The National Hockey League’s Calgary Flames need a new stadium. At least their owners say they do. The 35-year-old Scotiabank Saddledome is perfectly functional, but the team owners’ dream project was CalgaryNEXT, a new Bow-riverside complex home to the Flames and the Canadian Football League’s Stampeders that may also pull in more concert revenue. The […] More »

Taking to the ice with smooth transitions and ever-changing focal points, contemporary ice skating company Le Patin Libre uses minimalistic choreography to create a performance that founder Alexandre Hamel calls “magical.” The Montreal-based troupe, founded by Hamel in 2005, focuses on providing a skating experience for its audience that’s free from competition and scores. “It’s […] More »

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, […] More »

Popular opinion says that when Montreal Canadiens fans at the Bell centre harassed two Ottawa Senators fans during Friday night’s game, it was wrong. Social media saw comments on how this is typical behaviour for Montreal fans or how Montreal fans were embarrassed on behalf of the Canadiens and their fandom. Less popular topic of […] More »

The 2014 Winter Olympics may or may not take place in Sochi, Russia. The country has spent a reported $53 billion developing infrastructure for the Games, but a troubling new law banning “homosexual propaganda”—pride rallies or anything deemed “pro-gay”—could derail the event. Here is our round-up of who’s saying what about the Sochi debacle. The […] More »

Extreme fighting has always been illegal in Ontario, but underground fights happened anyway. With legalization in 2011, the controversial sport is about to become big business. The champ climbs into the steel cage against the sounds of loud, thrashing theme music, polite applause, and the odd hiss. Caleb Grummet may be holding the championship belt, […] More »

The National Hockey League playoffs open this week and the abundance of emotion-laden storylines are sure to captivate a significant portion of the the Canadian sporting public’s hearts. But while three Canadian squads—the Vancouver Canucks, the Montreal Canadiens and the Ottawa Senators—vie for Lord Stanley’s coveted Cup, there’s another, less exciting, story unfolding that probably […] More »

Today in Verbatim, This contributing editor Andrew Wallace interviews Dave Zirin, sports editor of U.S. progressive weekly The Nation and host of Edgeofsports.com, a blog and radio show that examines the collision of politics and sports. He’s the author of several canonical books on that topic, most recently of A People’s History of Sports in the United States, […] More »

In Podcast #008, This Magazine contributor—and our own resident sports blogger—Andrew Wallace talks with Dave Zirin, sports editor with the influential U.S. progressive weekly The Nation — the first sports writer the Nation has ever employed, in fact. Zirin writes a weekly column about what he calls the “collision” of athletics and politics called Edge […] More »

Guest blogger Canice Leung recently wrote in this space that Canada’s “national sport,” our beloved ice hockey, has became too elitist, too expensive and too inaccessible to maintain its position near to the top of the Canadian cultural hierarchy. Sparked by a fiery debate on Twitter the day before, her words were thought-provoking and insightful […] More »

In all the hoopla following the New Orleans Saints’ momentous victory over the Indianapolis Colts in last week’s Super Bowl, an important piece of the biggest day in North American sports seemed to disappear all-too-quickly from the collective consciousness. With the pervasive and nauseating hyperbole around the significance of the Saints’ win in Hurricane Katrina’s […] More »