Ottawa Charge to move to Canadian Tire Centre next season PWHL team played first 3 seasons at Lansdowne Park's TD Place Arena
Guy Quenneville · CBC News
Posted: Jul 09, 2026 1:12 PM EDT | Last Updated: 3 hours ago
The Ottawa Charge have announced they will move to the Canadian Tire Centre (CTC) next season.
Ottawa's Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) team played several post-season games at the home of the Ottawa Senators earlier this year.
Thursday's news, delivered at the CTC, comes after the team confirmed it won't play at the new arena being built at Lansdowne Park because that venue will have less seating than the current TD Place Arena, where the Charge have spent their first three seasons.
Charge General Manager Mike Hirshfeld said the Charge and Senators have signed a multi-year agreement for playing and practising at the arena.
He was joined by Ottawa Senators President and CEO Cyril Leeder and Charge forward Rebecca Leslie, who is from Ottawa, for the announcement.
"We really feel that the PWHL and the Ottawa Charge are an important part of our hockey ecosystem here," Leeder said.
The Charge are one of the PWHL's original six franchises and spent their first three seasons at TD Place Arena, also home to the Ontario Hockey League's Ottawa 67's. That team now appears poised to become the new Lansdowne arena's main sports tenant.
Leslie said her family had season tickets for the 67's when she was growing up and that she has fond memories of watching games at TD Place Arena.
"So both arenas hold special places in my heart and are both great facilities and we're really excited to be playing at the CTC," she said.
Hirshfeld said that as part of the Charge's moving in, the team will get its own "self-contained exclusive locker room space."
"We'll have a lounge for our players. We'll have medical space for our players, equipment space for our equipment people, coaches' offices. So for us that's a big step forward. I think we'll have probably the top facilities in the PWHL," he said.
And to all those who insisted that the Charge’s ‘threat’ to leave TD Place was just a bargaining position . . . may be this will open your minds to other possibilities. Maybe The Charge was genuinely upset that they were not included in the City’s plan to shrink the rink.
Pretty big deal that the Sens will build their own locker room and facilities. Curious how they can find the space.
I read it as the Charge was building the facilities, but I guess they weren't specific on the finances. There's quite a bit of space at arena level. The north side of the building is mostly operations and some meeting space/club space. The Sens have about a quarter of the floor, so there is still a good chunk of space left if they want to be near the rink. I think it's more likely they take space on the other side of the hall, which has lost of room.
And to all those who insisted that the Charge’s ‘threat’ to leave TD Place was just a bargaining position . . . may be this will open your minds to other possibilities. Maybe The Charge was genuinely upset that they were not included in the City’s plan to shrink the rink.
I'm not sure that's what people were saying. The use of threats by sports teams to get what they want, whether genuine or not, is pretty distasteful to a lot of people. Personally I always thought they would end up playing in the Sens' rink, I just didn't think that they would leave TD before they had to. And the threat was to leave Ottawa, not just TD Place, which I thought was posturing. Given that the plan to "shrink the rink" was made long before the Charge existed or knew what their attendance would be, it would seem pretty hard to be upset not to be included.
I wish them well in Kanata, but I think there will be a lot of challenges there, as evidenced by the disastrous 67s move and the Sens' history. 7000 fans feels pretty sparse in a 19,000-seat building, so they will need to increase attendance to maintain the atmosphere. They'll alienate some of their existing fans (I for one will be going to a lot fewer games with that trek involved), and expansion pillaged their roster, so they'll need to build up a new fan base in the west end.
Attendance was good, but a bit soft for the finals, which is a bit of a red flag. If I were them, given the excess seat inventory they will have, I would be targeting kids and making a lot of seats available at lower prices. I've gotta say, I'm a bit worried though. The Sens' new downtown arena can't come soon enough.
I read it as the Charge was building the facilities, but I guess they weren't specific on the finances. There's quite a bit of space at arena level. The north side of the building is mostly operations and some meeting space/club space. The Sens have about a quarter of the floor, so there is still a good chunk of space left if they want to be near the rink. I think it's more likely they take space on the other side of the hall, which has lost of room.
Seems the building was designed with growth in mind. Really too bad it's such a terrible location, cause the building is fine.
What TD Place Arena meant to the Ottawa Charge over the last three seasons
The Charge has called TD Place Arena home for the last three seasons, with the venue allowing the team to build its roots in Ottawa
By Natasha Baldin, Ottawa Citizen
Published Jul 10, 2026
It was just another day of practice on April 28 as the Ottawa Charge hit the ice at TD Place for one final skate before boarding a plane to Boston to open the Professional Women’s Hockey League semifinal.
That is, until the end of the skate, when the team stopped to take an extra look around the venue that many had called home for the last three seasons.
They gathered at centre ice, a tradition that marks the end of every practice, and the team cheer sounded a little bit different.
At the time, it seemed safe to assume it would simply be the last time the Charge skated at TD Place that season, especially after the league announced just days earlier that the Canadian Tire Centre would serve as Ottawa’s playoff home.
But the chant carried a sense of finality.
It was almost as if the Charge knew something the rest of the world didn’t, that the practice would be the last time they ever skated at TD Place Arena.
A little more than three months later, it turns out that intuition was right.
On July 9, Charge general manager Mike Hirshfeld announced that the PWHL had signed a multi-year deal for the Charge to practise and play at the Canadian Tire Centre starting next season.
While the move to the 17,153-capacity Canadian Tire Centre will open the doors for even more fans to experience women’s hockey in Ottawa, it also marks a bittersweet farewell to the building where the sport planted strong roots in the nation’s capital.
Two-and-a-half years ago, 8,318 fans packed into TD Place Arena for Ottawa’s inaugural home game. Many fans likely weren’t sure what to expect as the then-nameless PWHL Ottawa hit the ice, but the electric atmosphere made history, setting an attendance record for a professional women’s hockey game at the time.
And night after night over the last three seasons, Charge fans have built what is now known as one of the most passionate fan bases in the entire league.
“No matter where this team ends up playing, TD will always have a special place in my heart and in this organization’s history,” said Emily Clark at the Charge’s end-of-season availability. Clark spent the last three seasons at TD Place, before signing with PWHL Hamilton ahead of next season.
For defender Jocelyne Larocque, her first Charge thunderclap was the TD Place moment that sticks out the most.
It took a few home games for it to happen, since the Charge lost three straight at home after Larocque came over to Ottawa in a trade from Toronto, but Larocque remembers the moment the team gathered at centre ice to celebrate with the TD Place crowd.
“I was like, ‘Wow, this is so fun,’ and I had a huge smile on my face. That’s always something that I’ll never forget in this rink,” she said. “And then just not even being able to communicate during TV timeouts, because it’s so loud.”
First opened in 1967 and tucked beneath the north grandstand of TD Place Stadium, the aging arena has worn its 59 years with a mix of charm and dysfunction.
Debris from the ceiling routinely floats down onto the ice, including during the team’s picture day when staff scrambled to find shovels before the photo could be taken.
Ceiling leaks were a near-daily occurrence, and one particularly persistent drip even treated this reporter to an unexpected mid-game shower at the media table between periods.
Puck drop was delayed by an hour during a March 4 game due to an “ice malfunction,” after a carpet rolled out onto the surface during pre-game ceremonies became stuck, tearing a hole two centimetres deep into the ice.
And the quirks weren’t just part of the fan experience. Players felt them, too.
“It’s such a special place for us to call home and a hard place for visitors to come play in with its uniqueness, whether it’s the structure of the stands or its unique bounces that we didn’t even always know were going to happen,” Clark said.
A player poll conducted by the Athletic at the beginning of last season revealed that TD Place was voted by players as the second-least popular primary venue in the league behind new York’s Prudential Center, with most citing the sharp-angled corners and stiff boards as major drawbacks.
“The boards (at TD Place) are also pretty loud, and one hit, you hear all the way to Europe,” defender Ronja Savolainen joked at the end-of-season availability.
Many of these deficiencies were outlined in the City of Ottawa’s 2019 obsolescence report as part of the reason why the structure functions at levels “well below contemporary standards,” with issues such as ongoing leaks unable to be permanently repaired.
The Charge certainly deserves a venue upgrade where ceiling debris and haphazard leaks are no longer on the game-day bingo cards, but this upgrade needed to take into account that the team averaged 8,131 fans at home during the regular season.
So, when the City of Ottawa approved the $419 million Lansdowne 2.0 project, which includes an event centre with 3,000 seats fewer than TD Place Arena currently holds, the league was forced to look elsewhere.
“These women have worked too hard to get to the point today where a 5,500-seat building is well below what we average in Ottawa, so we will not play at Lansdowne 2.0 — that’s the one option not on the table,” Amy Scheer, the PWHL’s executive vice-president of business operations, said in a November availability.
It’ll certainly be a big change for the Charge athletes who have built their lives in Ottawa with TD Place at the epicentre, with many living in the surrounding Glebe neighbourhood and becoming regulars at the local coffee shops and restaurants.
As the team found out during the playoffs, the move to a venue 25 kilometres west means trading walks to the rink for a 20-minute drive, on a good day with no traffic.
“The drive wasn’t fun, but I mean, I didn’t drive there,” Savolainen said. “(Katerina Mrazova) was a great Uber driver, so I was enjoying it.”
And not only did the players build their lives around TD Place Arena, but the fans did, too. Before or after every game, Charge jerseys became a feature in every bar and restaurant as fans built a community around the arena’s central Lansdowne location.
Fans who rely on active or public transportation were able to get to the games with relative ease, a privilege they weren’t otherwise offered if they wanted to watch a Senators game in Kanata.
“I know it was on the older end of things, but there’s something to be said about being able to play in the core of a city in a historic building that isn’t overwhelmed by sponsorships and ads and bright lighting and all these things,” said Britt Hurley, a season-ticket holder since the inaugural season.
“There’s benefits to that when it comes to connecting with each other as human beings and creating community fan base, which is really what saw the Charge rise to success in the city.”
And not only that, but the venue also fostered a safe space for fans to be themselves, allowing a strong LGBTQ+ fan base to build around the team.
“It’s really wonderful to have that space,” said Charge fan Piper Hattenbach. “I’ve never really gotten to enjoy hockey before, and over the last three years, it’s been really wonderful. You feel safe and accepted and celebrated in sports.”
The move to the suburban Canadian Tire Centre won’t be an easy one for a team that has become so engrained in the downtown Ottawa community over the last three years.
Hirshfeld acknowledged the concern from fans and the possible decline in ticket sales that a move to the Canadian Tire Centre would bring.
“We appreciate that we can’t take anything for granted with our fan base, and we’re going to have to work extremely hard to ensure that we have an environment where people feel it’s an open and safe place to come to a game,” he said at the July 9 announcement.
The Charge general manager also took a moment to thank the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group, which operates TD Place, for its partnership over the last three seasons.
“I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge and give a shoutout to Mark Goudie and Adrian Sciarra and their team at OSEG,” Hirshfeld said.
“You really don’t need to do that,” Ottawa Senators president and CEO Cyril Leeder quipped playfully as he sat beside Hirshfeld during the venue announcement.
“They were great partners for us, and obviously we loved being there,” Hirshfeld continued, after pausing to laugh with Leeder. “We created some great memories. They were very professional and great to work with, and I want to make sure that we acknowledge them and all that they helped us with as we started from day one to get to this point.”
And, as the Charge bid farewell to its beloved downtown arena, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel that it might not be the last time the team calls downtown its home.
Work is underway for a new Senators arena at LeBreton Flats, though considering shovels aren’t even in the ground yet, that move is still quite a few years away. Leeder said the Senators hadn’t yet turned its attention to how the Charge would fit into the downtown plans.
“It would be natural, and at some point we will be designing some interior spaces at the downtown venue, and we’d very much like to be designing a campus there for the Charge as well.”
So, maybe it’s not a goodbye to downtown Ottawa for the Charge, but a prolonged, “See you later.”
Prev
Linear Mode
