The Canadian Hockey Association

The Stanley Cup was first awarded in 1893 and for the next 20 years, Canada was filled with a range of amateur hockey associations from coast to coast. Challenges for the Stanley Cup were conducted in haphazard fashion. For example, in the winter of 1906, three separate Stanley Cup challenges were made, and two separate champions—the Ottawa Silver Seven and the Montreal Wanderers—won the prize that year.

In January of 1905, the Cup trustees allowed a team from Dawson City to challenge the defending champion Silver Seven for Lord Stanley’s prize. The results were embarrassing; after winning the first game 9-2, Ottawa, led by a 14-goal performance by Frank McGee, won the second game 23-2.

Amateur leagues, like the powerful Eastern Canada Amateur Hockey Association (ECAHA), were quietly paying top players under the table. Finally, realizing that there was no way to stop the tide, in 1906 the Stanley Cup was officially opened to professionals, and the Montreal Wanderers iced the first officially-sanctioned professional players in history.

Bitterness over the use of professionals grew in the ECAHA, and in 1909 the last two amateur teams, Montreal AAA (the first-ever Cup champions) and the Montreal Victorias, dropped out of the ECAHA. Within a year, a new pro league named the Canadian Hockey Association (CHA) was formed with the remaining ECAHA teams.

Meanwhile, a new Allan Cup championship had been launched in 1908 as Canada’s new true amateur trophy. And, in 1908-09, a new National Hockey Association (NHA)—the forerunner of the National Hockey League—was formed. Competition between the CHA and NHA was fierce; but in 1910, both the Ottawa Senators and Montreal Wanderers defected from the CHA and joined the new, upstart NHA. Those moves guaranteed that the NHA would be seen as Canada’s premier professional league; the Stanley Cup trustees agreed, and guaranteed the NHA champs a berth in the Stanley Cup final, further freezing amateurs out of that competition.

The Allan Cup was supposed to be a salvation for amateur teams, but because so many clubs made challenges, the Allan Cup finals were as dodgy as some of those early Stanley Cup finals. In 1914, Claude Robinson, an Allan Cup trustee, suggested that a new national governing amateur hockey be formed. If that body would guarantee that the amateur champs of Western Canada would play the Eastern Canadian champs on a regular basis, it would ensure the Allan Cup would be competitive (no Dawson City debacles) and would become a real annual event (no three-challenges-in-a-season scenarios).

Later that year, under the presidency of Winnipeg’s Dr. W.F. Taylor, a new amateur Canadian Hockey Association was formed, with branches in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. Of the 21 new CHA members at the inaugural CHA congress in Ottawa, Alberta had a lone representative, J.W. Ward from the Alberta Amateur Hockey Association.

The new CHA became the official amateur-hockey body of the country. In 1919, the Ontario Hockey Association and members of the CHA launched the Memorial Cup, a new amateur championship for players under 20 years of age.

Today, the Canadian Hockey Association is known as Hockey Canada—and administers the hockey associations of all 10 provinces and three territories.

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