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The National Hockey League (NHL) is a men’s professional ice hockey league. Widely recognized as the world’s premier hockey league, it was established in Montréal, Québec, in 1917. The league currently includes 31 franchises: 7 in Canada and 24 in the United States. The Canadian teams are the Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, Ottawa Senators, Winnipeg Jets, Edmonton Oilers, Calgary Flames and Vancouver Canucks. Teams compete annually for the Stanley Cup, the oldest professional sports trophy in North America.

The Brier is one of the most prestigious trophies in Canadian curling. A Dominion championship competition for men's curling was inaugurated in 1927, sponsored by the W.D. Macdonald Company for a trophy known as the Macdonald Brier Tankard. This annual event gave curling a significant impetus.

Tobogganing developed independently in eastern Canada among native tribes who used their transportation sleighs for occasional fun. It was refined by groups such as the Montreal Tobogganing Club, the first such club in Canada, formed in 1881.

Fishing for sport as well as for food is inseparable from the history of human evolution. Some of the earliest evidence can be seen in rock shelter carvings of fish before 10 000 BC and in 5000-year-old Egyptian drawings of anglers.

The sport of diving can be traced back to 400 BC through pictures on Egyptian and Roman vases. Plain diving was practised from cliffs to the oceans during the 8th to 10th centuries by Vikings in Sweden and later in the 1770s by Indians in Acapulco, Mexico.

Orienteering is a sport in which participants navigate with the aid of a map and compass around a prescribed course, checking in at specified and clearly marked control points.

Each summer musicians of all ages and abilities meet at music camps and schools across Canada to participate in programs of specialized instruction, supervised music-making, and, often, social and recreational activities. At many of these camps, music is one facet of a larger arts program.

The Vancouver Canucks are a franchise in the National Hockey League. The team had been a member of the Pacific Coast Hockey League, and then the Western Hockey League, since 1945.

The Vancouver Grizzlies were a basketball team. Spurred on by the intent of the National Basketball Association to expand to Toronto, Vancouver Canucks owner Arthur Griffiths launched a bid to secure an NBA expansion franchise for Vancouver in 1993.

Capitalizing on the public interest aroused by the Canada-Soviet Hockey Series of 1972, Douglas Fisher of Hockey Canada, and Alan Eagleson of the NHL Players' Association, arranged to bring national teams from Europe to compete against Canada and the US in tournaments which would be staged, every 3 or 4 years, in North American arenas.

The Edmonton Mercurys, a team consisting of amateur hockey players, was the last Canadian hockey team to win an Olympic gold medal until 2002. The 1952 win at Oslo was the fifth gold medal in six Winter Olympics to that point for Canada.

Organized athletic contests originally held in ancient Greece to celebrate an Olympiad (a period of four years), and revived in Athens in 1896. The running of the modern Olympics is controlled by the International Olympics Committee (IOC).

Olympic Games are an international sports competition, held every four years. Although winter events were included in the 1908 and 1920 Olympic Games, the first separate Olympic Winter Games were held in 1924 in Chamonix, France. Canada has hosted two Olympic Winter Games: in Calgary in 1988 and Vancouver in 2010. In total, Canada has won 199 medals at the Olympic Winter Games: 73 gold, 64 silver and 62 bronze medals. This does not include the gold medal in ice hockey won by Canada at the 1920 Olympic Games; while considered the first Olympic medal in ice hockey, it preceded the establishment of the Olympic Winter Games. The country ranks fifth in the total number of medals won at the Olympic Winter Games.

Since the first British Empire Games were held at Hamilton, Ontario, in August 1930, and attended by 400 competitors representing 11 countries, Canada has been a leading proponent and participant in this quadrennial multi-sport festival.

The Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum began as a non-profit, charitable foundation in 1983. While its original home was in Toronto, the Hall of Fame and Museum moved to its current location in St. Marys, in southwestern Ontario, in 1994, opening its doors to the public in 1998.

On 15 April 1947, Jackie Robinson played in his debut game with the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first African American to play in the major leagues in the modern era. Prior to that point, professional baseball in the United States was segregated, with African Americans playing in the Negro leagues. When Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s colour barrier in 1947, he entered American history books. What many baseball fans may not realize, however, is that Robinson was embraced by Canadian fans one year earlier as a member of the Montreal Royals, a farm team for the Brooklyn Dodgers.