Jack Todd: Is Clifford Starke the owner the Alouettes need right now?

The cannabis entrepreneur's closest association with the Alouettes is through his friendship with Larry Smith’s son.

Clifford Starke

Montreal businessman Clifford Starke has formally announced his intent to purchase the Montreal Alouettes. Hampstead Private Capital

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Let me see if I have this straight:

CFL rosters have to be cut down to 75 by April 30, the CFL draft is May 2. Rookie camps open May 15, regular training camps open May 19 and the regular season kicks off June 13, less than two months from now.

The league’s basic agreement with the CFL Players Association expires May 18. CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie, busy with such pressing matters as a European draft for players who will never take a snap in the league, says he can’t possibly open reopen negotiations for the CFLPA before April 29.

Strategy? Back the players up against the wall, then assume enough of them will buckle for the league to resume its usual “partnership” with the guys who are out there wrecking their bodies: “Shut up and play ball and we’ll take care of the business.”

Meanwhile, the Alouettes (their record a combined 8-28 the past two seasons) don’t even know who owns the team. Season tickets, anyone?

And who is the owner? Is it Bob Wetenhall, the genial patriarch who has owned the team since 1997? Is it his son, Andrew Wetenhall, who has had significantly less success?

Is it the CFL? Or is it the hitherto unknown Clifford Starke, who apparently made his money in the medical cannabis business and who was best buddies with Larry Smith’s son?

Or none of the above? The group led by former Alouettes star Éric Lapointe was apparently brushed aside in its attempt to buy the team.

Why was Lapointe’s group turned away? I’m told they were well-financed and well-positioned to turn this mess around, but that there was a disconnect between the governors and the commissioner, with the governors backing Lapointe, while Ambrosie did not — maybe because he was too busy with that European draft to pay proper attention. Too bad, because Lapointe would have brought instant goodwill and credibility from the francophone side, which is critical to marketing a team in this city.

Instead, the apparent incoming owner is Starke. But imagine you’re a typical member of the CFL Board of Governors, befuddled but highly conservative, and the prospective new guy talks like this:

“The focus was on pharmaceutical and more recently medical cannabis,” Starke told my colleague Stu Cowan. “My partners and I have created billions of billions of dollars of capitalization. The whole taboo of cannabis and smoking a joint on the corner is done. We’re now presenting a pharmaceutical-grade product to someone to get better. Mental health, stress, anxiety, pain relief, that type of thing. So I’m on a global scale of operations in Uruguay, Colombia, Israel, Germany, Denmark, Portugal … it goes on and on. My day-to-day focus is cannabis related, specifically on one company called Franchise Cannabis Corp.”

OK, so Franchise Cannabis Corp. with operations in Colombia and Uruguay, is about to join the CFL ownership club. Got it.

I’ll reserve judgment on Clifford Starke team owner — although a few questions did occur to me after hearing his statements. If you’re really a “Tier 1 guy in business,” do you talk about being a Tier 1 guy in business?

And what of the other “Tier 1 guys,” the ones Starke says he’s going to bring into team management? What are they doing in management for a struggling CFL team that has lost so much attendance it is closing 5,000 seats at Percival Molson Stadium?

We’ll forgive Starke for thinking Johnny Manziel would be the next Doug Flutie rather than the next tire fire, because he wasn’t close to the sport at the time. Manziel has fooled a lot of people in his time and he will go on fooling them for a while yet.

But how does current team president Patrick Boivin feel about the prospect of these Tier 1 guys poking around his office? What of GM Kavis Reed and head coach Mike Sherman? They haven’t exactly burned up the track, so how are they feeling about their job security right about now?

Starke’s closest association with the Alouettes is through his friendship with Larry Smith’s son. The former Alouettes president (and former CFL commissioner) could sell oil to the Saudis — but Smith wasn’t strong on the nuts and bolts of management and he tended to have a blind eye to such details as conflict of interest.

Still, Smith is the man who made the reborn Alouettes work at a time when the task appeared hopeless. He sold the team (and the sport) to the francophone community and he is one of the primary reasons football took such a deep hold among French-speaking Quebecers from les Pirates de Richelieu to the Laval Rouge et Or.

Whatever Starke’s strengths and weaknesses as a prospective owner, he could not possibly do worse than the Wetenhalls and their surrogates have done over the past five years. Starke seems to have a genuine passion for the CFL game.

At a time when the Alouettes prospects have rarely been so stark, perhaps Starke is the man.




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