Taking a simplified look at it, even selling 15000 tickets over 41 regular season home games at $49 would only bring in CAD $30mil from ticket sales. For comparison, the lowest NHL payroll this year is the LA Kings at $45mil USD. With todays exchange rate you'd still have to find another CAD $24mil (corp, ads, etc) just to break even on player salaries.
http://nhlnumbers.com/compare.php?season=0809