MONCTON – Maritime Football is seeking to set up an Atlantic Canadian CFL team in Halifax and Moncton could play a role in the process. Mayor Dawn Arnold said the city would be open to hosting the team for one or two seasons while a new stadium is constructed in Halifax.

Maritime Football lead investor Anthony LeBlanc and CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie recently toured Moncton’s stadium and the new $113-million Downtown Events Centre with the Mayor.

“I think they realized what the potential in our community could be,” she said. “However this all works out, it’s got to be all of Atlantic Canada on board, it’s got to be the Atlantic Canadian team.”

Although the city won’t bid to have the team based in Moncton, Mayor Arnold said Moncton could host a couple of seasons to help establish an Atlantic Canadian audience base before the team moves to Halifax.

Halifax Mayor Mike Savage told Huddle over the phone that if his city were to get a CFL team, “it would have to be a regional effort.”

If they need to do a regular season [in Moncton], that’s fine. I want to cooperate with any mayors in communities in Atlantic Canada that want to take part in the effort,” said Savage.

“It would show the level of collaboration and team spirit that we have here. It could be a really positive thing to help out in this way and help enable [the Atlantic Canadian franchise] to be successful,” Mayor Arnold said.

Mayor Savage said Maritime Football is looking at having the team enter the league in 2021 or 2022.

Moncton has the past experience of hosting CFL games for more than 20,000 fans. Its stadium has a capacity of nearly 21,000 seats. Talks are still preliminary, but Ambrosie and LeBlanc said some changes might be needed at the stadium to play games in Moncton.

“They did mention nicer box seats and obviously we’d have to bring in more seats and that’s doable too,” Mayor Arnold said. “There would probably be a lot of negotiations that have to happen. No one has really been talking about money at all here so that would be an interesting conversation that would have to take place.”

Mayor Arnold said the meeting with Ambrosie and LeBlanc was “a provincial play” and not arranged by the city.

In February, Maritime Football founding partner Bruce Bowser said it’s time to make the CFL a truly coast-to-coast league by adding an Atlantic Canadian team.

“The time is right. We deserve a world-class stadium here. We have tremendous momentum and we’re ready for a team,” he said in a Tweet posted by the company.

Mayor Savage said the idea of bringing a CFL franchise into Halifax has been around for decades. But this time, it’s led and promoted by a private sector group that recognizes that the city’s main issue is the lack of a stadium.

“They’ve been working on a couple of assumptions. One is that the city has not been inclined to put a lot of money into it up front and we need to find a more creative way. Depending on that creative way, they could possibly think of putting more money upfront or a combination,” he said.

Maritime Football presented the idea to the City Council before Christmas and returned last Tuesday ready to “start talking numbers,” Savage said.

Mayor Savage said Maritime Football has identified four possible locations, none of them are likely to be in the city’s core because of the lack of space.

“We have areas outside the core of the city with complete communities, so we’d want it to be there,” he said. “We don’t want to build a stadium with 15,000-to-20,000 parking spots either. We don’t want to see an asphalt jungle. Essentially, we’d like to see a downtown stadium, even if it’s not downtown.”

Although the specific value of a Halifax stadium hasn’t been disclosed, Mayor Savage said it would be “a lot more” than the $60-million stadium proposed for Commonwealth Games. The stadium would have to have 20-to-25,000 seats and be expandable for bigger events.

“They’ve put some numbers together to identify the best financing model. They’ve been looking at what the marketplace would look like beyond football, for concerts and other events,” he said. “Now we have to direct our staff – if we’re interested – to take it to the next level, which is to see what the numbers look like and if it’s something the city council could support.”