Bruce Dowbiggin
Double Jeopardy: How The West Let Putin Off The Leash

You get the enemy you deserve. So if Vladimir Putin is what the West deserves then what does it say about the West today? It says they’re in the basement watching Netflix after leaving the front door open and giving the burglars a map to where they hide the family jewels.
Translation: The Ukraine catastrophe is a byproduct of the West abandoning proven energy methods in place of utopian Green schemes. Now, too late, it sees the implications of the energy gap created by buying foreign products— the U.S. importing 600 K barrels of Russian oil a day.
But in this climate of nuclear brinksmanship the Media Party can’t report that. Not if you’re invested in the legend of intrepid western-intelligence. So instead of truth we have Ukraine: The Musical where the poor locals being slaughtered by Putin are turned into plot devices, noble victims of the evil Russian tyrant; their own blundering leaders are shown kitted out in flak jackets and helmets, porting what liberal media call “assault weapons”.
In the comic-book narratives beloved by CNN and CBC, the plot lines were fed to a waiting world about a Ghost pilot picking off Russian jets like so many quail. About 13 brave sailors who gave the FU to Russians and were massacred to the man. About soldiers sacrificing themselves to blow up a bridge. Soft-hearted liberals— the core CBC/ CNN crowd— ate it up.
All of it fog-of-war BS. But with Putin’s brigades inexorably bearing down on Kiev and Lviv there’s no time for the skeptical to do fact checking. Or remind how Western experts caught with the pants down and their hands in someone else’s pockets need cover. Fast. So their willing media partners have served up Putin fury by the shovel full. Don’t hold your breath for the truth on how this went wrong.
That’s what happens when you do business in the ninth-most corrupt nation in the world. Truth is fungible. The Canadian deputy PM, whose roots in Ukraine spring from her Nazi-loving grandfather in WW II, is a crusader for truth. The woman who said Putin would make the west fall “in love” with Russia again is now the tip of the righteous Canadian spear. Print it. (Not the photos of Freeland porting a neo-Nazi banner.)
Independent voices such as Mark Steyn , Matt Taibbi and Lee Smith have tried to remind readers that the rapacious 2022 Putin is a product of Western intelligence’s wishful thinking and political negligence 25 years ago. Taibbi— who was working in Russia at the time— reminds us NATO and the dormant press allowed Putin to achieve the daily double: rape the post-Soviet economy with a few hundred oligarchs while establishing a Mafia state within the government.
Here’s Freeland writing in 2000: Some critics have lamented Putin’s support for the bloody second
war in Chechnya, accused him of eroding freedom of the press… and worried aloud that his KGB background and unrepenting loyalty to the honor of that institution could jeopardize Russia’s fragile democratic
institutions. But many of even Putin’s fiercest prosecutors seem inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the economy…”
As Taibbi says, “He was going to be our bastard. Now he’s become his own bastard”.
What the Ukraine fiasco also reveals is yet another product of Donald Trump’s upset win in 2016. (A product that must stay unreported by the Media Party.) Having bought into the U.S. State Department’s blandishments about U.S. security from Russia and having paid serious cash to Joe Biden’s son as protection for the rest of the decade, the Ukrainians made a rude discovery.
Instead of Hillary Clinton extending the Obama doctrine—and their protection— for anther four years, they got Trump on the phone asking WTF was going on with the Biden protection grift. Trump had seen video of Biden publicly shaking down the Ukrainians for a billion dollars. Unless they got a prosecutor off of Hunter’s company The Big Guy wasn’t giving them the cheque.
Trump wanted to know what happened. When Democrats moles inside the U.S. bureaucracy (Col. Alexander Vindman, come on down!) got wind of Trump’s inquiries the red light went off on Nancy Pelosi’s Bat Phone. If Trump got to the bottom of Biden’s deal he was likely to find a whole lot of other DC critters’ payola, too.
Faster than you could say Lying Adam Schiff, the Democrats and their friends in the Swamp cooked up an impeachment witch hunt, accusing Trump of interfering in the sovereign business of another state. The stage managers of Never Trump, who’d been shut out by the Mueller Inquisition, rallied the troops for another show trial.
To anyone who could count Senate members the whole enterprise was doomed to fail. Except that distracting people about Trump’s bulldog intrusion into eastern Europe kept them away from unravelling the State Department’s Ukraine policy. The one that has resulted in the current disaster.
The mystery Trump hinted at— and being asked by too few in the Beltway— is why did the supposed old-hand state geniuses allow a corrupt nation where the average income is $200/ month to become a political fulcrum for nuclear war?
Steyn puzzles it out: “The Trump impeachments? Ooh, he telephoned …Ukraine! The “Russia investigation”? Putin wanted Trump to win why exactly? Oh, no problem: because he’ll roll back sanctions imposed for Moscow’s actions against …Ukraine!
Do we have any witnesses to any of this? Yeah, sure, the really good guy’s some Colonel Vindman. He’s an immigrant from …Ukraine! On the other hand, Obama made Biden his point-man in …Ukraine!Biden told the Ukrainians they had to clean up all the corruption. They took the hint and put Hunter on the board, and Joe, Jim and the rest of the mob family suddenly acquired extensive “business interests” in Ukraine. Oh, and the biggest source of foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation is …Ukraine.”No one pays that much attention to a failed state unless the big players have their fingers in the pie. As Lee Smith remarks of the same big players who’ve left the poor of Ukraine open to the Putin War Machine: “So long as the media continued to bark that the 45th president of the United States is Putin’s stooge, no one would be held accountable for anything.
Except, as it turns out, D.C. political operatives aren’t the only people who can make history. Putin can, too. And the people of Ukraine will come out much the worse for both of their efforts.”
Set that to music.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
2025 Federal Election
How Canada’s Mainstream Media Lost the Public Trust

Breaking: CBC News admits that host Rosemary Barton was wrong on April 16 when she said “remains of indigenous children” have been discovered.
Call it the Panic Election. From The Handmaid’s Tale to Quebec alienation to plastic straws, the dynamic is citizens being stampeded in a brief six weeks by Big Brother. (There’s no Big Sister. That would mess with the narrative.) Prompting Covid Part Deux from the Laurentian media scolds.
Nowhere is this panic more keen than among aging Boomers who’ve pronounced themselves willing to ignore a decade of Justin Trudeau’s clumsy, unethical and sometimes criminal behaviour in the wake of Big Bad Trump. Even the threat of losing the country’s AAA credit rating can’t sway them from full-throated panic about being the 51st state.
The 51st state gambit is the window dressing. The real Trump panic is over him exposing the inadequacies of a Canadian society penetrated by China, dominated by globalist fanatics and more indebted every day. Specifically, Trump labelled Canadians defence dead-beats and entitled snobs who’d be crazy not to join the U.S. The insulting Trump framing has been a lifeline to those most recently in office— Liberals— to point at the Big Bad Wolf outside the door rather than the Frozen Venezuela inside its walls.
Integral to this panic is the role of Canada’s legacy media, a self-serving caste saved from bankruptcy (for now) by generous wads of public money. The 416/613 bubble ponies operate as if it were still 1985, not 2025. They’ve managed to preserve their status while society changed around them. For instance, CBC’s flagship At Issue panel features three people from Toronto and a fourth from Montreal.
It has worked perfectly in Boomer Canada. Until this past week, when the media guardians finally lost the plot. The combination of TV panel hubris and the incompetence of the Elections Commission exposed an industry more interesting in protecting its own turf than protecting the truth.
The meltdown was the notion that conservative social media— with its intrusive reporters and tabloid tactics— had no place in their sandbox. This hissy fit came after Wednesday’s French debate. Members of Rebel News, True North and other outfits dominated the party leaders’ scrums with obtrusive questions about Mark Carney’s opinions on same-sex sports and what constitutes a woman— questions the French moderator had neglected to ask.

For legacy reporters and hosts who take it as given that they be allowed the front pew this was an affront to their status. As purveyors of the one true political religion the talking heads on CBC, CTV and Global began speaking of “so-called journalists” and “far-right” intruders elbowing into their territory. Their resentment was all-consuming.
This resentment spilled into Debate Night Two when a shouting match ensued in the press room. A CBC source claimed (incorrectly) that Rebel Media leader Ezra Levant had been barred from the press room. A writer from the Hill Times screamed at members of their raucous rivals. The carefully chose panelists suggested that these outfits were funded by dark right-wing sources.
Before the debate had ended Elections Commission organizers— reportedly goaded by the Liberals— called off the post-debate scrum citing “safety” issues that seemingly included a Rebel reporter conducting a hostile walking interview with a furious Liberal official. This unleashed another torrent of Media Party vitriol about its position as the keepers of Canadian journalism.

In a show of irony, these complaints about right-wing misinformation came from people whose livelihood is dependent on Liberal slush funds or whose organizations have accepted government funds to stave off bankruptcy or whose union is an active shill for non-Conservative parties. The conflicts are never mentioned in the unctuous festival of privilege.
What makes this rearguard action against new media risible was the 2024 U.S. election where Donald Trump acknowledged the new day and rode the support of non-traditional media back to the presidency. His shunning of the legacy networks and hallowed print brands heralded a new reality in American elections. Poilievre has struggled to find this community in Canada, but for those with eyes it remains the future of disseminating political thought.
A perfect example of alternative media scooping the tenured mob on Parliament Hill has been the sterling work on China by Sam Cooper, a former Global employee who has independently demonstrated the ties between Chinese criminal gangs and the Canadian political structure going back to the 1980s. Working with others outside the grid he’s shown the scandal of a Liberal candidate urging Chinese Canadian voters to reap a bounty for turning his Conservative opponent to the Chinese Communist Party. A disgrace that Carney has forgiven.
Predictably Cooper’s work and the independent story by two retired RCMP investigators who implicated nine Liberal cabinet members in compliance with the Chinese communists has gotten the ‘tish-tish” from the Laurentian elites. Like the Democrats who buried the Hunter Biden laptop story to save his father in the dying days of the 2020 U.S. election the poodle media hope to delay the truths about China long enough to get the compliant Carney over the finish line.
For contrast to how it was— and could be— one only had to witness the moderator performance of journalist Steve Paikin of TVO. Largely unknown outside Ontario, Paikin overcame the skepticism of Westerners by playing it straight down the middle. Such was his honest-broker performance that Poilievre was heard telling him after the debate that he had no idea how Paikin might vote. (Ed. note: Paikin is a former colleague and longtime friend.) In other words, it’s still possible.
It’s a cliché that this election is a hinge point for Canada. Will it face itself in the mirror or indulge in more denialism about its true self? No wonder unaffiliated journalists joke that their stories today will be the lead on mainstream media in three months. Carney has promised to continue bribing the mainstream media, but their day is done. It’s simply a matter of fixing a date for the next panic.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Bruce Dowbiggin
Is HNIC Ready For The Winnipeg Jets To Be Canada’s Heroes?

It’s fair to say everyone in hockey wanted the Winnipeg Jets back in the NHL. They became everyone’s darlings in 2011 when the Atlanta Thrashers, the league’s second stab at a franchise in Georgia, were sold to Canadian interests including businessman David Thomson. (Ed.: Gary Bettman’s try number three in Atlanta is upcoming.).
Yes, the market is tiny. Yes, the arena is too small. Yes, Thomson’s wealth is holding back a sea of inevitability. But sentimentalists remembering the Bobby Hull WHA Jets and the Dale Hawerchuk NHL Jets threw aside their skepticism to welcome back the Jets. The throwback uniforms with their hints at Canada’s air force past were an understated nod to their modest pretensions. It was a perfect story.

The question now, however, is will the same folks get dewey-eyed about the Jets if they become the first Canadian team to win the Stanley Cup since (checks his cards) Montreal and Patrick Roy did it in 1993. It would be helpful in this election year if something were to bind a nation torn apart by politics. The Gordie Howe Elbows Up analogy is more than shopworn, and Terry Fox can only be resurrected so often. So a Cup win might be a welcome salve.
But the approved script has long dictated that the Canadian team to break the schneid should be one of the glamour twins of the NHL’s Canadian content, the Edmonton Oilers or the (gulp) Toronto Maple Leafs. The Oilers and their superstar Connor McDavid barely lost out last spring to Florida while the Leafs, laden with superstars like Auston Matthews and William Nylander, are overdue for a long playoff run.
Hockey Night In Canada positively pants for the chance to gush over these two squads each week. When was the last time Toronto played an afternoon game so HNIC could showcase the Jets? Like, never. Same for the Oilers, who with their glittering stars like McDavid Leon Draisaitl and Ryan Nugent Hopkins are the primary tenants of the doubleheader slot, followed by Calgary. Winnipeg? We’ll get to them.

But there’s going to be no ignoring them in the spring of 2025. The Jets in the northern outpost in Manitoba were the top team in the entire league in 2024-25. They’ll comfortably win the Presidents Cup as the No. 1 squad and have home-ice advantage throughout the playoffs. They have the league’s best goalie in Connor Hellebuyck (an American) and a stable of top scorers led by Kyle Connor and Mark Schiefele. Because Winnipeg is on a lot of No Trade lists, they have built themselves through the draft and thrifty budgeting.
But will the same people who swooned over the Jets in 2011 now find them as adorable if they ruin the Stanley Cup plot lines of the Oilers, Leafs and Ottawa Senators? Will the fans of Canadian teams in Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal not making the postseason take the Jets to their hearts or will they be as phoney as the Mike Myers commercials for the Liberals?
In addition, the Jets will be swamped by national media should they proceed through the playoffs. It’s one thing to carry the expectations of Winnipeg and Manitoba. It’s another to foot the bill for a hockey crazy county. We remember Vancouver’s GM Mike Gillis during the Canucks 2011 Cup run bemoaning the late arrivers of the press trying to critique his team as they made their way through the playoffs.
It will be no picnic for the Jets, however strong they’ve been in the regular season. No one was gunning for them as they might for the Oilers or Leafs. They will now get their opponents’ best game night after night. Hellebuyck has been a top three goalie in the NHL for a while, winning the Vezina Trophy, but his playoff performance hasn’t matched that of his regular-season version.
Already the injury bug that sidelines so many Cup dreams is biting at the Jets. Nikolaj Ehlers collided with a linesman in Saturday’s OT win in Chicago. Defenceman Dylan Samberg is also questionable after stopping a McDavid slap shot with his leg. A rash of injuries has ended the run of many a worthy Cup aspirant in the past. Can Winnipeg’s depth sustain the churn of seven weeks of all-out hockey?
As always for the small-market Jets time is of the essence. Keeping this core together is difficult with large markets lusting after your players. With the NHL salary cap going up it remains a chore to keep their top players. Schiefele and Hellebuyck are tied up longterm, but 40-goal man Connor is a UFA after next season while Ehlers is not signed after this season. Young Cole Perfetti will be an RFA in 2026. Etc.
So how much do Canadians love the Jets if they sneak in and steal the hero role by winning a Canadian Cup? Lets see Ron MacLean pun his way through that one.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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