No End in Sight for Return of Ottawa To the Canadian Football League

By an exact same vote of 15-9, the same as it was back last November, Ottawa City Council approved the Lansdowne Live project which will bring CFL football back to Ottawa in a new Frank Clair Stadium.

But you won't find the CFL rejoicing over the news.  It's not even mentioned at their website.

All that is clear is how divisive an issue this has become in Ottawa.

Far from CFL football fans celebrating and exclaiming, "Full steam ahead!" for a return of Ottawa football and a nine-team CFL once more, it is still unclear if the project will go ahead and when Ottawa will return to the CFL.

In truth, there is more enthusiasm in small Moncton for the Touchdown Atlantic game in September this year.  The CFL might have better luck trying to get an investor to start a permanent franchise there.

To begin with, it took 12 hours of debate before Ottawa City Council approved the project, after debating 50 more amendments to the proposal.

And the project can be torpedoed too easily.

Ottawa Sports And Entertainment Group, the potential new owners of the franchise, must produce a signed contract with the CFL, confirming Ottawa will have a franchise, within 90 days or the deal is automatically terminated.

There can also be legal challenges and appeals to the Ontario Municipal Board, and when a new city council is elected this fall, they will have the power to cancel the project if they wish.

Originally, Ottawa was supposed to rejoin the CFL to start the upcoming season, but it was discovered that the existing stadium needed major structural repairs.

Debate about what to do has postponed Ottawa's return to the CFL indefinitely.

Earlier this year, there were optimistic reports that if everything went well, construction could begin as early as this fall, but every aspect of the project including the stadium itself has been called into question.

Still worse, there seems to be more opponents making themselves heard than long starved Ottawa football fans.

On June 18, a group of citizens opposed to the project met, with many of them describing the project as an unsavory "backroom deal".

This is the result of 30 years of non-competitive football and bad ownership, a sad reflection of how much enthusiasm for football has declined in Ottawa.

Another revealing measurement of football enthusiasm in Ottawa is the size of the stadium.

Though the design has been described by some enthusiasts as a "jewel of the CFL", which is supposed to blend in with a park woodland setting, the seating has been pegged at only 24,000, in Canada's fourth largest city, making it the smallest stadium in the CFL, 1,000 seats below the CFL's supposed minimum of 25,000.

This at a time when Montreal has increased its seating capacity by 5,000, Winnipeg is building a new 33,000-seat stadium, and when there is debate about building a larger stadium in Saskatchewan.

So what should have been a joyous event is not even being mentioned by the CFL at their website.

What was supposed to be an enthusiastic, visionary project has sunk to the level of believe-it-when-you-see-it.