Sam Bennett, Brad Marchand and Tom Wilson celebrate after a goal by teammate Shea Theodore during the third period of the men's ice hockey semifinal game at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics on Friday.Carolyn Kaster/The Associated Press
Where have you gone, Jean Béliveau?
The nation of Quebec turns its lonely eyes to the Canadian men’s Olympic hockey roster, and can’t find any Québécois names. For the first time since 1952, no players from la belle province are representing Canada at the Games.
That has elicited a pang of malaise among sports fans and nationalists in a place where hockey is bound inextricably with identity, and where Quebec’s place within the federation has again become a live question.
This is the land of Guy Lafleur and Mario Lemieux, Patrick Roy and Martin Brodeur. How could such a hockey hotbed, arguably the birthplace of the sport, be overlooked so completely?
Mario Lemieux, centre right, celebrates with teammates during semifinal action at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah.TOM HANSON/CP
The question has filled dozens of newspaper columns, TV segments and talk-radio spots since the men’s roster was announced in late December.
The snub has fed a growing unease about the decline of hockey in Quebec, reflected in the gradual disappearance of its sons from the top ranks of professional players, and instilled a certain ambivalence toward Team Canada in some quarters.
The sovereigntist Bloc Québécois jumped on the omission to declare “systemic discrimination against Quebeckers,” and some sportswriters have used the occasion to renew a periodic fantasy about Team Quebec taking the ice.
But most observers in Quebec have arrived at a more sobering conclusion, as Canada prepares to play a gold-medal game on Sunday without them: their province just isn’t producing enough elite hockey talent.
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It would be easier to decry anglophone bias with a credible list of Quebeckers who should have made the cut. But even diehards acknowledge no such list exists.
It has been three years since a Quebec player ranked among the top 50 scorers in the NHL, the picture for goalies is hardly more encouraging, and you won’t find any Quebeckers among the finalists for the Norris Trophy, given to the league’s best defenceman.
The truth is, there are fewer Quebec-born players in the NHL than there have been for generations. That number currently sits at just 51, compared to more than 100 throughout most of the 1990s, according to a glumly in-depth analysis by Radio-Canada in February.
“It’s a crisis, it’s an absolute crisis,” said Brendan Kelly, author of Habs Nation: A People’s History of the Montreal Canadiens.
Explaining this fall from grace occupies the province’s top hockey minds. Premier François Legault struck a committee in 2021 to “relaunch” the sport in Quebec, not long after the Canadiens played their first game in franchise history without a Quebecker in the lineup – an ignominious milestone denounced by the Premier himself.
The Habs’ renunciation of their traditional role as a hothouse of French-Canadian talent has coincided with hockey’s decline in Quebec. From the time of Maurice Richard to Béliveau to Lafleur, the team was always led by homegrown heroes who seemed to incarnate the nation as it evolved, Mr. Kelly said, until as recently as its last Stanley Cup in 1993 with Roy in net. New ownership and management deprioritized cultivating local stars, arguably hurting the team and hockey culture in the province more broadly.
The Montreal Canadiens pose for a photograph with the Stanley Cup following their victory over the Los Angeles Kings, on June 9, 1993.FRANK GUNN/The Canadian Press
Recent decades have also seen an explosion in the cost of playing hockey, leading some commentators to conclude that a have-not province such as Quebec can’t compete with richer Ontario and British Columbia. The presence of three truly great players on Team Canada from smaller and poorer Nova Scotia – Brad Marchand, Nathan MacKinnon, and Sidney Crosby – seems to undercut the economic argument, however.
Others blame Hockey Quebec for mismanagement, or point to the rise of soccer and basketball, or the emergence of competition from other hockey-playing nations. But in the end, the declining quality of top-end players from the province remains a whodunnit.
“There’s something mysterious there,” said Mr. Kelly.
Quebec’s lack of modern-day hockey greats leads to an existential crisis
Quebeckers have no trouble dominating other winter sports; they have cheered on as their athletes continue to rake in Olympic medals in skiing and speed skating. The women’s hockey team was, of course, captained to a silver by Beauceville, Que.’s own Marie-Philip Poulin, a legend of the sport.
But ardour for the Canadian men’s hockey team in Quebec is notably cooler in the absence of Bourques and Savards and Robitailles. The other day, Montreal graduate student Simon-Pierre Thibeault overheard a couple friends on campus talking about the phenomenon: “Is it just me, or is it a bit less exciting without Quebeckers?”
It’s not just them. Mr. Thibeault, a master’s student in sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal, published an essay in La Presse before the Games about how the men’s hockey roster was a symptom of Quebec’s “invisibility” to the rest of Canada.
Sovereigntist groups on social media have been buzzing about the issue, he said in a recent interview.
“Federalists should want to see Quebec players in the team,” said Mr. Thibeault. “Events like this weaken Canadian unity.”
For the time being, the rest of Canada may just be hoping it doesn’t weaken Connor McDavid and MacKinnon on Sunday.