Forget the Charge...OSEG is coming!

 

OSEG's Catch-22: The Charge's Departure Is a Stress Test, Not a Hockey Story

Earlier this month, the PWHL's Ottawa Charge confirmed what had been rumoured for months: the team is leaving Lansdowne Park for the Ottawa Senators' Canadian Tire Centre. The Charge averaged roughly 7,300 fans a game at TD Place last season. The new Event Centre being built as part of Lansdowne 2.0 tops out around 6,500-6,600.

It's tempting to file this under sports news. It shouldn't be. The Charge's exit is the first real test of the financial promise that got Lansdowne 2.0 through council — and the early results aren't reassuring.

The promise council was sold

When the $419-million Lansdowne 2.0 plan came up for its final vote last November, it passed 15-10. Part of what got it there was a financing pitch built on a simple reassurance: the City wouldn't be on the hook. Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group (OSEG), the city's private partner at Lansdowne, would absorb any shortfalls, the same way it always had. The City's own public materials on the project put it plainly: OSEG covers the losses, and the City has never lost money in the partnership.

That promise depends on one thing holding steady — enough ticket revenue, surcharges, and event volume flowing through the site to keep the model solvent. It was never a taxpayer guarantee so much as a bet that OSEG's revenue base wouldn't shrink.

The bet already looked shaky before the vote

This wasn't an unforeseeable risk. The PWHL had already gone on record warning that a smaller arena wasn't financially workable for the Charge, and that the lost capacity could cost the team up to a million dollars a year. Councillors had that number in front of them when they voted. Amendments were even introduced attempting to keep the Charge in Ottawa as part of the deal. The concern was raised, considered, and set aside in favour of moving forward with the smaller design.

Now the tenant that concern was about has left — before the new building has even opened.

Why this is a catch-22, not a scandal

The easy version of this story would be to blame whoever's on council when the bill comes due. That's not really where the problem lives. This is structural, and it doesn't matter who wins Ward 13 or any other seat in October:

If the next council quietly helps OSEG absorb the loss — through a renegotiated agreement, revised terms, or any mechanism short of a public bailout — it confirms that the "taxpayers are protected, the City hasn't lost money" pitch didn't survive contact with its first real test. Every councillor who voted for the plan on that basis owns that outcome, regardless of party or ward.

If the next council refuses to backstop OSEG, OSEG absorbs a real financial hit on a facility it operates on the City's behalf — or the Event Centre ends up under-programmed, which undercuts the retail earnings, surcharges, and tax-revenue projections used to justify the smaller footprint in the first place.

Neither outcome is good. Both were foreseeable. That's the definition of a structural problem: it doesn't go away based on who's sitting at the table.

The question that actually matters

Residents deserve a straight answer to one specific question, and it shouldn't take a MFIPPA request to get it: does the Lansdowne 2.0 agreement contain any explicit City backstop or guarantee for OSEG shortfalls — or is that scenario genuinely left ambiguous?

If there's no backstop, then "the City hasn't lost money" was always going to depend on OSEG's revenue holding up, and residents should know that's the deal they signed onto. If there is one, buried in the fine print, then the "no taxpayer risk" framing sold during the campaign for this project needs to be corrected in public, not quietly managed after the fact.

Either way, the next council — whoever sits on it — inherits this question on day one. That's worth knowing before you vote, not after.