Televised sport as a purveyor of Canadian government sports policy

This paper summarizes the rhetoric of national unity which has characterized the emerging concern of the Canadian federal government with questions of sport and leisure. It is argued that the state, in the post-World War II period, began to include sport and leisure as part of its perceived responsibility in the sphere of social welfare. Yet in its concern with the construction of a coherent national identity, the state developed a view of sport which is highly compatible with the media's presentation of it as commodified entertainment. The contradictions of this position are examined in a discussion of television's presentation of the Grey Cup, the national football final. It is shown that sport and leisure, seen by the state during the last four decades as a means of welfare for the population generally, takes on an ideological emphasis embodying the ambivalences of the ‘national’.