Hockey Night in Canada Is Over

The CBC’s ninety-year run of broadcasting hockey in Canada, first on the radio in 1936 and on television in 1952, is over. Rogers Sportsnet is now the sole rights holder after it and the CBC failed to reach a sublicensing deal that would have kept the national broadcaster in the business of broadcasting the country’s national winter sport.

Anger, frustration, disappointment, grief, and shock over the end of CBC hockey broadcasts reflect a sense of loss, that something has been taken away from us, that we’ve sold out a public institution to a for-profit company. For some, the concern includes worry about access to watching hockey, since free broadcasts will disappear with the end of the CBC’s rights deal. That means another fee, another streaming service, if you can afford it, if you can access it, and if the stream holds up (insert nightmares from the 2025 Blue Jays playoff run here).

Plenty of commentators have already assessed the cultural loss of Hockey Night in Canada. Historian Craig Baird had lots to say—and to the CBC itself. He captured the sadness felt from coast to coast to coast.

Baird’s “shock” reflects a mourning for the death of this institution, albeit one that’s been in decline for years and whose end had a feeling of inevitability to it. The death wasn’t written in the stars, though. It was a choice that emerged from the long-term decline of the CBC and its mismanagement. The internal failures were exacerbated by years of, at best, government ambivalence and dithering over the public broadcaster’s role within a free and sovereign country that, from time to time, dares to think of itself as a nation.

I’ll spare you the rundown of my memories watching Hockey Night in Canada as a child because you’ve surely heard plenty of that already, and what you haven’t heard, you can fill in with your imagination or, more likely, your own memories. The upshot of those memories, however, was connection and shared space. So much of our fondness and nostalgia for Saturday night hockey broadcasts is bound up with time and place, of growing up and being around friends and family, taking part in something that could and would be shared right across the country. For decades, the broadcast was a tradition, a common reference point, a lingua franca accessible to anyone with a radio set and, later, a television.

Today, we can take issue with the quality of hockey broadcasts on Sportsnet—indistinct, ad-choked, near serviceable, and not much else—and the barriers to access that come with putting gates up around the games, but that’s just part of the problem. A greater fracture is underway as we bury our heads in our devices, splinter online into smaller and smaller groups, and watch the loss of social capital and connection in the world outside our homes. An affordability crisis and the decline of public and accessible third spaces means we gather less still, putting our common points of familiarity, our common language, at risk.

At times, there’s hope for optimism. Just days ago, over 4 million Canadians (when you count streaming) watched their national team draw Bosnia and Herzegovina in the country’s World Cup opener. That game was gated, too, through a subscription but still drew massive viewership—though it would have been higher if barriers to access were lower or non-existent.

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The World Cup is a shared experience and common reference point for die-hard and casual fans alike, online and offline. Moreover, it functions as a bridge not just within the country but beyond it too. It connects viewers to billions around the world who make soccer the most popular sport on the planet, a sport whose popularity is due in no small part to the fact that you can play it just about anywhere for cheap.

The common denominator between Hockey Night in Canada and the World Cup is entertainment-as-connection, as a shared thing. Thinking back to the institutional value of Saturday night hockey broadcasts on the CBC, we recall the added value of accessibility, the capacity for each of us to choose to share in that thing. At this point in our national story, that connection is as important as it’s ever been, not just as we face external challenges from the United States and an uncertain global order but as we grapple with a technologically obsessed world that’s ostensibly “connected” but, in fact, lonely and sundered.

The CBC’s loss of Hockey Night in Canada ought to impel us to ask what we want and expect not just from our national broadcaster but from our country. If we are to be united in common purpose and understanding, we require shared points of reference and connection, not just politically but culturally too, and those points must be accessible. If we’re going to maintain, build, or rebuild a distinct country in the twenty-first century, this commonality and these links are non-negotiable. We should thus understand the materials that make them possible—whether hockey or anything else—as more than frivolities but rather as the necessities that make countries possible and life within them fuller and more fulfilling.

Originally published as “Who Owns Hockey Night in Canada?” by David Moscrop (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.