#ElbowsUp: Why have Canadians chosen hockey as the symbol of our national unity?

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29-03-2025

Faced with American tariffs and threats of annexation, Canadians have been using hockey as a way to express our discontent.
Canadian fans have booed The Star-Spangled Banner at NHL games, and Canadian singer Chantal Kreviazuk — performing O Canada before the Canada-U.S. final at the 4 Nations Face-Off on Feb. 20 — changed the lyric "in all of us command" to "that only us command" as a protest against American expansionism.
That 4 Nations final match became a kind of surrogate for the political conflict between our two countries.
The game was one of the most-watched in North American history and, when Canada won, the celebrations had a distinct nationalist edge.
Even then prime minister Justin Trudeau tweeted "You can't take our country — and you can't take our game."
It's perhaps no surprise, then, that ever since Canadian comedian Mike Myers mouthed the words "elbows up" at the camera during an appearance on Saturday Night Live, the reference to legendary hockey player Gordie Howe has become a national rallying cry.
In this moment of crisis, why is hockey our metaphor of choice for Canadian unity?
It's been called "Canada's game" and a "national religion," but hockey's popularity as both a pastime and a spectator sport has declined in recent years. Youth participation has dropped 33 per cent since 2010, and hockey viewership is shrinking, too.
When asked in 2022 how important they felt hockey is to our national identity, Canadians ranked it well below the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, our public health-care system and our education system.
Since the weakening of relations with our neighbour to the south, the importance of hockey to our collective imagination seems to have bounced back.
As a multicultural society with a colonial past, we have few touchstones that bind us all together.
"For a country that often feels fragmented," literary scholar Jason Blake has written, "the hockey arena is a convenient gathering place and focal point."
Howe, 50 at the time this photo was taken, delivers one of his well-known elbows to the head of Quebec Nordiques forward Curt Brakenbury in 1978. An oft-repeated, but incorrect, explanation of a 'Gordie Howe hat-trick' is a fight, a goal and an assist. (The Canadian Press)
Hockey reflects a neutral, natural aspect of Canadian living — our northern climate — though even that isn't universal. Rarely does any pond on Vancouver Island freeze thick enough for skating.
Hockey also has the benefit of being a multicultural Canadian innovation, combining settler ice sports like English bandy, Scottish shinty, and Irish hurley with Indigenous baggataway (lacrosse). Still, at the professional level, hockey has always lacked diversity.
Contemporary ice hockey was developed by young, privileged, male students at McGill University in the 1870s, and even today most professional players are white men. The NHL is the least racially diverse professional sports league in North America, and the Professional Women's Hockey League launched only last year.
Yet despite their historical exclusion from white men's leagues, other Canadians refused to be written out of the sport.
Women began organizing their own hockey teams at the collegiate level in the 1890s, and in 1895 Baptist community leaders in Halifax and Dartmouth founded the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes, which lasted into the 1930s. Asian leagues popped up in the mid-20th century, and Dick Loiselle and Jean Lane introduced sledge hockey to Alberta in 1980.
Hockey was codified by students at McGill University in the 1870s. This photo shows a student match on campus in 1901. (Library and Archives Canada)
Even early hockey was progressive in its own way. In 1870s Montreal, most local athletic clubs were restricted to affluent English speakers. Hockey, in contrast, accepted French and working-class players, breaking down class and cultural barriers.
The sport represents values many Canadians share regardless of demographics, like team spirit, tenacity, and integrity. It embodies not only resilience but audacity in the face of hardship: give us winters so cold our eyelashes freeze, and we'll literally make a game out of them.
But hockey's dark side is impossible to ignore.
In his poem "Hockey Players," Al Purdy calls hockey a "combination of ballet and murder," replete with officially sanctioned violence that seems at odds with our international reputation for courtesy. This very aggression, though, may be what's made the sport such a powerful and lasting emblem of Canadian sovereignty.
Hockey surfaced in the wake of Confederation, at a time when Canadians were keen to map out an identity separate from the British, who had previously governed them, and the Americans, who were hoping to govern them next. The sport's violence distinguished it from genteel national games like British cricket and American baseball.
In cross-border matches between Canadian hockey teams and American ice-polo teams in the 1890s, the Canadians' ferocity made them dominant on the ice. According to news reports, "many a man had to be carried to the dressing room," and, in at least one instance, police were called in to break up a fight.
There weren't many black hockey players in rural Ontario in the 1950s, let alone hockey lines with multiple black players. Howard Sheffield, Arthur Lowe and Gary Smith played on a line together for the Mount Forest Redmen during the early 1950s, where they got the nickname the 'Black Flashes.' (Mount Forest Museum & Archives)
During the 1972 Summit Series, an eight-game exhibition tournament between Canada and the former Soviet Union, Team Canada struggled against the swift, skilful Soviets until the Canadian players dialed up the aggression, roughing their way to victory.
Like the 4 Nations Face-Off, the Summit Series took on political overtones. For the Canadian public, their team's win represented a triumph of democracy over communism and of freedom over tyranny.
Today, as Canadians borrow the language of hockey to push back against a new international rival, our choice of phrase reveals something meaningful about our national self-image.
After all, it's not easy to assault someone with your elbow. Gordie Howe's signature move wasn't for offence but for defence — he used his elbows to ward off opponents who were coming after him.
Canadians won't attack first, "elbows up" seems to say. But anyone who threatens us had better watch out, whether we meet at the hockey rink or in the political arena.
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