Baseball may dominate the summer, and basketball may have yielded more recent major league success, but hockey remains Canada’s biggest and most popular sport.
Still, with seven NHL teams positioned across only five of the ten provinces of Canada, perhaps there’s a greater love for the sport in some parts of the country than others.
By looking into metrics like participation, attendance, fan share, and search data, we hope to find out which of Canada’s provinces is the most hockey-crazed.
NHL Team Fans
Our research into the most popular Canadian sports teams in Canada found the Toronto Maple Leafs to be narrowly ahead of the Montréal Canadiens, followed by the Edmonton Oilers and then the Vancouver Canucks.
As for fandom, research relayed by Statista finds Montréal and Toronto as the frontrunners with a 20 percent share of all fans, followed by the other five teams in close competition between 12 and nine percent.
The figures revealed that 46 percent of the NHL fans in Canada are fans of more than one team. Assuming some local team bias, it’d seem that Ontario (29%) and Alberta (22%) are where hockey is the most popular.
However, this isn’t the best metric for measuring hockey’s popularity, as those two provinces are buoyed by the presence of two teams. Plus, NHL fans are all over the country and support teams beyond their borders.
Still, the overall fandom of individual teams does follow a historical bias of the most successful clubs, even though national hero Wayne Gretzky spent the better part of his career with the Edmonton Oilers.
Now, Connor McDavid is the face of Canadian hockey and also in Edmonton. If he can guide the Oilers to the Stanley Cup from their favourites tag in the NHL odds at +800, perhaps the popularity of the club and the sport in Alberta will see an uptick down the line.
Stadium Attendance Figures
Canadian NHL teams are notoriously well-attended. In fact, both the Montréal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs report attendance figures as close to full every night as a team can get.
Behind the Buds and Habs, the Canucks, Oilers, Flames, and Jets also report season attendance percentages above 90 percent. Only the Ottawa Senators have dropped below this mark in recent years.
Hockey runs much deeper than the NHL in Canada, though, with the Canadian Hockey League of major junior hockey competitions garnering quite impressive attendance figures as well.
As reported by HockeyDB, the Western Hockey League boasts 11 teams that averaged an attendance of over 4,000 last season, the QMJHL had three, and the OHL had seven.
Looking at these teams in regards to their provinces, and narrowing down to the top most attended Canadian teams in the CHL – which deducts Spokane, Everett, and Portland – Ontario boasts the most teams.
Ontario (four teams) is followed by Alberta (two teams), and then Québec, Nova Scotia, British Columbia, and New Brunswick (one team) for the top ten most attended CHL clubs last season.
That said, the Québec Remparts (9,726 avg.) and London Knights (8,995 avg.) were by far the most attended teams, and both made it to their respective league championship games.
Interestingly, the presence of phenomenal talent Connor Bedard didn’t do much to the attendance of the Regina Pats in Saskatchewan. In 2019/20, the average attendance in the 6,000-seater arena was 4,711, but that sunk to 4,501 in 2022/23.
While Bedard put up some superb numbers for Regina, he’s not expected to make an immediate, season-changing impact for the Chicago Blackhawks, who’ll be underdogs on most hockey lines and are at +8000 for the Cup.
Participation and Search Volume
Other ways to gauge the popularity of a sport are through official participation stats and online search volumes. With Ontario being a simply colossal province compared to the rest, hard numbers can be misleading.
So, to work out where hockey is participated in the most according to official figures, here’s a ranking of the provinces according to their official 2022 total participation numbers, per Carelton University, and that figure as a percentage of the province’s population (per Statistics Canada):
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Prince Edward Island: 5,710 participants among 170,000 population (3.4%)
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Saskatchewan: 33,745 participants among 1.2 million population (2.8%)
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Newfoundland and Labrador: 11,043 participants among 500,000 population (2.2%)
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Manitoba: 26,596 participants among 1.4 million population (1.9%)
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New Brunswick: 14,988 participants among 820,000 population (1.8%)
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Nova Scotia: 16,903 participants among 1.0 million population (1.7%)
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Alberta: 72,699 participants among 4.6 million population (1.6%)
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Ontario: 209,694 participants among 15.3 million population (1.4%)
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British Columbia: 56,470 participants among 5.4 million population (1.0%)
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Québec: 79,938 participants among 8.8 million population (0.9%)
Of course, these figures are only for the Hockey Canada Memberships: not everyone who plays hockey or is interested in hockey will register in youth, junior, adult, senior, school, para, or other official teams.
Pond hockey, for example, seemingly isn’t taken into consideration in those official figures, but there’s a huge pond hockey contingent in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
In terms of search volume for “hockey” and “NHL” over the last 12 months, per Google Trends, “NHL” is the more commonly searched term in all regions.
“Hockey” is shown as having the most interest as a search term in Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia – in that order.
“NHL,” as a fraction of total searches, has the most interest in the territory Nunavut, followed by the provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, Alberta, and then Manitoba.
For both terms, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island have the heavier search volumes and percentages of overall searches from the regions. Both also rank highly in hockey participation.
Looking at everything above, in terms of sheer numbers, it would seem that hockey is at its most popular in Ontario and Québec, but as percentages of province populations, perhaps it’s Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island that are where the sport is technically the most popular per Canadian.
*Credit for all images in this article belongs to AP Photo*
