Bruce Dowbiggin
They Were Who We Thought They Were. And Trump Let Them Off The Hook

In sports it’s well-known that if you’re complaining about refereeing you must have lost. Judging by the tsunami of criticism launched by Republicans at ABC News’s moderators after Tuesday night’s presidential debate it would tell you that Donald Trump lost his first— and likely only—debate with Kamala Harris.
“Three against one” was the persistent complaint about the work of ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis. And you could make the case for that criticism. A media analysis of ABC’s leftist news coverage before Tuesday showed that it gave Harris positive coverage 95 percent of the time, while Trump received just six percent positive coverage (most dedicated to his being shot). Further, Harris is a close pal of the woman who runs ABC News. Davis is Harris’ sorority sister. Really? Where were Trump or viewers informed of these conflicts?
Muir thought moderator meant fact-checker and inserted himself by debating Trump on his claims. On at least a half dozen occasions an unctuous Hume debated Trump about, among the topics, the eating of family pets by Haitian immigrants in towns and cities overrun by migrants. (A claim supported by Ohio’s attorney general.)
Snippy co-moderator Davis challenged Trump’s assertion that Harris was in favour of unlimited abortion until the moment of delivery (Davis was wrong) and then quickly moved on to softball Harris. Fair enough, if you or your bosses think your job is to correct in real time the assertions of the politicians.
Except they never upbraided Harris on a series of her own whoppers that have clearly been debunked. (“Fine people”, “bloodbath”, etc.) With that comfort zone, Harris lost her jitters and avoided mistakes. It was now a home game. Hence the chorus of “Unfair” that followed.
But let’s be honest, what was Trump expecting? This was Trump’s charge of the Light Brigade expecting another outcome. After the past decade, making a headlong charge into cannons is not a wise career move. But like the doddering generals of the 1850s British Army, an aging Trump has reached peak self delusion after dodging a bullet himself this summer. He is like the psychotic Maggott character Telly Savalas played in Dirty Dozen. Everything is going well on the mission till he sees a German woman he likes. Then he abandons the script. And hell breaks loose.
Sadly, his lieutenants now do a better job articulating his talking points these days. (It wouldn’t be a surprise if the GOP let RFK Jr. and VP candidate J.D. Vance do the more talking from here on in.)
Whether this debate was a missed opportunity or a campaign turning point will be decided in the coming weeks. For those who think it’s going to change the polls, remember that Biden’s epic debate meltdown from June only cost him a couple of points in popularity. Trump advanced but one point. Still, the DEMs panicked in June, launching a coup against the man who’d overwhelmingly won the primaries. (Mirror to January of 2017 when they launched a three-year attempted coup to remove Trump.)
Trump mentioned Harris not getting any primary votes, but ABC wrinkled its nose at a real story, preferring to delve into how Trump’s father made money 50 years ago. What was definitive about Tuesday is that the DC Media Party is again in the tank. The son of the President of the United States of America had just pled guilty to tax evasion for bribes he received from foreign adversaries in exchange for selling access to his father, the vice president at the time. This should have been the first, last and every question from ABC’s Mod Squad. Nope, let’s talk about E. Jean Carroll.
There’s no price to pay for burying uncomfortable stories. Example: Here’s John Kirby, spokesman for the Defence Dept., “Was anyone ever held accountable by the president directly for what happened with the withdrawal in Afghanistan?” KIRBY: “We have all held ourselves accountable…”
Oh good. Let’s move along. As Louisiana senator John Kennedy noted, “I know many people in Washington D.C. that would unplug your life support to charge their cell phone.” That explains a media mob that now talks openly of banning anyone who doesn’t sing from their anti-Trump hymn book..
This cheerleading has metastasized in the past generation. As veteran journalist Matti Friedman wrote this week on Substack in When We Started to Lie: “The practice of journalism—that is, knowledgeable analysis of messy events on Planet Earth—was being replaced by a kind of aggressive activism that left little room for dissent. The new goal was not to describe reality, but to usher readers to the correct political conclusion…
The activist-journalists, I found, were backed up by an affiliated world of progressive NGOs and academics who we referred to as experts, creating a thought loop nearly impervious to external information. All of this had the effect of presenting a mass audience with a supposedly factual story that had a powerful emotional punch and a familiar villain.”
What’s interesting is that no one in the U.S. has had to pay journalists to do this. In Canada the Trudeau federal government is taking no chances. It has taken to threatening media outlets it now supports through its media slush funds. Here’s Taleeb Noormohamed, parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage dressing down a media critic who mentioned Noormohamed’s sketchy real estate flipping history,

. @Taleeb Your paper wouldn’t be in business were it not for the subsidies that the government that you hate put in place – the same subsidies your Trump – adjacent foreign hedge fund owners gladly take to pay your salary.” Translation: Nice little business you’ve got there. Too bad if something were to happen to it.
This behaviour has cowed many establishment journalists who, instead of carving Justin, write Trump thought-loop diatribes so they don’t get the Roman Polanski Chinatown nose surgery. (Nosy boy?”) Long, long after even the Dems have moved on from the most demented Trump fabrications the CDN media will still be slavishly regurgitating the pablum served to them by their heroes in American spy craft.

As such CBC newscasts are now time capsules of 2016 Think, indistinguishable from PMO press releases and leaks. We recently watched a newscast while in the lobby of the CBC building as the network adopted the missionary position on the latest Obamite Russia propaganda campaign. Followed by yet another deep swallow on Hottest Year on record. CBC had its senior reporter wheel out a single embedded “source” it’s used since the 1990s– w/o any conflicting “experts” as CBC reporting code requires– to re-varnish the narrative it has excreted since it decided that hot, not cold, would kill us all.
Unapologetic propaganda for imbecile liberals. That’s why it’s easier to blame the refs.
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.
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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