Hockey’s streaming spree means there’s one fewer thing holding Canada together

The Oilers lost to the Detroit Red Wings on 26 October, but Edmonton captain Connor McDavid got an assist anyway. He’s been doing that a lot lately. Just 16 games into the year, McDavid has 31 assists. It’s the fastest anyone has ever hit that milestone in any NHL season. But on that night in late October, many fans in Edmonton were unable to see McDavid’s feats – including patrons of a local bar – because it was one of nine Oilers games this season that are only available via a subscription to a premium streaming service.It’s the same story in every Canadian NHL city, thanks to changes to broadcasts that have meant that a handful of games for each team are now only available with a $12.99 per month subscription to Sportsnet+, a streaming channel owned by Canadian telecom juggernaut – and owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs – Rogers Communications Inc. But it’s not just Sportsnet+. The NHL also expanded its broadcast deal with Amazon, so when, two nights after the game against Detroit, the Oilers played their provincial rival, the Calgary Flames, only Amazon Prime subscribers could watch (true to form, McDavid got two assists in that one).It gets worse. In June, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s public broadcaster, announced it would stop airing Saturday night games – Hockey Night in Canada – for the first time since 1952. Again, Rogers played a role. In 2013, the telecom company signed a $5.2bn deal with the NHL for the league’s Canadian rights, with a sublicensing deal with the CBC to jointly present Saturday games. When the two sides couldn’t reach a new agreement, Rogers went ahead alone on its 12-year, $11bn rights renewal that started in October. “Watching hockey on Saturday night is a time-honoured tradition for Canadians, and Sportsnet is privileged to continue delivering that tradition,” the network said in a statement when the split was announced.Needless to say, “delivering” was doing a lot of work in that sentence, and no surprise, Canadians hate the arrangement now that they see what it means. Data released last week from Canadian pollster Angus Reid shows that 78% of Canadians say that “it’s bad that more games require additional subscriptions” and 63% say they pay too much for Sportsnet+, while roughly a third (33%) say Amazon Prime is too expensive. Hardly surprising, when the cost of living remains atop the list of issues facing Canadians. An even higher proportion (79%) say that it’s become too expensive overall to follow their favourite NHL team.Canadians also broadly lament Hockey Night in Canada’s demise, with 74% of respondents to the survey saying it’s a “major loss for Canadian hockey and its traditions.” This, as 90% of those surveyed said hockey is “an important or defining part of Canadian identity” – on par with how people felt a decade ago (88%), despite multiple changes to the league and scandals in the wider hockey world.Even if that figure is slightly inflated by the context of the survey itself, it’s worth pausing on. Hockey didn’t become a defining aspect of Canadian identity by accident; it arrived over the airwaves. In the late 1930s, Foster Hewitt’s voice carried Maple Leafs games from Halifax to Victoria. In 1972, children paused their school day to watch Paul Henderson score against the Soviets in the Summit Series. The sport was always a part of Canada’s story, but it became a shared national experience over decades because the whole country could watch it together.Advocating for a public broadcaster in 1932, the founder of the Canadian Radio League, Graham Spry, put the stakes bluntly: “The question is, the State or the United States.” Canada built public broadcasting as part of its endless project to keep its disparate population together – and, ideally, not American. Within a few years, Hewitt was on the CBC coast to coast. That’s not to say Canada can’t survive without hockey on Saturday nights, just that there’s one fewer thing holding it together in quite the same way.The thing is, this fragmented trajectory isn’t unique to hockey. The same Angus Reid survey revealed that the younger Canadians are, the more likely they are to agree that highlights and clips on social media are often enough to keep up with sports. Culture increasingly arrives on our own schedule, consumed asynchronously within the smooth walls of a personalised information silo. When Spry and others campaigned for what was to become the CBC, it was driven by a belief that we are more than individuals. This feels like an archaic notion in the atomised, curated social platform age, but it shouldn’t be.McDavid is doing something nobody has ever done, and it shouldn’t just drift by in the stream. At the very least, Oilers fans should be able to watch it at their local pub, owning the moment together. And sure, nations aren’t built on assist streaks. But nor do they hold together when everyone’s personally subscribed but no one’s collectively invested.