Bruce Dowbiggin
EU To Canada: Next Time Try Sending Your Best
Living in the people’s republic of Trudeaupia you’re often told that you live in the greatest place on earth. From its bovine media to its placid middle class the inhabitants of the nation are one contented lot. Now they have the added bonus of an alliance between a party leader going nowhere (NDP) and a party leader going anywhere he can but Parliament (Liberal).
We speak, of course, of the Liberal/ NDP Grand Alliance cast this week with the goal of making sure never is heard a discouraging word about the PM. In fact, one of the organizing principles behind the Grand Alliance is creating new laws that allow the government to better police pushback from those who cause Trudeau dismay. Like Truckers.
This new legislation has emerged from Trudeau’s faculty lounge… er, caucus… and has caused almost zero perturbation from sea to sea to sea. Yes, the usual cranks like Jordan B. Peterson have pointed out that Bill C-38 etc is totalitarian in tone, but they’re always on about something. Just listen to PM Skippy: Canadians are the most envied people on earth. They have me.
Except if you choose not to take his vaccine that sorta’ works on days that don’t end in Y. Then “they are extremists who don’t believe in science, they’re often misogynists, also often racists. It’s a small group that muscles in, and we have to make a choice in terms of leaders, in terms of the country. Do we tolerate these people?” These comments—made in French— only seemed to upset truckers and their like at the time. In the urgency of the Convoy coverage it was more important to find KKK members or alt-right militias, not the Where’s Waldo PM.
Which is probably why dozing Canadians are a little miffed to see the rude welcome afforded the PM at the European Parliament where he came to drop pearls of wisdom about freedom and democracy. Seems a few at the MEP have caught Trudeau’s vaxx vituperation and were less than happy to see his smug countenance in their midst.
Even if Canadians don’t mind, the EU members saw his suspension of liberties, his use of police tactics, his manipulation of state media and his freezing of bank accounts as something un-Canadian. One after the other they got up to denounce the effrontery of a man who had fabricated a political coup coming to lecture them on liberty. A Croatian member tweeted, “Trudeau, in recent months, under your quasi-liberal boot, Canada has become a symbol of civil rights violations. The methods we have witnessed may be liberal to you, but to many citizens around they seemed like a dictatorship of the worst kind.”
“He’s exactly like a tyrant, a dictator. He’s like Ceaușescu in Romania,” said a Romanian speaker. “Trudeau is terrified by the fact that populism is taking root in Canada and giving ordinary people a voice. He ignores the fact that he and the Liberals have driven Canada into the gutter. Populism is only a reaction to our elites who have lost the plot.”
“Spare us your presence here,” added a third. The invitation to Trudeau, noted a fourth EU member, is to someone “who’s been trampling on human rights.” (Naturally Canadian media on the payroll concentrated solely on PMJT’s speech, not the condemnation.)
Even more embarrassing, no one in EU high office stood up to denounce the battering Canada’s PM was taking. Let’s just say that this is not the sort of thing that happened when Lester Pearson went abroad to represent the country. Remember, too, that these were representatives of nations where democracy was—and is— still hard-won and costly. As opposed to the price paid by the trust-fund PM and his Woke acolytes who’ve lived charmed lives.
Just as telling as the barbs thrown at Trudeau was the repudiation of the coverage he’d received from his own purchased media back home during the Truckers Convoy. We made the point at the time that the images from the streets would stain Canada internationally. All the PM’s calls for order would be lost.
Yet the media of the time played the PM’s tune. They praised police. While Trudeau hid in his bunker they concentrated their wrath on the truckers, building them into a swastika- waving subversive group bent on insurrection— as opposed to a rowdy group democratically protesting in the nation’s capital. The real victims, according to the Liberal media, were the poor condo dwellers of Central Ottawa, their sleep interrupted by honking horns.
This week’s EU Parliament fiasco (who does Trudeau’s advance work?) exposes the game going on in Ottawa. The World can see. Canada was only fooling itself. Now the world mocks the PM and Canada. And that will now go on for another three years.
Speaking of media party games, you’d be a brave person in Canada to also express a negative thought about Ukrainian PM Vladimir Zelensky these days. Such is the Western reverence for his defiant performance in the current Russian invasion of his country that he’s been compared to Churchill or FDR.
Certainly no one in modern military history since that pair has made a more compelling cause for his cause. Using video, photo ops and Congressional/ Parliamentary addresses to politicians in Canada, the U.S. and U.K. Zelensky’s been called a Titan of democracy, the best friend the West could have. A bulwark against Russian terror.
All this laudatory media outpouring comes from fanboy press that seems to take Zalensky love as a loyalty oath. “The Western intelligence apparatus won the information war in Ukraine before a shot was fired” tweeted Pedro L. Gonzalez. If this were simply a battle for minds, the Russians would be TKO’d already.
The reality is less commendable. Zelensky is not simply the former comedian-made-good. Elected as a reformer, Zelensky set about enriching himself and sidelining his enemies. Even as Canadian war hawk David Frum gushed that Zelensky’s Ukraine was “the first example in human history of a country that under the pressure of war is becoming *more* tolerant and *more* liberal” the PM suspended 11 opposition parties, merged all TV channels into one controlled by him and imposed censorship.
Hey, it’s a tough neighbourhood. The point is not whether Zelensky is too toxic to justify his Western support . The U.S. is used to dealing with the devil they know. Clearly the West will support him in the face of the cruelties imposed on his nation. The question is why does legacy media need to promote a false image of Zelensky as a democrat and reformer when the facts don’t support it?
Yet the Media Party has made any recognition of Zelensky’s foibles into Putin love. Here’s Frum trying to put dissenters into line: “I’m trying to recall a single instance of a resignation of conscience at Fox News over the network’s support for Putin’s war.” (Fellow Canadian John Roberts had to remind Frum that FOX had had two employees killed and another seriously wounded on the job in Ukraine. “You used to be better than this.”)
You get the drift. Too many people are invested in the Zelkensky Method to back down. The same overwhelming desire for Canadian media consensus that led Trudeau to his EU humiliation is now also at work in sanctifying Zelensky. As he old expression goes, when faced with a choice between the facts and the legend, print the legend.
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
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
This Ernest Hemingway gem from The Sun Also Rises has gotten a workout in this time of progressive economic policy. But it’s worth repeating in the case of Justin Trudeau’s Canada where the F word is fiscal. The “gradually” part of Liberal fiscal policy has now passed. Leaving the “suddenly” of $60 B deficits with no plan for recovery
You’d think that missing your deficit estimate by $40B might have cost the finance minister Chrystia Freeland her job. But no! In Trudeaupia it was the failure of Freeland to embrace even more wack-a-doodle spending plans by the prime minister and his brain trust of former groomsmen and climate acolytes. Yes, the cratering of finances is the ideal time to award a GST holiday and $250 cheques to much of the nation. It has been noticed.
You know how Canadians are always bitter that America pays no attention to Canada? (Doug Ford appeared Tuesday on @CNN which identified him as Premier of “Ontaria”.) Well, the Collapse By The Canal in Ottawa has brought much attention to the nation. Specifically, president-elect Donald Trump, the Shecky Green of presidents, has noticed the chaos. ““The Great State of Canada is stunned as the Finance Minister resigns, or was fired, from her position by Governor Justin Trudeau,” Trump wrote, using his barb that Trudeau is not a PM but a lowly governor.
Adding for good measure, that Freeland’s “behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada… She will not be missed!!!” Three exclamation points if you get that far.
Certainly no-one with a memory longer than two weeks will miss the deputy PM who gleefully wiped out the personal finances and freedoms of the Freedom Convoy truckers. Or the cabinet minister who promoted a standing O in the Commons for a former Nazi soldier. Or the senior government official who demanded legal restrictions against voters shouting at her in public.
Or the feminist who stood aside while her boss Trudeau expelled an indigenous female finance minister for allowing the RCMP to investigate PMJT’s nefarious activities on behalf of his donors. Or who… never mind. Just look up Blackface.
No, the current version of Freeland is the plucky woman who was fired on a Zoom call by a man. A woman of integrity who then sent off a stinging letter of resignation in which she revealed she was being pushed aside for a Trudeau buddy Mark Carney. A fiscal warrior who resisted going $60B in the red (she was cool at $40B, however). And, BTW, could she please deliver the government’s financial statement before she’s fired?
See how it works? She’s now a victim. “She didn’t just quit. She said ‘f**k you’ to Trudeau on the way out.” This is another case of somethingvblogger Melissa Chen calls Schrödinger’s Feminist, defined as a woman who is simultaneously a victim and empowered. Until something happens and she collapses into one of either states, whichever is politically expedient for her circumstance.
Chen expands on the notion. “A major component of the angst that characterizes much of the modern dynamics between men and women today comes down to the fact that women have demanded equal rights but also wish for preferred treatment.” A week’s viewing of The View will serve to illustrate this concept.
One of The View’s textbook cases of Schrödinger’s Feminist was Kamala Harris. The treatment of the defeated Democratic Party presidential candidate was guard-railed between her brave quest to become America’s first menstruating president and, on the other side, her victim status as a woman, the unfair way she was treated. It was enough to make Joy Behar’s head spin.
Forget that everyone in the mainstream media from pollsters to networks to Hollywood stars was all-in on Kamala as a “joyful “warrior. Even though they knew she was losing they cooked the polls the whole way for her. She was a victim, the kind Hillary Clinton meant when she said all women should be believed if they’re trying to destroy Justice Kavanaugh. Or, like serial fabulist E. Jean Carroll, waiting 30 years to bankrupt Trump and disqualify him from the presidential race, with a Law & Order script. How could a woman ever invent a story about getting trapped in a change room at Bergdorf Goodman with Trump?
Oh, Kamala played the brave front as she blundered to her record defeat. (Still called “a perfect campaign” by her apologists.) But underpinning it all was her status as a woman, a woman for whom her followers on The View demanded a double standard. In the end, only the Schrödinger feminists in the Dems coalition stayed loyal to Harris, (Kamala Harris Did A Good Job!) explaining away her failure to tell the world that Joe Biden was koo-koo for Coco Puffs as her innate decency.
And so Freeland, too, is being gifted with Schrödinger’s Feminism. Having Justin Trudeau, the Trust Fund twit, as your antagonist sure helps. So does the Woke media corps now in Ottawa painting sympathetic portraits of your sacrifice. Your dubious resumé since donning Liberal colours is forgotten. You will receive the get out of jail free card .
Hell, even the leader of the opposition will give you a tongue bath. “Instead of taking responsibility, the prime minister told her that she should take all the blame,” Pierre Poilievre said. “The good old boys in the back room would protect themselves and make the then-finance minister take all the blame.” Trudeau, who rejects bankers in favour of poets, will take the fall.
Which summons up this nugget from F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”
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 . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
MLB has seen parity and proclaimed, “We don’t give a damn!” Okay, they didn’t say that. In fact they insist the opposite is true. They’re all about competition and smaller markets getting a shot at a title. But as the 2024 offseason spending shows, believe none of what you hear and half of what you see in MLB.
Here’s the skinny: Juan Soto‘s contract with the NY Mets — 15 years and guaranteeing $765 million, not a penny of which is deferred. Max Fried signed an eight-year, $218 million deal with the New York Yankees. Later, Nathan Eovaldi secured a three-year, $75 million contract to return to the Texas Rangers. Blake Snell (five years, $182 million with the Los Angeles Dodgers) and Matthew Boyd (two years, $29 million with the Chicago Cubs) added to the splurge.
There’s one more thing that stands out. MLB has no trouble with the financial big boys in New York, Los Angles, Texas, Toronto, Atlanta and Chicago shelling out money no small market dare pay. In the MLB cheap seats, Tampa, Pittsburgh and Miami can’t send out quality players fast enough. But MLB is cool with that, too, as those paupers get a healthy slice of TV money.
So yes, they’re all about talking parity with their luxury tax system. But to keep the TV, digital, betting and marketing lucre flowing they have to have large media markets swinging the heaviest bats come postseason. The question is, do MLB fans care the way they used to about parity? It says here they don’t. More want to seed best-on-best more often. Which is brutal but refreshing.
Their sister leagues, married to draconian salary cap systems, are still pushing parity, even as they expand beyond recognition. In our 2004 book Money Players, legendary Boston Bruins coach/ GM Harry Sinden noted, “The problem with teams in the league, is that there were (then) 20 teams who all think they are going to win the Stanley Cup and they all are going to share it. But only one team is going to win it. The rest are chasing a rainbow.”
And that was before the expansion Vegas Golden Knights won a Cup within five years while the third-year Seattle Kraken made a run in those same 2023 playoffs. There are currently 32 teams in the league, each chasing Sinden’s rainbow of a Stanley Cup. That means 31 cranky fan bases every year. And 31 management teams trying to avoid getting fired.
Maybe we’ve reached peak franchise level? Uh, no. Not so long as salary-capped leagues can use the dream of parity to sell more franchises. As we wrote in October of 2023, “If you believe the innuendo coming from commissioner Gary Bettman there is a steady appetite for getting a piece of the NHL operation. “The best answer I can give you is that we have continuous expressions of interest from places like Houston, Atlanta, Quebec City, Salt Lake City, but expansion isn’t on the agenda.” In the next breath Bettman was predicting that any new teams will cost “A lot, a lot.”
Deputy commissioner Bill Daly echoed Bettman’s caution about a sudden expansion but added, ”Having said that, particularly with the success of the Vegas and Seattle expansions, there are more people who want to own professional hockey teams.” Translation: If the NHL can get a billion for a new team, the heck with competitive excellence, the clock might start ticking sooner. After all, small-market Ottawa just went for $950.”
It’s not just the expansion-obsessed NHL talking more teams. MLB is looking to add franchises. Abandoned Montreal is once more getting palpitations over rumours that the league wants to return to the city that lost its Expos in 2005. Recent reports indicate that while MLB might prefer Salt Lake City and Nashville it also feels it must right the wrong left when the Expos moved to Washington DC 19 years ago.
The city needs a new ballpark to replace disastrous Olympic Stadium. They’ll also need more than Tom Brady to fund the franchise fee and operating costs. And Quebec corporate support— always transitory in the Expos years— will need to be strong. But two more MLB franchises within five years is a lock.
While the NBA is mum on going past 30 teams it has not shut the door on expansion after seeing the NHL cashing in. Neither has the cash-generating monster known as the NFL where teams currently sell for over six billion US. The NFL is eyeing Europe for its next moves.
The question that has to be asked in this is, WTF, quality of competition? The more teams in a league the lower the chances of even getting to a semifinal series let alone a championship. Fans in cities starved for a championship— the NFL’s Detroit Lions or Cleveland Browns are entering their seventh decade without a title or the Toronto Maple Leafs title-less since 1967— know how corrosive it can be.
Getting to 34, 36, maybe 40 teams makes for a short-term score for owners, but it could leave leagues with an entire strata of loser teams that no one—least of all networks, carriers and advertisers—wants to see. Generations of fans will be like Canuck supporters, going their entire lives without a championship.
In addition, as we’ve argued in our 2018 book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports and How The Free Market Can Save Them, watering down the product with a lot of teams no one wants to watch nationally or globally seems counter productive. The move away from quality toward quantity serves only the gambling industry. But since when has Gary Bettman Truly cared about quality of the product? So long as he gets to say, “We have a trade to announce” at the Draft, he’s a happy guy.
When we published Cap In Hand we proposed a system like soccer with ranked divisions using promotion and relegation to ensure competition, not parity. Most of the interviewers we spoke to were skeptical of the idea. But as MLB steams closer to economic Darwinism our proposal is looking more credible every day. Play at the level you can afford. Or just watch Ted Lasso. Your choice.
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, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. 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 . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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