Bruce Dowbiggin
The Californication Of Toronto: Urban Nowhere

Last weekend I talked on the phone with my broadcasting friend Andrew Krystal about the state of Toronto— including his beloved Maple Leafs. Little did I know it was to be our final conversation; Andrew died just a few minutes after as he walked home in Yorkville.
In his inimitable way Andrew had been giving me the gears for criticizing Toronto after I’d spent so many years there. “You made your name here. You are a product of Toronto,” he pointed out above the din in a local Toronto bar.
Indeed I was a product of the Toronto I left behind in 1998. As I told him, that Toronto— the Little City That Could—is long gone. Replaced by something… else. As we shouted to make ourselves heard I told him that Toronto now reminds me of the California nightmare described in a recent Matt Taibbi piece on Substack. “California is what happens when new money becomes old money.”
Taibbi quoted Swedish writer Malcom Keune: “California shifted mid century from being the US’s fastest-growing state — 50% population growth between 1950 and 1960 — to a state that is somehow, improbably, shrinking… mostly because of the regulations the state’s inhabitants put in place that block the housing that’s required to support California’s economic success. As a result, California has lost the “technology” of being able to affordably house its inhabitants…
To use a California literary reference, that meant no more living off the “fat of the land,” for with the well of plenty drying, even elites are now forced to feed off each other. In such a society, he wrote, “belligerence is not a choice,” and “you need to dispossess others” to get ahead, because “not doing so means losing your own way of life.”
The Diaspora of middle-class Californians to Texas, Montana, Florida, Tennessee, Colorado and elsewhere has been mirrored by the thousands of successful businesses such as Tesla, Oracle, Hewlitt-Packard and many more also leaving the state, taking with them tens of thousands of excellent jobs. Leaving behind a titled elite and a serving class— many just arrived in the state.
The desire to make California a morally pure progressive paradise has turned into open drug use on streets, collapsing infrastructure and sclerotic one-party rule. “California announced a high-speed train in 1996 and the current plan is for service on the L.A-San Francisco line to begin in 2033. One executive I spoke with described the state’s development as “frozen in aspic.”
One reason is strangulation by bureaucracy. “Institutions everywhere are filling up with employees bearing skills “orthogonal” to the bureaucratic mission,” Kyeyune writes, “part of what’s been packaged as progress but feels more like a vast jobs program for otherwise unemployable pseudo-intellectuals. “Hire us, pay us, give us and our clients sinecures at your expense, “or we will make life difficult for you.”
As I told Andrew, “It doesn’t take a great leap to see these descriptions applying to Toronto as it came into its new status as a progressive cosmopolitan haven.” The Toronto of today, like California, is moving forward and backward at the same time. A champion in its day for fighting apartheid in South Africa, the same city now proudly celebrates segregated commencement sessions .
The source of Toronto’s entitlement was the stopping of the Spadina Expressway in the 1970s, the singular NIMBY resistance to growing the city at the expense of leafy neighbourhoods. Since then attempts to move newcomers around the heart of privilege have produced gridlock.
The result? Stratospheric housing prices in a city that resisted growth even as it imported hundreds of thousands to serve as its worker drones. The basic roof-over-one’s-head now is exclusive to aging Boomers squatting on their cashboxes while their children and newcomers move two hours away (if lucky) or mortgage themselves to the real-estate lottery.
Like Hollywood, Toronto’s hip class is besotted by Woke culture. Instead of Hollywood, Toronto is an IT factory married to media elites. But this success a two-edged sword for liberals— as California discovered. The Golden State “began to worry about how to balance the proceeds of its mastery of lowbrow markets with the desire of its most influential inhabitants to maintain reputations for the latest in progressive attitudes”.
Toronto’s IT culture has opinions; they’re just all virtually the same. None may say a negative word for fear of being banished to Barrie or London or (gasp) Alberta to find a living. It is a self-imposed gag order.
Exit strategies? Like California, Toronto’s business Diaspora to its suburbs and beyond has been replaced by a tax base resting on rapacious condo construction and gentrification. Its attempts to replace cars with rapid transit, such as the Eglinton subway project, mirror California’s rapid-rail project. No one in office wants to make hard decisions about the Gardiner Expressway, so they put off the inevitable.
Once a bastion of security, Toronto’s street crime is blighting the city. No wonder the middle class is cashing out its homes and heading to Northern Ontario, PEI, Alberta and the U.S.
Like the California elite in Silicon Valley, Toronto’s Family Compact has shown its survival skills in the Trudeau years, returning Captain Blackface to power on three occasions in a Faustian bargain to preserve its status. With the reality sleeping on homeless sidewalks, Toronto’s nomenklatura moved “to dispossess others” to get ahead, because not doing so meant losing their own way of life.
The accelerator for decline has been the gelding of its media. With government now pumping billions into media based in the city, there is a homogeneity of thought in coverage. Reporters who were once independent and cranky now see their best interests served in building echo chambers for the government/ corporate crowd. In California there are at least some people such as Taibbi defying the Media Party directives. For how long not one knows.
I will miss Andrew but in many respects. I’m just glad he won’t be around to see what will happen to the city where he was raised and where he revelled in the last days of old Toronto.
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
2025 Federal Election
How Canada’s Mainstream Media Lost the Public Trust

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.
Bruce Dowbiggin
Is HNIC Ready For The Winnipeg Jets To Be Canada’s Heroes?

It’s fair to say everyone in hockey wanted the Winnipeg Jets back in the NHL. They became everyone’s darlings in 2011 when the Atlanta Thrashers, the league’s second stab at a franchise in Georgia, were sold to Canadian interests including businessman David Thomson. (Ed.: Gary Bettman’s try number three in Atlanta is upcoming.).
Yes, the market is tiny. Yes, the arena is too small. Yes, Thomson’s wealth is holding back a sea of inevitability. But sentimentalists remembering the Bobby Hull WHA Jets and the Dale Hawerchuk NHL Jets threw aside their skepticism to welcome back the Jets. The throwback uniforms with their hints at Canada’s air force past were an understated nod to their modest pretensions. It was a perfect story.

The question now, however, is will the same folks get dewey-eyed about the Jets if they become the first Canadian team to win the Stanley Cup since (checks his cards) Montreal and Patrick Roy did it in 1993. It would be helpful in this election year if something were to bind a nation torn apart by politics. The Gordie Howe Elbows Up analogy is more than shopworn, and Terry Fox can only be resurrected so often. So a Cup win might be a welcome salve.
But the approved script has long dictated that the Canadian team to break the schneid should be one of the glamour twins of the NHL’s Canadian content, the Edmonton Oilers or the (gulp) Toronto Maple Leafs. The Oilers and their superstar Connor McDavid barely lost out last spring to Florida while the Leafs, laden with superstars like Auston Matthews and William Nylander, are overdue for a long playoff run.
Hockey Night In Canada positively pants for the chance to gush over these two squads each week. When was the last time Toronto played an afternoon game so HNIC could showcase the Jets? Like, never. Same for the Oilers, who with their glittering stars like McDavid Leon Draisaitl and Ryan Nugent Hopkins are the primary tenants of the doubleheader slot, followed by Calgary. Winnipeg? We’ll get to them.

But there’s going to be no ignoring them in the spring of 2025. The Jets in the northern outpost in Manitoba were the top team in the entire league in 2024-25. They’ll comfortably win the Presidents Cup as the No. 1 squad and have home-ice advantage throughout the playoffs. They have the league’s best goalie in Connor Hellebuyck (an American) and a stable of top scorers led by Kyle Connor and Mark Schiefele. Because Winnipeg is on a lot of No Trade lists, they have built themselves through the draft and thrifty budgeting.
But will the same people who swooned over the Jets in 2011 now find them as adorable if they ruin the Stanley Cup plot lines of the Oilers, Leafs and Ottawa Senators? Will the fans of Canadian teams in Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal not making the postseason take the Jets to their hearts or will they be as phoney as the Mike Myers commercials for the Liberals?
In addition, the Jets will be swamped by national media should they proceed through the playoffs. It’s one thing to carry the expectations of Winnipeg and Manitoba. It’s another to foot the bill for a hockey crazy county. We remember Vancouver’s GM Mike Gillis during the Canucks 2011 Cup run bemoaning the late arrivers of the press trying to critique his team as they made their way through the playoffs.
It will be no picnic for the Jets, however strong they’ve been in the regular season. No one was gunning for them as they might for the Oilers or Leafs. They will now get their opponents’ best game night after night. Hellebuyck has been a top three goalie in the NHL for a while, winning the Vezina Trophy, but his playoff performance hasn’t matched that of his regular-season version.
Already the injury bug that sidelines so many Cup dreams is biting at the Jets. Nikolaj Ehlers collided with a linesman in Saturday’s OT win in Chicago. Defenceman Dylan Samberg is also questionable after stopping a McDavid slap shot with his leg. A rash of injuries has ended the run of many a worthy Cup aspirant in the past. Can Winnipeg’s depth sustain the churn of seven weeks of all-out hockey?
As always for the small-market Jets time is of the essence. Keeping this core together is difficult with large markets lusting after your players. With the NHL salary cap going up it remains a chore to keep their top players. Schiefele and Hellebuyck are tied up longterm, but 40-goal man Connor is a UFA after next season while Ehlers is not signed after this season. Young Cole Perfetti will be an RFA in 2026. Etc.
So how much do Canadians love the Jets if they sneak in and steal the hero role by winning a Canadian Cup? Lets see Ron MacLean pun his way through that one.
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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