Founding the Nationals
How a 2004 conversation at Western Cup launched Canadian gay curling's national championship
How a 2004 conversation at Western Cup launched Canadian gay curling's national championship
The Canadian Gay Curling Championship — known today as the Canadian Pride Curling Championship (CPCC) — was conceived during the 2004 Western Cup bonspiel in Calgary and held its first competition in Edmonton in November 2005. This page draws directly from the original 2004–2005 correspondence between the founding cities, which is preserved in the Apollo Curling archive. Some published accounts of the championship's origin contain errors of fact or sequence; the account below is sourced from the original emails and proposals.
In early 2004, Bryan Evans of Edmonton's gay curling community sent a note to organizers in other cities. Edmonton's IceBreaker bonspiel — held in early November — was struggling to attract out-of-town teams, and Bryan was looking for ideas. Several people responded, and Phil Ivers of the Apollo Curling League suggested that interested parties take a few minutes to talk it through in person at the upcoming Western Cup in Calgary.
That conversation took place on April 11, 2004. Around the table were Phil (Calgary / Apollo), Bryan (Edmonton), Murray Leaning (Toronto), and Ken MacDonald (Vancouver / Pac Rim). What had started as a discussion about one bonspiel's attendance turned into something much larger.
By the end of the meeting, three distinct ideas were on the table:
The four left Calgary in agreement that some form of national cooperation was overdue. The shape of it was still wide open.
On the same day as the meeting — April 11, 2004 — Phil drafted and circulated Proposal for a Canadian Gay Curling Association on behalf of Apollo. The document proposed a board with one director per member league — Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, Québec City, and Halifax — funded by member dues, operating a calendar of sanctioned bonspiels, and running the points-based rewards program.
The proposal was deliberately a starting point, not a final design. The next day, Louis Ricard of Les Fous du Roi in Montréal forwarded it to organizers in Québec, Ottawa, and Vancouver in French, and the discussion widened.
Through May and June, the conversation slowed as people moved on to summer. On June 28, 2004, Bryan checked in with the group asking whether anyone had had a chance to think about Phil's proposal. Ken MacDonald replied with three things: congratulations to John Chabai in Winnipeg for getting Keystone's first season and website set up; the news that Ken was stepping off the Pac Rim board and that Cam Carruthers should be added to the distribution list as the new president; and one substantive request — that the founders should think of the body as international from the outset, even if the immediate focus was Canada. He cited the North American Gay Volleyball Association, which had launched as a North-America-only organization and run into structural problems when the Gay Games and EuroGames brought wider participation. The point was filed away rather than acted on, but it would resurface.
On August 13, 2004, Murray sent his draft Canadian Gay Curling Championships proposal along with a slide laying out a sample 16-team field for the inaugural year. He pushed back firmly on the rewards model: the promise of even a $1,000 payout would not offset the cost of multi-city travel, and curlers who could afford to travel that much did not need the prize. The right motivator, he argued, was the same one that drove every other curler in the country — the chance to compete for a national title, the way teams aspire to the Brier or the Scotties.
His proposed structure was straightforward. Two berths would go to each of the seven founding cities — Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montréal — plus two wildcard spots, for a 16-team field. Each city would decide its own qualification mechanism: league standings, internal playdowns, or bonspiel results. The board would meet once by conference call before each season to set the location, sanction qualifying events, and resolve any rule changes.
A handful of decision points were flagged but left for later: how to define "the same team" from one season to the next, whether to expand to a world championship, and how to handle wildcard selection. Most of these would be revisited many times in the years that followed.
A month after Murray's proposal, on September 14, 2004, Joel Dubé and Louis Ricard sent the most substantive critique of the year. They had met to work through the back-and-forth correspondence and were responding directly to Murray's championship structure as well as to the rewards model still on the table.
Cash prizes, they wrote, would not change behaviour: people who already travelled to bonspiels could afford them, and people who could not afford them would not register on the speculative chance of winning back their costs. More importantly, as new leagues stood up bonspiels in Winnipeg, Ottawa, Québec City, and eventually Halifax, the calendar would saturate. Teams would naturally choose the closest event for cost reasons, and Canada would split into a Western and Eastern conference with little cross-country travel — the opposite of what a national body was meant to encourage. Layering a national bonspiel on top of the existing calendar would, they argued, make this worse: locking it to the fall would damage Edmonton's IceBreaker, locking it to the spring would damage Calgary's Western Cup, and the teams that had to pick one expensive trip a year would pick the national one and skip the regional spiels.
They also raised a fairness concern with Murray's framing: qualifying only top teams from bonspiels excluded weaker teams from a national event in a sport that, at the recreational level, was supposed to be played for fun.
Their counter-proposal was structural: rotate the major bonspiels. Four cities would host in one year, the other four the next, with the off-cycle group running a national bonspiel that drew its field from the top finishers of each division (A, B, C, D) at that year's hosted events. The idea was too disruptive to adopt directly — it would have required Vancouver and Toronto to skip their well-established bonspiels every other year, and Calgary to give up the Easter long weekend — but it sharpened the design conversation. The fragmentation argument, in particular, became a touchstone for the rest of the discussion, and the multi-division qualification idea foreshadowed the way the championship would later evolve.
A year after the original conversation, the working group reconvened at Western Cup 2005 in Calgary and made the call. On May 10, 2005, Phil sent the announcement to the wider list of league organizers: the first Canadian Gay Curling Championship would take place in November 2005, hosted alongside Edmonton's IceBreaker bonspiel. Sixteen teams — two from each of Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montréal, plus two wildcards. Each city would choose its own representatives.
The next morning, Murray confirmed Toronto's endorsement and noted that www.gaycurl.ca was now configured as a national portal where the championship's details could be posted as they were finalized. Other cities followed within days. The first championship went ahead on schedule that November — a full year ahead of the 2006 target Ken had originally proposed.
One contribution from outside the founding correspondence shaped the championship's competitive structure for the long term: Scott Harcourt and Paul Campbell of Toronto designed the original playoff draw used at the inaugural championship, and the same draw is still in use today. It survived the rebrand to the Canadian Pride Curling Championship and remains the format teams play under each year.
Apollo Curling hosted the founding meeting at Western Cup 2004 and authored the first written proposal for a national governing body. Phil Ivers acted as the central coordinator across the twelve months of correspondence between cities and drove the May 2005 commitment that turned the discussion into an event. The points-and-rewards mechanism Apollo originally proposed did not survive the design conversation — Murray's "gay Brier" framing won — but the organizational shape (one director per league, board votes by conference call, bonspiel-based qualification) traces directly back to Apollo's April 2004 draft.
The championship has been held annually since 2005, rotating among the founding cities and held alongside the host city's existing bonspiel — so the date moves each year with whoever is hosting. It is known today as the Canadian Pride Curling Championship.
The named participants in the 2004–2005 founding correspondence were: