Colby Cosh: The CBC's anti-Western Conference bias is showing (2024)

The good news is that the CBC apparently does intend to broadcast (but not stream) all the games of the Stanley Cup final. So we’ve got that going for us. Canada’s public broadcaster bushwacked sports fans last week by declining to carry a free-to-air feed of Sportsnet-produced coverage of Games 5 and 6 of the Western Conference finals between the Edmonton Oilers and the Dallas Stars.

Article content

As Simon Houpt observed in the Globe when revealing the decision, this is a departure from the network’s established priorities — although those who remember the 1987 Dave Hodge Pen Flip (yes, it was a pen) will be aware that the CBC also has older traditions of touchiness and hostility toward sports-enthusiast heathens. It’s surely telling that the Oiler games were pre-empted to make way for a broadcast of the Canadian Screen Awards, a festival of culture-industry self-congratulation, and for the finale of a showpiece “reality competition format” series that was, if we’re being honest, significantly less real or competitive than the drama of the Stanley Cup playoffs. (But it did get four Canadian Screen Awards nominations.)

Well, of course I don’t like the decision, except insofar as it might give my Oilers some extra bulletin-board impetus in the approaching Cup final. I’ll admit that the harm is minimal: almost everyone reading these words will have access to either Sportsnet on cable, a chair in a pub or digital piracy. More generally, we’re probably going to have to get used to NHL hockey not being present on free-to-air TV in Canada at all pretty soon.

Article content

Article content

The NHL, which often makes clumsy decisions on the pretext of growing the game, should probably favour maximum accessibility: Canadian interest in hockey isn’t a feudal privilege to be taken for granted. But, then again, I don’t own a TV set. It might be pointed out, perhaps by a troublemaking newspaper columnist, that in Britain the broadcasting regulator Ofcom has a schedule of “listed” sporting events that are part of the national heritage and that must, by law, be shown on free-to-air television.

What’s striking is that this was not the first time in these playoffs that the CBC carelessly wrong-footed fans. After replaying Sportsnet feeds of first-round games on the CBC’s Gem streaming service, the network found itself having to pull the plug before the start of round two, which featured a memorable Oilers-Canucks tilt. On social media, many fans blamed Sportsnet for the unpleasant surprise: few ever noticed the terse official CBC announcement that the first round had been “aired … in error” on Gem and that the CBC doesn’t have streaming rights to the playoffs anymore. Another triumph for the CBC’s crack legal team!

Article content

Alberta Conservatives are using the CBC’s dropping of the Oilers-Stars series opportunistically, as they’re entitled to. There is a question of pure value-judgment here. If the CBC were just another commercial broadcaster, they would be perfectly entitled to prefer their own hacky programming to Sportsnet’s hockey broadcasts. We are told, however, that they take the nation’s interests, habits and desires into account. Quantitatively, it’s not clear that they did such a good job of it.

But the twin scheduling foul-ups raise questions about the sheer competence of the CBC, never mind its cultural judgment. And they leave us wondering if there could be a causal connection between the decisions. Did the CBC suddenly decide that the Screen Awards were sacred territory after Sportsnet complained about the accidental first-round Gem piracy? (Did Sportsnet complain?)

And while an Edmontonian can’t caterwaul too much about possible regional prejudice at the CBC, we did spot the Montreal Gazette’s Jack Todd wondering aloud whether this foofaraw would have taken place at all if the Maple Leafs had made the Eastern final and created scheduling conflicts. This will strike every hockey fan as a zany counterfactual, since it involves a serious Leafs playoff run, but I somehow have little doubt that CBC would have found room for the Buds.

National Post

Article content