Suchergebnisse

In this article we examine the recent debate over the continued role of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in airing National Hockey League (NHL) games on its iconic television show, Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC) . Specifically, we outline the heightened competition between the CBC and private networks for the most desirable sports rights in the context of the explosive growth of subscription television. We then review how the CBC was, in the face of this competition and to the surprise of many commentators, able to secure a new contract with the NHL in 2006. We argue here that, while Canada's public network will never again have the place in Canadian life that it had in the early days of television (Rutherford, 1990), HNIC remains an important investment because it acts as a critical promotional platform for the public network, as well as providing a sizeable revenue stream that subsidizes the network's other programming. We will also argue that providing free-to-air broadcasts of the sport that matters most to Canadians is an issue of cultural citizenship, and thus an important part of the mandate of a public broadcaster, and a matter of national interest.

International sports events have long evoked the discourses and imagery of internationalism while serving as occasions for the advertisement of the host nation and city. This article seeks to explore some of the tensions that follow from this. It has become almost a truism that hosting international events generates enormous benefits for the host city and region. However, the economic evidence examined suggests that although these events provide short-term windfalls for the local construction and tourist industries, the public sector costs of staging them are understated regularly. This is routinely justified in terms of the importance of establishing an identity as a "world-class" city, but the relationships between public costs and private gains need to be examined carefully. The article argues that the benefits of living in a world-class city are very unevenly distributed, and it raises questions on both economic and equity grounds about the urban strategy of promoting the city as a center for leisure, tourism, and consumption.

This paper seeks to theorise change and resistance to change in contemporary gender relations as these are manifest in Canadian national sport organisations. Interviews which sought to explore why women were under-represented in senior technical, administrative, and volunteer positions pointed to lack of qualifications and family responsibilities as the two most widely perceived reasons. As many respondents argued though, these phenomena themselves are rooted in structures of gender relations which transcend sport. The final section considers theories which seek to explain these deeper structures, and argues that the evidence supports a theory based on the analysis of power and conflict.