From Corporate Welfare to National Interest: Newspaper Analysis of the Public Subsidization of NHL Hockey Debate in Canada

Abstract

Despite the historic and popular alignment of ice hockey with Canadian identity, the public subsidization of National Hockey League (NHL) franchises remains a highly contentious public issue in Canada. In January 2000 the Canadian government announced a proposal to subsidize Canadian-based NHL franchises. The proposal, however, received such a hostile national response that only three days after its release an embarrassed Liberal government was forced to rescind it. This article explores how Canadian anglophone newspapers mediated the NHL subsidy debate and emerged as critical sites through which several interrelated issues were contested: the subsidization of NHL franchises, competing discourses of Canadian national identity, and the broader political-economic and sociocultural impacts of the Canadian government’s adherence to a neoliberal agenda.