NHL has fired a shot across Canada’s bow

Decision on Olympics is a colonial imposition that should be resisted, Irvin Studin says. Whether the National Hockey League realizes it or not, its decision earlier this week against sending its players to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang next year is nothing short of a shot across the bow of our country’s self-identity and self-respect.

As we prepare to celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary, we Canadians should view it as a colonial imposition that must be ferociously resisted and reversed.

Who are the defending Olympic champions in hockey? Answer: Canada, in two Olympics running. Which single event has, almost uniquely in the Canadian experience and in recent national history, managed to galvanize, at one moment in space-time, the passions and imaginations of nearly all Canadians, regardless of region, tongue, ethnic or religious community? Answer: the Olympic hockey final.

When an executive group based out of New York City, dominated by American decisionmakers, decrees, de facto, that Canada will suddenly not be able to field its best players to defend its Olympic gold medal and unite the country in common cause and euphoria, we Canadians must react as would the Brazilians, inevitably, if a foreign soccer league ever decided to prohibit Brazil’s footballing geniuses from representing their country at the World Cup, or New Zealanders if ever faced with the prospect of All-Blacks players being barred from the rugby World Cup by foreign employers.

This decision must not be allowed to stand, and Canada must deploy all the resources and energy at its disposal to ensure that this is properly understood (and felt).

To be sure, there is a paradox at the heart of the Canadian hockey condition. On the ice and in the rinks of the country, Canadian hockey breeds first-order men and women who take no prisoners and accept nothing but excellence and total victory. The hockey-player mentality in Canada is sui generis and quasi-imperial: It lords over the players of other countries, and sets the governing idioms for how the sport is played around the world.

Off the ice, however — most importantly, in the decision-making centres of the world’s most important hockey league, the NHL — we Canadians remain second-order people in the organization of our own national sport. We are, for the most part, not the term-setters, and evidently do not yet wield any veto power over decisions that are fundamentally injurious to Canadian interests and culture. After all, there are only seven Canadian-based teams out of 30 in the NHL, and it remains the case that our business and political leaders are often forced to prostrate before the hockey overlords across the border to grant us just one additional team.

The NHL and its commissioner can, on the evidence, be forgiven for presuming that the national reaction to the decision to keep the hockey heroes of Canada out of the Olympics would be met with colonial passivity and indifference — or perhaps by some perverse species of rationalization by parts of the commentariat that do not themselves seem to be conscious of the colonial cage they inhabit.

But Canada is not a colony. Not at 150 years of age — a longevity celebrated by precious few political-constitutional entities around the world and in human history. And we Canadians are not, by now, a colonial people. Or are we?

I am calling, humbly, for the prime minister, all our political and business leaders, and also our sporting and cultural stars — including Canadian NHL players, present and past — to make it plain to the NHL that this decision is unacceptable to Canada and to the Canadian people.

In our own sport, as in much of this fastchanging new century, Canada will be thinking for itself. Our hockey heroes will successfully defend the gold next year in South Korea.

And they will enjoy the unified support of the entire country.

We Canadians remain second-order people in the organization of our own national sport.

Irvin Studin is editor-in-chief and publisher of Global Brief magazine, president of the Institute for 21st Century Questions and visiting professor at the Université du Québec à Montreal.