Quebec still longs for its lost hockey team, a nationalist symbol

When the Nordiques left Quebec nearly three decades ago, the hockey team’s departure fueled the kind of mythologizing and nostalgia familiar to fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The Nordiques’ stint in Quebec, where they played in the NHL from 1979 to 1995, overlapped with the French-speaking province’s two failed attempts to secede from the rest of Canada, and the team’s identity merged with that of their fans: a linguistic minority struggling to assert themselves in a part of the world dominated by English speakers.

The Nordiques literally wore their politics on their sleeves, putting the fleur-de-lis of the Quebec flag on their uniforms. They also sang the Canadian national anthem only in French.

The team’s departure “left a hole in the regional politics of Quebec City and Quebec, and also in the French-speaking identity,” said Jean-François Lisée, who led the separatist Parti Québécois from 2016 to 2018 and is now a columnist for the newspaper Le Devoir.

So since the financially ailing Nordiques left for Denver, generations of Quebec political leaders have tried to bring them back, even going so far as to build an arena that cost 370 million Canadian dollars (nearly $280 million), even as economic changes have made the team’s return increasingly unlikely.

“People see themselves in a national concept and in a hockey team, or in the memory of a hockey team, and politicians have tried to exploit this sense of nationalism for political gain,” said Martin Paquet, a historian of Quebec at the University of Laval in Quebec. “That’s essentially why they keep calling for the return of the Nordiques.”

The last to do just that was the government of Premier François Legault, which was overwhelmingly re-elected for a second term in 2022 but whose approval ratings have fallen over the past year due to a series of missteps, including approving a 30 percent salary cut. increase for legislators.

In November, his government announced with much fanfare that it had agreed to pay 5 million to 7 million Canadian dollars ($3.8 million and $5.3 million) for the Los Angeles Kings to host two preseason games in Quebec in October to play, as part of a strategic maneuver. to keep the pressure on the NHL for the city’s own team.

Such a move might have led to at least a rise in the polls in the past. But this time it failed. The announcement, which was heavily criticized, pushed Legault’s ratings down even further, putting him in first place most unpopular of Canada’s 10 provincial leaders, according to polling by the Angus Reid Institute.

Was the criticism, and the lack of rise in the polls, due to the timing of the announcement? It came around the same time that hundreds of thousands of teachers and health care workers in the province went on strike demanding better wages.

Or was it the cost of the deal, a lot of money spent on a long-term gamble? Legault’s own Finance Minister, who has nicknamed himself “Minister of the Nordiques,” candidly, if carelessly, acknowledged that the chance of getting a team back was only 10 percent.

Perhaps it was the fading of nationalist sentiments among French Québécois, especially the young. Or was it just the passage of time?

“If a couple has broken up because one of the members left about 25 years ago, it really is time to move on,” Mr Pâquet said.

Of course, the province of Quebec still has an NHL team: for decades, the Montreal Canadiens have been one of the league’s most storied franchises.

But for many in Quebec, being a fan of the Canadiens was never an option; they had never been French-Canadian enough. The Canadiens played in Montreal, the multicultural, diverse, bilingual metropolis that is the historic rival of predominantly French-speaking Quebec City.

Outside the province, however, the Canadiens were known for their French-Canadian stars, such as Guy Lafleur.

As the Quebec independence movement emerged in the 1960s, so did hopes for an NHL team in Quebec City, in what it was hoped would eventually become the capital of a new nation. The city got its team in 1979 after the Nordiques and others entered the NHL in a minor league

After Quebecers voted against independence in the province’s first referendum the following year, some channeled their frustrated nationalist sentiments into fierce support for the Nordiques. The matches between the Nordiques and the Canadiens took on mythical proportions and served as a proxy for larger battles.

“We learned at a very young age to hate the Canadiens,” said Jocelyn Simard, 65, a French Québécois man who has lived in Quebec City all his life and grew up as a die-hard fan of the Chicago Blackhawks.

When the Nordiques arrived, Mr. Simard felt he had found the team he had been waiting for all his life. While the Canadian national anthem was sung in both French and English before games elsewhere, only French could be heard in the Nordiques arena. Mr. Lafleur would play his final two seasons of a long career for the Nordiques.

“In the end, a lot of French Canadians identified more with the Nordiques than with the Montreal Canadiens,” Mr. Simard said, adding that he had not lost hope of a return of the Nordiques.

Mr. Simard spoke while watching a game played by Quebec’s junior league team, the Remparts, at the Vidéotron Center — the expensive arena that provincial and city leaders built with public funds in 2015 to show the NHL how committed they were to getting a team.

But while fans of Mr. Simard’s generation tended to share his feelings about the Nordiques, the team’s significance did not seem to resonate with the younger hockey fans in the arena, many of whom were born after the team’s departure.

“I’m a fan of the Montreal Canadiens, while my dad still has the Nordiques on his mind,” said Mathis Drolet, 17, a student who grew up in Quebec.

His friend, Justin Tremblay, 17, said he was aware of how the Nordiques were connected to the aspirations of previous generations — “Quebec wants to be a nation and all that” — but that hope felt far away to him.

“It’s stuff we learned in school,” Mr. Tremblay said.

Located in the league’s smallest market — the Quebec metropolitan area now has a population of about 800,000 — the Nordiques struggled financially for years and left for Denver in 1995. In the team’s first season in the United States, renamed the Colorado Avalanche, it won the Stanley Cup – deepening a sense of betrayal in Quebec.

The then-Parti Québécois-led government had rejected the Nordiques’ owner’s request for a bailout — just months, it turned out, before the province’s second referendum on independence from Canada.

The referendum failed by a razor-thin margin – with some politicians and political pundits ultimately blaming the loss on the government’s refusal to bail out the Nordiques.

And so, to this day, Quebec’s political leaders promise to bring back the Nordiques, and even the smallest development can generate significant attention in the local news media.

“In Quebec City, these stories are on the front page of the newspapers,” he said Frank Ponsa professor of sports management at the University of Laval.

But most hockey industry experts say the chances of a return are virtually non-existent.

In recent years, the NHL has opted to expand into larger markets, including Seattle and Las Vegas, and no indications have been given of serious interest in Quebec as a candidate for expansion or relocation, Mr. Pons said. For the NHL, Quebec and its small television market make little business sense.

“It’s an economic approach,” he said, “whereas in Quebec it’s an emotional approach.”

Given the lingering emotions toward the Nordiques, few expect politicians to acknowledge the cold, hard truth about the chances of the Nordiques ever coming home.

“How many votes would that generate?” said Mr Lisée, the former party leader. “If you don’t want to be in power, you can say so if you think so. Most politicians will say it would be great to have the Nordiques back.”