Chris Selley: The hysterical nostalgia for Hockey Night in Canada is classic Canadian unthinkingness

Pedestrians walk past the CBC building in Toronto on June 7, 2006. CBC hasn’t produced Hockey Night since 2014. Photo by GEOFF ROBINS /AFP via Getty Images

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I’m generally happy to roll my eyes at pearl-clutching urban sophisticates in private. Sane National post readers don’t need me to explain why Hockey Night in Canada signing off the public airwaves for good doesn’t matter, despite all the column inches and airtime it has taken up.

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The problem is, I think all this wailing speaks to a genuinely harmful aspect of the Canadian character — or at least the pearl-clutching urban sophisticate Canadian character, and unfortunately, that character holds a lot of sway in this country.

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Many have pointed out that CBC hasn’t produced Hockey Night since 2014. It simply plugged into Sportsnet’s broadcast. Fewer have noted that very few CBC viewers watch over the air as it stands — it was only five per cent, according to CBC, when they last reported it in 2012.

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So other than a weird sort of nostalgia and public broadcasting fetishism, the case for alarm, or even to notice, rests on one supposedly empirical change to the viewing experience: namely, that Hockey Night will no longer be “free.”

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No surprise that everyone making these arguments seems to live in an urban area — not unlike people insisting on the necessity of door-to-door mail service. For a great many Canadians, over-the-air CBC hasn’t been available for ages. In 2007, the CRTC ordered the phasing out of analog television broadcasting, requiring broadcasters to switch to digital over-the-air signals, although the CBC didn’t replace all of its coverage nationwide.

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“We had 620 analog TV transmitters and we simply couldn’t afford to replicate that infrastructure,” CBC explained. “It was also clear that to do so wasn’t a good use of scarce resources.”

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It’s not just the hinterlands where you can’t get a digital TV signal. Geographically, it’s the vast majority of the country. CBC digital broadcast towers are in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina (but not Saskatoon), Winnipeg, Windsor, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières, Quebec City, Saguenay, Rimouski (francophone Quebecers actually watch CBC’s French-language offerings, remember), Fredericton, Moncton, Charlottetown, Halifax, St. John’s, Whitehorse and Iqaluit.

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Everyone outside those broadcast areas has needed cable or satellite TV service, or internet, to watch Hockey Night for 15 years.

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The CRTC’s rationale for phasing out analog TV spectrum was to free it up for more important things, like cellular service. No doubt spurred on by its communications department, it added another justification: digital offers a higher-quality picture. And hey, if you can get digital TV over the airwaves, while the channels are very limited even here in Toronto, the picture is indeed pristine. I have watched Hockey Night over the air because the picture is so superior to what you get from streaming.