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The CFL’s Man of the People again lifted the cone of silence Saturday to give community leaders and Ottawa Redblacks season-ticket holders a look at what the future may hold for the league.

CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie, in the first stop of his cross-country Randy’s Road Trip that will visit each of the league’s nine cities along with a Feb. 23 stop in Halifax, spoke with passion about the CFL 2.0 initiative, how the CFL hopes to engage fans across the league but especially in Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto, a joint venture with U Sports to have the Vanier Cup and Grey Cup both played in Hamilton on the same weekend in 2021 and how the league may change the way it runs its playoff system.

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Here’s how Ambrosie, who loves getting feedback from fans, answered some of the questions from the audience in an hour-and-a-half session at TD Place’s Otto’s Club.

ON CFL 2.0 AND FINDING NEW FANS IN CANADA

“We need to make the CFL more cool, being more international is part of that. You’re going to have, this year, two active (roster) spots for global players. We’re asking community associations to form a welcoming committee for the athletes coming to our training camps? Why? To re-energize the league, we have to get a Canadian but much more international audience to come to our games. At our scouting combine in Japan, our head global scout Greg Quick said there was a running back who looks like he was born to play CFL football. He had staggeringly good results. Let’s use that as an example. There are tens of thousands of Canadians who have Japanese heritage. We can use that to get the Japanese Canadian community to come and watch a kid from Japan play football. It mostly matters in our three biggest cities (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver). (B.C. Lions owner) David Braley is in the hospital right now and I’ve been spending time visiting with him — we’ve been talking about a strategy to re-energize the Lions. David is really passionate about getting B.C. Place back to where it was. When I played there — 1985 my rookie season and we went there — B.C. was 5-0, we were 0-5 — there were 54,000 people for a regular-season game. I’m not that old, that’s not that long ago. We have a bunch of strategies we’re working on, but it’s got to be about diversifying our fan base. Our international strategy is not just about 100 million watching around the world on TV, it’s about reaching into the communities in Canada that aren’t necessarily familiar with football and welcoming them in through the introduction of athletes they can relate to.”