal which incorporates with that an outdoor stadium, the Island’s first outdoor stadium. It would be multipurpose in concept, and an extensive sort of social housing infrastructure as part of the concept.”
The idea includes a new, 25,000-seat stadium, tentatively called Confederation Square. The organization had spoken with some local property owners but did not have a location picked yet, Samuels said.
The Greater Charlottetown Area Chamber of Commerce supports the idea “in principle” of course, even though there is no site, no funding model (Samuels wants the support of politicians before seeking partners), and there’s been no gauging interest among residents.
And, a 25,000-seat stadium to serve an island whose population is about 175,000? Sure, people travel to PEI, and I can imagine going on holiday and also taking in a football game. But is that a sustainable model?
In a new twist, Samuels says “social housing” would be an integral part of the stadium development, and would require government funding. See? So you might hate sports, but do you hate providing low-cost housing too?
To his credit, MacLean follows up with Samuels to try and pin him down on some — any — specifics:
Samuels wanted to wait for word from the city council on its next steps before revealing details about other collaborators. He did expand on who has shown interest, saying 95 per cent of people he’s spoken with in business and community organizations have been keen on the idea.
“This is the kind of energy we’ve been getting from people in Charlottetown, outside of Charlottetown, on the Island.”
Well, I guess we might as well start breaking ground for the stadium then.
On its website, the Atlantic Moose describes itself as “a community-driven consortium which seeks to establish the Canadian football league’s 10th team on Prince Edward Island in the proposed Confederation Stadium complex.”
Now, any reasonable person might think, why Charlottetown and not Moncton or Halifax? Well, the Atlantic Moose proponents have an answer for you: high crime rates and local governments in disarray. Here is what they have to say on their website. I am going to put [sic] beside every error in here, to make sure you notice them all:
Halifax and Moncton in Atlantic Canada suffer from a pervasive socio-economic malaise which has resulted to [sic] persistent [sic] of [sic] relatively high rates of crime. Their local governments are essentially is [sic] disarray and have unsurprisingly have [sic] lacked the will to commit to the development of a new CFL team.
PEI in sharp contrast is characterized by unified communities which have very low rates of crime and both provincial and municipal governments highly oriented toward tourism.
The extremely minimalist Atlantic Moose website has a section called “What we offer” and what they offer is a spinning counter that stops at “25,000” — the number of seats in their proposed stadium. There is a merch page, offering hoodies and t-shirts, and although it urges visitors to “Show your Atlantic Canada football nation pride now” there doesn’t seem to be a way to actually buy the merch.
Oh, and the photos of people wearing the t-shirts and hoodies? They are stock images from a company that promises to “make you a creator” by letting you upload designs.
The address listed on the “contact us” page is the same mailing address as the Independent Canadian Commission on Civil and Human Rights, which turns out to not, in fact, be a commission on civil rights but a non-profit with an extremely confusing web page that talks a lot about self-publishing books. There is also a UPS Store in the building, at 207 Bank St., in Ottawa. So it’s possible the “suite” is a UPS Store mailbox.
In any event, these are not serious people.
It’s taken a few decades, but people are finally starting to see through the stadium grift. Last week, voters in Missouri declined approving public funding for MLB and NFL stadiums. And rightfully so.
Look, I am not an anti-sports person. I have travelled great distances for the primary purpose of attending sporting events. That doesn’t mean public money should be going to support dubious enterprises that can’t even toss together a half-decent website.
