I am very excited by this month’s cover story. I have long believed Halifax was doing a disservice to itself by not having a stadium facility, so renewed talk of this project finally coming to fruition brings a lot of personal satisfaction. The added possibility that such a facility might be located in Burnside simply makes it even sweeter.
Of course, there’s the usual chorus of naysayers that claim we don’t need such a facility or that it costs too much. I have to say, these voices have almost become background noise to me. Almost every time a new project pops up, five minutes latter there’s a new coalition in this city actively working to crush it. And nothing seems to satisfy them.
Take the new convention centre, for example. In the run up to the decision to proceed with the project, I myself wrote a column about whether it was the right direction for Halifax. The point I made at the time was that we couldn’t say yes just because we thought it was a good idea, or because we thought we would kick-start downtown development. We needed numbers. We needed research that showed there was a solid business case for the Centre and that it could provide the kinds of results this city needed.
Eventually such a business case was presented. Using research and hard numbers, the city was able to see for itself what impact the convention centre could provide and it was enough to convince our elected representatives that it was worth the investment.
Was that enough to stem the tide of negativism? Not by a long shot. Just as I sit here writing this, my inbox dinged with the arrival of yet another call to kill the project. Sometimes people just want to oppose, regardless of whether their case is valid or not.
Getting back to the stadium, we’re still waiting for the business case. If it comes back negative, I’ll be shocked – but I’ll go along with it. If the numbers show it isn’t a good deal, then we shouldn’t do it.
However, as I write this I am convinced the numbers will show it is indeed a good project. Setting aside the possibility of hosting the Women’s World Cup of Soccer – which is a major opportunity for our city – there are still dozens of potential uses for a modest stadium. I won’t spend a lot of time going over the ones that have been trumpeted extensively in other media – such as big name concerts and potential football franchises – but there are any number of events that Halifax will suddenly become a viable location for if we have the stadium available.
A few years ago I was involved in the local soccer community and watched every year as our young athletes competed for the right to go to Nationals – which were always held somewhere else in the country. Why, I asked my colleagues at the time, has Halifax never hosted the Nationals? The reason was we didn’t have a facility capable of getting the job done.
That situation eventually changed and we did stage the event, but if a stadium had been in place back then, it would never have taken so long to happen. And that is just one small example of an opportunity we missed due to the lack of proper infrastructure.
A properly designed, multi-use facility is long overdue. The opportunities it would open up are numerous. But what about the cost? Current estimates put the cost of a stadium at between $30 and $60 million. That’s certainly a lot of money. Yet the Canada Games Centre in Clayton Park cost $46 million and I didn’t see protestors lining up to say we shouldn’t build it.
Yes, but the federal Minister of Sport has already stated there would be no money from Ottawa to help pay for the stadium as there was with the Canada Games Centre. Would that be the same federal government that said the municipal gas tax rebates couldn’t be used for sports stadiums and then bent over backward to allow Quebec to use the funds for just that purpose?
What Minister Gary Lunn really said is that none of the funds that Ottawa set aside for the Women’s World Cup bid would be used to build a stadium. That has no impact on all the other pots of money the feds have available for funding infrastructure projects, like the P3 program that covers public-private partnerships – an approach that has already been discussed as the way to go in building the stadium. So don’t be fooled by government doubletalk. Beside, Defence Minister Peter MacKay – a senior member of the cabinet – has stated he fully supports the project and MacKay has a track record of delivering federal dollars to this province.
