Bruce Dowbiggin
Dead-End Streets & Empty Graves: Faking The Past
The problem with history is that you can attach your name to passing fads— say, Ukraine flag emojis— and be considered one of the cool kids. For a while. But eventually truth catches up with you. (Just ask Joe Biden.) And if you cannot defend your attachment to banning Dundas Street or calling Canada genocidal you will eventually find yourself on the wrong side of history, mocked, disparaged and rightfully ignored by future generations.
If you are Stalin or Mao in such a bind you simply shoot everyone who points out your gross inaccuracies. But if you live in a less blood-soaked tyranny, you’d better be prepared to face your critics.
Which brings us to the virtuous folks at Toronto City Hall who want to remove the name of Scotsman Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, from the 23-kilometre stretch from Mississauga to Scarborough that bears his name. In the same rush of blood to the head that saw radicals change the name of Ryerson University to the Anodyne School of Nothingness, these crack researchers decided Dundas was an active proponent of slavery in the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries.
The proposal they’ve presented to Toronto City Council would cost (their estimate) $8.1 M to remove his name from the endless street. This at a time when the Gardiner Expressway is set to collapse. And city parks are filled with drug addicts and mental health patients. And getting a building permit is only slightly less difficult than the Egyptians creating the pyramids. Priorities!
But we digress. The cost to every person, business or church located on that span or to those doing business with, sending a parcel to or planning a transit trip on Dundas dwarfs that estimate. But Wokeness must be served. Dundas had tried to prevent the anti-slavery forces in England from banning the practice universal in the world at the time. Smart guys say so.
Now—saints preserve us— three former Toronto mayors beg to disagree. They’ve actually read the history of Dundas that the civil servants misrepresented, and they want new lefty mayor Olivia Chow to stop the Dundas Street purge. Turns out Dundas was a LEADER in ending slavery in the British empire, after all. Oops.
For media slappies— you know who you are— who embraced the demise of Dundas much as they embraced the defrocking of Egerton Ryerson, Joseph Brant and Sir John A. this creates whiplash. How to stay onside with the real history after going balls-deep on the slavery devil narrative?
The easy answer is to— look at that shiny object— refer to the handy list of other street names still to be banned by city hall. Yonge Street. Wellesley Street. Simcoe Street. Even Baby Point Road. Go hard on them. Sure, you’ll run out of tyrants and racists eventually, but by then everyone will have forgotten how you libeled Dundas and Sir John A.
A similar rethink is also underway in regards to the “Mass graves/ Genocidal Canada” story promoted by PMJT. You remember? Skippy clutching a teddy bear in a Kamloops cemetery that was rumored to contain the graves of children who met a bad end in the care of the Church or residential school? Then cancelling Canada Day and leaving flags at half mast for months. And telling the UN that Canada is genocidal, because x-rays showed what could have been dead babies underground. Or just rocks.
Forget that no parent of a Rez school child had ever reported a child missing or alleged murder or exorcism, the PM cast his lot with the murder meme. In several cases Trudeau was told by chiefs that the locals knew precisely who was buried in those graves. Cowessess First Nation band member Irene Andreas . “There is no ‘discovery’ of graves. We buried our dead with a proper funeral. Then we allowed them to Rest In Peace…To assume that foul play took place would be premature and unsupported… So please, people, do not make up stories about residential school children being put in unmarked graves. No such thing ever happened.”
Trudeau was unrepentant. It was Teddy bear or bust. As we wrote in June, the narrative was furthered by the absence of any exhumed graves. Critics— labelled as deniers— were forced to disprove the story. Former Indigenous Affairs Minister Marc Miller described as “ghouls” those who pointed out that residential school indigenous children died of the diseases of the day. As a few brave souls discovered, crossing Miller was a ticket to non-person status.
Until now. Turns out that Brandon University excavators examined a site under a Manitoba church identified as problematic by x-ray. The ground search cited 57 abnormalities. Their finding? Nope. Just rocks.
Which should be good news. Except if, like Trudeau’s chum Miller, you’re invested in Justin’s Genocidal narrative. Then it’s very bad. Pine Creek nation chief Derek Nepinak took great pains in announcing the discovery to stress, like Yosemite Sam, that I-don’t-know-how-they-done-it, but-I-know-they-done- it.
Nepinak’s preamble: “As a community we were preparing for more than one possible outcome, which meant we would prepare for the worst but hope for the best.” This suggested no remains was a positive. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/excavation-after-14-anomalies-detected-at-former-residential-school-site-found-no-evidence-of-graves-manitoba-chief
Guess again. “The results of our excavation under the church should not be deemed as conclusive of other ongoing searches and efforts to identify reflections from other community processes including other (ground-penetrating radar) initiatives… “This does not mark the end of our truth-finding project.”
No kidding. Except the very limited excavations done so far have revealed none of the alleged murdered children so desperately conjured up by the Trudeau media and the radicals in the Indigenous community. Barring forensic evidence we are left with stories from elders and the lurid tales at the reconciliation committee.
That standard may be fine for the Indigenous community, but in the outside world those journalists who described scenes of horror and Canada’s role in it should disappear for a while. Fat chance. That would include David Butt, a Toronto criminal lawyer writing in the Globe and Mail, claiming “The discovery of thousands of unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the sites of former residential schools…looks and smells like criminal activity.”
Activist firebrand Robert Jago said anyone questioning the validity of his own genocide allegations should be considered equivalent to “Holocaust denial” and punished as a hate-speech purveyor. And then there’s Trudeau cabinet hacks like Miller echoing The Boss.
So don’t expect a reckoning. There are truths, and then there are truths. As former CRTC vice chair Peter Menzies observed: “The one thing this process has made abundantly clear is that the interests of anyone outside their club are irrelevant to all inside it.”
Sign up today for Not The Public Broadcaster newsletters. Hot takes/ cool slants on sports and current affairs. Have the latest columns delivered to your mail box. Tell your friends to join, too. Always provocative, always independent. https://share.hsforms.com/16edbhhC3TTKg6jAaRyP7rActsj5
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. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new 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 http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Bruce Dowbiggin
Why Canada’s Elites Are Captives To The Kamala Narrative
“As he closes the election with rank racism, relentless unreality and authoritarian threats, Trump’s popularity among Canadian Conservatives is higher than ever. This seems like it could be a problem”.— Bruce Arthur, Toronto Star
A problem for whom, Bruce? It’s telling that while 50 percent of Americans see through Kamala Harris and the DEMs coup narrative as complete bushwah, probably 90 percent of Canadians– led by Arthur and the corporate media– lap up this condescending narrative. Their biggest fear remains that the populist revolt against authority in the U.S. might threaten Canada’s elite class. Like Toronto Star squishy columnists.
In the hermetically sealed media world of Canada, natives take their cues from CNN and MSNBC talking points both of which employ Canadians in highly visible roles. (Here’s expat Ali Velshi famously describing on NBC that the 2020 George Floyd riots that burned for weeks— destroying billions in damages while resulting in multipole deaths— as “generally peaceful”
The narratives of Russiagate, drinking bleach, “fine people” to Hunter Biden’s laptop— long ago debunked down south— are still approved wisdom in Canada’s chattering class. Especially if America’s conflagration election can be used to demonstrate the good sense and judgment of Canada’s managerial and media class.
The northern pecksniffs have loads of insanity to work with as Trump seemingly edges ahead in polls. There’s the brouhaha over a shock comedian at a Trump rally calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage”. Unhinged outgoing POTUS Biden then called GOP voters “garbage”. So Trump made an appearance as a garbage man, to the shrieking disapproval of CBS News chief anchor Nora O’Donnell.
Then there’s Whoopi Goldberg on The View predicting Trump will “break up interracial marriages and redistribute the white spouses: “He’s going to deport and you, put the white guy with someone else… The man is out there!” Forget that Trump did nothing of the sort when he was president from 2016-2020. It’s every hysteric for himself as Nov. 5 looms. Their biggest fear? Those who vilified Trump the past decade will be out of the power loop for at least four years— or longer if VP candidate J.D. Vance extends the Trump revolution. It’s panic time.
Picked up on by those fearing their place in the Canadian power grid might fall next. The disdainful cheers from Arthur and Andrew Coyne and the CBC bien pensants at each thrust of Trump-as-Nazi echo through a press corps which now fawns over Mark Carney, the bespoke banker/ heir apparent to Trudeau. They grasp at each anti-Trump narrative like starving men in the desert.
It’s 1990s redux in Ottawa as think-tank Aristotles work to reinforce their status quo. While a public that has CPC ahead by 20 points in the polls demands change, the Liberal/ NDP cabal want that old-time political religion of insider baseball Ottawa-style. Here’s NDP attack bot Kathleen Monk insisting that PM-in-waiting Pierre Poilievre get security clearance on the Chinese election interference case so that he might better be skewered for not telling Canadians the truth included in them about how their elections are being subverted by the Chinese.
No one drawing a Liberal support cheque worries aloud that Trudeau knows the truth contained in this files, that it’s injurious to him and the NDPs, that Canadians need to know the names of MPs and senators taking bribes, why a police request sat on a minister’s desk for 54 days unopened. It’s Poilievre/ Trump who’s untrustworthy. It’s a strategy that the Libs and NDP pray Poilievre will fall for. Pierre’s sin is he doesn’t believe the public should depend on government for everything. That’s heresy in Canada’s Family Compact, and so the Trump comparisons.
The anti-Trump vendetta also means that Canadians have decided that Elon Musk, the pre-eminent genius of the 21st century— is now Josef Goebbels to Trump’s Hitler. As we wrote recently “on his way to immortality Elon Musk made one critical mistake: purchasing the website Twitter, now re-branded as X. In doing so he fired 90 percent of the previous staff and instituted a policy of open speech for the Right on the site— starting with restoring Donald Trump’s account. Which put Musk on the Hit List for leftist plutocrats.”
So now the sneering scribes are going after him, too, in spite of his Canadian citizenship. This is no small thing as Canadians reflexively grab at any shred of CanCon elsewhere. Canadian politics under the Liberals has become a vedette exercise since Pierre Trudeau started dating Funny Girl Barbra Streisand. In the U.S. outsiders to the political system are rare. Much of the pearl clutching about Trump results from his not being manipulated by the byzantine American political universe.
In cases such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, the nominees were moulded by the machine to highlight their acceptability. Ronald Reagan excepted, the insider track is the preferred route to a nomination in either party. Biden personified lifelong membership in the insiders club. As did John Kerry, Mitt Romney, Al Gore, John McCain, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Gerald Ford, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and so on.
But in Canada, the Liberal party in particular now disdains the tried-and-true. After decades of zero-charisma PMs such as Mackenzie King, Louis St. Laurent and Mike Pearson, the Grits went ga-ga for the international flair of PET. His irreverence and impertinence on the world stage was catnip to Liberals as the 1960s cultural revolution shook up staid Canada. Since then the blue print has listed more toward “star” candidates from outside the party, such as Michael Ignatieff, Stephane Dion, Justin Trudeau and now Mark Carney.
Trudeau II is the epitome of the vedette candidate, bathed by the glow of U.S. magazines and slathering leftists in Europe. Liberals felt vital as long as the trust-fund PM got props from outside, such as when WEF honcho Klaus Schwab outed Skippy as one of his lieutenants. Trump, the antithesis of the Dauphin, is a blustery carny riding the wings of populist outrage. His crass, bumptious style personally offends the sensibilities of Toronto Star scribblers and CBC wind therapists.
The clincher for Canadians is the overwhelming Kamala love from the Hollywood crowd. Virtually every high-profile actor/ singer/ writer has embraced the woman who was parachuted into the nomination in a coup— even as the glitterati raved about anti-democratic Trump. From Beyoncé to Bilie Eilish to Bruce Springsteen, their support has been a winner in Canada’s fangirl/ fanboy culture.
So as we head to next Tuesday’s end to the election marathon in America, the finger-wagging will increase as Canadians try to elevate themselves above a nation that, for all its faults, has actually staged a policy choice. Meanwhile in Canada, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh once again embraces his coalition with a drowning Trudeau for another year.
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.
Bruce Dowbiggin
Musk Win: How Elon’s Heel Turn Has Driven The Left Insane
It’s not often that we can watch the workings of our modern world with childlike glee. But glee might be the best word to describe the feelings of most as they watched the stunning safe return of the booster rocket from Starship X. The video showed how the arms of the Starship X tower grabbed the rocket from out of thin air as it slowly descended to earth, gently place it safely back on the launch pad.
In normal times the person who created such a company would be hailed as the pinnacle of human potential. Add in that he has also created revolutionary electric cars and Starlink satellite systems and the PayPal network and you’d probably nominate the South African/ Canadian in question as a permanent Nobel winner. He’s among the world’s richest people as a result.
But on his way to immortality Elon Musk made one critical mistake: purchasing the website Twitter, now re-branded as X. In doing so he fired 90 percent of the previous staff and instituted a policy of open speech for the Right on the site— starting with restoring Donald Trump’s account. Which put Musk on the Hit List for leftist plutocrats.
How? He hired prominent independent journalists such as Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberg and Matt Taibbi to show that Twitter, along with Facebook and other prominent social media sites, had been paid to censor opponents at the behest of the Joe Biden campaign during the 2020 election. He started posting about the disturbing contrast of America’s voting system (results up to three weeks after election) compared to Argentina (6.6 hours). He pointed out that America is broke, saying things like “”The reason why I’m involved in politics this time, is because this time it’s a fork in the road. I think we’re doomed if Trump doesn’t win, so he’s gotta win.”.
From worshipful respect, Musk was suddenly met with scorn, derision and, in Europe, plans to censor him permanently. Brazil shut down X completely. British intelligence targeted his association with Trump. The radical Left in the U.S., accustomed to its version of truth, suddenly decided that Musk was in line with Nazis and the Far Right.
As blogger Mike Benz notes, the deep state targeted him for not playing along. “CCDH — whose explicit written goal is to “Kill Musk’s Twitter” — not only has its Chairman come from NATO’s Atlantic Council, its former Comms chief was a CIA operative who worked extensively in NATO intelligence ops… CCDH’s former Head of Communications is a self-described “CIA operative” in her own Twitter bio (!!) with an extensive history of NATO operations: ‘Covert operations, intelligence & disinformation’”
While admitting that he’ll likely be in jail within six months of Kamala Harris winning the presidency, Musk is unfazed. Here’s fired CNN talking head Don Lemon challenging— and losing— on Musk’s commitment to free speech. But Musk’s deft debating didn’t discourage the purchased media of the left from trying some more.
Here’s Vanity Fair excoriating Musk for veering from their catechism. Here is reliably lunatic NBC News saying Musk is— gasp— against DEI. For good measure here’s Reuters giving an airing of former Twitter employees grievances against Musk. Topped by president Joe Biden’s demand to “Politically, lock him up — lock him out, that’s what we’ve got to do,” said even as he president’s Justice Department was in fact trying to jail Mr. Trump literally.
When he realized that the Left was using him as a piñata Musk responded to the onslaught by making an alliance with former president Donald Trump, the Beelzebub of Woke folk and the bureaucrat’s nightmare. Because Trump, the braggart, was at least in favour of free speech for other braggarts, Musk agreed to join his team after the election as Efficiency Czar for government.
Musk began saying things like he’d reduce the approximately 340 agencies in the U.S. federal government to just 90. He also questioned the usefulness of most people in the DC bubble. He began asking why the government’s $42 B plan for rural internet, awash in delay and debt, shouldn’t be shelved for his Starlink system which already serves customers at a fraction of Kamala Harris’ white elephant.
While he was at it, Musk also eviscerated the DEMs pet cause of border reform. “If given 4 more years to do it, the big govt machine will legalize vast numbers of illegals, making all swing states permanently deep blue, just like they did with California. Every major Democrat politician has stated that their goal is to legalize all illegals. Believe them.
If you thought January 6, 2021, was a shock to Washington’s privilege, a Musk efficiency regime— combined with RFK Jr taking on the healthcare industry— will be tantamount to setting off a thermo-nuclear device beneath the Senate lunchroom. Democrats and the trained hamsters of the GOP establishment swore a fatwa on a guy whom they’d venerated not long ago.
Here’s the New York Times, party organ of the DNC, on Musk’s Efficiency commission. “That would essentially give the world’s richest man and a major government contractor the power to regulate the regulators who hold sway over his companies, amounting to a potentially enormous conflict of interest.” Yahoo calls him a threat to national security because something something something. MSNBC, the TV voice of Woke Washington, declarded that Musk is using his power to sue his critics into silence.
But such is the temperature of the DEI Left as it faces imminent destruction in the 2024 election. Having rationalized two assassination attempts on Trump they now nurse snuff fantasies about eliminating Musk the Menace. As legal scholar Jonathan Hurley writes, “It is all part of Musk mania and the need to break the only executive who has defied the anti-free speech movement.”
You can measure their panic by the employment of DEMs superstars like Barack and Michelle Obama and the odious Clintons. While the obsequious Obama laments division in the body politic, Kamala Harris states: “Trump is literally Hitler and he will use the military to kill US citizens.”
Obama, who institutionalized the Racism® industry upon his winning the presidency, is accusing Trump and Musk of… you guessed it… racism for dividing Americans. From Henry Louis Gates to struggle sessions in the military to embracing race hustlers with ankle bracelets in the White House, Obama guaranteed the George Floyd America as it heads to the polls on November 5. Before Musk bought Twitter, he got away with it all, But a Musk X has exposed the glib Obama as a petty Marxist tyrant.
That a transitional figure such as Musk is being sacrificed to the altar of Woke politics is, regrettably, no surprise in these times. Which makes it no less reprehensible. The Obama motto regarding enemies is “No one gets out alive”. Perhaps Musk should heed A.E. Houseman who observed, “smart lad to slip betimes away from fields where glory does not stay. For early though the laurel goes, it withers sooner than the rose.”
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.
-
Alberta2 days ago
Heavy-duty truckers welcome new ‘natural gas highway’ in Alberta
-
Alberta2 days ago
Alberta Bill of Rights Amendment, Bill 24 – Stronger protections for personal rights
-
Business1 day ago
Premiers fight to lower gas taxes as Trudeau hikes pump costs
-
Economy2 days ago
Gas prices plummet in BC thanks to TMX pipeline expansion
-
Alberta2 days ago
Another Blow To The Carbon Tax
-
MAiD2 days ago
Quebec set to take euthanasia requests in advance, violating federal law
-
Economy2 days ago
One Solution to Canada’s Housing Crisis: Move. Toronto loses nearly half million people to more affordable locations
-
Bruce Dowbiggin2 days ago
Why Canada’s Elites Are Captives To The Kamala Narrative