Abstract
This paper details the political and legal contestations that shaped the status and development of professional Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) in Canada from the sport’s high-profile and highly contested arrival in 1996, to its legalization across the country after 2013. The transformation of MMA from criminal activity to sporting spectacle in this short period of about 15 years was due, in part, to contextual and political factors centred on indigenous political contestation in themselves not related to the sport; and in part to political debates that focused on the activity’s popular acceptability, augmented by a lobbying campaign devised by the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) the sport’s pre-eminent promotion company, in the province of Ontario. As a result of these contestations, legal constraints formulated at both the federal and provincial levels had been rescinded by 2013.
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