Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay Random
How do you propose that governments do this? Pass a law that somehow applies in both Canada and the U.S., evicting every NHL team from every arena that was built with public money, and then force them to buy the arenas at the original cost of construction?
Because the only subsidy that most NHL teams are receiving is the ability to play in a publicly-funded arena that has already been built – decades ago in the majority of cases.
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In Canada it would only take 5 provinces agreeing to amend the municipal governance act to ban Canadians subsidizing nhl arenas. That likely would be widely supported as if you remember when the feds gave the NHL teams a tax break it didn’t last long as it was overwhelmingly panned.
If Canada did this the NHL would have to seriously ask itself if it needs the Canadian market outside of Toronto, Montreal and BC. It might conclude it doesn’t.
Now to get the US involved would likely be more difficult but you would start by working through the North American Mayors Summit to get buy in on ending the stupidity.
You don’t need to evict existing owners as the NHLs likely response would be something around extracting money from the NHLPA.
It’s funny you talk about how the NHLPA would be tough to extract 900 million per year from. The only reason cities are easy to extract that from is that they don’t act like a union. It starts by getting all the existing locations on board and then working against poachers.