Canadians are grappling with the loss of a cultural touchstone after CBC announced Tuesday its Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts have come to an end.
“It came as a major shock,” Craig Baird, host of the Canadian History Ehx podcast, told CBC News.
“It’s not just a show, it’s a part of our culture. It’s woven into the fabric of Canada.”
The national broadcaster said it was unable to come to an agreement on a new sublicensing deal with rights-holder Rogers Sportsnet on the NHL games, including its staple Saturday night double-header broadcasts.
Canadians lamented the loss on social media, with X users calling it “devastating,” the “end of an amazing era” and a “sad, sad day for hockey in Canada.”
Some on social media blamed corporate greed or insufficient government funding and expressed frustration that they’ll now have to pay to watch NHL hockey. Others took the opportunity to renew calls to defund CBC.
Baird says HNIC‘s cultural impact was “massive” in its nearly century-long run.
“Every great Canadian hockey player was either listening to Hockey Night in Canada on the radio, picturing themselves on the ice, or they were watching Hockey Night in Canada,” he said.
CBC started broadcasting NHL games on radio in 1936 and televising them in 1952.
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Baird says a lot of Canadians bought their first TV sets so they could watch the games, which pushed CBC to be creative in its programming. The show was even credited with inventing the instant replay, which revolutionized sports programming in 1955.
From 1968 to 2008, its classic theme song was often referred to as Canada’s “second national anthem.”
“It’s kind of like the Mr. Dressup theme song, where you hear it and you’re immediately transported back to being a kid,” Baird said.
HNIC‘s double-headers launched in 1995, with an East Coast game airing around 7 p.m. ET followed by a West Coast game starting around 10 p.m.
CBC was operating under a sublicensing deal since Rogers Sportsnet acquired the league’s Canadian rights for $5.2 billion in 2013. Rogers Sportsnet renewed those rights with a 12-year, $11.2-billion deal to begin in October.
Baird sees the change as a continuation of Canadian institutions “starting to fade away,” from the closure of Eaton’s department stores in 1999 to the more recent shuttering of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Growing up near Edmonton, his favourite HNIC memory was watching the Oilers hoist their fifth Stanley Cup in 1990.
With the rising costs of subscription services like Sportsnet, as well as rising costs for tickets to watch NHL games in person, he says a lot of kids growing up now will miss out on the chance to be inspired by hockey stars the way he was.
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“I think it’s very detrimental to Canadian culture and even the future of hockey in Canada,” Baird said. “It was an incredibly important program, and for it to disappear is a huge loss.”
Toronto author and musician Dave Bidini also remembers watching the games with his family as a kid.
As an adult, he says HNIC was instrumental in promoting the work of himself and other Canadians. He got shout-outs for his hockey books, his band The Rheostatics and his Summit ’72 documentary series that aired in 2022.
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But as significant as this “grand tradition” was, Bidini questions how much of it is left.
“I just don’t know how much we’re losing because I don’t know how much we still had in terms of that tradition, to be completely honest,” he said.
He says the way hockey fans watch NHL games in 2026 is splintered, in part because Smart TVs don’t come loaded with antennas that carry basic channels, as was the default in the past.
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While CBC still technically offered the games for free up until the end of last season, people now find various ways to watch, sometimes from their phones and sometimes from subscription services or pirated streams.
Former HNIC broadcaster Dave Hodge told The Canadian Press that the broadcast had become “almost indistinguishable” from broadcasts on other channels and called the change “inevitable.”
Richard Gruneau, co-author of the 1993 book Hockey Night in Canada: Sports, Identities, and Cultural Politics, also said the change was inevitable, with the CBC facing funding threats from politicians while operating in a “vastly different” digital world.
“[CBC] can’t bid on equal terms for hockey anymore,” Gruneau told CBC News in an email. He said HNIC will become “a cultural relic from a bygone era.”
Looking back, Bidini says there was “something beautiful” about the way HNIC was once so ubiquitous and how the whole country “kind of exhaled” and came to a stop for three hours on a Saturday night.
“I think it’s important to find moments like that in our f—king crazy, hyper-speed worlds and lives, where we’re all kind of communing and watching the same thing…. We just get a chance to put our foot on the brake pedal for a minute, and that can be valuable,” he said.
“And that’s probably never going to happen again.”
