Canada got this one right, and anybody twisting themselves into knots over it should take a breath. The federal government has told Hockey Canada and the IIHF it won't issue visas for Russian players to appear at the upcoming World Juniors in Edmonton and Red Deer. Russians who already hold valid Canadian visas to play junior hockey here are out too, even under a neutral flag. Mark Carney put it about as plainly as a prime minister can: "So, if you're asking specifically about the world juniors, the Russians will not be there."
Good. A country that invaded its neighbour in 2022, the event that triggered the original ban in the first place, doesn't get a warm welcome on the ice of a G7 nation that has spent years arming the other side. Secretary of State for Sport Adam Van Koeverden said the immigration minister "will take measures to individually assess and prevent Russian and Belarusian athletes and officials from entering Canada to compete, regardless of whether they already hold valid visas." There's no loophole left to wriggle through. Hockey Canada thanked Ottawa for the stance. Ukraine's foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, had already called for exactly this, writing on X, "If CAS lacks a moral compass, let's show that hockey still has values. Refuse to play against Russia and deny visas to its players."
The anger belongs somewhere else. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled on October 30 that Russia and Belarus must be reinstated to international ice hockey, then refused to decide the one question that mattered. CAS explicitly said its ruling didn't address whether Russia should have to play without national symbols as a team of neutral athletes. It reinstated a country and punted on how. That's a governing body and a court passing a live grenade back and forth, hoping it goes off on someone else's watch.
The IIHF then picked up the grenade and pulled the pin. It could have built a real neutral-athlete framework with teeth. Instead, by Norway's account, it told the Norwegians they were being bumped out of the ten-team field to make room for Russia's national squad. The IIHF still hasn't publicly confirmed that, and as of this week Norway remained listed as a participant on the federation's own site. But the IIHF already knew what it was walking into. The federations of Sweden, Finland, Czechia and Latvia, with Norway and Austria adding their names, have all said they won't play Russia while the war continues. Sweden went the furthest, refusing matchups at every level. The sport's own powers told the IIHF they would forfeit before they'd face Russia, and the IIHF reached for Russia anyway, over a country that qualified fair and square.
There's a case to be made, in the abstract, that a national government's visa office shouldn't be able to override an international sporting body's eligibility ruling, that it invites politicians to meddle in sport whenever it suits them. But CAS can interpret IIHF bylaws all it wants; it can't order Canada's immigration ministry to stamp a passport. Sovereignty is the whole structure of a border, and CAS has no say over it. If the IIHF wanted to keep a government out of this decision, it had an easy way to do that: don't try to drop Russia's national team into a tournament hosted in Canada mid-war. It chose the fight. Ottawa simply refused to host it.
Nobody running the tournament seems to know what happens now. The event isn't even federally funded, Hockey Canada confirmed that, so this ruling rests purely on immigration authority. There's loose talk that Russia could run back to CAS or push to move the whole thing somewhere that will let its players in. That's speculation, nothing more.
One country's visa office can't fix a sport this broken. The IIHF and CAS manufactured this crisis by litigating a war through a paperwork technicality, and until the people who run hockey find the nerve to say Russia doesn't play this cycle, every host nation is going to keep making that decision for them. Canada just showed them how it's done.
