The growth of girls hockey in Toronto has a problem: The city's ice-time policies are stuck in the past

After she threatened to take the City of Toronto to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario over “discriminatory” ice-allocation rules, council passed a motion in February 2024 calling for an internal review. Two years later, the city has produced no public report and says its policies are just fine.

“The internal review showed that (the City of Toronto’s) permit and ice-allocation policies are grounded in the principles of fairness and equity … as a result, policy changes have not been recommended,” spokesperson Jas Baweja said in an email.

Prime time for ice is 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. on weekdays and 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekends. The bulk of the 2,800 hours a week in city arenas is reserved for youth: 60 per cent for community groups and 25 per cent for competitive leagues. Adult groups get 14 per cent. Junior hockey and commercial enterprises each get 0.5 per cent.

When it comes to sports fields and recreational facilities not including ice time, Toronto’s policy favours equity. It states that when more than one community youth group wants the same time, the priority is Indigenous, Black and equity-deserving groups followed by young females. Prime-time ice, though, is different. It’s handed out based on the number of participants divided by total available ice time.

“Why would you make the exception for ice time? It just raises so many more questions,” Laski says. “They’re trying to tick the boxes of satisfying various groups, but there doesn’t seem to be a method to the madness.”

Councillor James Pasternak, whose motion pushed for a policy review, says discussions about ice time in Toronto tend to become “a bench-clearing brawl” leading to unhappiness on all sides.

“The city should make sure that we meet the aspirations and dreams of girls and women in hockey, and they have every right to access ice time,” he says before adding: “It’s very hard to bump a boys’ team for a girls’ team. I don’t see that as a viable option.”

The solution, he says, is to “create more capacity” — through better policing (ensuring large groups that get to book ice time they’ve long held are actually using it all), moving older players to later times (to free up better slots for young players), requiring private rinks to offer some low-cost or free ice, and building more arenas.

The scarcity of prime-time ice in public arenas, which costs youth groups about half as much as private, affects almost everyone in the sport: driving up player fees, increasing travel distances and limiting participation. And the Ontario Women’s Hockey Association and Hockey Canada have said girls and women are disproportionally affected because of historical contracts.

According to city data provided to the Star covering hockey, speedskating, ringette and figure skating, girls make up 25 per cent of Toronto youth registered with organizations that get community ice time, up from 22 per cent last season. The portion playing girls-only hockey has also ticked up.

Laski, though, knows first hand that participation numbers don’t tell the whole story.

For the first two years of her program, she rented ice from a hockey organization with a long-standing city contract. It added her girls to its registration numbers to secure more low-cost city ice, then sold its more expensive, contracted private ice to her.

The Tween Girls Hockey League nearly folded in 2023, when Laski applied to the city and was initially denied three hours of ice time on a weeknight in North York. They were offered Saturday morning, a non-starter because many players are from Sabbath-observant Jewish families.

The city has made changes for the 2026-27 season to help new groups understand the application process and asks for more information, such as times that are unsuitable.

The Tween Girls Hockey League (once-a-week skills training with all-female coaches plus a scrimmage) has expanded to cover ages seven to 17 in Toronto, with a smaller program in Vaughan. It needs a new name as well as more ice time. 

In Toronto, Laski started the season with 44 girls and finished last week with 66. They played Wednesdays from 6 to 9 p.m. at Amesbury Arena near Keele Street and Lawrence Avenue West. The junior, intermediate and senior groups each got an hour and a half on the ice, with some overlap.

“We’re bursting at the seams, because if you want to get more ice you have to show more enrolment,” Laski says. “We’ve gotten really creative with overlapping and half-ice games.”

For 2026-27, Laski asked the city to bump her existing three hours to six for the growing west-end program, plus three hours in the east.  Applicants will find out in April what they’re getting.

Sixteen-year-old Emily Weinstein says she can’t wait to come back in the fall. She also hopes there’s more ice time.

“I did like when there wasn’t an overlap of the different age groups just because sometimes the scrimmage shifts don’t line up perfectly, so there would be seniors against the intermediates and I don’t think it’s quite fair for either of us,” she says. “But it’s a wonderful thing that more girls are interested in Amy’s league and generally just getting into playing hockey.”