players were paid under the table well into the 1940s in order to keep up the pretense of amateurism, though it was an open secret that the WIFU had become professional. The WIFU's increasing professionalism, combined with the growing use of air travel in Canada, made expansion to Vancouver a more feasible option. In 1954, the BC Lions joined the league, thus giving the West the same five teams that compete in the modern CFL. By the end of World War II, the WIFU had upgraded its quality of play to a level almost equal to that of the strongest Eastern union, the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union (Big Four). From 1945 onward, the WIFU champion regularly faced the Big Four champion for the Grey Cup. An important turning point came during the 1948 Grey Cup in which fans of the Western and eventual Grey Cup champion Stampeders brought pageantry to the event for the first time, with pancake breakfasts at Toronto City Hall, riding a horse through the lobby of the Royal York Hotel, and the first Grey Cup parade. This development proved decisive in turning the national football championship into big business, and the Big Four and WIFU quickly dropped all pretense of amateurism. Despite this, the Big Four was reluctant to accept the WIFU as an equal. Well into the 1950s, long after the Big Four champion got an automatic berth to the Grey Cup, the WIFU champion was often obliged to play the champion of the Ontario Rugby Football Union — the only purely amateur union still playing for the title — in a Grey Cup semi-final. However, as the 1950s wore on, the ORFU found it increasingly difficult to compete in the new environment. The ORFU stopped challenging for the Grey Cup after the 1954 season, and the Grey Cup has been an East vs. West contest since. Although the amateurs would not be formally locked out of Grey Cup play for another four years, 1954 is usually viewed as the start of the modern era of Canadian football. In 1956, these two leagues agreed to form the Canadian Football Council as an umbrella organization. In 1958, the CFC withdrew from the CRU and renamed itself the Canadian Football League. The new league also assumed control of the Grey Cup, though it had been the de facto professional championship of Canadian football for four years before