Bruce Dowbiggin
Civil Liberty: The Hard Is What Makes It Great
Across Canada sports teams are falling in line with the idea that public health is best served by customers showing proof of a double-vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test. (The policy is also being extended to restaurants, theatres, gyms and government offices.)
The best way to mange this policy is by government-issued health “passports” to tell ushers, waiters, towel boys, maître’d, security people and other healthcare “professionals” that the bearer has been good and succumbed to the coercion of the past few months. (The author has had both vaccine shots— Ed.)
In the sorry annals of “flatten the curve” solutions to the virus, the “passports” notion takes the prize for blunt-edge hysteria. Coming on the heels of “you must be vaccinated” and “you must be vaccinated twice”, and “Oops, you need a booster”, the idea that your personal health record be made known to people with no professional reason for having access is a concept that, pre-Covid, would have been laughed at.
The same Nancy Pelosi who saw health passports as fascistic in 2019 (“we cannot require someone to be vaccinated” and “it’s a matter of privacy to know who is and who isn’t [vaccinated]”) and “The Resistance” as a noble calling now want to build education camps for those who disagree on exposing your details to the unwashed.
If we might sum up the arguments for the passports they fall into a few categories:
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You already allow access to personal data for taxes, banks and other instruments of the state. What’s the big whoop? This is the equivalent of saying, “Hey, you’ve been stabbed five times, what’s so bad about a sixth time being run through?”
2) Your reluctance to seriously accept the Spanish Flu Inquisition is going to kill me— despite this paper masks, furious hand scrubbing, six-foot distancing, being locked in a basement for the better part of a year— and getting vaxxed twice. This the vanity position of you being the boss of me and everyone else when it suits you.
As we wrote last week in “Everyone Wears The Ribbon”, the SJWs ignore that we now know the vaccinations are not the promised Raid to wipe out Covid. We know from testing in Israel/ UK that increasingly we are seeing double-vaxx people testing positive for the virus. We know that one or more boosters are coming. We know that these are the latest distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies from the “passport” people in authority since early 2020. The people, like Bullwinkle the Moose, saying, “This time it’s got to work.”
We know that this is now a healthcare crisis, not a Covid-19 crisis. That’s why they don’t tell you the seven-day moving average Covid deaths in Canada is 11. In a nation of 38 million. Instead, to scare you, they give you phony PCR positives. (PCR tests are the trawler-net of healthcare, pulling up old boots, sharks, floating plastic, dolphin, oil drums and yes, a few of the fish you’re looking for.)
Hospitals are full of collateral victims of 2020’s flatten the curve, because clinics and doctors won’t see people with virus symptoms. They’re also jammed with psychiatric patients traumatized by the failed solutions of the WHO, CDC etc. They’re packed with cancer, cardiac, stroke and other patients who went untreated in 2020 and now have accelerated symptoms.
3) The passport will, in the words of an eager booster this past weekend, make it “easier” to identify the pox-ridden unvaccinated. It’ll be like buying beer or dynamite. Just flash the card and you’re a member of a preferred class. Maybe get AmEx to sponsor the cards?
The problem with the “easy does it” method is that it is inspired by the abject and often irrational fear of Covid-19. (“Kids’ll die by the thousands, you can get it from table tops, CPR tests are not wildly inaccurate”) Fear makes us do almost anything to protect ourselves. And it makes us vulnerable to smiling governments and healthcare officials telling us only what they want us to know. So the Family Compact downplays the selectivity of victims and hypes the unicorns.
The founders of democratic nations with liberal values understood the power of fear. The Declaration of Independence was forged in the midst of the American Revolution. Its authors would be hanged if it failed. They knew fear. That’s why they made it so damned difficult to circumvent the rights to person and privacy when people get nervous. They knew “easy” would get a lot of traction in a moment of stress.
The Canadians who died fighting Nazi oppression likewise knew what happens when you just shrug your shoulders and go along with the herd who are coercing you. It’s why, when they defeated the powers of a totalitarian state, they enshrined the right to privacy and independence of speech in our laws. They didn’t want it to be a Dixie cup casually thrown away in a time if fear.
They knew there would come a day when some glib suit would say surrendering your health record was the “easiest” thing to do. That the media would take the path of least resistance. They knew saying no to the mob would be hard. They understood, in the immortal words spoken by Tom Hanks in League of Their Own, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard everyone would do it. The hard…is what makes it great.”
Holding your principles when everyone around you is going along to get along is an exhausting process. It is like the free-speech laws now being trampled by Twitter, Facebook, the Liberal Party and others. We protect free speech not for the people we agree with— but for the people with whom we disagree.
In the paranoia and power grabs of today those principles are being forgotten in the rush to “make it easy”.
A final thought: our blessed media— who now include censorship in their quiver— continue to hammer the public with numbers about the unvaccinated, extrapolating dark right-wing QAnon figures as the source of the resistance. And while a certain segment of the resisters are conservatives and even zany, a very large tranche of those saying no comes from the black, Asian, east Asian and other minority groups.
Seems they don’t trust our diversity PM not to introduce some poison into their bodies. But because the media and the PM are such dedicated patrons of cultural diversity you’ll never hear a peep that vaccines and passports are anathema to the people they’re lionizing. Instead you’ll see resisters pictured as white, lower-middle-class gun owners and dirt-bike aficionados. Easier to get the petrified sheeple on board that way.
The early polling for Canada’s September election shows that these elites might— might— be in for a reckoning. If so, it might be the first positive thing to come out of the virus. Just don’t expect them to give up easily.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper 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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