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Work continues in the broadcast control room during a tour of CBC’s 2026 Olympic broadcasting production setup at their headquarters in Toronto last week.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
In ancient Greece, legend has it that conflicts between neighbouring city-states were so relentless that three war-weary kings signed a treaty to create a brief period of peace during the Olympic Games. The respite became known as the Olympic Truce.
Today, the spirit of that effort lives on in Canada, where every couple of years three of the most powerful broadcasting companies lower their usually sharp elbows and work together to bring the thrill and delight of the Olympic Games to citizens and screens from coast to coast.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has been the official Olympics and Paralympics rights holder in this country since 2014, but it has sublicensed some of the English language rights to Bell Media’s TSN and Rogers Sports & Media’s Sportsnet channel during each of the Games.
With NHL players set to return to the Winter Olympics for the first time since 2014, both Sportsnet, which holds national rights to the league’s games through the 2037-38 season, and TSN, which holds regional rights for four of the seven Canadian teams, want to make sure they are a prominent part of the coverage.
That means every one of the Canadian women’s and men’s hockey games will be simulcast on all three of the broadcaster’s main channels for as long as the teams last in the tournament.
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“We thought it was really important that we gather and put the content in as many places as possible,” said Chris Wilson, CBC’s executive director of sports and Olympics, in an interview. “The Team Canada games will truly be uniting opportunities for Canadians.”
If all goes according to plan, it could result in one of CBC’s largest audiences on record: The 2014 gold medal men’s match, in which Canada defeated Sweden, attracted an average audience of 8.5 million viewers, despite the fact that it began shortly after 4 a.m. on the West Coast (7 a.m. ET).
Nowhere will the broadcaster’s co-operative spirit be more apparent than during the Canadian women’s and men’s hockey coverage. Hockey is the only sport for which the play-by-play commentators and analysts will be on site in Italy: all other events will be called remotely from CBC HQ in downtown Toronto. (That is, for the English-language broadcasts; French-language broadcasts will be produced out of Radio-Canada’s Montreal headquarters.)
Kenzie Lalonde of TSN and the two-time Olympian Cheryl Pounder will call the Canadian women’s games, with TSN’s Claire Hanna serving as on-site reporter. (Daniella Ponticelli and Becky Kellar will call the other women’s games.) Those broadcasts will also include a panel featuring Andi Petrillo and Saroya Tinker in Toronto with Cassie Campbell-Pascall and Hailey Salvian piped in from Milan.
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The broadcast sets at CBC’s 2026 Olympic broadcasting production setup at their headquarters in Toronto.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
On the men’s side, the two sports channels are sending their big guns to Milan to work together. Sportsnet’s Chris Cuthbert will do play-by-play, with TSN’s Mike Johnson handling colour for the Team Canada games. (Matt Cullen and Becky Kellar will call the other men’s games, from Toronto.) Sportsnet’s Kyle Bukauskas will handle reporting duties.
Campbell-Pascall and Pounder will also serve on the men’s hockey panel, joining TSN’s James Duthie along with Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman and Kevin Bieksa.
But though they are working together, all three broadcasters will be using the Games to advance their own individual strategic goals. The NHL is a pillar of Sportsnet’s and TSN’s programming, which the channels’ participation in Olympics coverage allows them to reaffirm, no matter which national team wins.
And both of the sports channels will be producing their own morning and midday studio shows using talent from their deep bench.
CBC has even more to gain. The Olympics is the one occasion every two years that the public broadcaster repeatedly wins prime time with its legacy CBC-TV channel.
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But just as NBC is trying to use the Olympics to sell subscriptions for its Peacock streaming service, CBC is focused on using Milan Cortina to drive sign-ups for its Gem streaming service, which will be the home of every single live event in the Games as well as offering repeats on demand.
CBC-TV will also carry 22 hours a day of live coverage.
Though Gem is free, users are required to sign up for the service using an e-mail address: That will enable CBC to send marketing messages about its other programming on Gem.
It will also allow the broadcaster to boast of its unique role in supporting amateur sport in Canada, which has taken on greater significance in the last year as the country’s sovereignty continues to be threatened.
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Video inputs are amalgamated at the broadcast central command during a tour of CBC’s 2026 Olympic broadcasting production setup at their headquarters in Toronto last week.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
“We cover all of these Olympic sports 365 days a year,” noted CBC’s Wilson. “We’re really hopeful that it will also provide a chance for people that love figure skating or love alpine skiing or love snowboarding that may not know how much of those sports we carry throughout the year. It may cue them into the fact that they can actually watch them almost every single week on CBC.”
Still, CBC recognizes it can’t gatekeep all of its content if it wants to reach new audiences.
“We’re under no illusion that every teenager knows what the CBC main channel is,” said Wilson.
“It’s a big focus of ours to try and make sure that even if you’re watching highlights on YouTube or a clip on TikTok, that somehow we’re getting the message through that, ‘If you like this, here’s where you can get more.’ Or ‘Don’t forget you can watch the full event here,’” he said.
“As audiences get more and more segmented and they watch on more and more different platforms in more and more different ways, we’ve got to work really hard to try and reach them where they are, and then do our best to try and direct them to where they can find the main live streaming, if that’s what they’re looking for. And if they’re not: ‘Here’s a great story about an athlete,’ or ‘Here’s a great clip of a goal.’
“We just want Canadians to enjoy the Olympics, and not everybody’s probably going to enjoy watching it for 10 hours a day. But those of us of a certain generation certainly will. And hopefully a lot of the youngsters will get dragged into that habit as well.”
