Bruce Dowbiggin
Closing Of CHML Latest Sign Of Demise For Local Journalism
For many Canadians the past month has witnessed the demise of two venerable broadcasting brands in the nation. First, they saw what could be the final CBC Sports-led production of a Summer Olympics. The drama and surprises of the recent Paris Games for Canada were a reminder of the many seminal moments in CBC’s history with the Olympics.
Donovan Bailey’s double golds in 1996. Ben Johnson’s DEI disqualification after winning the 1988 100 metres. Nancy Green’s gold in slalom in 1968. Caetrina LeMay Doan’s back-to-back golds in speed skating (1998 and 2002 Games). Greg Joy’s silver medal in high jump on the final day of the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics. Gaetan Boucher’s double golds/ one bronze in speed skating medals in 1984. Clara Hughes’ bronze in both the road race and time trial at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta plus winning speed-skating medals in three straight Winter Olympics. We could go on.
As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the retirement of anchor Scott Russell is one small precursor of what might come if Pierre Poilievre becomes prime minister in 2025. He has promised to take a scythe to the CBC budget, reportedly eliminating its preferred status as a broadcaster in Canada. (The Corp’s former dominance as a far-flung national signal transmitter disappeared with digital.)
Unless the government makes a special dispensation for Olympics, the Corp’s ability to broadcast a full Olympics in the future could be severely impacted if that happens (CBC has rights to 2026/ 2030 Winter Games & 2028/ 2032 Summer Olympics). The best CBC might do is a sharing agreement with private networks and, possibly, digital outlets like Amazon or Apple. Someone else will have to talk about statue gender equality and trans athlete rights in Milano/ Cortina (2026) and L.A. (2028). A bracing possibility for CBC lovers.
The other broadcast shocker was the sudden demise of Hamilton Ontario’s iconic CHML 900 radio station on August 14. Its owners at Corus shuttered the station with no fanfare or warning to its devoted listeners. For decades CHML (and CHCH TV) was the plucky electronic voice for the western end of the Golden Triangle, the buffer against the massive media voice coming out of Toronto.
Along with the CFL Tiger Cats, CHML personified the blue-collar sensibilities of Steel Town. The Cats were a touchstone of their identity with Perc Allen, Vince Mazza and Bob Bratina (later Hamilton mayor) on their crew. CHML was where local advertisers could pitch their products to the city and down the Niagara Peninsula. It was where local news had a voice. You got your local traffic and sports news first, not as a tag-end of a Toronto newscast.
Now, only the Hamilton Spectator stands as a remnant of a vibrant culture in what has become a booming residential market (and that as a pawn in national newspaper chain). As Hamilton’s population balloons, its identity and ability to reflect this new reality shrivels.
In its own way CHML was like many private stations across the country (CJAD, CJOB, CHED, CHQR, CKNW) that prospered by reflecting the local, not national perspective on news and sports. But two factors aligned against this model in the modern age. First, the advent of different delivery systems from digital to SiriusXM to grey market cut their listenership and savaged their advertising base.
They were not alone. “@cp_doge Legacy media is witnessing a decline in viewership, while 𝕏 continues to break new all-time usage records. This is because legacy media simply can’t compete with the hundreds of millions of people providing real-time information on 𝕏.”
Local stations like CHML, already fighting CBC for listeners, now were challenged by podcasts, independent opinions and a rapidly devolving demographic of aging listeners. They reacted by doubling down on their base, ignoring competing communities. This led to cutbacks, the elimination of familiar stars and the desertion of sponsors.
Second, when financial pressures got tight, many of these stations were bought and controlled by national chains. The economic formula for those stations switched from satisfying a local model of small businesses and city council to feeding a publicly held beast— the national chain. In the short term it brought stability and programming.
But as time went by, listeners noticed that the programming generated by the chain was Toronto-centric. The political slant was also dominated by the 416/613/514 axis. Attempts to localize the stations again via Toronto head office resulted in fly-over management.
Sports rights, often an asset to local programmers, were swallowed by the national all-sports media chains. In 2015 the Cats went to a Bell Radio station for a time, only to return to CHML til 2024. The death of the station sends the team games over to online and a smaller FM frequency.
Worse for local broadcasters, their solvency was now tied to the overall health of the chain. Problems elsewhere become their problems. In the case of CHML, that means the woes of publicly traded CORUS, which is now taking a financial beating. The company is madly slashing staff. ”By the end of August, Corus expects it will have reduced its full-time workforce by 25 per cent — or nearly 800 jobs — compared with September 2022. By the end of May, Corus had cut about 500 employees.”
The radio situation was prefigured by the demise of local Canadian newspapers which went from revenue-generators to welfare cases when they became married to large chains. When we arrived at the Calgary Herald in 1998, the paper had 11 full-time sports reporters and three editors. Now merged with the equally dismal Calgary Sun, there are three full-time reporters. The sports editor is in Edmonton. The paper is laid out in Hamilton. Door to door is non-existent.
The empty Herald/ National Post building, the most desirable real estate property at one time in the city, is now stripped of its presses and is used by a car rental company. The situation is replicated at many of the formerly great Canadian papers. The national chain model is dire with only the Globe & Mail as an semi-independent entity.
And yet this prime minister, dependent on their corporate donations, pumps millions into a sunset industry, propping up a few major communications firms bleeding red ink on the broadcast side (their phone/ communications branches keeps Rogers and Bell in business). Leaving local markets abandoned and neglected while unionized workers and wealthy owners scramble for the scraps left in the trough. As they say in the biz, That’s A Wrap.
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.s.
With the Canada/ U.S. Tariff War going from talking conflict to hot trade war on Feb. 1 there are numerous predictions as to what might happen if the dispute drags on. As the sides in the Ukraine War will tell you very few of the outcomes so far were foreseen by the sides when the shooting started. That’s the nature of these conflicts.
One immediate byproduct seems to be the continued descent toward 60 cents by the Canadian dollar. If Trudeau and his anointed successor Mark Carney are true to character it will also involve billions in cheques going out the door— a la Covid— to those citizens “harmed” by the Liberals stumbling into a highly predictable and easily avoidable trade war. If past is prologue, vast amounts of that money will disappear as bad actors find a way to access the funds. While Canada’s GDP collapses some more.
For the moment, however, let us concentrate on what Justin Trudeau’s ineptitude might be costing Canadian professional sports teams in American-based leagues. On the purely trivial level it means that your beer at the park/ arena will be Canadian suds exclusively. Not cheaper or better. Just Canadian. Owners will stock luxury boxes with Canadian wine, etc. A road trip to see the Canucks in L.A. or the Canadiens in NYC will balloon, too.
But on a more serious level the showdown between Donald Trump and Trudeau could well return Canadian teams in the NHL to the bad-old days of the early 21st century. Despite efforts then to create a Canadian fund to save teams, two clubs— Winnipeg Jets and Quebec Nordiques— were forced to sell because of a dollar that bottomed out around 62 cents U.S. Winnipeg went to Phoenix/ Quebec City went to Colorado as a result
In Montreal the MLB Expos also moved— to Washington— after 37 years, because no one in Quebec would/ could pony up the money to make up for the declining dollar or repair the disastrous Olympic Stadium. Expos fans then had the cruel fate of watching Washington win the 2019 World Series after the Expos had never gotten that far. (Nordiques fans saw Colorado win two Stanley Cups after escaping Quebec.)
Why were these teams forced to move? Because while teams collect revenues locally in Canadian dollars almost all their payroll and other costs are paid in American dollars. So when you see the Toronto Blue Jays facing a possible US $500 million price tag to keep star Vladimir Guerrero you’re really talking about raising $750,000 million in CDN revenues to meet the demand. Multiply those jumps over a 25-man roster and you’re talking a huge jump in payroll— or being consigned to after-ran status.
While no one is about to hold a tag day for Toronto it will make the Jays’ job of competing in a division with the big-spending New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox that much harder. With a national market of almost 40 million now to exploit they still have resources. But will American players want to play in Canada during a hot trade war between the nations? Now that yahoos fed by a doltish CDN media have started booing the Star Spangled Banner in Ottawa and Vancouver before games do you think that will encourage American stars on teams there to stick around?
But the NHL is where the biggest losses will be seen. Already there have been concerns about the Jets.2 surviving in Winnipeg. Last week it was revealed that after years spent coming back from Covid revenue shortages, the NHL is going to raise its salary cap from today’s US $88 million to as much as an estimated US $115 million in three or four years. The news that players will no longer have escrow payments held back to compensate owners for revenue shortages was greeted with cheers by players and their agent.
The boost in the cap will likely mean that today’s US$14 million peak (Leon Draisaitl) will also advance to somewhere just beneath US$20 million a season. And while that figure is a few years off, teams will have to start negotiating today with their stars with that figure in mind if they wish to retain them.
The test case will be superstar Connor McDavid who is due for a new contract after 2025-26. For the small-market Edmonton Oilers that will mean creating a template that buys him out of estimated salary later by boosting his salary before the cap arrives at its peak. With Draisaitl already pulling down top dollar the Oilers’ resources will be stretched thin to accommodate McDavid— while still paying the rest of the roster.
Could the drop in the dollar produce another Gretzky-like trade for Edmonton when the Oilers were forced to dump the greatest scorer in NHL history to L.A. because his worth exceeded the Oilers’ ability to pay? We chronicle the trade in depth in our new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey.
The fate of hockey stars will be only a small piece of any future U.S. trade deals. But they will be highly visible to Canada’s hockey fans. Not being able to satisfy them is a political price no pelican wants to face. But given the current intransigence by Justin Trudeau scrambling to stay in office it is far from improbable.
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.
In case you missed it, the Hubris party has halted the business of Canada for three months in the heart of the biggest existential crisis since NAFTA. The reason? Justin Trudeau called timeout to allow banker/ green advocate Mark Carney to slide into his chair before the next election becomes Bull Run.
Who is Carney? In September Justin Trudeau appointed him a “special advisor” to the Liberals. He then asked for— and received— $10 B for Brookfield, the private hedge fund of which he was chairman, so that he might sprinkle it on the Green Agenda. There’s more, but this tells you why Libs think he’s ideal.
In his introduction to a nation that didn’t know Mark Carney was a solution to anything, Carney insisted that Canadians want new ideas, new energy, new purpose. (In his defence his opponent Chrystia Freeland is mumbling the same contrition.) And who were the architects of the malaise requiring such an overhaul?
The Liberals themselves. Okay, the NDP rates blame for polishing the Liberal apple in a minority government. But Canadians have long ago consigned Jagmeet Singh to a deserved obscurity. Yes, the denials choir at the Toronto Star and CBC are trying to harpoon Pierre Polievre for ruining the Parliament that Liberals prorogued. While the Flora MacDonald Marching Society cites Donald Trump’s tariffs for the crisis. Deny, deny, deny.
It’s not working. Consult the polls. Even the staunchest supporters of Canada’s self-appointed national party are fed up with PMJT and his legacy. In fact it is stunning to see how wobbly the Liberal platform is under Carney. All the massaged polls and handshakes with Olympic heroes on the Rideau Canal cannot disguise that their legacy issues are now DOA. As we wrote last week the challenges come on a many fronts.
Trump’s tariff challenge/ 51st state tease is the most public challenge— and the one the Liberals believe they can whipsaw to their favour. #OrangeManBad simply tore away the PMO’s artifice of postmodern Canada. By threatening tariffs and gleefully laughing about Canada joining America he exposed an entitled political elite unwilling to admit that the world has changed.
By stirring Canada to some united economic response against his audacious measures Trump has shown Canadians how little they have in common. Ontario and Quebec want Alberta to put on the hair shirt. Alberta wants Quebec to pay its fair share. etc. Trump’s new Commerce secretary says it would be an easy ask to avoid tariffs. But Trudeau/ Doug Ford would rather posture and preen. Canadians, after years of sitting in first-class but paying for economy, now find themselves exposed to the world. As we said in 2018, Canada is an ingrate nation living off Trump’s America.
The destruction of Liberal DEI legacy doesn’t stop with tariffs. The PMO pretends that they can still use the Climate inquisition to hammer Canadians. But Trump has moved the West away from the Al Gore/ King Charles doomsday consensus. By taking America out of the UN Net Zero scheme he’s produced a landslide of financial institutions and governments escaping the draconian conditions imposed by this once-mighty body. Trudeau’s precious climate supports are toppling almost as fast as Sir John A. statues.
Trump has forced the high and mighty in banking, investment and government— who’ve been wedded to these principals— to escape his climate wrath. Trump used the election to remind voters of deadlines for catastrophic weather that come and go with only elites getting rich. During the 2024 vote he heard from average people who no longer believe the Greta Thunberg countdown clock to ruination. And he said, Drill, Baby, Drill.
CO2-obsessed Canada, meanwhile, is still dithering on its commitment to what CBC and everyone in Parliament stubbornly call the “climate crisis”. Carney talks about moving away from the sacred tablets of climate change, but only to find a new green euphemism for draining the public purse.
Another sacred cow of Trudeau’s Disaster Run has been his stewardship of Covid 19— a talking point he brags about openly but whose Emergency Measures Act are condemned by the courts and public opinion. Again, Trudeau’s flank has been protected by purchased media and a smothering censorship program.
But now Alberta’s Covid Task Force has ripped the province’s actions in the two-plus years of virus, vaccine and vexation. The Davidson Report demonstrates how The Science was used to defend government overreach while health officials used faulty data to deceive the public about the reality of Covid. (The criticisms apply to the federal response just as easily.)
One example cited in the Task Force report was one we wrote about continuously from 2020-2023. Namely the media’s daily positive CPR tests that purported to show massive numbers of infected Canadians. The truth was 80 to 90 percent of the “results” were false positives or samples too small to be transmitted or make the carrier ill. Even when they knew in 2020 no one bothered to let citizens in on the scam.
Want more? Another sink hole beneath the Libs is the Rez Schools “murdered babies” libel they used to cast Canadians as genocidal. Trudeau sought to criminalize any doubt on their veracity. Turns out that the money allocated for exhumation of alleged graves of victims has turned up nothing. Instead the “$12M spent to find purported 215 children’s graves at an Indian Residential School was instead spent on publicists & consultants with no graves found to date. “
There’s more. Environment minister Stephen Gilbeault was found guilty of violating federal rules in siphoning $254 M to a company he owns. While Conservative MPs continue to call for the release of “green slush fund” documents, Trudeau continues to defend his minister by burying the records. Then there is the $187 B in infrastructure grants supervised by former Lib cabinet minister Catherine McKenna that is unaccounted for.
Wait, there’s more. On the celebrated immigration front nearly 50,000 international students failed to show up at their designated colleges and universities in Canada during March and April 2024, according to government data.; No one can trace them. And let’s not forget the government’s seeming impassivity to the crowds of pro-Hamas fanatics crowding Canadian streets each week calling fore the death of Canadian Jews and anyone else trying to stop the intifada.
We could go on, but this seems like weak sauce on which to launch a new leader of the Liberals. But they’re going to try. And with Singh’s flip-flop, now refusing to bring down the government, it will have a puncher’s chance in the Liberal heartland. Expect them to try stretching the mandate till the fall and later while spitting out more federal aid money, a la Covid, to compensate Canadians for this stupidity.
The only question then, who volunteers to bell the cat? Can you say Convoy.2?
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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