Bruce Dowbiggin
Grave Mistake: Blame The Trudeaus, Not Sir John A.
Pop Quiz: Since the 2021 Residential schools “secret burials” hysteria allowed prime minister Justin Trudeau to declare Canada a genocidal state, how many of the graves in question have been exhumed? Examined, even, to judge the merits of the wild claims?
The answer to that would appear to be zero. Because they know what will be found. “There is no recorded case of any indigenous parent claiming that their child had disappeared after being enrolled in a residential school. Not one police report, or historical records, of any of these tales from the crypt ever occurring,” writes Brian Giesbrecht.
Which didn’t prevent Trudeau’s grotesque teddy-bear photo op in a former residential cemetery. Nor his lowering of the Canadian flag for months to draw attention to murders and abuse he has never proved—or even bothered to prove. Nor his libelling the nation he leads before the world community. (Nor firing the first Indigenous Justice Minister, Jodie Wilson Raybould, for trying to protect justice from the political needs of the PMO.)
While the federal government, in a spasm of settler guilt, set aside $320 million to indigenous nations to find more evidence of a horrific crime, the dead remain undisturbed in their graves. If only we could say the same for the truth over allegations that went across the globe about the church-run residential schools.
These “truths” are behind the recent hounding of former Mount Royal University professor Frances Widdowson at University of Lethbridge over her claims that most, in not all, the allegations of priests murdering residential kids or being used for sado-masochistic purposes had no basis in fact. Widdowson lost her job for questioning the Trudeau catechism of white guilt on the Prairies.
Widdowson is one of the people Indigenous Affairs Minister Marc Miller described as “ghouls” for pointing out that residential school indigenous children died of the diseases of the day— in particular tuberculosis. Even more children were dying of TB on the reserves where they came from. (As we pointed out here ) If residential schools had never existed these children would, sadly, still have died.
Widdowson is in good company. In the white-guilt frenzy unleashed by Trudeau many of the founding figures of the nation have been denounced, their statues toppled, their names removed from schools. None worse than Sir John A, Macdonald, the first prime minister of the nation. While radicals doused his image in fake blood, it is an uncomfortable truth that, had Macdonald not been a visionary about the nation and its Indian tribes, the Plains Indians would not exist today.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, poses for a selfie with an elder after receiving a ceremonial headdress while visiting the Tsuut’ina First Nation near Calgary, Alta., Friday, March 4, 2016.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
In a time of economic frugality Macdonald’s government paid the entire cost of inoculating the Plains population for TB, against which they had no immunity. It is no exaggeration to say that were it not for this policy there would be few or no Indigenous Plains peoples for Trudeau to use as political props.
As Giesbrecht explains here Macdonald was instrumental on a number of fronts that saved the population.“Canada’s Indians escaped the bloody fate of the American Indians and their Trail of Tears,” writes Giesbrecht. “Macdonald was justly proud of this accomplishment.”
While the U.S. Seventh Cavalry was hunting down its native population on horseback, Macdonald was concluding treaties that ended the bloody inter-tribe wars between Plains Indians in the West. He tossed the rotgut whiskey purveyors exploiting Indians south of the border. That guaranteed the natives safety from U.S. imperialism by extending the railway from coast to coast, installing the Crown, not Washington, as their partner in treaties. He also saved them from the starvation brought on from the extinction of the buffalo herds.
Most of all, Macdonald saw education, not genocide, as the saviour of natives in Canada. When the concept of building conventional day schools for them failed he proposed the idea of boarding schools where native children could be educated and, hopefully, become Christian. As Giesbrecht notes, “providing education to Indian children was a treaty obligation demanded by the Indians chiefs, and gratefully granted by the federal government. The numbered treaties included provisions that schools would be built on reserves if requested, and all of the chiefs made that request.”
Further, attendance at the schools was voluntary until about 1920. Under Macdonald parents had to agree to send their children. The government would accept the full cost of the program and the treatments of disease that so many of the children brought with them to the schools. For this and many other policies towards Indians the population of the Plains nations has increased at least tenfold since his time.
But Macdonald’s statue at Queens Park in Toronto must be boarded up to protect it from the radicals stoked by Trudeau’s alleged infamy.
Sadly, another pioneer of education in Canada was not so fortunate. Egerton Ryerson’s name was stricken from the eponymous university when the Reign of Error thugs decided that his participation in starting free live-in education for natives was tantamount to genocide. Despite the fact this proponent of free education for all died before residential schools were in practice, his statue in Toronto was toppled. Whatever happened at the schools after his death in 1884 cannot diminish his desire to educate the native peoples of Ontario and establish universal access to education in Canada.
Guess which Canadian political leader is not having his statue toppled, his likeness removed from schools and his reputation sullied? That would be Justin’s daddy Pierre Trudeau. As PM in 1968 he proposed in a white paper to eliminate native status and turn indigenous people into ordinary Canadians, thereby abrogating all the treaties they’d signed in good faith with the Crown.
With his fellow Liberal cabinet member (and later PM) Jean Chretien, Pierre Trudeau set back native rights by advocating for assimilation when what native leaders wanted was self government under the treaties they’d signed with the Crown. When forced to finally withdraw the white paper, PET petulantly said, “We’ll keep them in the ghetto as long as they want.” In 1973, the Canadian Supreme Court validated those treaties.
Oh, from 1969 until 1978, control and maintenance of residential schools was in the hands the federal government of Canada. The Liberal Party prime minister throughout this eleven-year period ? Pierre Trudeau. Funnily, his son has not made an issue of his father’s role in the bureaucratic mess by calling him a genocidal leader.” Wonder why?
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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
“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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