COLD WAR FREEZES CFL AT WORST POSSIBLE TIME
League officials, players need to remain united in fight to survive COVID-19 crisis
The what-if scenario, a standard pandemic by-product, has positioned the Canadian Football League at unsightly loggerheads with its players.
The two sides should be working together against one obvious enemy, to mitigate the myriad effects of a virus that has infected millions, killed hundreds of thousands, shut down economies, and lastly on this incomplete list, threatens the 2020 CFL season.
Instead, they have managed to anger one another and conjure up aspects of the darkest days of testy collective bargaining agreement negotiations in 2019.
Gone are the good vibes, the Tuesday and Friday working committee conference calls and spirit of co-operation in a crisis that had been intensifying through March and into early April, as it became obvious there would be nothing regular at all about the 2020 CFL regular season. Indeed, on April 7 the campaign’s start was officially postponed to at least July 1, pending the determinations of government and health officials.
At that crucial inflection point, their hand-in-hand drive toward the end zone, whatever it looks like in this new normal, was stopped cold. The CFLPA foisted Paragraph 16 of the standard players contract onto the table, and it was seen by the league as an act of aggression, whether that was the intention or not.
It states: It is mutually understood and agreed that if the operation of the Canadian Football League is suspended, this Contract shall immediately be terminated and the remuneration to be paid to the Player shall be on the basis as provided by Paragraph 11 herein.
Paragraph 11 states players are entitled to compensation for work they have completed, meaning there would be no pay cheques if the 2020 season is cancelled.
So the interpretation of Paragraph 16 is indeed a major issue, given that its trigger mechanism would send every CFL player into immediate free agency. And yet, it seems obvious the intent of the paragraph is to address a complete cessation of league operations, a folding of the tent if you will, not a postponement in the midst of a pandemic, or even the cancellation of an entire season.
And it’s believed the CFLPA doesn’t want to leverage such dire circumstances to create an entirely new class of free agent.
So why the discord, if both sides can see the most logical intent of Paragraph 16?
The pandemic and its potential to shorten or wipe out the CFL season creates myriad Cba-related issues that require collective bargaining, and room for gains and losses on each side.
Once the players raised Paragraph 16 as an issue that needed to be addressed, it entered those discussions as a threat to league stability. In other words, it’s a massive bargaining chip.
The league doesn’t want to continue negotiations with that unresolved threat in the air, and won’t abide a player proposal to open a short window during which a CFL player could vacate his deal to sign with a National Football League team, a proposal that might affect fewer than 15 players.
That’s largely because the league reads Paragraph 16 as a clause addressing the end of days, not the end of a season, and has no appetite for an interpretation that cedes ground to players who are still employed, have been paid their off-season bonuses, and may yet collect salaries in 2020.
The players, on the other hand, look down the same road at potential financial hardship and loss of medical benefits, and want the right to explore whatever opportunities exist to play the game elsewhere in the event of a cancelled CFL season.
For now, there can be no solution because the two sides aren’t talking. The CFLPA sees
Neither side can afford to allow the relationship to become mutually destructive.
the communication shutdown as league obstinance. The league views it as a logical result of the players leveraging Paragraph 16 to their potential benefit.
Eventually, they’ll have to negotiate the length of schedule, travel concerns, compensation, safety precautions in the locker-room, pension issues and many other extraordinary circumstances in and out of the CBA that have been forced upon all of them by the pandemic. Luckily, there is still time for those talks, each side is represented by level-headed leadership, and neither side can afford to allow the relationship to become mutually destructive in the midst of a crisis.
The CFL is under pressure to put a marketable product on the field, because there are livelihoods at stake. Every member of the head office staff in Toronto has already taken a pay cut, so has many personnel with most, if not all, of the nine teams. Some team employees have lost their jobs as the league comes to terms with a dearth of cash that would normally be flowing from ticket sales and sponsorship deals.
The players have their own obvious financial concerns; paying mortgages and feeding families, perhaps in the absence of bringing in their CFL salaries.
Too much is at stake for too many for this squabble to go on for too long.