There are plenty of issues Canadians expect their politicians to be vocal about — the economy and national defense to name two — but sharing their thoughts on sports? It turns out this is one arena where politicos can’t keep quiet.

After Research In Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie announced on May 5 that he’d like to move the Phoenix Coyotes to southern Ontario, a whole host of politicians came out in favour.

“I’d love another NHL team in Canada . . . particularly southern Ontario can support another team,” Prime Minister Steven Harper told reports while he was at the EU-Canada Summit in Prague.

Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty also came out in favour of the move and Toronto mayor David Miller told reporters that he thinks “it’s time we stepped up and brought another NHL franchise to the GTA and created a great rivalry between hockey teams in Toronto and Hamilton.”

It might seem a little odd that stuffy politicians, who are usually discussing issues like employment insurance and immigration, are sharing their ideas on how the NHL should run its business, but governments have been meddling in sports for years.

“One of the great myths of the modern public affairs discussion is that politics and sports are somehow separate fields,” says Allan Tupper, head of the politics department at the University of British Columbia. “They’ve been intertwined for centuries — there used to be competitions between societies and nations. Sports is at the heart of politics and national identity.”

Tupper explains that many historical sporting moments were also political milestones. He points to Jackie Robinson’s acceptance into Major League Baseball in 1947. The slugger ended decades of segregation in that sport when he became the first African-American to take the field. This wasn’t simply a situation of a good player getting his start in the majors; it was a huge cultural and political event that helped shape racial politics in the U.S.

In Canada, Tupper says Maurice Richard became a symbol of Quebec nationalism, so the “wall between politics and sports has always been easily broken.”

Chiming in on sporting matters, especially about a team coming to southern Ontario, is one way for politicians to curry favour from voters without having to make any real commitments.

Ian Hudson, an associate professor of economics at the University of Manitoba, says “it’s a cheap way of getting votes.” That’s because politicians aren’t signing any cheques, though they can still “throw their hat in the ring as a city booster.”

Often times, politicians have no plans to comment on sporting-related matters; it’s the media that draws them into the debate.

“Media do press politicians to offer their views on sporting issues,” says Scott Reid, Paul Martin’s former director of communications. “They might get asked to offer their view on public policy questions like, ’should there be public tax dollars to support teams?’ They even put questions to them about who they’re rooting for in the NHL finals. Not answering makes the politicians look like they’re afraid to expresses the ‘man-on-the-street’ point of view.”

Reid touches on one of the main reasons why politicians speak up when it comes to sports: it’s about being in touch with the average person.

“It permits a politician the opportunity to connect,” he explains. “It’s easy to look at the U.S. president, who suggested changes to the U.S. college football championship system, and say he’s so far removed from my reality. But it turns out the president follows college football just as much as I do and he sounds like me when I sit at a bar and complain about sports.”

But picking a sports team to go all the way, or voicing support for a team’s relocation, comes with risks. In March, Barack Obama revealed that the University of North Carolina was his choice to win the NCAA basketball championship. It was a pick that got people all over the country talking.

“I really thought [the controversy] was much ado about nothing, but I think we all learned an important lesson,” he said, jokingly, in Arizona on Wednesday. “I learned to never again pick another team over the [Arizona State] Sun Devils in my NCAA bracket. It won’t happen again.”

Reid admits that politicians can get in trouble simply for picking who they want to win a game. He cites an example involving his former boss, who became the Liberal leader two days before the 2003 Grey Cup game involving the Edmonton Eskimos and the Montreal Alouettes.

“He was asked who he wants to win the Grey Cup,” says Reid. “Well, he’s from Montreal and he picked them, but western Canadians pay close attention to the CFL, so it can get dicey. In that sense, a politician has to be careful when they’re sitting around restaurants and hotel bars with a Montreal jersey on.”

It’s impossible to tell if votes are lost based on what team a politician is rooting for, but invoking the sporting world to specifically win votes during an election carries huge risks. During the last Manitoba election, the leader of the Conservative opposition party, Hugh McFadyen, promised Winnipeggers that if he won he’d bring the Jets back to Winnipeg.

“This came out of nowhere,” says Hudson. “It was just taken as craziness. You don’t have to be in power to bring the Jets back. What an odd election promise and it totally destroyed his credibility.” What was a close election suddenly became a blowout for the reigning NDP party.

Reid says the prime example for not mixing sports with politics lies with former deputy prime minister John Manley. He came out with a proposal to offer direct subsidies to NHL teams, a position much of the public disagreed with.

“He got beat black and blue,” recalls Reid. “The government had to reverse course within days. That’s a public policy-related issue, but it illuminates the fact that just because people love their sports, doesn’t mean they’ll support every proposal that can be developed in aid of sports.”

Of course, sporting events and the policy debates around them aren’t going away anytime soon, so don’t be surprised if our elected leaders take a break from dealing with the economy to announce their Stanley Cup picks.

Appeared on Canadian Business Online on May 15, 2009.

Pic via