Chapter 10. This is the Modern World
10.16 Sport and Leisure in Post-Confederation Canada
Robin Anderson; Department of History; and University of the Fraser Valley
The story of sport and leisure since the mid-19th century has been shaped by many factors, but three historical processes stand out in particular. The first is social hegemony in sport, the process by which dominant groups define the possibilities and limits on sport, leaving outlier groups having to struggle for inclusion. The second is fan identification and representation, the process in which a sport grows from a haphazard set of localized experiences to a phenomenon that fuels powerful allegiances to city, region, and nation. The third is commodification, the process of turning what originally was an informal and voluntary set of sport and leisure practices into a thoroughly commodified cultural marketplace. We will briefly look at each of these historical processes next.
Social Hegemony in Sport
As with most cultural activities, sport and leisure in the 19th and 20th centuries reflected the wider patterns of existence, social hierarchy, and class behaviours of Canadians. While human societies have always displayed a desire for play, organized sport with its emphasis on rational outcomes and fair play began in Great Britain in the late 18th century and was exported to British North America in the early 19th century as an extension of the leisure activities of the newly arrived British middle-class. Most historians agree that Montreal’s Anglophone middle-class men defined many of the enduring structures and practices of organized sport across Canada by the middle decades of the 19th century, including drafting the first rules of play, establishing the standard playing surfaces and equipment, creating the first sport organizations, leagues and events, and articulating a set of middle-class beliefs about the social and personal value of organized sport and leisure. Their vision of appropriate sport was a limited one but one that lined up closely in its broad outlines with similar developments in Europe and the United States.
While this relatively small group of sports-minded men had the money, leisure time, and social influence to define much of the physical activity in the 19th century, less powerful groups were still able to play their games within the nooks and crannies of rural and urban Canada. For instance, many of Canada’s Indigenous peoples continued to play their traditional games, although some of these, like the richly complex and multipurpose Iroquoian stick and ball game Tewaarathon, came under a re-forming process in the mid-19th century to become the standardized and rationalized sport lacrosse to mimic other contained European field games. Ironically, many eastern-Canadian Indigenous communities embraced the simplified European game of lacrosse and used their superior fitness and skills to regularly crush their white opponents. Other non-Anglo groups, including easte