With the announcement that Curling Canada is formally adopting the World Curling rulebook, beginning with the upcoming season, Canadian curling rules and those governing the rest of the world will now be one and the same moving forward.
Getting in sync with World Curling on an ongoing basis will streamline the process of rules adoption going forward, allowing for greater clarity for Canada’s curlers as they hit the world stage in the future, looking for podium finishes at international events.
The timing is right, according to Curling Canada Chief Executive Officer Nolan Thiessen, noting that the number of principal differences between Canadian and World regulations has shrunk.
“I think for us it was just a situation where we said, ‘Look, there’s not a lot of benefit to us trying to do this on our own,’ ” said Thiessen.
“It was easy for the (Curling Canada) technical committee to say, ‘OK, we are getting so close to these (international) rules,’” added Curling Canada Chief Umpire Brett Waldroff, a member of that committee. “ ‘Why don’t we just follow the rules of World Curling?’ ”
For the most part, immediate changes to the game on the ice won’t be too noticeable.
That’s because over the last few years, the two governing bodies have been coming closer together where rules of play have been concerned. Long gone are the days when, say, World Curling-sanctioned competitions were using the four-rock free guard zone rule while Canada used the three-rock rule.
More recently, top competitions in Canada like the Brier and Scotties had even been using some of World Curling’s official rules, even when such rules weren’t yet codified in Curling Canada regulations.
That’s another reason for this change: synchronizing the timing of the application of new rules.
Previously, Curling Canada had updated its rulebook every four years — at the start of an Olympic cycle — while World Curling revised its own regulations on an annual basis. It’s latest rulebook, as well as a document showing changes from last season, are available by CLICKING HERE.
That had, at times, led to a lag in regulatory adoption while on other occasions it meant a tweaking of the Canadian rule book mid-cycle.
For instance, the “No-Tick” rule forbidding the bumping of opposition stones off the centre line prior to the fifth rock of an end being played was added by Curling Canada part way through this last cycle, after World Curling had first adopted it.
“We hadn’t had it in our rule book,” Waldroff pointed out, “but we were still playing it. We sent it out to everybody and said that we were playing the ‘No-Tick’ rule as per World Curling rules.”
That kind of mid-course change is something that will no longer be necessary.
“If there’s a change at the world curling level and it affects our teams that go on to the World Championships, we obviously want to make that change (immediately) as well,” said Thiessen. “I think it just makes it cleaner.”
While the adopting of World Curling rules won’t see a great deal of shocking change coming to the game in Canada, there is one new regulation that will be considered major and it will grab the spotlight as the 2026-27 season gets underway.
Starting this season, four-player teams will need to be exactly that, with new, stricter regulations insisting that each team start with four players at the beginning of a game, and if they cannot, the match is forfeited.
Teams must continue as a foursome throughout the game, with an exception — if one of the four needs to leave the game at any time, the affected team can play as three for up to two full, consecutive ends. After that, the exiting player would need to return or an alternate would have to be pressed into action or, again, the game would be forfeited.
A mechanism by which teams can apply for relief from that rule due to extenuating circumstances has been included in the new regulations, but entering a competition as a trio — or even playing in a single game with that make-up — is basically now a thing of the past.
“There’s been a lot of instances of teams playing with three players at various different competitions internationally and nationally,” said Thiessen, adding that some teams have seen the three-player set-up as giving them a competitive edge.
This new rule, Thiessen pointed out, has been coming for at least a year, now, having been discussed at the 2025 World Curling Congress in Australia, and then again at meetings this past spring.
“I know the World Curling Athlete Council was behind this change,” said Thiessen, who sits on World Curling’s Competition and Rules Commission. “At the championship event level perspective, I think they wanted to protect the fact that this is meant to be four players.”
One of the changes that World Curling is applying for the 2026-27 season actually puts the rest of the world more in harmony with the way Canada had already been doing things and it pertains to who’s permitted to be at the back of the house during a game.
Curling Canada had allowed for the skip and one other player to be there when the opposition was shooting. World Curling had regulated that it must be no one other than the skip and the vice-skip.
“They’ve now changed that,” said Waldroff, who served as the Chief Umpire at the Milano-Cortina Olympic Games last winter. “And they’ve done it even better. They’ve said any two players of the non-delivering team can be behind the back line.”
“It shows the cooperation between World Curling and Curling Canada is very, very strong,” he added.
Another area where there is a streamlining of rules is in how a rock is handled prior to its release.
Any touching of the granite (specifically, the granite and not the handle), after the shooter has reached the tee line, will now be universally accepted as a no-no, whereas previously, it had not been explicitly forbidden.
Rule, R9(a), states: “A double touch of the stone handle by the person delivering the stone, prior to the hog line at the delivering end, is not considered a violation.”
Previously, that rule did not include the words “of the stone handle.”
And now there is a regulation, R5(d), that reads: “Touching the granite at any time after the tee line at the delivery end is not allowed and considered a touched moving stone which results in the stone being removed from play.”
As has been the case in the past, Canadian curling clubs will have some leeway when it comes to implementing changes that are being adopted up top by Curling Canada.
Forcing a team to forfeit because they don’t have a fourth for Friday night mixed doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and so that’s not a rule that clubs will be expected to live by.
They could, if they choose to, but it’s the kind of regulation that Curling Canada will leave in the hands of club managers and members.
Thiessen understands the need to let grassroots curlers decide what works best for them at their particular club. But some rules and regulations should be adhered to by all. With that in mind, a simplified guide is on the way.
“We’re going to be building out sort of a short and sweet ‘10 Rules Of Curling To Live By’ type of thing,” he said.
That should allow for more clarity and a streamlining of the application of rules, something Canada’s top-level players will now have, too, with Curling Canada’s adoption of World Curling regulations.
