Hockey Night in Canada was a space that celebrated men, and upheld hockey as a man's space, including through segments like Coach's Corner. Now however, with the PWHL as the broadcast's main feature, the CBC has a chance to rewrite that history.
“Hello Canada and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland”.
When Foster Hewitt's voice rang out across radios in Canada in 1931 for the first broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada, Wednesday's, then Saturday nights for Canadian families became synonymous with hockey. The broadcast itself, it could be argued, cemented the ties between Canadian identity and hockey, and was a catalyst for the sport's rapid growth from coast to coast to coast. While women would listen and watch Hockey Night in Canada on CBC, women were almost never represented on the broadcast, at least not favourably.
In fact, for the first decades of the broadcast, women were not considered at all, despite the boom in women's hockey during the 1930s. As women's hockey opportunities died off in the 1940s due to WWII, and remained quiet until the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the game began planting seeds across the country yet again.
By the 1970s, as more women moved into the working middle-class providing disposable income, and as women took control of their own finances, broadcasters like the CBC saw opportunity, as did marketers and advertisers, to capture this growing demographic.
As Ryan J. Phillips wrote for the Canadian Journal of Communication in 2018 in his article An Inquiry into the Political Economy of Hockey Night in Canada: Critically Assessing Issues of Ownership, Advertising, and Gendered Audiences, the shift also generated a need for more "female friendly subcontent" on the hockey broadcast.
In a stroke of fate, one of the broadcast's most popular components, which was also laden with sexism, Coach's Corner, was an element that arrived in the early 1980s and helped, according to Phillips, secure women as viewers.
"The introduction of “Coach’s Corner” in the early 1980s... represents something of a happy accident in which the CBC managed to attract more prime time female viewers via more widely accessible content, while not alienating its already established male prime-time audience with more coverage of women’s hockey, or else with non-hockey content," Phillips wrote.
One of the primary elements that kept women's hockey out of broadcasting, alongside patriarchal control, was the lack of a consistent, North America-wide league Phillips asserted. Many existing leagues remained regional, and there was no location outside the Olympics, where the vast majority of the world's best players could be found competing as one.
That all changed with the foundation of the PWHL in 2023, coming at a time when the CBC was no longer able to financially compete with major private broadcasters for the rights to NHL games. It resulted in the CBC placing Hockey Night in Canada into hibernation until a suitable partner stepped forward. That partner was one that the broadcast had long ignored, women's hockey.
The First Woman Of Hockey Night In Canada
In 1975-76, Helen Hutchinson became the first woman to appear as a commentator on Hockey Night in Canada. Hutchinson, who passed away in February of 2023, was a trailblazer in Canadian television for women, working with CTV and W5, becoming not only the first woman commentator on Hockey Night in Canada for a single season, but also becoming the first woman to host Canada AM.
“We’d been thinking of putting a woman on the broadcast for over a year now,” then Hockey Night in Canada producer Bob Gordon said of hiring Hutchinson. “We weren’t interested in bringing in a woman as a token gesture. We wanted a good broadcaster with presence, knowledge of the game, maturity and enthusiasm. Luckily we found all these qualities in Helen.”
In 1975, Hutchinson had just won an ACTRA award for Best Public Affairs Broadcaster. She worked Hockey Night in Canada's Wednesday night broadcasts, primarily conducting interviews between periods.
Due to her busy broadcasting schedule however, Hutchinson could only balance her role with the hockey broadcast for a single season before she moved on to other endeavours. It took 30 years for a woman to gain a full time role with the broadcast.
That came in 2006 when Cassie Campbell-Pascall became the first woman to do color commentary on a broadcast, filling in for Harry Neale. Campbell-Pascall started with the program as a rinkside reporter, and worked with the broadcast until 2023.
Hockey Night in Canada's History of Sexism
As Phillips wrote, "HNIC’s history is one that has consistently privileged the voice of male sports entertainment and the viewership of male citizens."
The focus of the show was for men and by men, and at times, that mentality oozed into elements of the show itself, language used, and the economic decisions behind the broadcast.
There were sexist comments on broadcast, active exclusion of women's hockey in discussion and visibility, and a lack of representation for women both in the games shown and the broadcasters hired all tell the story. Beyond this, there was perhaps no more blatant example of Hockey Night in Canada's willingness to lean into the degradation of woman than the cult-like platform CBC gave to Don Cherry.
Cherry spoke about women in hockey clearly.
Cherry argued in 2013 that women should not be in NHL dressing rooms as members of the media, or in other roles. "I don’t think women should be in there," Cherry said, claiming men will not behave in an acceptable way in the presence of women in the locker room as reasoning.
As the Association for Women in Sports Media said at the time.
"Cherry's stance that women should not be allowed in hockey locker rooms is as sexist as it is outdated. Professional female sports journalists and media relations personnel have been working alongside their male counterparts in NHL locker rooms for nearly 40 years."
The CBC released a statement claiming Cherry's words did not represent the broadcast, yet countered that Ron McLean's push back provided space for discussion.
Cherry made a number of comments about the belonging of women in sports media, and hockey in general.
As Breagh MacDonald wrote in their 2021 paper, Who's Watching Anyway? & Other Gender Exclusionary Narratives of Canadian Hockey Digital Discourse, Cherry's comments, "sexualizes women and dismisses their role in professional hockey. On many occasions, Cherry emphasized his beliefs regarding women’s role in hockey culture."
MacDonald recorded many of Cherry's comments on women including that women “can be rough and tough hockey players, but they are more likely to be mothers and community volunteers” and that it's always women hit by pucks in the stands because they are "yapping away," or that the wives of NHL players were to blame for team losing streaks.
While it wasn't on Hockey Night in Canada, Cherry regularly made the assertion that women could not handle, or did not want to witness the physicality of hockey, nor the violence of fighting. While violence in hockey has been under a microscope, Cherry's assertions were made based on gender alone. Most often, these remarks came on his "Rock'em Sock'em" videos where prior to fights and hit compilations, Cherry would state, "Let’s give all the sweethearts a chance to turn it off" and often called it "tea time," where women could leave the room for a cup of tea while men remained to watch.
As MacDonald wrote, "The perpetration and defense of sexist ideology by hockey’s most idolized individuals nourishes a culture which excludes and represses women in hockey. It is apparent in the findings of this study that hostility towards women in hockey within the Hockey Night in Canada platform remains prominent despite the dismissal of sexist former broadcaster, Don Cherry."
Cherry was taken off the air following xenophobic comments made in November, 2019.
Back To The Future For Hockey Night
There are many who believe a new look is exactly what the CBC, and the recently struggling Hockey Night in Canada broadcast needed. Not only a new look, but a new feature, specifically, women's hockey.
In Phillips' 2018 article, he recommended the broadcast look at a league like the CWHL, which was a top women's hockey league at the time. He believed the shift to women's hockey could revitalize the program.
"Indeed, introducing broadcast coverage of the relatively new yet quickly expanding CWHL on HNIC would serve as a cost-effective way of reinvigorating the national interest in televised hockey, similar to what occurred during the 1970s with the expansion of NHL teams throughout Canada."
Others, like Western University professor Mike Dove, believe the CBC and women's hockey can together revitalize Hockey Night in Canada, and the positive impact the communal broadcast once held on Canadians in general.
"[A] renewed CBC focus on the youth, amateur and professional women’s hockey may indeed strengthen Canadian identity," Dove wrote in 2026.
When the PWHL drops the puck for the first time on Hockey Night in Canada on December 5, 2026 when the Walter Cup champion Montreal Victoire host PWHL Hamilton, the CBC will have the opportunity to do just that, and to open a new era and new opportunities for not only the future, but to make reparations for the past as well.
