Connor McDavid's expression matched that of many Canadians across the country last Sunday, after the Americans won men's hockey gold at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Is it too late to add a new sport for the next Olympic Games?
After spending most of last week going back and forth with CBC’s communications department trying to nail down exactly what the viewership was for Milan Cortina, it seems to me it could be totally entertaining to watch teams of PR professionals spin their TV ratings for public consumption. I imagine their bosses yelling like Brad Jacobs – “Hard!” – as they sweep their press releases clean of any bothersome data.
Mind you, I don’t know how you’d decide who gets the gold in a competition like that, since everyone is always declaring victory.
Take CBC’s press release issued last Monday, which proclaimed that 30.5 million Canadians had tuned in to some part of the Games across CBC/Radio-Canada’s English and French TV networks and the public broadcaster’s Olympic partners TSN, Sportsnet, and RDS.
The release said that CBC-TV pulled in an average of 25 per cent of the total TV viewing audience during the Games, up 11 points from the 2022 Beijing Winter Games, and that time spent on its flagship streaming app, Gem, was up 632 per cent over Beijing.
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The press release also included the top 10 most-watched moments of Milan Cortina. No. 1, of course, was when Jack Hughes scored that devastating OT goal in the men’s gold medal hockey game: It was seen by 8.7 million viewers. But that’s all CBC said about the game – which, okay, fine, maybe you don’t want to ever think about it again.
Even so, it was disappointing that CBC didn’t release any of the other numbers that usually have been announced in the past: figures like the average minute audience (AMA), or the total number of viewers who caught at least some part of the game (aka “reach”).
There are vanishingly few moments when Canadians can take the temperature of our own national pride. Sports can be a proxy, if an imperfect one, for measuring our patriotism and reflecting that back to us. Sometimes it can even offer us a guidepost to what kind of country we’re becoming, to our changing tastes and values.
Fans from coast to coast were glued to their TV sets during the Toronto Blue Jays’ playoff run last October. And if you were out in the parks and playgrounds and bars during that month, you saw your neighbours waving not just team-branded merch but the Canadian flag, too. Same when the Raptors won in 2019.
The country was united in cheering the Blue Jays on through their run to Game 7 of the World Series last year. Sportsnet provided specific details that let its audience know just how many of them were tuned in for the highs and the lows of the run.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Canadian Press
So, when Sportsnet released viewership numbers to confirm that about 23 million viewers – or more than half of the country – watched some of the World Series, it helped to reinforce and amplify that experience, hearing an objective measure of our month-long national obsession.
The Canadian men’s gold medal hockey game in 2010 remains in the popular imagination not just because of Sidney Crosby’s iconic overtime goal but because we also know it was the most-watched TV event in Canadian history. The game had an average audience of 16.7 million across the entire broadcast and a reach of 26.4 million, peaking at 22 million when Crosby scored.
When I asked CBC for the average audience figure for this year’s men’s gold medal game, the network said technical limitations prevented them from determining that. (Basically, their research department had to have classified the game as its own separate program rather than just part of its full Sunday morning broadcast.) Happily, late last Thursday they finally got back to me and said their research department had figured the number was 7.8-million.
But even that isn’t a proper measure of the full audience, because it doesn’t include anyone who watched on Gem, the service that CBC had spent the entire Games promoting.
It was a confounding admission. Over the past few years, the TV industries in both the U.S. and Canada have created systems to measure combined viewership across traditional TV channels and streaming services.
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That’s how Bell Media was able to announce that an average audience of 6.8 million watched this year’s Super Bowl on TSN, CTV, RDS, and live streaming on Crave, and how Sportsnet determined the World Series drew an average of 7.5 million across all seven games.
CBC doesn’t do that. They explained to me that they have two separate systems for TV and digital. All they could tell me was that, in addition to the 7.8 million average viewers on TV, there were four million stream starts on CBC and Radio-Canada’s digital platforms for the men’s gold medal game.
If your eyes are glazing over, you’re not alone – there were several times during my interactions with them last week when I almost threw in the towel, figuring it wasn’t worth trying to get to the bottom of the numbers they’d published.
Still, I admired CBC’s willingness to keep answering my questions, because that kind of transparency is increasingly rare in Canadian TV.
The Milan Cortina opening ceremonies were one of CBC's top 10 highest rated moments of the 2026 Winter Olympics.Cameron Spencer/The Associated Press
For many years Numeris, the Canadian TV ratings agency, published a weekly list of the top 30 programs in this country. They stopped doing that in the summer of 2022, without ever fully explaining why. The suspicion was that the Canadian broadcasters behind Numeris didn’t want the public to know how much their audiences were shrinking in the face of foreign streaming services.
But even though this is the sort of information that should belong to us – it is, after all, literally about us – it’s kept locked up, accessible only by a few for commercial purposes.
Meanwhile, Canadian broadcasters have adopted a version of my late grandmother’s mantra: If you don’t have anything positive to say, don’t say anything at all.
Traditional viewership is withering: according to Numeris, the audience tuning in to linear TV is now less than 60 per cent of what it was in 2014, during the Sochi Games. The PR departments of broadcasters are being more stingy and selective about the data they release. Sports is the only programming pulling in mass viewership, so sports ratings are the only ones we’re given. And even then, rarely.
That’s a shame. There are already too many moments when we feel divided from each other in this country. Sports broadcasters should tell us when we’ve come together for a game, so that we can celebrate not just what we’re watching but the fact that we watched it together. And if our hearts are broken by an unlucky overtime bounce, so be it. It would just be nice to know how many of our fellow citizens were along for the ride.