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Bruce Dowbiggin

Usual Suspects 2021: The Year of Fear

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Nuclear inferno is so out for Doomsday fans. Plague is in. In the second year of the Covid Conflagration flammable object (virus) met accelerant (media fear mongering). In the words of researcher/ author Heather Mac donald? “The media want you to believe that everyone around you is scared out of his mind, and thus you should be, too.”

It worked. Catatonia is king. Usual Suspects monitored the media-generated hysteria in 2021. Here’s what we saw from January to December:

Shock To The System: Mr. Smith Comes To Washington “ I’ve said this before. The Left brought Trump on themselves when they treated anodyne Mitch Romney like an axe murderer in 2012.  It was a turning point for many on the Right to get a candidate who’d fight back against progressives. They’d have accepted any number of GOP figures who’d espouse their cause. Only Trump was willing to talk honestly about immigration, the eternal bureaucracy and captive media. So he got the job by default.”

The Reset Reach: Trudeau Takes Aim At Your Retirement Savings “Shareholder value will be ditched and feel-good activism will take its place as the central force driving society… The end goal of the financial flip is social equity. Not social equality. (That’s yesterday’s leftist love child.) Social equality meant equal opportunity. Social equity means equality of outcome ie. everyone gets a kewpie doll. Former Obama zealot and now Ambassador the the UN, Susan Rice thinks it’s Job One for the new administration.”

The Descent Of Dissent: Why The Chicago 7 Would Be Appalled. “But the Democratic Party of 2021 has morphed from brave to slave, dedicated to intellectual conformity, not contrary opinions. Gone are the civil libertarians like (William) Kunstler. In their place are AOC and her brigades of SJWs purveying hate-speech laws and attacking deniers of the “true climate religion”. First amendment rights have been replaced by cancel-culture indictments. “

The Great Deception: How Health Elites Blame the Public For Their Failures “In short, have we created a nation of Howie Mandels, germaphobes who cannot touch others, who eschew public venues and shared spaces at all costs? Having roused the fear of sickness in these children will we ever be able to put the toothpaste back in the healthcare tube?”

Media To Biden: We’ve Got Your Back “If you want to know just how insane your world is going to be in five years, enrol in a liberal-arts faculty today. It’s the coming attractions of the authoritarian class looking to ruin your life. Everything from reparations to gender bingo is tried out there first. Just so you won’t be surprised when they target you for re-education.”

Too Cool For School Is No Joking Matter. “Everyone will have their own opinion about the death of humour, but for us, it was probably the decision  by Canadian A&W restaurants— previously best known for root beer—  that a hamburger was no longer a steaming combination of bun, salt and pickle. No, the chain decided that their burgers now constitute a virtue experience. Their commercial brand careened from a goofy comedian cracking jokes with a bear to the same actor interviewing teenagers about hormones in beef.”

From Foaming Beer To QuExit To C10: It’s No Longer Your Parents’ Canada “Need a single example of how Canada has changed? Observe the “cold one after a run” froth raised by progressive zanies on social media over CPC leader Erin O’Toole’s tweet that his wife gave him beer after a run. Even people as docile as my old media colleague Evan Solomon of CTV wondered aloud about the sexism of this gesture. That was one of the milder outbursts.”

Mesley + 1 Year: The Snitches And Snobs Have Won “Everything is identity politics. Try getting a white male bank president on the Corp or TVO these days. Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than have an inappropriate political messenger soil the lineup sheet dominated by the downtown Toronto aristocracy. Most alarming is that the Canadian media, culture and government are all located there, imposing their tortured worldview on the nation.”

Breaking Faith: When Liberals Realize They’ve Been Useful Idiots. “This is not a conspiracy,” John Stewart said about the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. “The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird!… There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania, what do you think happened? I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel made it with a cocoa bean. Or it’s the fucking chocolate factory!”

The Veneration Of St. Catherine The Martyred By Her Friends In The Press. “The alleged Liberal “feminist” stood mute while her male boss publicly humiliated and fired Wilson Raybould and Jane Philpott from the cabinet. She protected her own jet-setting climate sinecure by biting her tongue on a fellow woman. There were no CBC “barrage of online hate” or  “target of sexist attacks” lick jobs for Raybould. Just female cabinet ministers calling her a grifter for defying Skippy the Wonder PM.’

How Michelle Obama and Corporate HR Turned Wall Street Into Woke Street “Michelle Obama led the HR takeover of corporate America, and no CEO is now willing to oppose that tide. Enjoy your guilt.”

Zero Covid Is Not An Achievable Goal “The Covid fear crowd has no intention of surrendering  easily— or admitting the terrible damage they’ve inflicted by their draconian societal controls.  All because they won’t answer a simple question: How much is too much?”

The PM Who Tells “Made-Up” Stories To The World “All your elders have knowledge of every grave. The Band office has records from the Bishop’s office, the Church board and from cemetery workers who were in charge of digging graves and burials… So please, people, do not make up stories about residential school children being put in unmarked graves. No such thing ever happened.”

The Great Climate Hustle: Covid Crazies’ Next Stop “Ultimately, the credibility of climate change will rest with how much the public accepts from “experts” who’ve dramatically revised their estimates since “96 months to save the planet” or Greta Thunberg’s dystopian teenage vision. With predictions pushed back to 2150, 2200 or even later there has been wiggle room to adjust their doom forecasts.  But the public is just now emerging from two years of “experts” operating predictive models in real time. The abject failures of computer modelling and autocratic behaviour on Covid-19 is fresh in their mind as they reassess the climate-change agenda being pushed.”

Covid’s Weighty ICU Problem: Why Do Obese Get A Pass? . “ The World Obesity Federation has shown that death rates from COVID-19 have been 10 times higher in countries where more than half of the population is overweight. Yet there is no call from the media and its acolytes to punish the obese for clogging the healthcare system. No demand they be put to the back of the line. Why? Because it doesn’t suit the narrative of right-wing extremism that non-vaxxers do. Too many allies of Woke land— in and out of politics— would be shoved down the line.”

Graven Images: The Greening Of Calgary. “The evolution of Green is a litany of half-baked predictions and salacious slanders. Even as European governments scramble to replace their sacred renewable dreams with the realities of nuclear power or, gasp, Russian natural gas, the pious will still party like it’s 1999— when all things seemed possible. There’s a revolution of purity happening here, folks, and a few inconvenient facts isn’t going to harsh the vibe.”

No News Is Good News: When Facts Don’t Matter . “The difference from a decade ago is that media has succumbed to the mission creep of self worship. Where once stories were assembled to create a picture of the day’s news, stories are now assembled to support a preordained picture. One that flatters the cult of journalists with their moral superiority. And so what is that narrative? The new reality is class— a generation of educated whites, many in the knowledge, government or media industries. Their Woke opinions are like the electric cars, private schools, summer cottages, pink pussy hats and other trappings they accumulate to cement their superior status. Talismans of their significance. ”

 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

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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2025 Federal Election

Trump Has Driven Canadians Crazy. This Is How Crazy.

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“Liberalism is based on one central desire: to look cool in front of others in order to get love. Preaching tolerance makes you look cooler than saying something like, ‘Please lower my taxes.’”— Greg Gutfeld

Having lived 25 years in the West after 45+ years in the East we can now generalize on the state of the nation. In the West the attitude is to grasp the future. Not fear it. Accept risk and loss as partners. In the East the default sentiment is to fear the future. Think of every reason why it might fail.

Quebec fears losing its culture. Ontario fears losing its power. The Maritimes fear losing equalization money. Hence Danielle Smith and Doug Ford as contrasting symbols of leadership. But 2025 is something new.

Donald Trump’s unsparing assessments of modern Canada— “We don’t really want Canada to make cars for us, to put it bluntly. We want to make our own cars — and we’re now equipped to do that”— have exposed this fissure in the country. Is it him or is it us? Families and friendships are being destroyed by the response. As Canadians head to the polls it’s obvious that persuasion is not going to apply in this climate. Arguments are falling on deaf ears.

With a large segment of the population doubling down on a failed past it’s time to make an I-told-you list of the implications of letting Donald Trump scare you into voting for a re-run of the Liberal Party. Double this dread if the Liberals get a majority.

To those Boomers living off the equity in their paid-off homes, get ready to be taxed on the appreciation in your homes. While you cherish your stand-alone private residence, get ready for the neighbours to sell out to someone who will erect a six-storey, 36-unit condo on the property right next to you because “sustainable growth”.

Got someone under 50 in your life? The Carney Reflex is bad news. Adding debt and embracing the destructive Trudeau social positions is a killer for those looking to commit to a future in Canada. Should Poilievre lose the election and his seat expect a brain drain away from the failed state. And the prosperity they create to vacate as well.

To those who cherish free expression expect hate-speech laws like those in UK where police will arrest you in your homes for social-media comment hostile to the ruling Party. And even if you shut down your posts watch out for neighbours who will exploit snitch lines to get you out of the hood.

Buttressing the party line, Carney will restore CBC’s funding— and then some— to drown out any social media pointing out the indelicate facts about his Trudeau-sourced cabinet members. He’ll also keep propping up failing private media, preventing them from bankruptcy so long as they spew DEI 24/7/365.

For those who cried fake tears over the Rez school graves scandal, watch Liberals pass legislation that gives unelected leaders of indigenous communities veto power over development of Crown Lands. Expect the Liberals, trying to maintain the NDP vote they assumed this year, to resurrect the “genocide” label against Canadians and fly flags at half mast again.

If you hoped to get to the bottom of innumerable scandals on the Liberals watch— ranging from eco-theft to China infiltration— Carney will put the clamps on any inquiry. The steady stream of Canada’s wealth to third-world kleptocrats will become a flood.

To those who thought Mark Carney had cancelled the consumer carbon tax, prepare yourself to find out that he just reduced it and will come back full-throttle as soon as the Conservatives fire Pierre Poilievre. While Carney plays the Housing Saviour he will also use the Carbon Tax to make concrete and fertilizer way more expensive, thus boosting the cost of the 50,000 homes he will never build and farm land will go fallow.

With CPC out of the way, expect no significant moves to end Canada as the money laundering capital of the world, the global fentanyl hub, international home to organized crime heads and a reported 1 in 7,800 residents as members of organized crime.

Batten down the hatches as Carney’s Liberals use their mandate to maintain the immigration deluge, thereby destroying Canada’s support systems for health, infrastructure and burying western values.

Get set for all your fossil-fuelled vehicles and heating to be taxed into oblivion with the proceeds going to more bike lanes, clogged public transportation on unreliable electric vehicles. Expect listening to obnoxious Quebec politicians brag on their “clean” hydro power.

Speaking of vehicles, the Sheila Copps set mocked Poilievre’s vision of urban hell where cops tell you not to protect your goods in a home smash-and-grab or car-jacking. With police ceding the field to organized gangs it will be open season as courts and the Liberals abandon the middle class to obey DEI imperatives.

And most of all, welcome to a full-fledged constitutional crisis sparked by Alberta and Quebec that will make the 1980s federal/ provincial rumbles look like Sunday school. Both will seek referendums from their voters on sovereignty or some equivalent. As we suggested last month the best case could be the UK model of regional parliaments. Saskatchewan and Alberta could join with indigenous communities to demand a regional say on how their revenues are distributed. Expect purchased media to humble brag for the ruling Liberals.

The worst outcome of Carney as PM is Alberta gaining independence or, gasp, joining America. Because Quebec can never get a better deal outside Canada expect them to use any momentum on sovereignty to extort further concessions from what’s left of Canada.

But why believe us? According to the report released in early 2025 by Policy Horizons Canada — the Government of Canada’s in-house think tank— upward social mobility could become a relic of the past, with wealth and opportunity increasingly inherited rather than earned.  Their scenario outlines a country where rising inequality, inaccessible housing, and a broken promise of meritocracy leave younger generations disillusioned, disconnected, and doubtful that effort alone can improve their lives.

So with scant days left in the campaign the problem for Conservatives is not that the Liberal base believes Carney and their heroes. They’ve seen enough to know Mr. Burns is a fraud. But with their #TDS the true believers will never admit to backing a lying, losing hype train. That would be like death to them. So they’re closing their eyes and hoping it will all be over soon and they can go back to Mr. Dressup. Just know their kids will never forgive them.

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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2025 Federal Election

How Canada’s Mainstream Media Lost the Public Trust

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Breaking: CBC News admits that host Rosemary Barton was wrong on April 16 when she said “remains of indigenous children” have been discovered.

Call it the Panic Election. From The Handmaid’s Tale to Quebec alienation to plastic straws, the dynamic is citizens being stampeded in a brief six weeks by Big Brother. (There’s no Big Sister. That would mess with the narrative.) Prompting Covid Part Deux from the Laurentian media scolds.

Nowhere is this panic more keen than among aging Boomers who’ve pronounced themselves willing to ignore a decade of Justin Trudeau’s clumsy, unethical and sometimes criminal behaviour in the wake of Big Bad Trump. Even the threat of losing the country’s AAA credit rating can’t sway them from full-throated panic about being the 51st state.

The 51st state gambit is the window dressing. The real Trump panic is over him exposing the inadequacies of a Canadian society penetrated by China, dominated by globalist fanatics and more indebted every day. Specifically, Trump labelled Canadians defence dead-beats and entitled snobs who’d be crazy not to join the U.S. The insulting Trump framing has been a lifeline to those most recently in office— Liberals— to point at the Big Bad Wolf outside the door rather than the Frozen Venezuela inside its walls.

Integral to this panic is the role of Canada’s legacy media, a self-serving caste saved from bankruptcy (for now) by generous wads of public money. The 416/613 bubble ponies operate as if it were still 1985, not 2025. They’ve managed to preserve their status while society changed around them. For instance, CBC’s flagship At Issue panel features three people from Toronto and a fourth from Montreal.

It has worked perfectly in Boomer Canada. Until this past week, when the media guardians finally lost the plot. The combination of TV panel hubris and the incompetence of the Elections Commission exposed an industry more interesting in protecting its own turf than protecting the truth.

The meltdown was the notion that conservative social media— with its intrusive reporters and tabloid tactics— had no place in their sandbox. This hissy fit came after Wednesday’s French debate. Members of Rebel News, True North and other outfits dominated the party leaders’ scrums with obtrusive questions about Mark Carney’s opinions on same-sex sports and what constitutes a woman— questions the French moderator had neglected to ask.

For legacy reporters and hosts who take it as given that they be allowed the front pew this was an affront to their status.  As purveyors of the one true political religion the talking heads on CBC, CTV and Global began speaking of “so-called journalists” and “far-right” intruders elbowing into their territory. Their resentment was all-consuming.

This resentment spilled into Debate Night Two when a shouting match ensued in the press room. A CBC source claimed (incorrectly) that Rebel Media leader Ezra Levant had been barred from the press room. A writer from the Hill Times screamed at members of their raucous rivals. The carefully chose panelists suggested that these outfits were funded by dark right-wing sources.

Before the debate had ended Elections Commission organizers— reportedly goaded by the Liberals— called off the post-debate scrum citing “safety” issues that seemingly included a Rebel reporter conducting a hostile walking interview with a furious Liberal official. This unleashed another torrent of Media Party vitriol about its position as the keepers of Canadian journalism.

In a show of irony, these complaints about right-wing misinformation came from people whose livelihood is dependent on Liberal slush funds or whose organizations have accepted government funds to stave off bankruptcy or whose union is an active shill for non-Conservative parties. The conflicts are never mentioned in the unctuous festival of privilege.

What makes this rearguard action against new media risible was the 2024 U.S. election where Donald Trump acknowledged the new day and rode the support of non-traditional media back to the presidency. His shunning of the legacy networks and hallowed print brands heralded a new reality in American elections. Poilievre has struggled to find this community in Canada, but for those with eyes it remains the future of disseminating political thought.

A perfect example of alternative media scooping the tenured mob on Parliament Hill has been the sterling work on China by Sam Cooper, a former Global employee who has independently demonstrated the ties between Chinese criminal gangs and the Canadian political structure going back to the 1980s. Working with others outside the grid he’s shown the scandal of a Liberal candidate urging Chinese Canadian voters to reap a bounty for turning his Conservative opponent to the Chinese Communist Party. A disgrace that Carney has forgiven.

Predictably Cooper’s work and the independent story by two retired RCMP investigators who implicated nine Liberal cabinet members in compliance with the Chinese communists has gotten the ‘tish-tish” from the Laurentian elites. Like the Democrats who buried the Hunter Biden laptop story to save his father in the dying days of the 2020 U.S. election the poodle media hope to delay the truths about China long enough to get the compliant Carney over the finish line.

For contrast to how it was— and could be— one only had to witness the moderator performance of journalist Steve Paikin of TVO. Largely unknown outside Ontario, Paikin overcame the skepticism of Westerners by playing it straight down the middle. Such was his honest-broker performance that Poilievre was heard telling him after the debate that he had no idea how Paikin might vote. (Ed. note: Paikin is a former colleague and longtime friend.) In other words, it’s still possible.

It’s a cliché that this election is a hinge point for Canada. Will it face itself in the mirror or indulge in more denialism about its true self? No wonder unaffiliated journalists joke that their stories today will be the lead on mainstream media in three months. Carney has promised to continue bribing the mainstream media, but their day is done. It’s simply a matter of fixing a date for the next panic.

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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