[BRIEF NOTE] Canadian football and Canadian nationalism

[rfmcdonald]

This weekend, the Canadian Football League Grey Cup is taking place in Toronto, as the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers face off in the Rogers Centre, formerly known as the Skydome. It goes without saying that this, the penultimate event of Canadian-rules football is a fairly huge sporting event, even though Toronto's not that much of a football town. That's part of the reason why it's a minor irony that, as people in Buffalo quite fear, the owner of the Buffalo Bills might sell the team to investors who'll set that team up in Toronto. Certainly, that's a possibility that wouldn't surprise the CFL's commissioner.

"All of the tea leaves are indicating that it's shifting," [CFL commissioner Mark] Cohon said Friday in his state of the league address during Grey Cup week in Toronto. "You have guys like Ted Rogers and Larry Tanenbaum and Phil Lind, very powerful Canadians who are interested, you have an owner Ralph Wilson in Buffalo who has said, 'When I die, my estate will sell the franchise,' [and] you have the Bills interested in marking Toronto as part of their territory."

"I'm not sticking my head in the sand. That would be the worst thing for the CFL commissioner to do. So I think there's a real potential."

Cohon's comments mark the first time the CFL has taken such a definitive stance on the issue.

The commissioner also said an NFL team in Toronto would threaten the CFL in southern Ontario, a key region for the league.

Cohon hopes that should the NFL bring a team north, it will do so in partnership with the CFL.

The NFL's Buffalo Bills announced in October that they are seeking approval to play one pre-season game and at least another regular-season contest at the Rogers Centre in Toronto as part of the team's plan to develop its market outside western New York.

The move sparked speculation that the Bills are eyeing Toronto as a potential permanent home in the future. But the team remains adamant that its plan to play in Toronto is not the first step in relocating north of the border.

As Cohon warns, a Toronto Bills team might well take market share away from the Toronto Argonauts, with serious implications for the two teams' viability. That might be why Torontonians don't seem very enthusiastic about this possibility--it turns out that Canadian-rules football and the CFL are seen by many Canadians as a non-trivial marker of Canadian identity.

It has long been believed that what defined the CFL to most people was the distinctiveness of its rules when compared with the American four-down variety. Instead, the CFL's most compelling quality seems to be rooted in its identity and the notion that being a CFL fan or supporter is in some small way an expression of being Canadian.

Football is unique as the only sport defined so clearly as either Canadian or American by its rules and the history of two games that have evolved separately. That history, along with the CFL's rivalries and its regional representation, seems to resonate most with fans.

"An institution like the CFL is unique," said Steve Bunn, a doctorate history student at York University and devout member of argos-suck.com, a website for Hamilton Tiger-Cats fans. "There is, of course, [NHL] hockey, but the Americanization of that is well known. In regard to finding anything comparable to the CFL in Canada as a Canadian cultural and historical institution, you have to go outside sport and look at something like the Hudson's Bay Co. Like the CFL, it's something that in its best years turned a meagre profit, but the value of it isn't measured in dollars."

I don't pretend to know how this story will resolve itself. Maybe the Bills will move north; maybe Toronto will set up its own NFL team; maybe the NFL will stay in the United States. This news story is interesting inasmuch as it illustrates the serious tensions which exist between the two realities of Toronto's increasing embeddedness at the heart of a sort of eastern Great Lakes conglomeration of metropolises and Toronto's confirmed Canadian identity. Which strand of identity will give way first?