...and while I'm at it NO to soccer in Kanata, too.
The bottom line on both proposals is that they depend, either explicitly or implicitly, on public money. And right now the public is out of money. Wen we are having trouble keeping the streets cleared of snow, when we are closing libraries, when we are pissing away money bribing people to do something that they are going to do anyways, there's no money for sporting ventures.
Or at least there shouldn't be.
The thing is: Ottawa isn't a sports town. The media wants it to be, but it isn't.
Recent history features several professional teams as solidly dead corpses -- multiple ownership groups for the Ottawa Rough Riders, several more for the Ottawa Renegades, plus the Lynx who left town before they could be forced to close, which was what happened to the Rapids.
The only reason why hockey is currently popular is because of the team's recent run. The last year and a half aside, the team has been a winning team, going all the way to the cup finals in 2007. If this downturn is a prolonged one, Ottawa will abandon the Senators as they have abandoned other sports teams. The ridiculous state of affairs for fan access to the arena in Kanata is only going to compound things.
Ottawa is a bandwagon town. They love a winner. However they are not interested in supporting a bad (or, lets face it, an indifferent) team. They'll hop on the bandwagon if it is going, but as soon as it isn't, they are gone, along with their bums in the seats.
So it would be an incredibly stupid move to put public money into any scheme which revolves around a sporting franchise, no matter where in the city its base of operations is. The Landsdown Live group should be told hey that was a nifty idea, sorry we can't make it work, have a nice day. And then we put the whole issue back on the back-burner.
Honestly, if sporting franchises were such sure-fire guaranteed winners, you could bet your last dollar that business organizations would be falling over each other to offer to finance the whole thing privately. The fact that they are not is proof-positive that they are not sure-fire winners.
