The game is gone. On 16 June 2026, CBC and Rogers confirmed what most of us already suspected: men's NHL hockey on CBC is finished after 74 years. It started in 1952. It was free — over the air, no cable bill, no streaming password, playoffs included right through this spring. Rogers paid $5.2 billion for those rights in 2013 and renewed at $11 billion over twelve years. The game moved to Sportsnet. Our Saturday nights moved behind a paywall.
In the same stretch, Mark Carney went to the NATO summit in The Hague and committed Canada to five percent of GDP on defence by 2035. That is roughly $150 billion a year. The Globe and Mail called it the biggest military increase since the Second World War. Meanwhile, CBC/Radio-Canada's parliamentary funding for 2026-27 came in at $1.38 billion, down from $1.58 billion. The Hill Times reported a $192-million cut.
Carney announced a $150-million-a-year top-up that doesn't restore it. Defence and broadcasting sit in separate budgets, so setting $150 billion against $192 million is comparing two different pots. But Carney found a discretionary $150 million a year for the broadcaster when he wanted to — which means the money could move. It just didn't move far enough. The obvious objection is that CBC lost hockey on price and filled the gap with whatever was cheap and available, nothing political about it. But the money moved when Carney wanted it to move, and that is the whole answer. The defence commitment and the broadcaster's cut are the same political choice about what kind of country this is meant to be. $150 billion for the guns, and they couldn't find $192 million for the one national tradition anybody could watch for nothing.
Chuck Thompson, CBC's head of public affairs, explained the new Saturday lineup: lacrosse, a cricket league called the Canada Super 60, curling, figure skating, speed skating. "As a new Olympic sport, with a major event being held in Canada," Thompson said, "the Super60 was a strong option for us to consider." Both cricket and lacrosse were added to the 2028 Los Angeles Games — which means the schedule follows the IOC's programme, not a reading of what Canadians were watching on a Saturday night. Millions of people have arrived over the last few years, a lot of them from India; Statistics Canada counted 2.8 million non-permanent residents living in Canada by January 2024. The country changed, and nobody chose the pace.
Now consider who's holding the file. Trudeau appointed Carney chair of his own economic task force in September 2024, six months before Carney had the job. Trudeau resigned in January 2025. Carney won the leadership in March. Most of the cabinet carried over. Chrystia Freeland — who announced the freezing of convoy protesters' bank accounts, people flying Canadian flags on Parliament Hill — is now Minister of Transport. She's at the table when the flag is wanted again. Steven Guilbeault held the Canadian identity and culture portfolio until November, when he resigned over Carney's Alberta pipeline deal, and Carney handed the file to Marc Miller, another Trudeau-era minister. The people running our cultural institutions today are the same people who built them into what they are.
They want us on a war footing now — unity, resolve, feeling something in our bones the way our grandparents did in 1939. But our grandparents shared something: a country with a common shape, common signals, common Saturday nights. Justin Trudeau called this the first post-national state in a New York Times Magazine profile in December 2015. You can't spend twenty years saying that, cut the few things everybody actually shared, and change the country at a pace nobody voted on — and then ask us to pay for a war footing.
Saturday nights used to be free — over the air, no cable bill, no streaming password, right through the playoffs. They made that choice. A government that can't find $192 million for the last thing we all watched together has already decided what the country is for.
