... in the States. I would think black Canadians are substantially no less interested in hockey than any other ethnicity.
And when you start doing the math it makes sense that there are only a handful of black NHL players historically. If you believe this source:
www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmhockey1.html, blacks made up only 0.02% of Canadians in 1971. Roughly 22,000,000 Canadians means roughly 4400 blacks. Let's say there were roughly 300 NHL players at the time, 95% of them Canadian, so that leaves 285 Canadians, or roughly 1 NHL player out of 77,200 Canadians.
Fast forward to today: 33,000,000 Canadians, 2% (~660,000) of them black. Roughly 400 Canadian NHLers, good for 1 in 82,500 Canadians. Proportionally, that's 8 blacks in the NHL.