A Decade Later, The Picture That Launched A Thousand Ships To The West

Nine years after September 2, 2015 the image is still searing. A little Syrian boy in shorts and a t-shirt washed up on a Turkish beach after his father’s boat capsized during a panicked escape from the civil war in their country. If you had a shred of humanity you probably resolved to do something about it. You vowed to help these desperate people.

So you unwittingly elected radicals and social engineers to the highest offices in the nations, trusting that their honeyed words about Aylan Kurdi’s sacrifice would not go to waste. What you didn’t know is your tears for a tiny lad would be re-purposed by radicals into an immigrant culture washing over Western culture. Is it correlation or causation? At this point it doesn’t matter.

There are many factors at play, but you could do worse than look at that dead boy as Patient One in the fever gripping the elites of Canada, the U.S. and the EU. While you can argue about previous conditions in Syria and the Middle East, the photo is Day One in the obliteration of Western traditional society.

It certainly contributed to the downfall of PM Stephen Harper, who was holding his own in the 2015 federal election until the Syrian war spit out that desperate family, the family that was taken down by the waves. Looking to be taken seriously in his battle for PM, Justin Trudeau used the Syrian crisis to flail Harper’s cold-hearted approach to the refugees.

For a PM whose warmth was never a strong point, Trudeau’s exploitation of the drowned little boy hit with the Liberal’s burgeoning base of white suburban women (and men who want to sleep with them). As we wrote in September of 2015: “If the campaign has had a moment where blood pressure crested, even briefly, it was in the visceral reaction to the drowned Syrian boy. The heartbreaking photo provoked an authentically Canadian dismay and a completely disproportionate response to the gravity of his desperate personal quest.

Even flinty Post columnist Christie Blatchford was advocating open borders to assuage first-world guilt over the Syrian mess.” Before you could say Joe Biden/ Kamala Harris, the doors to Europe and North America were indiscriminately opened to penniless refugees, to the worst criminals the third world produces, to the most extreme Marxist revolutionaries, to climate-change fanatics. The pillars of western thought, built over two thousand years, are disintegrating as those immigrants (legal or otherwise) clog the streets with the politics and religions they supposedly left behind.

When a newly-elected Donald Trump sought in 2017 to limit immigration from nations with radical politics he was met with a banshee wail from MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times. Still smarting from Trump’s election they branded him a racist, a stain that follows him till today.

Making it doubly exasperating was the fact that these interlopers were not what the public had voted for. A succession of progressive politicians such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh repurposed a geopolitical tragedy, diluting the traditional population with immigrants who neither care for nor respect their adopted homes. (Hands up anyone who’s heard these demonstrators with a good word about Canada or the U.S.)

The impact of this seemingly virtuous immigration touches every corner of Western societies. Having open borders is misconstrued as being open minded. It was argued again in the U.S. vice presidential debate on Oct. 1 with Democrat Tim Walz and his CBS News allies bizarrely insisting that the newcomers haven’t made housing more expensive. GOP nominee J.D. Vance countered that the surge of buyers was a supply/ demand driver for home-price inflation. The fact this was even debatable underscores how deep the rot has become.

From housing to education to healthcare, the ballooning of Canada’s population from 35 million to 40 million ignores the reality that makes citizens feel like strangers in their own land. While the moribund Liberal/ NDP axis and their paid media still embrace the flood of illegal aliens, polls show that most Canadians agree with the CPC’s stand that the saturation point was surpassed a long time ago.

The impact was similar in Europe where the attempts to staunch the flow of refugees looking for a toehold in the generous EU turned into a raging flood. Anyone asking to slow down the process was accused of wanting more Aylan Kurdis. Landing on all manner of craft in southern Europe the refugees made their way north to the embrace of health benefits and income guarantees. By the end of the decade all the major cities in the EU were penetrated by ghettos of aliens seeking to recreate their previous Damascus home in Stockholm or Paris or Brussels.

The clash of cultures produced horrific results that those who’d invited the strangers into their homes were reluctant to admit. Stories of grooming white girls in Bradford, England, or attacking outsiders who wandered into Malmo, Sweden, were dismissed and, now, punished by new anti-hate legislation. Those who cared in 2015 are now finally realizing the impact of using Aylun Kurdi to satisfy their liberal guilt has been a disaster for their culture.

It is said that a week is a long time in politics. In this case a decade has been more than enough to bring Western Civilization to its knees.

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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Bruce Dowbiggin

www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Award-winning Author and Broadcaster Bruce Dowbiggin's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience . He is currently the editor and publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster website and is also a contributor to SiriusXM Canada Talks. His new book Cap In Hand was released in the fall of 2018. Bruce's career has included successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster for his work with CBC-TV, Mr. Dowbiggin is also the best-selling author of "Money Players" (finalist for the 2004 National Business Book Award) and two new books-- Ice Storm: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Vancouver Canucks Team Ever for Greystone Press and Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion for Random House. His ground-breaking investigations into the life and times of Alan Eagleson led to his selection as the winner of the Gemini for Canada's top sportscaster in 1993 and again in 1996. This work earned him the reputation as one of Canada's top investigative journalists in any field. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013) where his incisive style and wit on sports media and business won him many readers.

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A Decade Later, The Picture That Launched A Thousand Ships To The West

Bruce Dowbiggin / 4 days ago

Rogers Buys Out Bell In MLSE Shakeup: What Does It Mean For Fans?

Bruce Dowbiggin / 1 week ago

Trudeau Unrepentant: Sorry Seems to Be The Hardest Word

Bruce Dowbiggin

Rogers Buys Out Bell In MLSE Shakeup: What Does It Mean For Fans?

Published on October 1, 2024

Bruce Dowbiggin

There is an old joke that Canada has two seasons. Summer. And the months when the Toronto Maple Leafs lead the nightly Canadian sports networks. Perhaps it’s not that bad, but for those who don’t live in southern Ontario it often feels that way.

The reason, some said, for this Buds obsession was that both TSN and Rogers Sportsnet were part owners of the team through Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, a business giant created in 2011 when the warring telcos took equal percentage shares in MLSE (Larry Tanenebaum took the final 25 percent, now 20 percent after selling a share to The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System.)

At the time the merger of Bell (TSN) and Sportsnet (Rogers) was compared to Twitter and Facebook deciding to partner. Such was the rivalry that many predicted it wouldn’t last. But it did—if you don’t include Stanley Cups. Until this past week when it was announced that, if approved, Rogers will buy out Bell’s stake in MLSE, leaving it with 75 percent ownership. The process should close next year.

Rogers also has an option to buy out Tanenbaum next year, giving it complete control of the Leafs, Raptors, Argos (CFL), Toronto FC (MLS) and Toronto’s ScotiaBank Centre, among other baubles. (The new Toronto WNBA team is owned by Tannenbaum and several partners.)

Why the deal? Why now? Despite the huge national audience for the NHL, NBA and MLB, the component parts are said to be underperforming in a time when equity in sports franchises is soaring. Rogers’ national NHL TV contract is a significant drain on revenues. The Blue Jays’ flopping in the standings has left them a “stranded money-losing team” whose value isn’t fully reflected within Rogers. The Raptors are now also-rans.

Bell’s debt rating was downgraded to one notch above junk in August by Moody’s Investors Service. While not to the point of selling pencils there’s a thought that packaged as a group under one owner, the teams will now be more lucrative and, possibly, lead to an IPO in the future.

What does it mean for sports fans? For now, not much change. TSN is getting a 20-year agreement to get 50 percent of the regular-season Leafs and Raptors games. So it will have an NHL/ NBA presence until April. (It also has regional Montreal Canadiens rights.) TSN also has a strong NFL, tennis and golf presence. Rogers will have the existing property rights for the NHL playoffs as well as regional interests in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa. Plus its existing monopoly on the Blue Jays broadcasts.

Bell is reportedly interested in cutting its property inventory and concentrating on “5G, cloud and enterprise solutions”. TSN says it remains the prime media backer of the CFL, even though it no longer has an ownership position. Mediocre Toronto FC remain an add-on with a niche audience. As NHL national rights holder, Sportsnet (using CBC as a cutout) will still be the major outlet for postseason hockey. It’s also the exclusive home of the Blue Jays and the MLB postseason.

What does it mean in business terms? Despite the apparent cordiality of the deal, there is a fly in the ointment should digital companies such as Amazon, Prime, Apple, YouTube or Disney decide to bid on the primo national NHL broadcast rights packages. Already big leagues such as NFL, MLB and NBA have hived off packages to these outfits. Could they drive the price past Rogers’ comfort zone?

All this begs the question of what happens to the Raptors, Argos and Toronto FC which have fallen from their hip status of years prior. It’s well known that Rogers execs aren’t fond of Raptors president/ GM Masai Ujiri. Will they get the love in the C suite to bid on the top basketball contracts? Ditto Toronto FC, a pet project of Tanenbaum’s. It competes nationally with other Canadian teams. Will it have an ally in the front office?

If there is an ally it will have to be the peripatetic new CEO Keith Pelley who returns to Canada from running the European PGA Tour after stints running TSN, Rogers Sportsnet, the 2010 Winter Olympics and the Toronto Argos. Pelley knows all the broadcast and sports players firsthand from his prior gigs. He’s seen as an innovator but he also has good friends in the traditional sports leagues.

The one certainty is that cable and satellite packages will not decrease in price. Nor will ticket prices as pro sports continues to stretch the boundaries on how much people will pay for tickets (still a key revenue for NHL owners). And, for those wondering, the chances of leading newscasts with a Maple Leafs practice will be remain very strong for the future.

Bruce Dowbiggin

Trudeau Unrepentant: Sorry Seems to Be The Hardest Word

Published on September 26, 2024

Bruce Dowbiggin

There’s a grim irony in seeing Justin Trudeau leave the country to find people still willing to buy his act. But find them he did in the U.S. media capital of New York where flash-frozen spares like Stephen Colbert or the ladies of The View are still re-living the 2016 presidential election.

Could it be that Justin’s real constituency all along has been these voidoids of Wokeness, not Canadians? Apparently so, judging from the cringeworthy interaction between Canada’s defrocked PM and Colbert. Like mammoths in a tar pit, fatuous Trudeau and fawning Colbert thrashed around in their irrelevance, steering clear of what will be a historic electoral drubbing of Mr. Happy Ways. It’s amazing Colbert didn’t hold Trudeau’s hand during the lovefest.

Colbert’s staff might have come up with multiple lines of questioning on why the former GQ squish is now reviled north of the border. Instead the two re-heated 2015 talking points from when Skippy was elected and Hillary was throwing away the 2016 election to Trump.

There were multiple softballs for a smirking Trudeau, but the PM’s entire detachment from reality could be summed up by a healthcare question pitched by Colbert. (Americans love the Canadian healthcare myth the way Kamala loves a suburban lawn). Trudeau was asked to reflect on the U.S. alternative.

“It would be a lot easier if you guys had universal health care,” he riposted. The self-satisfied grin on Trudeau’s face told us he knows he was among friends in the CBS TV studio. Colbert’s audience of midwits slapped their flippers after Trudeau inserted himself in the current American presidential election. As his Papa once said during the October Crisis: “There’s a lot of bleeding hearts around who don’t like to see people with helmets and guns,” Trudeau remarked jauntily. “All I can say is, go on and bleed…”

Anyone with a shred of journalistic integrity might have replied, “This year, Canadian patients faced a median wait of 27.7 weeks for medically necessary treatment from a specialist after being referred by a general practitioner. That’s over six months—the longest ever recorded. It’s a slight increase from last year’s median wait—and a 198 percent increase from the 9.3-week median wait that patients faced in 1993, the year that Fraser Institute began tracking wait times. But let’s accept it as received that Colbert and the Kamala left are not given to intellectual rigour.

In his new persona as Michael Scott from The Office, Trudeau is the only guy not in on the joke he’s become while wielding power and teddy bears. (Dunning Kruger Effect states that some people are too stupid to know they’re stupid.) Politics can have that effect on those who take themselves just a little too seriously like (checks notes) Justin Trudeau. But Skippy has this syndrome to the Nth degree.

Trudeau makes a convenient avatar for the entire managerial class that sins greatly but uses its privilege to avoid accountability. Watching him slough off the poor clods he represents as PM, Trudeau is as stand-in for every politician and Blob creature who employed, to use one example, Covid to trample all that’s sacred in society without ever having to say sorry.

Sorry for what? 2023 meta-analysis of 40 high-quality studies shows that, despite the apocalyptic predictions off the elites, COVID death rate in 2020 for people younger than 70 was 0.07%. That’s 1-in-1,500. The death rate from COVID for those aged 0-19 years was 0.0003%. That’s 1-in-333,333. This is not a pandemic.

Still, while Skippy hid in the Rideau cottage, federal and provincial health officials churned out specious daily statistics on “positive cases” as justification to shut drown schools, work places and even the beaches. The social cost of grandparents dying alone and children denied schooling was incalculable. When Trump said the death rate from COVID was lower than 3.4 percent, the media angrily accused him of “misinformation.”

When the initial hysteria abated, bully boy Trudeau turned to vaccines to whip the herd. He removed the civil and financial rights of dissenters, incarcerating them in hotels. His followers actively talked of isolating vaccine deniers to work camps while denying them healthcare. When truckers objected he sent in the police on horseback. Because, as Naomi Klein bragged, events like the covid lockdowns are a Once-in-a-Century Chance to Make Our World More Equitable.

In this theatre of the grotesque Trudeau has become the epitome of the Ugly Canadian. As we wrote in the fall of 2015. “The scold impulse is never far from the Canadian id as we stare balefully south at the Excited States. In Canada it’s not so important that we have things such as single-payer health care and non-gun culture as that Americans don’t have them.

Trudeau represents that most vile class of Canadian, those who leap to print to disparage their nation in front of the world. Citing research (as yet unpublished) on attitudes in the Balkans, French Polynesia and Equatorial Guinea toward Canada, we are told that Canada’s reputation as a noble, compassionate nation is now in tatters. In Boy Trudeau’s Gatling-gun delivery, the government’s refusal to bend to the UN secretary general’s dictates has made us a travishamockery in the league of nations. See if Robert Redford ever comes here again.

This is always a rich vein to mine In Canadian politics. In a land that thinks Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, lamenting Canada’s fallen status is considered a political kill shot by the media.” Trudeau embraces the model.

It’s hard to square his unapologetic tough guy with the obsequious Trudeau of the Colbert show. But he knows that as long as there are pandering cretins such as Colbert he doesn’t have to apologize for causing citizens for not taking a for-profit experimental product with manufacturer immunity. His future is assured. Were that Canadians’ futures looked as rosy.