Thank you, committee members, for the opportunity to speak on behalf of the Canadian Women's Hockey League.
The Canadian Women's Hockey League is the only professional women's sport league in Canada, and we're the second oldest in North America, next to the WNBA. Our 2016-17 season will mark the league's 10th season. Still existing after 10 years is in itself an accomplishment for any women's professional sport. I''ll give you some facts and figures about our league.
When we started this league we had $100,000 to run the league. Currently we are at $1.8 million. The revenue completely covers all the costs of the players, but it does not pay any of our players. We have four full-time staff and five part-time general managers. The thing that our league stands for mostly is that our entire league is 80% females in non-traditional jobs.
We're home to 125 of the world's best female athletes and hockey players, and 21 of the 24 current members playing in four nations play in the CWHL. They represent dozens more on the national level that represent teams and development programs for youth playing across Canada and the eastern States. We are also providing homes for several members of the Japanese, French, American, and Russian national women's hockey teams, all playing here in Canada.
Over the last 10 years we've been able to secure a broadcasting deal with Sportsnet, which gives us four games a year. We started out with these games and we received approximately 22,000 viewers for all four games. Last year each one of our games saw between 92,000 and 108,000, which is comparable to a Detroit-Pittsburg game of 160,000 to 180,000. Those are actual viewers. It's a higher number when you look at the people who just blink on and off, so that is close to a half a million now following us.
One of the current problems we have within our league is a lack of resources to continue to hire women. It's difficult for us to get women to coach. It's difficult for us to get women into non-traditional jobs when basically they're volunteer positions, which makes it very difficult for them to get the experience they need in order to move on.
If you take a look at our players who aren't paid—I'll just give you a couple of examples—if we paid a minimum of $10,000 per player for all our players, it would cost $1.2 million. In the NHL, 440 players each make that salary, compared to that amount that would be paid for our entire league. If we paid minimum wage to our players, in Ontario, it would be $23,000 a year. There are 299 NHL players who are making that salary on their own, except that amount would run our entire league.
We're lucky that we have the CWHL, that I, as commissioner, am female, that all of our general managers are females, and our broadcasting staff, as we start to grow our streaming game—we're putting in play-by-play and colour commentating—are females. We met with Sportsnet last week, and they actually said they would start to use us as a template moving forward. They promised that in the next year, beginning with our Clarkson Cup for the year 2018, they would start having an actual play-by-play commentator for our hockey, because that doesn't exist right now in the sports world.
We're very lucky within our league with the non-traditional jobs. Outside of our league—and we are in many different areas in professional sports, such as HR, law, and finance—you will never see women commissioners, scouts, or coaches. You will never see us as GMs, but you see that in our league. We're trying to portray to all the youth in Canada that as women, we have the right to be who we were born to be and to continue doing that. Moving forward, the main difficulty for us—and I have some suggestions about this in my notes, which I'll give you—is that peer influence and media influence are the biggest parts of growing any sport. We need to have a different look, rather than the lack of females in sports leadership, so that young girls will know they can grow up to be a commissioner.
The other thing is policies. We have a lot of policies that say women should be in things, but we need the dollars to back those policies, and we need policies that state that if you're going to run an organization, if you're going to build a facility for sports, that facility should house professional women's leagues or amateur leagues. It should not be that the money just goes to the NBA, the CFL, the NFL, or the NHL. The dollars provided for building facilities and infrastructure should come with a policy that women must be included.
I know I'm out of time.