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

When the Nordiques left Quebec nearly 30 years ago, the hockey team’s departure sparked the same kind of mythology and nostalgia as fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The Nordiques’ NHL season in Quebec, from 1979 to 1995, coincided with the French-speaking province’s two failed attempts to secede from the rest of Canada. The team’s identity merged with that of its fans: a linguistic minority struggling to prove itself 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 politics of Quebec City and the Quebec region, and also a hole in 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.

Since the financially ailing Nordiques left for Denver, generations of Quebec political leaders have tried to bring them back. They have even gone so far as to build a stadium that cost 370 million Canadian dollars (almost US$280 million), even as economic changes have made the chances of the team’s return increasingly slim.

“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 use this sense of nationalism for political purposes,” he said Martin Package, a historian of Quebec at Laval University in Quebec. “That’s essentially why they keep calling for the return of the Nordiques.”

The last to do so was the government of Prime Minister François Legault. He was overwhelmingly re-elected to a second term in 2022, but whose popularity fell over the past year due to a series of missteps, including the approval of a 30 percent salary increase for lawmakers.

In November, his government announced with much fanfare that it would pay 5 million to 7 million Canadian dollars ($3.8 million and $5.3 million) for two exhibition games by the Los Angeles Kings in Quebec next October. This was part of a strategic move to keep the NHL under pressure to bring 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 a poll 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? Mr. Legault’s finance minister, who has nicknamed himself “Nordic minister,” admitted candidly, if imprudently, that the chance of getting a team back was only 10 percent.

Perhaps it was the waning of nationalist sentiment among French Québécois, especially the young. Or was it simply the passage of time?

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

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 Canadiens fan was never an option — they were never French Canadian enough. The Canadiens played in Montreal, the multicultural, diverse, bilingual metropolis that is the historic rival to 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, it also raised hopes for an NHL team in Quebec City, which 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 people in Quebec voted against independence the following year, in the province’s first referendum, some channeled their frustrated nationalist sentiments into fierce support for the Nordiques. The matches between the Nordiques and the Canadiens took on mythical proportions, acting as stand-ins 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 his entire life. While the Canadian national anthem was sung in both French and English before games elsewhere, only French was 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 for a return of the Nordiques.

Mr. Simard spoke while watching a game of Quebec’s junior team, the Remparts, at the Vidéotron Centre, the expensive arena that provincial and municipal leaders built with public money in 2015 to show the NHL how committed they were to recruiting 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 Montreal Canadiens fan, while my dad still has the Nordiques in his head,” says 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 wanted to be a nation and all that” — but that hope felt distant to him.

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

The Nordiques, based in the league’s smallest market — the Quebec metropolitan area now has a population of about 800,000 — struggled financially for years and left for Denver in 1995. In the team’s first season in the United States, which was renamed the Colorado Avalanche, it won the Stanley Cup — heightening the 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, those stories are on the front page of the newspapers,” said Frank Ponsprofessor of sports management at Laval University.

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

The NHL has chosen to expand in larger markets in recent years, including Seattle and Las Vegas, and has given no indication that it is seriously considering Quebec as a candidate for expansion or relocation, Mr. Pons said. For the NHL, Quebec and its small television market simply do not make much business sense.

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

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

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