The Canadian Elite Hockey League (CEHL) was a semi-professional

Semi-professional

A semi-professional athlete is one who is paid to play and thus is not an amateur, but for whom sport is not a full-time occupation, generally because the level of pay is too low to make a reasonable living based solely upon that source, thus making the athlete not a full professional...

 hockey

Ice hockey

Ice hockey, often referred to as hockey, is a team sport played on ice, in which skaters use wooden or composite sticks to shoot a hard rubber puck into their opponent's net. The game is played between two teams of six players each. Five members of each team skate up and down the ice trying to take...

 league that played one season in 2005-2006. The CEHL was founded by Harold MacKay, a prominent member of the local hockey community. He previously brought the expansion Halifax Mooseheads

Halifax Mooseheads

The Halifax Mooseheads are a CHL ice hockey club in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League based out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The team was founded in 1994 and began play in the Dilio division of the QMJHL for the 1994-1995 season. While the franchise has never won a league championship, they have...

 of the QMJHL to Nova Scotia in 1994 and was later responsible for moving the Granby Predateurs franchise to Cape Breton where they became the Cape Breton Screaming Eagles

Cape Breton Screaming Eagles

The Cape Breton Screaming Eagles are a major junior ice hockey team in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. Their home rink is Centre 200 in Sydney, Nova Scotia.-Franchise history :...

.

MacKay hoped to recruit players from major junior and university by giving them an opportunity to play locally and not re-locate to professional

Professional

A professional is a person who is paid to undertake a specialised set of tasks and to complete them for a fee. The traditional professions were doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and commissioned military officers. Today, the term is applied to estate agents, surveyors , environmental scientists,...

 leagues in Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 or the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. The league's champion won the Alexander Cup

Alexander Cup

The Alexander Cup was the Canadian national Major senior ice hockey championship trophy from 1950 until 1954.-History:Introduced in 1950, the Alexander Cup was created to bridge the gap between amateur and professional ice hockey and to create a new "open" level for both pros and amateurs alike...

. Team budgets were set at $450,000 CAD

Canadian dollar

The Canadian dollar is the currency of Canada. As of 2007, the Canadian dollar is the 7th most traded currency in the world. It is abbreviated with the dollar sign $, or C$ to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies...

 and rosters were limited to a maximum of six import players.

The first league champion was the Saint John Scorpions who defeated the Dartmouth Destroyers in four games. In June 2006 the Cape Breton Crush folded leaving the league with just three teams. Soon after that the league itself shut down.

Teams

The charter franchises of the league were:

• Cape Breton Crush
• Dartmouth Destroyers
  Dartmouth Destroyers
  The Dartmouth Destroyers were a semi-professional ice-hockey team in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. They played in the now defunct Canadian Elite Hockey League that was founded in 2005. They played their home games at the Dartmouth Sportsplex. They were the runners up for the Alexander Cup, which was the...
  
  
• Saint John Scorpions
• Summerside IceFox