Canada has two national sports, set out in law: lacrosse is Canada's national summer sport and ice hockey is its national winter sport, under the National Sports of Canada Act, which came into force on 12 May 1994. Lacrosse is the older of the two by centuries, a game of First Nations origin documented by a French missionary in 1637. Hockey in its modern form was first played indoors in Montreal on 3 March 1875 and more than 15 million people in Canada followed the National Hockey League as of 2021.
How Parliament Settled the Question on 12 May 1994
For most of the 20th century many Canadians believed lacrosse was already the official national game. In May 1964 Jack Roxburgh, a Member of Parliament and former president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, searched the parliamentary records and found that no law had ever said so. The Canadian Press suggested the belief came from an 1869 book titled Lacrosse, the National Game of Canada.
Roxburgh moved Bill C-132 on 28 October 1964 to declare hockey the national game, in the same months as the Great Canadian Flag Debate. The Canadian Lacrosse Association called the motion "out of line", and on 11 June 1965 Bob Prittie introduced a rival bill for lacrosse. Neither passed before Parliament was dissolved, and Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson's 1967 idea of naming a summer and a winter game went nowhere.
The matter returned in 1994, when the government brought in a bill naming ice hockey alone. First Nations groups objected that it ignored lacrosse, a uniquely Indigenous contribution to Canadian sport. The House of Commons amended the bill to recognise hockey as Canada's winter sport and lacrosse as its summer sport, and the act took effect on 12 May 1994. The seasonal labels are symbolic rather than strict, a compromise that let Parliament honour both games at once.
Lacrosse Before Confederation: the Creator's Game
Lacrosse began as a family of stick-and-ball games played by Indigenous nations across eastern North America, with roots that historians place as early as the 12th century. The Haudenosaunee and their neighbours played it as a ceremony, a training ground and a way of giving thanks, and it is still called the Creator's Game. Traditional versions were enormous by modern standards: teams of 100 to 1,000 men on fields between about 500 metres and 3 kilometres long, with matches lasting from sunrise to sunset over two or three days. Names recorded for the game include tewaarathon and baggataway.
The first written description came from the Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf, who watched Wendat players in 1637 in what is now Ontario. He called it la crosse, after the French term for a hooked stick, and the name stuck. In 1763, during Pontiac's War, a game between two First Nations outside Fort Michilimackinac was used as cover to enter and capture the British fort, an episode later described by the historian Francis Parkman.
English-speaking Montrealers took up the game after watching Mohawk players in the 1830s, and the first known match between European settlers and First Nations players took place in 1843. As the sport was codified, Indigenous teams such as the Mohawk side from Kahnawake remained among the strongest in the country.
William George Beers and the Montreal Lacrosse Club
The man most responsible for turning the Indigenous game into an organised sport was William George Beers, a Montreal dentist who founded the Montreal Lacrosse Club in 1856. In 1860 he wrote down rules that shortened games and fixed teams at 12 players a side; the first match under his rules was played at Upper Canada College in Toronto in 1867, the year of Confederation. A fervent nationalist, Beers campaigned for lacrosse to become the national game, and in 1869 he published the book Lacrosse: The National Game of Canada.
Organisation followed. The National Lacrosse Association was formed in 1875, and by the early 1890s lacrosse was the most popular summer game in Canada, with the 1900s its golden years. Canadian teams won both Olympic lacrosse tournaments ever held as full medal events, in St. Louis in 1904 and London in 1908. Escalating violence then sank the professional leagues in 1914, leaving the game centred on Montreal, Victoria, Vancouver and New Westminster.
The Canadian Lacrosse Association, founded in 1925, still governs the sport. In 1931 big-city hockey promoters introduced box lacrosse, played in hockey rinks with the ice removed, to turn winter hockey fans into a year-round audience, and within a few years it had nearly replaced the field game in Canada. Today the National Lacrosse League, founded in 1987, plays box lacrosse with about half of its franchises in Canada, among them the Toronto Rock and the Calgary Roughnecks.
Internationally, the World Lacrosse Championship has been dominated by the United States, which has won 11 of 14 titles; Canada has won the other three, including the 2006 edition in London, Ontario, where it beat the Americans 15–10 to end a 28-year American winning streak. World Lacrosse is the only international sports body that recognises First Nations and Native American nations as members, which is why the Haudenosaunee Nationals compete under their own flag. Lacrosse returns to the Olympics at Los Angeles in 2028 in the six-a-side format.
March 3, 1875: Hockey's First Indoor Game in Montreal
Ice hockey drew on British stick-and-ball games, skating games like bandy, and a Mi'kmaq stick game from the Maritimes. Mi'kmaq craftsmen made many of the sticks Europeans used in the 1800s. Earlier games were reported in Windsor and Kingston, Ontario, Deline in the Northwest Territories and on Chippewa Creek near Niagara, but the first organised indoor game recognised by the International Ice Hockey Federation was played on 3 March 1875 at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal.
It was organised by James Creighton, a McGill University student from Halifax, using rules imported from the Maritimes, and it used a puck rather than a ball. The rink, opened in 1862 between Drummond and Stanley streets, had an ice surface whose length became the standard for North American rinks. The same building saw the founding of the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada in 1886 and the first Stanley Cup playoff in 1894.
Lord Stanley's Cup and the Rise of the NHL
Lord Stanley of Preston became Governor General on 11 June 1888 and saw his first hockey game at Montreal's Winter Carnival in 1889, between the Montreal Victorias and the Montreal Hockey Club. Urged on by his sons Arthur and Algernon, he donated a silver bowl inlaid with gold, first presented in 1893 as the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup. As the Stanley Cup, it is considered the oldest trophy in North American sport. Junior and senior amateur hockey have their own national prizes: the Memorial Cup for junior men's teams and the Allan Cup, created by Sir Montagu Allan in 1908, for senior men's teams.
Professional hockey grew in two regions: the National Hockey Association in the east from 1910 and Lester and Frank Patrick's Pacific Coast Hockey Association in the west from 1911. The NHA became the National Hockey League in 1917, and in 1925 the Victoria Cougars became the first professional team from Western Canada to win the Cup. By 1927 the western leagues had folded and the NHL dominated professional hockey across North America. The Montreal Canadiens have won the Stanley Cup 24 times and the Toronto Maple Leafs 13, the two highest totals of any franchise. Today seven of the NHL's teams are Canadian, and the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto houses the Cup and honours players such as Wayne Gretzky, Maurice Richard, Gordie Howe and Bobby Orr.
Hockey Canada, the 1972 Summit Series and the Women's Game
Hockey Canada governs the sport and is a member of the IIHF. For decades Canada was represented abroad by senior amateur clubs: the Winnipeg Falcons, a team of Icelandic Canadians, won the first Olympic hockey gold at Antwerp in 1920, and the Trail Smoke Eaters won the 1961 world title. When state-backed Soviet teams overtook the amateur model, Father David Bauer founded a permanent national team in 1963.
The turning point came in September 1972, when Canada's NHL players met the Soviet national team in the eight-game Summit Series, four games in Canada and four in Moscow. The series forced a rethink of Canadian coaching and training. Once professionals were admitted to international play, Canada won Olympic gold at Salt Lake City in 2002, its first in 50 years, and again at home in Vancouver in 2010. The men's team now holds a record nine Olympic golds and 28 world championships.
Women's hockey in Canada dates to the 1880s, including games organised by Lady Isobel, Lord Stanley's daughter. Fran Rider founded the Ontario Women's Hockey Association in 1975, and Canada won the first official Women's World Championship in Ottawa in 1990. Women's hockey joined the Olympics in 1998, and Hayley Wickenheiser and Marie-Philip Poulin are its all-time leading Olympic scorers. The Professional Women's Hockey League began in January 2024 with three Canadian charter teams, in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, and a game in Ottawa on 2 January set what was then a professional women's attendance record of 8,318, a mark broken several more times that season.
For a wider view of where the winter game is played, read our guide to the geography of ice hockey nations, explore the landscapes that shaped these sports in our Canada geography guide, or turn to another official emblem with our post on the national animal of Canada.