Yup , a first time for everything for sure . It's hard to believe , especially in a league with only nine (and at times only eight) teams that this is the first time in CFL history that the combination of BC , Ham and Mtl have all missed the play-offs in the same season . One has to wonder what the odds of this only happening once in all this time would be ? Crazy when you think about it . :o
How did you find this out?
LOL !!! It's all in my head , so basically from memory . I'm I guess what you would basically call a CFL history junkie . You can research and look it up if you like but trust me it's never happened before . 
Don't forget that this could only possibly happen in a cross-over year so there really hasn't been that many opportunities for this to happen.
I would say odds are very good this year and next. Very good
Are you talking about all incarnations of Montreal?
Keep in mind BC has only been in the league since approx. 1954.
Pope has the answer..... unless...
Hey Bobo.... are you counting the years when there WAS no Montreal team at all
I imagine you could make the statement about Hamilton and Montreal missing the playoffs in the same year, without any reference to B.C.
H&M could both miss only in the crossover era, and M was either good or defunct throughout that era, except recently when H was good.
Kinda hard to happen all those years Montreal didn't have a team 8)
Amazing that it never happened before.
Johnny also thinks it is amazing that the Alouettes and Riders, met in the Grey Cup game for the first time ever in 2009. Before that, it had never happened.
That is some trivia I must say!
Okay fair enough , but hows about we take Montreal out of the equation and just strictly look at the Cats and Lions then dating back to the Lions inaugural season in 1954 . So eliminating the cross-over years completely and just going East and West top 3 in each making the play-offs regardless of W/L records this will only be the 3rd time in history that both the Lions and Cats have failed to qualify in the same season(1960,1990,2017) . So when you look at it , it basically translates to only 3 times for these two teams missing together dating back to the 1954 season . Yup , so 3 times in a 63 year span , now that's kinda crazy when you think about it . :o
The rarity of this occurrence is probably due to the fact that 67% (and in some years 75%) of the teams make the playoffs.
Of course winning a Stanley Cup with just 6 teams back in the day doesn't mean as much for such a team as winning a SC nowadays. Tell that to those teams that won when that was the case. Hey, the smaller the league, the better the talent really.
Who has won the most Stanley Cups in history? That is a number, a number any way to want to look at it.
Not really.
Technically Montreal did not make the Playoffs during any of those years.
And neither have the Atlantic Schooners every made the playoffs.
That sort of statistical analysis is what I believe Mark Twain was referring to when he popularized the phrase "Lies, damned lies, and statistics". Of course, what he was referring to was the use of "numbers" to bolster weak arguments when the numbers were either irrelevant, inapplicableor inappropriate for the argument being made. Sorta like stating how few gun deaths occurred prior to the invention of the firearm.