It’s a metaphor that has captured the national consciousness; with threats on annexation looming and an election just passed, Canadians coast to coast to coast have embraced “elbows up” as a mantra.
The phrase, generally attributed to the legendary Gordie Howe, has made its way into political ads and national news south of the border. The implication is clear: “elbows up” has come to symbolize Canadian resistance to the current US regime, which seems determined—rhetorically and through policies like tariffs—to undermine Canadian sovereignty and well-being. That a hockey metaphor so aptly symbolizes Canadian resistance draws on the longstanding identification between Canadian nationalism and independence and the game.
“Canadians love to tell stories about ourselves through the game of hockey,” says Associate Professor Simon Darnell, director of the Centre for Sport Policy Studies in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education (KPE). “Especially with our increasingly complicated relationship with the US, hockey offers a real sense of independence, separation and even superiority. So, when Canadian sovereignty is challenged by US policy and rhetoric, hockey is a powerful metaphorical response.”
Darnell subscribes to the notion that sports are not just a mirror, but are shaped by—and, in turn, help to shape—contemporary political and social life. He explains that the finals of the recent 4 Nations Face-Off between the US and Canada wasn’t simply a barometer of US-Canada relations; it took on more significance as a sports event because of the political tensions between the two countries. “There are some parallels here to the 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the USSR, which was a proxy for Cold War politics between opposing social and political regimes,” Darnell says. “The idea that sports and politics are separate, or exist independently from each other, is hard to claim or justify. Sports organizations have political power, athletes engage in political activism, and we look to sports as forms of political authority.”
Darnell, who has published extensively on sport as a tool for international development and peacebuilding, says that the current sports climate is all but inextricable from the global political stage. To wit: tensions arose earlier this year as Canadians repeatedly booed during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Darnell says that this makes sense. “The very fact of singing the anthems before sports events is rooted in geo-politics and nationalism, so when those politics shift more broadly, the implications and reverberations can be seen and felt in the sports world too,” he says. Those reverberations made their way to the Toronto Blue Jays’ home opener, where a PA address at the Rogers Centre encouraged fans to be respectful during the national anthems.
“I think it’s fine that clubs would ask fans not to boo the anthem, but it’s also fans’ rights to boo if they see that as a way to assert their political agency,” says Darnell. “Fans aren’t inappropriately mixing sports and politics; they are making it known where they stand on such political issues. Indeed, there aren’t many other such public fora in which Canadians can voice their displeasure with and towards American policy right now. I think it’s not such a bad thing that sports offer fans a relatively peaceful venue in which to make their political voices heard in these turbulent times.”