ABSTRACT
Between 1997 and 2000 the future of ‘major league’ professional sports in Canada became the focus of political debate, to an extent that took many Canadians by surprise. In 1995 and 1996 Canada had seen the departure of two National Hockey League (NHL) teams, the Québec Nordiques and the Winnipeg Jets, to US cities that promised greater revenue potential as well as attractive public subsidies. The mid-1990s had also seen repeated threats by the majority owner of the Montreal Expos that without a new stadium in downtown Montreal, half of it financed by public funds, Canada’s first Major League Baseball (MLB) franchise would ultimately be sold and moved to a US city. This was the context, then, in which a House of Commons sub-committee was formed, under the chairmanship of a Liberal MP, Dennis Mills (Broadview-Greenwood),2 to study the funding of sport in Canada. The Mills sub-committee held hearings over the winter and spring of 1997-8, and heard arguments from many stakeholders in Canadian sports: amateur and professional sports organisations as well as multisport organisations such as the Canadian Olympic Association (COA) and the Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union (CIAU). The most urgent and controversial submissions, however, in terms of the ‘problem’ outlined above, came from Canada’s major-league teams-in the NHL, in MLB and in the National Basketball Association (NBA)—and from these leagues themselves.3 Their briefs argued that Canadian teams in the major leagues operate at a structural disadvantage compared to their US counterparts because of the lower value of the Canadian dollar and the higher levels of ‘public costs’, including taxes or rents charged for the use of public facilities, that are borne by Canadian owners. If Canadians wanted to hang on to their existing teams, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman warned the sub-committee, their governments would have to start providing the same kinds of public subsidies and tax breaks to franchise owners that are now widespread in the United States.
