The Professional Women’s Hockey League played a first season and started a second, the Northern Super League fired its engines for an all-Canadian women’s soccer launch, and the WNBA announced its arrival in Canada. Women’s professional sports in Canada reached a critical mass in 2024.

“It was hard to believe in 2023 that we didn’t have professional women’s sports here,” said PWHL senior vice-president of hockey operations and Hockey Hall of Famer Jayna Hefford. It’s difficult to throw a blanket over the three women’s entities that made sports headlines in 2024 because they’re completely different. The PWHL, with three Canadian and three U.S. teams, is a single entity and geographically centralized in central and eastern North America and backed by billionaire American sports magnate Mark Walter.

The Toronto Tempo joining the WNBA in 2026 — that league’s 30th year — is backed by deep-pocketed Canadian sports mogul Larry Tanenbaum. The six-team NSL starting in April, 2025, is a Canadian coast-to-coast venture of club owners buying into a league that is building its business from the ground up. Teams signed players and introduced club ownership and management in 2024.

“This market is ready and has embraced this global movement of women’s professional sports. Not just as the right thing to do, but through a business case and lens. It did take us a while to get on that train.” Canadian Women and Sport conducted a poll and stated in a 2023 report that two out of three Canadians were fans of women’s sport and, just as important for business, that fan base was diverse, educated, and affluent. “It’s been a popular sport to dunk on women’s sports,” said CWS chief executive officer Allison Sandmeyer-Graves

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