Major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada
The Canadian Football League is the highest level of play in Canadian football. The league was organized in 1956 as a cooperative agreement between two regional leagues, the Big Four (which dated to 1907) and the WIFU (which was founded in 1936), and became independent from Football Canada in 1958. The league now consists of nine teams, all based in Canada. The Grey Cup is awarded annually to the champion every November and is the highest attended sporting event in the nation. The oldest extant teams, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Toronto Argonauts, trace their origins to the late 1860s and early 1870s, which ranks them amongst the oldest professional sports teams of any kind still in existence on the continent. The CFL attempted an expansion into the United States in cities that had no NFL team between 1993 and 1995, though the expansion teams all either folded or relocated to Canadian cities.
Amateur sport in Toronto
Rugby league in Canada was relaunched in 2010. The governing body of the sport Canada Rugby League has taken major steps to develop the sport at the domestic and international level. The province of Ontario now has 4 teams who compete in the domestic season. The Canada national rugby league team also known as 'The Wolverines', has come off a very successful season in 2011, recording victories against Jamaica and the United States, the qualifying nation of the 2013 RLWC. The match against the United States aired live on CBC as part of Spots Day in Canada, proving the rapidly growing fan base erupting in the commonwealth nation of Canada. British Columbia is also showing signs of developments with a domestic and university bodies developing in the Western part of Canada.