In Canada, the Premier of Quebec Worries About the State of Hockey
The New York Times
With the Montreal Canadiens in a losing funk, François Legault has expressed concern about the declining number of Quebec-born pros and vowed to get to the bottom of it.
MONTREAL — Of all the shortages that have emerged across the globe this year and attracted high-level political attention, the most astonishing may be this: the scarcity of Quebecers in professional hockey.
Forget worries about pasta shortages (the Canadian harvest of durum wheat is down by almost a third) and the soaring prices of poultry (the staple of Montreal’s famous rotisserie chicken outlets) and beef (the star of the popular steak frites joints that dot the city). The problem raised last week by François Legault, the premier of Quebec, is the lack of successors to Marcel Dionne, Mario Lemieux, Luc Robitaille, Mike Bossy and Guy Lafleur — the five leading goal scorers from Quebec in N.H.L. history.
There now are 51 Quebec-born players in the N.H.L. — about 7 percent of the league’s roughly 721 players, according to statistics parsed by the website QuantHockey. Ontario, with 171 players, far outpaces Quebec and now accounts for the most professionals from one province in the league. The difference is not merely explained by Ontario’s larger population.
