World Women’s Hockey Championship Returning To Halifax
HALIFAX — The cancellation of the international hockey tournament marked the start of mass Covid-19-related cancellations in Halifax – and now it’s coming back.
Today, the International Ice Hockey Federation announced the World Women’s Hockey Championship will come back to Nova Scotia in 2021.
The proposed new dates for the tournament are April 7-17, 2021.
The 2020 championship was supposed to take place in Halifax and Truro in early April of this year but was cancelled just as Covid-19 began to spread in North America.
That decision was the first major cancellation in the city related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the news acted as a wake-up call for many Halifax businesses and residents. At the time, no cases of Covid-19 had yet been identified in the province.
“I don’t want to say it was a total wake-up call, but it was a bit surprising. It has changed the tenor of the conversation,” Downtown Halifax Business Commission CEO Paul MacKinnon told Huddle at the time about the impact of the cancellation.
MacKinnon wasn’t exaggerating. Just one week before the cancellation, Halifax businesses from several sectors told Huddle they weren’t that concerned about the coronavirus pandemic.
“What’s different than last week is that there’s now an expectation that things could change very rapidly,” MacKinnon said after the cancellation was announced.
The tournament’s return next year offers a glimmer of hope for residents and businesses hoping for a return to normalcy, and a healthier economy, next year.
Prior to the COvid-19 pandemic, HRM staff calculated the tournament would bring about $2.5 million of economic activity to the city.
That included the approximately 2,000 hotel rooms that would have been booked and all the spending from the expected 82,000 attendees.