page_title: Sports in Canada
section_title: Rugby union
hierarchical_section_title: Sports in Canada / Team sports / Rugby union
caption_attribution_description: Rugby World Cup 2007&#160;: Wales vs Canada // Coupe du monde 2007&#160;: Pays de Galles contre Canada
context_page_description: Sports in Canada consist of a wide variety of games. The most common sports are ice hockey, lacrosse, gridiron football, soccer, basketball, curling and baseball, with ice hockey and lacrosse being the official winter and summer sports, respectively.
  Ice hockey, referred to as simply "hockey", is Canada's most prevalent winter sport, its most popular spectator sport, and its most successful sport in international competition. Lacrosse, a sport with Indigenous origins, is Canada's oldest sport. Canadian football is Canada's second most popular spectator sport, being the most popular in the prairie provinces. The Canadian Football League's annual championship, the Grey Cup, is one of the country's largest annual sports events. While other sports have a larger spectator base, Association football, known in Canada as soccer in both English and French, has the most registered players of any team sport in Canada. Professional teams exist in many cities in Canada. Statistics Canada reports that the top ten sports that Canadians participate in are golf, ice hockey, swimming, soccer, basketball, baseball, volleyball, skiing, cycling and tennis.
context_section_description: Canada has around 13,000 seniors and twice as many junior players spread across the country. Many of these come from Canada's rugby stronghold of British Columbia while also being strong in Newfoundland and Ontario. The Canadian Rugby Championship is the premier domestic rugby union competition since 2009, featuring four regionally based Canadian teams. In 2009, the top two teams advanced to the Americas Rugby Championship, where they faced the A national teams from Argentina and the United States. From 2010 to 2015, the country was represented at the ARC by one team, Canada A. Starting in 2016, the competition was revamped along the lines of Europe's Six Nations Championship and the Southern Hemisphere's Rugby Championship. Since that time, Canada's senior national team has competed in the ARC alongside senior national sides from Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and the USA, plus Argentina's A national team.
  The sport's domestic governing body, Rugby Canada, scrapped its previous national competition, the Rugby Canada Super League, in favour of a new national under-20 league, the Rugby Canada National Junior Championship.
  The Canadian national side have competed in every Rugby World Cup to date, yet have only won one match each tournament with the exception of the 1991 tournament where they reached the quarterfinals; the 2007 tournament when their best result was a draw against Japan in the group stage; and the 2019 tournament, when they went winless in their first three group matches and then saw their final match against Namibia cancelled and scored as a draw due to an impending typhoon.
  Highlights include famous victories over Scotland and Wales, and until recently frequent wins over their North American neighbours, the United States. However, since 2013, the USA has dominated the rivalry, with 11 wins and one draw from the teams' last 12 matches. Known for their trademark "hard nosed" style of play, many Canadian players play their trade professionally in English and French leagues.
  The Toronto Arrows professional rugby union club debuted September 2017, and started play in Major League Rugby as of 2019. The Arrows team, an independent off-shoot of the Ontario Blues Rugby Football Club, features mostly Canadian players and staff. The team's home field is York Lions Stadium on the Keele Campus of York University.
caption: The Canada national rugby union team at the 2007 Rugby World Cup.
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