Bruce Dowbiggin
Tale Of The Tape: Jerry Vs. Erin As Unifor Fights To Protect Media Slush Funds
After calling the federal election, Justin Trudeau says Canadians need to “counter the ‘she-cession’ and turn it into a ‘she-covery’.”
The writ has dropped and Canadians now have the head-to-head matchup they’ve wanted. Conservative Party of Canada leader Erin O’Toole versus Jerry Dias, president of Unifor, Canada’s largest private union that includes everything from auto workers to TV workers.
Oh, you thought we were going to say the matchup between O’Toole and Justin Trudeau, the sitting prime minister of this frozen shore? That’s what the Racing Form says, no?
Certainly Trudeau is the nominal figure flogging for votes. But with Gerry Butts now a pom-pom boy on the sidelines Trudeau’s most influential and powerful ally is Dias, who heads the merger of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and Communications, Energy and Paperworkers unions— a rabble 310,000 strong.
In the past Dias would have been safely in the camp of the NDP, the traditional home for labour in Canada. But since Jagmeet Singh turned the NDP into the Bernie Sanders Debate Club, a collection of fatuous socialists and Naomi Klein feminists, the NDP has no natural political home for Dias’ traditional hardball labour tactics.
Dias is unapologetic about his union’s desire to crush Conservatives of every stripe in Canada, describing himself as the “worst nightmare” of CPC leaders. Think Jean-Claude Parrot, the firebrand radical who used the Canadian Postal Workers Association as a cudgel to torture Canadians in the pre-digital world.
The union’s recent ad showing a rusted, decrepit pickup truck with O’Toole’s name covering Stephen Harper’s is a nasty piece of agitprop (made ridiculous because the disintegrating pickup is an American brand like the ones his auto members construct). “Canadian voters won’t be fooled by a new name on the bumper,” it promises while labelling the Tories as tools of big business and the filthy oil lobby. (Clearly he hasn’t checked Skippy’s dance card lately)
Unlike Parrot in the 60s and 70s Dias has the media oomf to effect the change he wants for the TV, radio and print journalists in Canada under Unifor’s banner. (CBC journos are represented by a separate but no less Woke union devoted to protecting its billion-dollar budget supplied by Trudeau.)

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Unifor President Jerry Dias embrace during the Unifor convention in Ottawa on Wednesday, August 24, 2016. iPolitics/Matthew Usherwood
While the CBC union kept its bias in-house in 2019 , Dias made no bones about using his medias might to get his puppet Justin Trudeau elected. Anyone expecting “balanced” Unifor journalists to go hard on Trudeau’s many failings (moral and ethical) was in for a shock. There was lots of dystopian Stephen Harper hyperbole about Tories enacting Handmaid’s Tale servitude on women and Simon Legree working conditions on the middle class. But calls for Trudeau bashing to quit? Get real.
Sadly for Trudeau and Dias it wasn’t enough to prevent the Liberals from losing their majority, and they have been forced to placate Singh and the self-destructing Greens to stay in power. They’ve complied, helping Trudeau escape a multitude of patronage, corruption, sexual assault, racial appropriation and Covid ineptitude. When that got too tight, he prorogued Parliament to still the baying hounds.
Happily for Dias in the wake of the minority, Trudeau’s Heritage Ministry has rewarded the yeoman service of Unifor’s journalists’ “resistance” in creating a slush fund for media outlets crying poor in Canada. Over $600 million was set aside over the five years for tax credits and other incentives aimed at propping up “struggling” news outlets. (This is addition to the approximate $1.5 billion shovelled into CBC/ Radio Canada to help it big-foot the digital news market in Canada by outspending private outlets.) Trudeau then appointed Unifor as one of eight groups who will help decide which media outlets will qualify for a government handout to journalistic outfits. The happy recipients of this baksheesh rarely explained why they were “struggling”, only that they deserved lotsa’ dough to ward off FOX News coming to Canada to do something something something.
Now, reports say that another payoff has been parcelled off to local journalists as the election takes off. Canadian Heritage was also refusing to disclose which media companies were awarded $61 million in subsidies billed as “emergency relief” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
There have been mild plaints of concern from some. The head of the Canadian Association of Journalists, Karyn Pugliese, noted in 2019, ”You have people who are dead set against the government giving any kind of money to media.” But then she added, “We’ve got some people who feel that something is necessary, because it’s important to keep news going.” Translation: Like Buckley’s, we take it but we hate the taste. Right.
The optics are clear. The union for journalists at major media outlets is partisan. How is one supposed to think they can hold Unifor’s opinions yet deliver honest, balanced coverage to Canadians during an election? It’s a bind previous generations strove mightily to avoid. This tranche of journos seems impervious to the mess they’ve made of their credibility.
With so much lucre being spread around, Erin O’Toole certainly has his doubts about their objectivity. He announced this past week that, as part of a Conservative government, he would eliminate the pork currently being fed to media. While keeping Radio Canada and CBC Radio, he’d cut all funding to CBC’s English-language digital operations, slash the English TV budget by 50 per cent, and aim to privatize the English TV operation by the end of his first mandate in government.
“The world of broadcast media has changed dramatically, but our public broadcaster is stuck in the past,” O’Toole said in the video. He indicated he’d also eliminate the special top-up payments to the companies that employ Unifor members.That puts the ball in Dias’ corner. How hard should he go in protecting the perks of Canada’s fading media interests? He serves as a useful foil to Trudeau, whose word salads and pontifications have grown increasingly banal to voters. With his pit-bull attacking style he can savage newcomer O’Toole in the harshest terms (although the CPC ads with Trudeau as a Willy Wonka character in a dress singing for a majority were venomous, too).
But Dias is already facing a public that believes the government should be fighting Covid-19 and economic issues, not each other. Push his members’ biases too hard— as Trudeau is doing— and he risks losing a great deal of an electorate sour on media’s performance over Covid, the border, Afghanistan, WE Charity, climate reset and much more.
As the cocky Nova Scotia Liberals learned this week in blowing a big lead to the Conservatives just hours after the federal election was called, six weeks is a long time.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Bruce Dowbiggin
Hunting Poilievre Covers For Upcoming Demographic Collapse After Boomers
For those not familiar with hunting seasons in Canada it may come as a surprise that the nation has a year-round hunting season. That would be the targeting of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre by the massed army of Liberals, their bots and the richly endowed media pack. Forget he’s never held power. He’s to blame for the ills in Canadian society.
It has been a good hunt. After floor-crossing by dissident CPC, the Liberals are one seat from the majority that Canadian voters denied them in the spring. (They’ll likely get the majority soon.) MPs who a day earlier were at Conservative Xmas parties suddenly sang the praises of Carney. MPs in ridings targeted by the Chinese suddenly joined Team Elbow Up.
All the while the media corps landed blows from their perch. Robert Benzie: “I know that Premier [Danielle] Smith is very unhappy privately with Pierre Poilievre because she thinks that [MOU motion] is undermining this [pipeline] project.” The nadir of the media dog pile was formerly eminent scribe Robert Fife who sniped, “Conservatives persist with cute legislative tricks, while the government tries to run a country.” Run a country. That’s rich.
From his lips to Liberal brains, however. “.@CBCNews and @AlJazeeraWorld viewers consider themselves uniquely informed, says @ElectionsCan_E report. The two TV networks were named by self-described “informed” voters when asked where they got their news. “
It is, seemingly, a great time to be a Liberal. Or not. While Operation Poilievre was gathering steam for Xmas polling revealed that Liberals and Conservatives remain locked in a tie, and Canadians continue to express ambivalence about the country’s direction, mixed feelings about their leaders, and sharp divides by generation, region, and policy concern. These generational discrepancies continue to be buried.

As was the case in the spring, the Liberals are supported only by the Boomer generation that swallowed Elbows Up nostalgia like a fat man on a donut. The under 60s demo at every level shows the current Carney agenda is a loser for them. In the segment of house-rich Boomers the Libs lead 50-31 over CPC. But in every other category it’s “how can I get out of here faster?”
The 45-59 demo it’s 46-36 Conservatives; 30-44 it’s a whopping 48-31 CPC; 18-29 it’s 40-39 CPC. A healthy chunk of Liberal supporting from the collapse of NDP vote. Where they used to poll in the 20s, the highest demo shows 11 percent support. Otherwise Poilievere would be PM.
Meanwhile, research now finds that 54 percent of Canadians say the growing number of newcomers to the country threatens our traditional customs and values— an increase of sixteen points since 2020. Over the same period, the share of Canadians who say immigration strengthens our society fell thirteen points to 35%
In short, the Carney Circus of marrying Canada to China and the EU is a card trick that will be exposed shortly. But where do we see the Ottawa press corps attention to this impending demographic snow plow? As we wrote in March “It’s not hard to see the (under 60s) looking at the Mike Myers obsession with a long-gone Canada and saying let’s get out of here.
Recently former TVOntario host Steve Pakin attended two convocations. The first at the former Ryerson University, (switched to Toronto Metropolitan University in a fit of settler colonizer guilt.) The second at Queens University, traditionally one of the elite schools in the nation. Here’s what he saw.
“At the end of the (TMU) convocation, when Charles Falzon, on his final day as dean of TMU’s Creative School, asked students to stand and sing the national anthem, many refused. They remained seated. Then, when the singing began, it was abundantly noticeable that almost none of the students sang along. And it wasn’t because they didn’t know the words, which were projected on a big screen. The unhappy looks on their faces clearly indicated a different, more political, explanation.
“I asked some of the TMU staff about it after the ceremony was over, and they confirmed what I saw happens all the time at convocations. Then I texted the president of another Ontario university who agreed: this is a common phenomenon among this generation at post-secondary institutions.”
At Queens, where Canadian flags were almost non-existent, O Canada was sung, but the message of unrest was clear: “Convocation sends a message of social stability,” Queen’s principal Patrick Deane began in his speech. “It is a ceremony shaped in history. You should value your connection to the past, but question that inheritance. Focus on the kind of society you’d like to inhabit.”
You can bet Deane is not telling them to question climate change and trans rights. As Paikin observes, “if we fail to create a more perfect union, we shouldn’t be surprised when a vast swath of young people don’t sing our anthem the way so many of the rest of us do.” So why are the best and brightest so reluctant to see as future in becoming the new professional class that runs society?
In the Free Press River Page searched the source of their discontent. “If the Great Recession, Covid-19, and the spectre of an artificial intelligence-assisted ‘white collar bloodbath’ has taught the professional class anything, it is that their credentials cannot save them. This insecurity, compounded by the outrageous cost of living in many large cities, has pushed the PMC’s anxieties to the breaking point.

“Add that to the triumph of identity politics in professional class institutions like universities, corporate C-suites, non-governmental organizations, and media—itself a byproduct of inter-elite competition as many have observed—and what you have is the modern left.
“… they’ve already come to the baffling conclusion that there’s no difference between class struggle and child sex changes. More to the point, the socialist mantra “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has only ever stood the test of time in Anabaptist sects. It requires a religious devotion to self-sacrifice that is not characteristic of this anxious and hyper-competitive class—as many actual socialists have spent the last decade warning.”
The tsunami over immigration has caused severe dislocations— as PM Steven Harper predicted in the 2015 election debate. He was shouted down by the dopey dauphin Justin Trudeau who opened the sluice gates to every kind of progressive nonsense. Which is now evident.
Like all people addicted, CDN Boomers don’t want the truth. They want performance theatre, T-shirts and hockey games. They blame Trump for their predicament, caught between grim realities. Will they take the 12 steps? Or will their kids have to tell them the facts as they escort them to the home?” We’re now seeing the likely answer to that question everywhere in Canadian society.
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 2025 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 new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books
Bruce Dowbiggin
NFL Ice Bowls Turn Down The Thermostat on Climate Change Hysteria
Oh, the weather outside was frightful. But the football was so delightful. Week 15 of the NFL season was a cryogenic success of snow and sub-zero temperatures. Here were the temperatures at game time this weekend.
Chicago: -11 degrees C.
Cincinnati: -12 degrees F.
Kansas City: -8 degrees C.
New England: -2 C (with an 87 percent chance of snow).
Philadelphia: -2 degrees C.
New York -1 degree C.
Pittsburgh: -7 degrees C.
For fans of NFL football none of this seemed out of character with late-season football. There are legendary games played in arctic conditions. The windchill for the 1967 Dallas/ Green Bay NFC championship was -25 C.
Chargers at Bengals: Jan. 10, 1982 (-24 C, feels like -39 C).
Seahawks at Vikings in NFC wild-card matchup Jan 10, 2016. -21 C with wind chill -25C
Dolphins at Chiefs: Jan. 13, 2024 (-4 degrees, feels like -27 degrees)
As recently as last week’s Bills win over the Bengals games are often played with drifts of snow on the field and the mercury bottoming out. While Canada’s Grey Cup game is played at the end of November it’s still had some brutal weather history of its own.
The point of this meteorology meandering is that, according to our good King Charles III and many other doomsday cultists the concept of snow and cold was supposed to be a figment of the past by now. For almost half a century Michael Mann and the climate prophets of IPCC have been predicting the end of snow and the onset of warmist floods and burning forests. They gambled trillions of the public’s dollars on the certainty that the public would buy computer modelling and data-distortion predicting doom.
For decades it has worked. The careers of people like critic Mark Steyn have been ruined, heretics declared and fortunes dissipated by the trust-fund fanatics who bankroll wackadoodles like Stephen Guilbeault, the convicted felon who Trudeau made Minister of the Environment. No matter how absurd or devious the source, it was a gospel that the fiery inferno was coming next Tuesday. But the weather has remained stubbornly resistant to Elizabeth May’s catechism of climate.

Yet, some dedicated climate advocates and their followers are finally changing their tune in the face of their own observation of lying liars like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. The share of Americans who say climate scientists understand very well whether climate change is occurring decreased from 37 percent in 2021 to 32 percent this year. A similar October study from the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute found that “belief in human-driven climate change declined overall” since 2017.
Reports the uber-liberal L.A. Times: “The unraveling of climate catastrophism got another jolt recently with the formal retraction of a high-profile 2024 study published in the journal Nature. That study — which had predicted a calamitous 62% decline in global economic output by 2100 if carbon emissions were not sufficiently reduced — was widely cited by transnational bodies and progressive political activists alike as justification for the pursuit of aggressive decarbonization.
But the authors withdrew the paper after peer reviewers discovered that flawed data had skewed the result. Without that data, the projected decline in output collapses to around 23%. Oops.”
Even stalwart media apologists for climate hysteria like the Times are starting to have doubts. Under the headline “The left’s climate panic is finally calming down” they describes “Erstwhile ardent climate-change evangelist Bill Gates published a remarkable blog post addressing climate leaders at the then-upcoming COP30 summit. Gates unloaded a blistering critique of what he called ‘the doomsday view of climate change,’ which he said is simply “wrong.”
Trump-besotted American Democrats seeking to soften their Woke image before the 2026 midterms are likewise carving out more moderate positions on climate “that could well deprive Republicans of a winning political issue with which to batter out-of-touch, climate-change-besotted Democrats. But for the sake of good governance, sound public policy and the prosperity of the median American citizen, it would be the best thing to happen in a decade.”
Sadly Canada under Mark Carney remains a staunch climate warrior. The removal of Guilbeault as federal Environmental Minister may have seemed a step toward sanity, but there is no hint that the billions of dollars from hidden money spigots will be closed down any time soon. The B.C. government’s acquiescence to the climate propaganda of Indigenous bands shows no sign of abating. Indeed, it is just ramping up in the land claims that threaten to make home ownership a thing of the past.

PM Mark Carney is a dedicated temperature fabulist going back to his days as governor of the Bank of England. His first fights in Canada were over taxing carbon and hobbling her energy industry. As we wrote in this November 2024 column, the certainty in which the Canadian Left revels is actually dividing, not uniting citizens.
So perhaps if enough citizens spend an afternoon shivering in the stands of a wintertime football game we might achieve a small piece of sanity and learn that that , while climate is always changing, it’s not worth the price we’ve paid this century.
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 2025 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 new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books.
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