The Owen Sound Attack of the Ontario Hockey League (OHL) was sold to a private equity-backed group in May 2026. Photo courtesy the Owen Sound Attack/Facebook.

I was seven years old when the Owen Sound Attack won the OHL Championship. It was May 2011, and for the first time in the team’s history, they had won.

On the drive back from Mississauga, an informal victory parade formed around the team bus. In a town of 20,000, more than 6,000 people gathered to wait for the victorious team to come home. It was late in the evening, and people and cars packed the highway. Like a lot of kids, I was there way past my bedtime. There was joy, excitement, and pride in where I was from. It’s a feeling that stuck with me.

For decades, the Owen Sound Attack was owned by a group of business owners and community leaders. In May 2026, it was sold to Ecological Dynamics Sports Partners (EDSP), an investment group with private equity backing, in a deal reported to be worth more than $20 million. The Attack is now owned by an investment group whose backers and financial structure are considerably less visible than those of the local ownership group it replaced, and whose connection to the community is tenuous at best. I have a very different feeling now: melancholic dread.

This is not a new story. Private equity is on a breakaway, seemingly unstoppable as firms consolidate more and more “assets.” But private equity isn’t merely buying businesses. It is increasingly buying the things communities organize themselves around: housing, health care, disaster response, and now sports. Private equity may be new to Canadian hockey, but it is hardly new to sports more broadly. Between 2019 and 2024, private equity firms invested more than US$55 billion in the sports industry, buying teams, platforms for watching games, data and technology services, and even entire leagues.

American youth hockey already offers a preview of what financialization can look like: private equity-backed rink operators have begun consolidating facilities and monetizing services that families once treated as incidental parts of community sport. Parents now pay to watch livestreams of their children play. In some arenas where parents are banned from recording, they can get photos or videos of their kids only by paying private equity.

What gets left behind

In my mom’s house, there is a chunk of glass. In a lot of ways, it has come to represent going back home: beautiful, a little rough around the edges. It is seafoam green, a colour reminiscent of the Great Lakes colliding with the forested Bruce Peninsula. It is also a reminder.

For 42 years, PPG Industries operated a glass factory in Owen Sound, employing hundreds of people. In 2008, it closed, and 170 people lost their jobs. When things are no longer profitable, they leave Owen Sound.

During its era as a shipping and manufacturing hub, the town was known as the........

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