Labour Day Classic

The Labour Day Classic is a particular week of the Canadian Football League (CFL) schedule that is played over the Labour Day weekend (which includes the first Monday in September). Labour Day weekend, roughly 10 weeks into the CFL season, is known for its matchups that do not change from year to year, unlike other "rivalry" weeks of the CFL schedule (with the exception of the BC–Montreal game which took place during the absence of Montreal's traditional rival Ottawa; both the Rough Riders and Renegades played in it). Labour Day weekend is also only one of two weeks (the Thanksgiving Day Classic being the other) in the CFL schedule that the league plays on a Monday. Mark's Work Wearhouse is the presenting sponsor of the event as of 2014.

The traditional Labour Day weekend matchups involve the Winnipeg Blue Bombers visiting the Saskatchewan Roughriders on the day before Labour Day. On Labour Day itself, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats are at home against the Toronto Argonauts, while the Edmonton Eskimos visit the Calgary Stampeders.

The Montreal Alouettes face the Ottawa Redblacks to round out the weekend. The BC Lions have no Labour Day rivals and have had a bye week on Labour Day in the past. Because Ottawa had no active team from 2006 to 2013, the Alouettes usually played the Lions during those seasons, creating a "coast-to-coast" rivalry; also during these times, the Alouettes received an annual home game in the Thanksgiving Day Classic in most of these years (Montreal still hosts Thanksgiving contests even after Ottawa's re-establishment).

During the early 1980s, the Montreal Concordes instead played the Hamilton Tiger-Cats as their Labour Day rival instead of the Ottawa Rough Riders. Due to scheduling conflicts, the Tiger-Cats temporarily revived its rivalry with the current incarnation of the Alouettes in the Labour Day game for the 2011 season; the change in opponents led Hamilton to dub the game the Labour Day Classique in reference to Montreal's francophone community. While in 2011, this automatically resulted in Toronto and BC facing each other, in the 1980s, the three teams (Toronto, Ottawa and BC) rotated each year. Ottawa and BC faced each other during the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s (the league had no team in Montreal at the time).

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