After 74 years, Hockey Night in Canada has been murdered by capitalism
And yet, there is still a chance it could be reborn...
After nearly three-quarters of a century on television, and decades more on the radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Hockey Night in Canada is coming to an unceremonious end, cancelled by the Rogers family conglomerate in order to pursue greater profits for their veritable dragon’s hoard of gold.
No longer shall Canadians be able to watch the National Hockey League play the national sport on the nation’s public broadcaster, funded solely by tax dollars. Foster Hewitt’s classic words bidding “Hello, Canada, and hockey fans, in the United States and Newfoundland”—a quote so old it comes from a time when Newfoundland and Labrador were a separate British dominion and not a Canadian province—will never be heard again on the CBC.
To call this damaging for CBC/Radio-Canada would be an understatement; this is positively cataclysmic. Mind you, I’ve shunned the NHL for a fair bit of time now; I see no reason to financially support a league that welcomes Carter Hart and his fellow conspirators with open arms. And yes, I do use the phrase “conspirators”, as the only reason they were found not guilty is that the judge decided the evidence proving their guilt was inadmissible on technicality. I’m not watching the NHL, or the AHL, or the ECHL, or the OHL or QMJHL or WHL. The whole men’s pipeline is rotten, from my perspective.
Nonetheless, my individual feelings clearly are not those of the Canadian public. An NHL player could murder someone on the ice with a gun, and their first thought would still be “it’s okay, he’s good at puck.” Hockey Night in Canada was one of the few remaining pieces of “appointment television” in our individualistic, atomized society; a large portion of the country sat down at the same time to watch the same show, and it built community.
The fact that it was accessible for free, funded by the CBC’s government-allocated budget, only made this experience even more universal as we entered the age of premium satellite and cable packages later in the 20th Century. Yet things took a turn for the worse in 2014, when the NHL decided they could make more money by selling the rights to the Rogers family, for their Sportsnet network of premium channels. The CBC was still allowed to broadcast Hockey Night in Canada, but it was now produced by Rogers, and the CBC saw significant losses to advertising revenue, resulting in many employees at our public broadcaster losing their jobs.
This sublicensing arrangement from Rogers to the CBC was the status quo which persisted until yesterday. While this recent form of Hockey Night in Canada has been a decaying and feeble mockery of its former self, it was at least a token throw from the capitalists towards the working masses, preserving a smidgen of free access to men’s hockey on Canada’s public broadcaster. Capitalism hadn’t taken quite everything, yet.
Anyway, that’s over now. Rogers may claim they “tried” to make a deal happen, but the reality of the situation is that they stand to make far more money from keeping all NHL games exclusive to a paid subscription package. They think Canadians are addicted to the NHL like it’s heroin, and that we’ll all shove wads of cash in Ed Rogers’ face to get our next hit as if we’re dope fiends. It’s hard for me to call their cynicism wrong, considering how many of you just watched Carter Hart play.
The CBC says they will replace the time slot with athletes doing Olympic-style competitions, and I cannot overstate just how much worse that is going to perform for their ratings. There is no universe in which Random Skiing Competition #37 is going to fill the gap of Hockey Night in Canada for Canadian audiences. This course of action will be a disaster, and could be the death knell for our public broadcaster.
Thankfully, however, there is a solution, a highly competitive hockey league to which the CBC does still hold the rights. Growing in popularity each and every season, the PWHL represents the peak of the women’s hockey pyramid in North America. It already has a strong established audience in Canada—as the massive victory parade for this year’s Walter Cup champions, the Montréal Victoire, demonstrates—and the CBC is the primary rights holder for Canadian broadcasts. Further, the CBC retains the legal ownership of the Hockey Night in Canada brand.
If our public broadcaster is smart, they have a path to avert annihilation. Don’t meekly cower in fear! Broadcast the PWHL as the main attraction of Hockey Night in Canada show, aired on Saturday night in prime-time, the same time slot it’s always had. Go band for band with Rogers and the NHL! Punish them, and steal away viewership from their league!
After 74 years on television, Hockey Night in Canada has been murdered by capitalism. Yet the potential exists for the show to be reborn, like a phoenix…and I dare say that a PWHL Hockey Night in Canada might be even better than that which came before.