Hockey teams specifically and sports franchises in general in this country do a terrible job of marketing their product. For too many, their key focus is finding someone to open the door, thinking that the fans are going to flood right in.
Canadian sports fans are kinda lazy, and kinda homebound. If they want to watch sports, their are 14 TV channels (and eleventy trillion legal and illegal streams) showing something on some screen somewhere. Why go out and spend $100 for a family to see a game live?
As
Tom ServoMST3K has pointed out, the loss of local media has meant that no one is talking about the team except at the stadium, and that means the local connection is gone. That's worse in larger centres, because their focus will always be on the bigger clubs, so in some ways, the Brandons and the Kamloopses have an inherent edge - if they choose to use it.
I don't know what it's like in Prince George this spring, but I was there the year that they went to the conference final in the 90s, with Chara and Brewer in the lineup and people would be talking about the club with strangers on the street. There were 2 1/2 newspapers in town, plus the TV station and three radio stations (not including the university station) all talking non-stop about the club.
Absent that media attention, teams have to do more to get the club and its players directly in the line of sight of the people who live there. They miss out on the easy wins - when Bedard was packing the rinks, they should have been walking through the arena handing out free single tickets to any kid under the age of 8, because you need to get kids thinking about going to games early, and those kids aren't coming without at least one parent.
It's way harder than it used to be to market hockey in Canada, make no mistake about that, but too many sports franchises in this country are stuck in 1984 thinking. A kiss cam and loud music is just not enough to bring people in the doors.