Bruce Dowbiggin
EU To Canada: Next Time Try Sending Your Best
Living in the people’s republic of Trudeaupia you’re often told that you live in the greatest place on earth. From its bovine media to its placid middle class the inhabitants of the nation are one contented lot. Now they have the added bonus of an alliance between a party leader going nowhere (NDP) and a party leader going anywhere he can but Parliament (Liberal).
We speak, of course, of the Liberal/ NDP Grand Alliance cast this week with the goal of making sure never is heard a discouraging word about the PM. In fact, one of the organizing principles behind the Grand Alliance is creating new laws that allow the government to better police pushback from those who cause Trudeau dismay. Like Truckers.
This new legislation has emerged from Trudeau’s faculty lounge… er, caucus… and has caused almost zero perturbation from sea to sea to sea. Yes, the usual cranks like Jordan B. Peterson have pointed out that Bill C-38 etc is totalitarian in tone, but they’re always on about something. Just listen to PM Skippy: Canadians are the most envied people on earth. They have me.
Except if you choose not to take his vaccine that sorta’ works on days that don’t end in Y. Then “they are extremists who don’t believe in science, they’re often misogynists, also often racists. It’s a small group that muscles in, and we have to make a choice in terms of leaders, in terms of the country. Do we tolerate these people?” These comments—made in French— only seemed to upset truckers and their like at the time. In the urgency of the Convoy coverage it was more important to find KKK members or alt-right militias, not the Where’s Waldo PM.
Which is probably why dozing Canadians are a little miffed to see the rude welcome afforded the PM at the European Parliament where he came to drop pearls of wisdom about freedom and democracy. Seems a few at the MEP have caught Trudeau’s vaxx vituperation and were less than happy to see his smug countenance in their midst.
Even if Canadians don’t mind, the EU members saw his suspension of liberties, his use of police tactics, his manipulation of state media and his freezing of bank accounts as something un-Canadian. One after the other they got up to denounce the effrontery of a man who had fabricated a political coup coming to lecture them on liberty. A Croatian member tweeted, “Trudeau, in recent months, under your quasi-liberal boot, Canada has become a symbol of civil rights violations. The methods we have witnessed may be liberal to you, but to many citizens around they seemed like a dictatorship of the worst kind.”
“He’s exactly like a tyrant, a dictator. He’s like Ceaușescu in Romania,” said a Romanian speaker. “Trudeau is terrified by the fact that populism is taking root in Canada and giving ordinary people a voice. He ignores the fact that he and the Liberals have driven Canada into the gutter. Populism is only a reaction to our elites who have lost the plot.”
“Spare us your presence here,” added a third. The invitation to Trudeau, noted a fourth EU member, is to someone “who’s been trampling on human rights.” (Naturally Canadian media on the payroll concentrated solely on PMJT’s speech, not the condemnation.)
Even more embarrassing, no one in EU high office stood up to denounce the battering Canada’s PM was taking. Let’s just say that this is not the sort of thing that happened when Lester Pearson went abroad to represent the country. Remember, too, that these were representatives of nations where democracy was—and is— still hard-won and costly. As opposed to the price paid by the trust-fund PM and his Woke acolytes who’ve lived charmed lives.
Just as telling as the barbs thrown at Trudeau was the repudiation of the coverage he’d received from his own purchased media back home during the Truckers Convoy. We made the point at the time that the images from the streets would stain Canada internationally. All the PM’s calls for order would be lost.
Yet the media of the time played the PM’s tune. They praised police. While Trudeau hid in his bunker they concentrated their wrath on the truckers, building them into a swastika- waving subversive group bent on insurrection— as opposed to a rowdy group democratically protesting in the nation’s capital. The real victims, according to the Liberal media, were the poor condo dwellers of Central Ottawa, their sleep interrupted by honking horns.
This week’s EU Parliament fiasco (who does Trudeau’s advance work?) exposes the game going on in Ottawa. The World can see. Canada was only fooling itself. Now the world mocks the PM and Canada. And that will now go on for another three years.
Speaking of media party games, you’d be a brave person in Canada to also express a negative thought about Ukrainian PM Vladimir Zelensky these days. Such is the Western reverence for his defiant performance in the current Russian invasion of his country that he’s been compared to Churchill or FDR.
Certainly no one in modern military history since that pair has made a more compelling cause for his cause. Using video, photo ops and Congressional/ Parliamentary addresses to politicians in Canada, the U.S. and U.K. Zelensky’s been called a Titan of democracy, the best friend the West could have. A bulwark against Russian terror.
All this laudatory media outpouring comes from fanboy press that seems to take Zalensky love as a loyalty oath. “The Western intelligence apparatus won the information war in Ukraine before a shot was fired” tweeted Pedro L. Gonzalez. If this were simply a battle for minds, the Russians would be TKO’d already.
The reality is less commendable. Zelensky is not simply the former comedian-made-good. Elected as a reformer, Zelensky set about enriching himself and sidelining his enemies. Even as Canadian war hawk David Frum gushed that Zelensky’s Ukraine was “the first example in human history of a country that under the pressure of war is becoming *more* tolerant and *more* liberal” the PM suspended 11 opposition parties, merged all TV channels into one controlled by him and imposed censorship.
Hey, it’s a tough neighbourhood. The point is not whether Zelensky is too toxic to justify his Western support . The U.S. is used to dealing with the devil they know. Clearly the West will support him in the face of the cruelties imposed on his nation. The question is why does legacy media need to promote a false image of Zelensky as a democrat and reformer when the facts don’t support it?
Yet the Media Party has made any recognition of Zelensky’s foibles into Putin love. Here’s Frum trying to put dissenters into line: “I’m trying to recall a single instance of a resignation of conscience at Fox News over the network’s support for Putin’s war.” (Fellow Canadian John Roberts had to remind Frum that FOX had had two employees killed and another seriously wounded on the job in Ukraine. “You used to be better than this.”)
You get the drift. Too many people are invested in the Zelkensky Method to back down. The same overwhelming desire for Canadian media consensus that led Trudeau to his EU humiliation is now also at work in sanctifying Zelensky. As he old expression goes, when faced with a choice between the facts and the legend, print the legend.
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
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.
Inquiring minds want to know: Why did FIFA (Federation of International Fraud Artists) award American president Donald Trump a new “Peace Prize” at the Washington D.C. draw for the June/ July tournament? The usual suspects are paralyzed with rage. Everyone else is laughing at the kabuki theatre stunt.
The short answer is that if you were FIFA and you were receiving a reported billion or more dollars from the U.S. and the Canadian/ Mexican cities hosting the 48-team tournament you’d give the host more than a bottle of wine and flowers as a thank-you. Thus the ugly statue and the Boy Scout medal. The obsequious awarding of the prize and match medal were proportionate to the greed of FIFA in extorting the cash.
(America’s fainting goat media immediately complained about unearned awards for little virtue, forgetting as usual that the Nobel folks gave Barack Obama a Peace Prize after nine months in the White House for simply being a black man.)
Trump getting a peace award from FIFA, the most corrupt sports body in the sports world, is mint, however. You can’t write this stuff. (They should give it to him on a speed boat heading across the Caribbean.) The Donald then playfully suggested that Americans leave the name football to the soccer folks because, you know… feet and a ball. More outrage from NFL fans.
So what was the gift for the two Canadian cities hosting games who have also coughed up plenty? Toronto says its estimated budget is $380 million for six games/ B.C. tax payers are obliged to cough up an estimated $580 million for Vancouver’s five games). For cities with, how shall we say, bigger fish to fry.
Sadly all they got was a little farce in which a delighted PM Mark Carney was allowed to Canada as the first ball to start the picking, evidently unaware that all the balls he had to select from also said Canada. Carney’s joy was tempered when he saw Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum draw a ball that said “Mexico” while Trump— in on the fix— got one entitled “United States”.
In a final attempt to curry favour with the fleeced nations FIFA boss Gianni Infantino gathered the world leaders for a painful onstage selfie, marking the first time Trump and Sheinbaum had ever met in the (orangey) flesh. Call it National Lampoon’s Soccer Vacation.
Having exhausted itself with the peace prize falderol FIFA evidently forgot to put any more thought into the rest of the 55-minute run-up to the draw. While soccer/ footie fans around the world ground their teeth in impatience the organizers presented a combination Eurovision/ People’s choice Awards ordeal of failed cues, untranslated interviews (the Spanish translator showed up about 30 minutes late) and pregnant pauses.
Host Heidi Klum’s stunning gold dress nearly made up for her wooden repartee with comedian Kevin Hart (“not sure why I’m here”) and co-host Rio Ferdinand, former star English defender who, alas, never won the WC. But that was all an appetizer for the real low point, the introduction of global brand stars to pick the draw. NFL legend Tom Brady, NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal and NHL… er, player Wayne Gretzky.
Their task, hectored by the hosts, was to draw a ball, unscrew the thing, withdraw a nation’s name and so on. While there may have been some tension in the audience there was no appreciation of that on the screen as more clunking dialogue and curious pronunciations (Ferdinand kept referring to Group “Haitch”) landed dead on the floor.
The nadir of the ceremony—indeed of his career— was Gretzky’s contribution. Brady and O’Neal had managed to survive their task of unscrewing the ball and pronouncing a name, but Gretzky was brought low by the stage business of the balls and the nations he was forced to announce.
The clearly flustered Gretz (he insisted he’d practiced all morning) wrestled manfully with the balls. Finally the producers went with a long shot of him fumbling in the dark. Then he topped that. Gretzy apparently thinks there are countries called “North Mack-a-donia” and “Cur-ack-ow.” Other stabs at geography were almost as tortured.
Bitter Canadians could put up with him sucking up to Trump (he was mentioned as being in the crowd at the DC Xmas tree lighting) but failing geography is unforgivable. The week that started with Gretzky in a photo golfing at POTUS’s Jupiter, Florida, golf course was ending with him pummelled for his abuse of nations with different-sounding names. The Wayne Gretzky Center For Kids Who Want To Talk Good.
The moral: Never send a centre to do a netminder’s job. Makes you understand why Bobby Orr has laid low since his Trump endorsement came out.
With that bracing date with immortality disposed of the draw proceeded. We had been pounded for an hour about how great the tournament was, and finally footy fans got what they wanted. As a host Canada got a bye into the field. Their reward is playing the tenacious Swiss and, gulp, probably Italy, which is forced to qualify after playing with their food for too long. (Insert your Stanley Tucci joke.)
If not Italy then one of Wales, Bosnia and Herzegovina or Northern Ireland. Oh, right Qatar is in there too as fodder. Been nice knowing you, Canada. The Americans somehow drew a creme puff quartet of Australia, Paraguay and Slovakia, Kosovo, Turkey or Romania. Money can’t buy you love, but it can get you a warm hug from FIFA.
In the end it’ll be one of Brazil, Argentina, Germany or France for the final in the NJ Meadowlands on July 19. Maybe they’ll have a spelling bee at halftime. Or maybe they’ll bring back Trump for the final game to give him another peace prize. Just don’t ask Gretzky to announce Lothar Matthaus, Bruno Guimaräes or Gabriel Magalhäes.
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.
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