Habs Nation: A People’s History of The Montreal Canadiens | Interview with Brendan Kelly

What makes a sports team more than just athletes? For the Montreal Canadiens, it’s a rich tapestry of cultural significance and national pride, deeply interwoven with Quebec’s history. 

Journalist-author Brendan Kelly, known for his work at The Montreal Gazette covering Québécois culture through sports and entertainment, explores these themes in his book, Habs Nation: A People’s History of The Montreal Canadiens. He recently sat down to discuss how the franchise’s story illuminates identity, nationalism, and the fascinating interplay between sport and society in Canada.

Habs Nation, published by Baraka Books, published on Oct. 1.

This interview is edited for length and clarity.

Jason Winders: We’d be remiss if we didn’t start with the death of (former Montreal Canadiens goalie and Hockey Hall of Famer) Ken Dryden, who passed away on Sept. 5. You mention Dryden in your book, along with his great book, The Game. Tell me about his loss to the Canadiens fandom and culture.

Brendan Kelly: We’re talking just a little ahead of opening night. To me, it’s a no-brainer that there’s going to be a tribute to Ken Dryden: The Player. But his legacy goes beyond that. In the last six decades, Ken Dryden is one of the most important Canadians and one of the most important Canadiens. 

As a Canadien, he has six Stanley Cups in eight years. No one’s ever going to break that record. No one. He was one of the greatest goalies ever. 

Ken Dryden is also a very important Canadian writer. The Game is the best book ever about hockey. It’s one of the best books about sports, maybe even Canada. He’s popular. He’s thoughtful. You think of Ken Dryden also as the goalie in the Soviet Summit Series. 

He was also a politician. He was a cabinet minister. It boggles our minds in Montreal, but he was President of the Toronto Maple Leafs. He’s been outspoken about head injuries in hockey. He’s just an incredible figure. Even weeks after his death, people are still talking about what he meant to them, to their families, to Canada. 

It’s the major a loss of a major figure for Canada.

Winders: Referencing your other hat as an entertainment writer, I hadn’t seen that kind of outpouring since (Tragically Hip lead singer) Gord Downie died.

Kelly: These guys encapsulated something in Canada. These guys bring almost everyone, from every corner of Canada together. You don’t need to be a hockey fan, or you don’t need to be music fan, to appreciate them and their legacies. I think everyone kind of knows of Ken Dryden in one way or another.

Winders: That can go for the Montreal Canadiens, as well. Everyone knows them. For non-sports people, however, they might struggle with the idea of a team becoming a “cultural institution”, as your book argues. How does this happen?

Kelly: I get that. Honestly, most teams aren’t cultural institutions. Most teams are just a team. The Columbus Blue Jackets are just a hockey team. The Florida Panthers, who won the last two Stanley Cups, are just a hockey team. 

The Canadiens are different. They are like Barcelona or Manchester United in soccer. Maybe the Boston Red Sox in baseball. There are teams where there’s something more to it from the start. I love the story, where this guy, Ambrose O’Brien, an Ontario businessman in the early twentieth century, sees an opportunity. There were already professional teams in Montreal. There was a team for the English. There was a team for the Irish. But there was no team for French-Canadians. 

Winders: Gotta love a good marketing opportunity.

Kelly: Right. He wasn’t just starting a hockey team. He was starting a team for the French-Canadian population. Even the name, “Canadiens,” which today means Canadian, but in 1907, when the team was founded, it meant French Canadian. 

At first, there were only French players. So, when you come all the way to the modern game, that’s always stayed in people’s hearts and minds. For example, it’s an unwritten rule that the head coach of the Montreal Canadiens must be able to speak French. It could be an Anglophone. Fine. But he must speak French.

So, there’s always been something more to this team. The league may change, expand. There’s a new hockey team in Seattle. There’s a team in Vegas. It’s just a business. Well, there’s something more to the Montreal Canadiens. It’s 2025, and everything’s about business. And obviously, it’s still a sports team, and they want to win the Stanley Cup. But at the same time, they know they carry this stuff, this responsibility, this legacy with them. 

We tend to think everything is business. Well, this isn’t just business.

Winders: Your “Around the World” chapter is the one that really fascinates me. You talk about when the league starts welcoming Europeans and Russians and really starts changing the face and style of play of the game. That changing face is mirrored by Canada and Quebec at that time which are dealing with a changing society.

Kelly: Deep into the 1970s, the league is basically Canadians. Then the Americans start coming on, and then the Europeans start coming. I thought that was so interesting to make these parallels between the team and society. 

We talk about the two referendums in 1980 and 1995. So, there was a 20-year period where that was the focus in Quebec. Are we going to separate from Canada or not? The big debate, as everyone knows, I think even across Canada, is that in Quebec, it’s identity politics. Who are we now that we’ve got all of these immigrants and children of immigrants? You see this explored in media and politics all the time. They’re wondering how do we protect French-Canadian identity in this world? 

Then you look at the hockey. Is it important that the team is Quebecois? If you’re an English fan of the Canadiens, whether you’re in Quebec or the rest of Canada, you probably don’t care. You just want to have the best team possible. For a lot of Francophone fans, however, it is a factor. For sure, if the guy is a local guy, there’s something special about that. The goaltender right now is Samuel Montembeault, from a little town just outside of Trois-Rivières. And you can feel that he gets more love because he’s French-Canadian.

Winders: That seems to be more of a European sports attitude. You see that in the soccer franchises there, but it’s not a North American attitude. The Yankees don’t care if all their players are from the Bronx or the Dominican Republic. They just want to win the World Series. I can’t think of another franchise in North America that would think that way about player origins in that sense.

Kelly: I find that fascinating. Any team is happy to have a hometown boy or girl. Look at Mitch Marner and the Maple Leafs. They love them (until that relationship goes sour). You like to have a local guy, but it’s absolutely not a priority. Whereas it really is in the case of the Canadiens. Across all those years of winning, they were led by a French-Canadian. But it’s a completely different league today. It’s a more competitive league. In 1993, when Montreal won the Stanley Cup, they had 14 Quebecois players. You couldn’t do that today. 

Winders: But as your book points out that doesn’t mean it’s any less important, right?

Kelly: Exactly. In 2021, there was one night at the Bell Centre when Phillip Danault, who was one of the French-Canadians on the team, was off for health reasons. At the same time, Jonathan Drouin, who was another French-Canadian player, was off on a personal leave, and there was a game where there were no Quebec players.

To tell you the kind of situation we’re dealing with, this goes right to the National Assembly. (Quebec premier) François Legault forms a committee to increase the number of young people playing the game, all toward increasing the low number of Quebecers in the NHL. It was a big deal.

Winders: So, this moment wasn’t a historical footnote or a nice trivia piece. This was a moment.

Kelly: Oh yes. These happen throughout the team’s history. When the team fired Jacques Martin as head coach in 2011, who’s Franco-Ontarian, French-speaking, and they replaced him with an interim coach, Randy Cunneyworth, who’s an English Canadian, it was like World War III. Again, it also landed in the National Assembly.

I love it. I think it’s fascinating. Look at even the Toronto Maple Leafs. I know people are as fanatical about the Leafs, but it’s just a hockey team. There’s something else going on with the Canadiens.

Winders: It’s beyond who you root for. It’s about who you are as a person.

Kelly: It goes beyond hockey. When the team goes on a run, the whole society — the grandma in Laval, the dude in the South Shore who doesn’t follow hockey — they are all in and talking about it. It’s something bigger than sports. It’s bigger than hockey. 

Winders: A lot of this nostalgia started before many of these fans today were alive. The good ole’ days were a long time ago now. How has this passion sustained?

Kelly: What I love about sports is it’s just about winning, really. Montreal has lost. We’ve lost for a long time. The last cup was in ‘93. So that means you have to be almost 40 to have experienced, as a living person, winning the cup and the excitement. You’ve gone all those years without the winning, without the Quebecois flavour. It’s been a tough period. 

Winders: But the franchise is still selling this mystique and this tradition.

Kelly: Never stopped. The Canadiens specialize in looking back and the love of nostalgia. All these great names. You have never seen them play hockey, but you’ve seen those videos they play before and during games. The joke amongst our cynical friends was, “The Canadiens lead the league at making those videos. No one comes close.”

The team’s not very Quebecois today. They’re getting better, but they’re still not a very Quebecois team. They play on this thing, and it really works. There’s a sense of national pride in Quebec. It’s a thing in daily life. It really is. Sometimes English Canadians don’t realize that. It’s not a negative. It just is. 

The Canadiens are the most important entity in French Canada. Really, what else would it be? But the heyday of the Quebecois Canadiens was a long time ago. It will never come back, I don’t believe. They just don’t think they have the players to do that. So, I find it fascinating. It’s a great story. 

Winders: Why sport to tell this story?

Kelly: Sports bring together society in a way that maybe nothing else does, when you think about it. And there’s a lot of boring corporate sports crap out there. But when you have the World Cup, when you have the Euro, when you have the Manchester Derby between Manchester United and Manchester City, or great hockey rivalries, it brings people together. In its ideal moments, it’s about more than sports. 

The Canadiens have this unique story. My book’s about Quebec history, but it’s not a Quebec history book. It can bring people in in a way that they would never read in a history. 

Winders: This book took a unique journey to publication – French to English to French. 

Kelly: It’s quite unique. I wrote the book in French, so right away, an English person writing a book in French is a little unusual. Almost all the interviews were in French. I wrote my text in English, and then I translated it myself because I translate stuff all the time as a journalist working in French in Montreal. 

I worked extensively with my editor, François Couture, and the thing is he didn’t edit any content, but it was just phrasing. I’m English. He’s French. So, then the book came out, Le CH et son peuple : Une province, une équipe, une histoire commune, and then we sold it to Baraka Books, a Montreal publisher. A small publisher but prestigious, well-known. They specialize in publishing English translations of French books. 

So, the publisher, (Baraka Publisher and President) Robin Philpot, said to me, “Okay, we’re going to translate. We’ve got this translator.” And I’m like, “No, why wouldn’t I? I’m English. I’m an English journalist.” 

So, we got this translator, Peter McCambridge, who’s very well-known, award-winning translator based in Quebec City, but he’s from Belfast, which I liked right away because I’m from Glasgow, but my roots are Irish. Funnily enough, for a guy named Peter McCambridge, he went to Cambridge University and did his master’s thesis decades ago on the Montreal Canadiens and popular culture in Quebec.

Winders: So, this is your guy! 

Kelly: Exactly. Every chapter he would translate, send it to me, and I would go through it. I didn’t change that much, but sometimes I would see something, and I would actually go back to my original English text and put it in. This process fit right in with the theme of the book of French and English. 

We added one new chapter. I wanted something about the relationship between the team and English Montreal, because English Montrealers are as big fans as French ones are. It was my publisher who came up with the idea of the title Trumping the Two Solitudes, so a little joke about a certain president. 

Now, it’s one of my favourite chapters. In it, we have an interview with P.J. Stock, who’s not a major player. He played for the Habs and played for a few teams, and he was a fighter. But he’s a big guy in the media here. He used to be on Hockey Night in Canada. Now he’s on RDS in French. He talks about how different it is if you’re French or English. He had this great line where he said: 

“If you’re English, when you go to see a Canadiens game, you’re going to see a hockey game. But when you’re French, you’re going to see a hockey game, and you’re going to see your history on skates.”

That’s perfect. The Montreal Canadiens are the most storied team in hockey. They might not be the most successful right now. They might not be the richest right now. But if you’re interested in hockey, if you’re interested in the NHL and where it came from, if you’re interested in Canada, then you care about the Canadiens. 

Jason Winders

Jason Winders is a writer, editor, journalist, ad man, and dad living in Tecumseh, Ontario, Canada. His first book, George Dixon: The Short Life of Boxing’s First Black World Champion, won the 2022 North American Society for Sport History (NASSH) Book Award.

• Jason Winders

  https://miramichireader.ca/author/jason-winders/

  

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