Canadian women have made significant strides in the hockey world. Olympic gold medals and the creation of a national professional women’s league were followed by the City of Ottawa playing host to the most recent Clarkson Cup game.
Despite the progress, the City of Ottawa has only just brought gender equality to the distribution of its recreational facilities, which include its arenas.
A change to the existing policy that allocates recreational use of the city’s facilities was put forth to city council last week and was approved, giving more access to groups and associations in the city based on need rather than history.
With the rise of women’s hockey in Canada, the increased cost associated with playing the sport and other cities engaging in similar equality strategies, this move is long overdue.
For years, women’s hockey in Canada has led the international sphere, winning the past four Olympic games and finishing no lower than second in the World Championship in the past 25 years.
This dominance led to the launch of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League in 2007, the first professional women’s hockey league of its kind in North America.
Accompanying the success, according to Hockey Canada, came an influx of over 6,000 registered female hockey players since 1993-94. While that exponential rise in numbers has brought much attention to the sport, the accessibility of services, at least in Ottawa, has lagged far behind.
In 2002, the city created the City Allocation Policy to allocate time to groups for all city recreational facilities including arenas, ball diamonds, pools and community centres. The distribution formula relied heavily on what the organizations were historically given, meaning that groups who received top hours in the past would continue to in the future.
Noticing this, Nalin Bhargava, president of the Ottawa Girls Hockey Association, launched a study in February into the distribution of ice time for both boys and girls in the city of Ottawa. What he found was that girls’ teams were buying time on private rinks far more often than boys teams, which cost nearly twice the hourly rate of city-owned arenas.
According to the study, this translates into girls’ hockey teams paying $100,000 for private ice per year which breaks down to $200 more per family with a girl hockey player due to ice costs.
The city responded to Bhargava’s study last month, putting forth a proposal to make ice distribution more gender equal. The policy change was approved by vote March 23 and will allocate a new baseline starting next September.
Really though, Ottawa isn’t as progressive as it may appear with other Canadian cities addressing the problem much earlier. In Toronto, for example, men’s shinny groups and other Greater Toronto Hockey League teams were forced to move out of Toronto arenas in 2009 after the Toronto Leaside Girls Hockey Association threatened a human rights complaint for similar inequality of ice time access.
That’s not to say this change won’t come without its hiccups. If implemented equitably to where girls would get approximately 70 per cent of their requested ice—they currently receive 57 per cent—boys’ teams would lose approximately 300 hours of public ice per season that they would have to replace with private rentals. Of course, this is the cost of equality: it’s a decision that will anger some within the hockey community nonetheless.
While behind schedule, the city made a positive step in changing the outdated policy to represent current participation rates.
Women’s hockey in Canada is bigger than it’s ever been with more participants and championships by the year. It’s about time Ottawa acknowledged that with equal access to public ice.