It’s time to pay hockey juniors
Everything about these leagues says ‘professional’
Ontario may soon officially indulge one of Canadian hockey’s most peculiar fantasies: that the 16-to-20-yearolds playing in the three major junior leagues are not employees, and therefore not entitled to such extravagances as the minimum wage.
Ontario Hockey League Commissioner David Branch wrote to Premier Doug Ford and Sports Minister Michael Tibollo last week requesting an explicit exemption from these noisome labour laws. Nine other jurisdictions have granted them, he noted. Tibollo responded positively.
“We are actively looking at providing this clarity to the OHL and we will have more to say in the coming weeks,” he said.
Branch is grappling with a $180-million class-action lawsuit against the Canadian Hockey League — parent of the Ontario, Western and Quebec major junior leagues — seeking lost wages.
He had better hope the lawyers argue better than he does. “Our players, together with their parents and with the support of player agents, enter and continue to play in the OHL clearly understanding that they are participating in amateur athletics,” he avowed.
Well, yeah. Obviously the players understand they’re amateurs — because they’re not getting bloody paid.
Every single other thing about these leagues screams “professional.” The most successful teams draw 6,000 to 9,000 fans. Ticket prices are in the same general range as the American Hockey League, which is the second tier of pro hockey in North America. Financial information disclosed by OHL teams as part of the lawsuit found team revenues ranged from $1.3 million to $6.5 million. The London Knights reported a profit of $1.9 million.
Others lost a bundle. Some owners argue actually paying their players might bankrupt them, and they might be right. Sadly, they don’t sound like very viable businesses. The scholarship programs Canada’s major junior teams offer alumni are all well and good. Players get some pocket money for gas. But nothing justifies not paying these kids for their labour.
Mind you, the whole system is close to unjustifiable.
In England, the best young soccer players will be wooed by the top pro teams before they’re even 10. They’ll have their pick — and because soccer teams tend to exist where there are soccer players and soccer fans, they’ll not have to go far from home to play if they don’t want to.
In Canada, the Brandon Wheat Kings can draft a 16-year-old from Vancouver and if that 16-year-old doesn’t want to move 2,000 kilometres away from his home and his school and his friends to play major junior hockey and spend half his life on a bus, well, he’s not going to play major junior hockey. Tough beans. And if he does decide to go, and the Wheat Kings decide they want to ship him off to Swift Current in the middle of the school year, well, there’s nothing he can do about that either.
Does that sound like “amateur athletics”? Does it even sound sane?
In a rational universe, top hockey players from smaller towns and cities would be moving to the bigger ones, not vice versa, because that’s where all the best teams would be. And the best teams would be training the best young players. There are seven London teams in this year’s English Premier League, and six in the general vicinity of Manchester and Liverpool.
The equivalent cities in Canada are Toronto and Montreal. They have one NHL team each, and they will never get another. Winnipeg, one of the biggest natural hockey markets in the world, only has a team because Atlanta became literally untenable. Quebec City, another of the biggest natural hockey markets in the world, has a brand-new arena and a willing billionaire, and it can’t get a meeting. There are three teams in New York City, two in Los Angeles, 10 in cities where essentially nobody plays or knows the game. Saskatoon or Halifax are far bigger “hockey markets” in the strictest sense than Miami or Phoenix; putting an NHL team in either city isn’t even a pipe dream.
We might at least hope to be left with second-tier pro hockey. But the AHL only has teams in Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and Belleville, Ont., of all places. The thirdtier ECHL has one team in Brampton, Ont. Of course, that’s because major junior has filled the market space that minor pro would more logically occupy. Which is to say major junior is minor pro; we just pretend it’s not.
This is all fruit of the poison tree we let the NHL plant on our national front lawn many decades ago, and it has grown ever mightier and more toxic during Gary Bettman’s 25 years as commissioner. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame this week, incidentally. There is no hope of change. We are stuck with this hideous cartel and its sub-cartels and all the market-distorting effects it has wrought on our national sport. We gave them the Stanley Cup, for God’s sake.
Luckily, none of that prevents major junior team owners from paying their employees. Canadian governments should be insisting upon it, not granting these fakakta “exemptions” from reality.