Who Owns Hockey Night In Canada?
The CBC's loss of broadcast rights is a blow to national, and personal, connections at the worst possible time.
The CBC’s 90-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 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 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.
