Thank you to the committee for your invitation, to all MPs for their leadership and to our essential workers for their courage. I have never had more sleepless nights, and I have never been prouder to be Canadian. I'd also like to acknowledge my fellow panellists. They all work to make Canada a better place.
I appear here on behalf of the Canadian Football League and the Grey Cup, which has been a source of Canadian unity and celebration since 1909. The CFL is a valuable and integral part of Canadian life, and its future is very much in jeopardy. It would be terribly sad if this pandemic were allowed to take it away.
Ours is a big brand, but not a wealthy business. Collectively, our teams lose between $10 million and $20 million a season. We survive because of the passion of our fans, the dedication of the volunteers who guide our community-held clubs and the civic philanthropy of the people who own and subsidize our privately held teams.
Our players are world-class athletes and first-class people. Their devotion to charity and community is second to none, but the salary of NBA superstar Steph Curry is equal to the salaries of all our players combined.
Our product is football, but what we really do is bring Canadians together. Two million Canadians buy tickets to our games each year. When our players go into the community to talk about violence against women, or bullying, or food banks, they draw a crowd.
Bringing people together makes us great, but in a pandemic it makes us vulnerable, because the first thing to go and the last thing to come back is large gatherings, and large gatherings are the lifeblood of the CFL. Unlike large U.S.-based leagues, our biggest source of revenue is not TV. It's ticket sales.
For reasons of public health that we totally support, governments coping with COVID-19 have made it impossible for us to do what we do. Our best-case scenario for this year is a drastically truncated season, and our most likely scenario is no season at all.
We are currently operating on the money that our fans and, to a lesser extent, the broadcasters and sponsors pay us in advance for games. The day is fast approaching when we will have to cancel several games and perhaps the season, and then our fans and partners will have every right to demand their money back. At that moment, our financial crisis will become very real and very big.
The spirit and substance of our ask to the federal government has been obscured somewhat by the power of a headline, something that I'm sure all of you in public life are very familiar with. We have told the federal government that we need $30 million in working capital this summer to keep operating and to keep as many people as possible employed.
It is very challenging to be precise on what additional help we might need, because COVID-19 has literally created a world of uncertainty. Will we have games this fall or no season? What about 2021? Can we pack our stadiums then or not ?
One of our most famous Grey Cup games was called the Fog Bowl because the players couldn't make out what was in front of them. A friend of mine says that we're all operating in a fog bowl right now.
We did our best to consider what might be ahead of us, and we estimated that we could need as much as an additional $120 million over the next two years if the most negative scenarios—all of them—come true.
But here is our bottom line. We want the support we need to get through this crisis and not a dime more. We support the decisions governments have made, but their effect on our business is devastating. We just don't want it to be fatal.
A ban on large gatherings means no revenue and no business for us, and we want to ensure it does not mean no CFL for the future. We want to earn this money and pay taxpayers back by delivering real value through a partnership with government.
We can share our in-stadium, online and broadcast assets so government can deliver important information, and we can build on our track record of service to the community. For example, we could expand the award-winning Be More Than a Bystander program we deliver with the Ending Violence Association of B.C. and train boys and men across the country about consent and respect for women.
I don't mind telling you that this is humbling, but the fact is, we need your support so we can be there for all the community groups that depend on us, so we can continue to deliver $1.2 billion in economic activity each year, and so the CFL can continue to be one of those things that connects us as Canadians—something uniquely ours.
Whenever it comes, we want our next Grey Cup, Canada's 108th, to be the place where we can all celebrate what we did to get through this and that Canada is back.
I thank you very much.