Opinion
Reginald “Red” Deer wants to build a lemonade stand but is not sure where to put it.
Reginald “Red” Deer was enduring another hot pre-summer day in the backyard with his family and friends when he decided he would build a much needed lemonade stand, in his backyard.
The cost of the build would be $70 for plywood and nails. He decided that with a daily average of 4 people per day in his backyard each buying 1 glass of lemonade each day with a $0.25 profit he would make $10 before school starts.
Sounds like a no-brainer, right? His friend disagreed and suggested that if he moved the location to the front yard, spent $25 on a sign and some paint he do a lot better. Sure his family and friends may resist walking around the house to get a lemonade but there is 100 times more traffic in front and with all the neighbours and with the playground across the road, you should sell a lot more lemonade. Right?
The friend did not stop there, his vision grew even more. Lemonade is a great product on hot sunny days, what about the colder days? How about offering hot chocolate?
You could play it safe and spend $70 and build in your backyard, you could spend $25 more on advertising and exposure and do better or you could spend another $20 on a hot thermos and serve a wider audience on more days.
What do you think “Red” Deer should do?
By now you know I am talking about the Multi-use Aquatic Centre that the city is recommending building in the north-east corner of Red Deer in Timberlands.
I am suggesting you build the Aquatic Centre in the north west corner facing the QE2 near Hazlett Lake Park and incorporating the proposed “Dawe” ice rink, to draw in more traffic. It may cost more and take a little longer but this is a generational project, so what’s a few more months?
Or we could simply build the lemonade stand in the backyard.
The decision is ours. Just saying.
Aristotle Foundation
The Canadian Medical Association’s inexplicable stance on pediatric gender medicine
By Dr. J. Edward Les
The thalidomide saga is particularly instructive: Canada was the last developed country to pull thalidomide from its shelves — three months during which babies continued to be born in this country with absent or deformed limbs
Physicians have a duty to put forward the best possible evidence, not ideology, based treatments
Late last month, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) announced that it, along with three Alberta doctors, had filed a constitutional challenge to Alberta’s Bill 26 “to protect the relationship between patients, their families and doctors when it comes to making treatment decisions.”
Bill 26, which became law last December, prohibits doctors in the province from prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapies for those under 16; it also bans doctors from performing gender-reassignment surgeries on minors (those under 18).
The unprecedented CMA action follows its strongly worded response in February 2024 to Alberta’s (at the time) proposed legislation:
“The CMA is deeply concerned about any government proposal that restricts access to evidence-based medical care, including the Alberta government’s proposed restrictions on gender-affirming treatments for pediatric transgender patients.”
But here’s the problem with that statement, and with the CMA’s position: the evidence supporting the “gender affirmation” model of care — which propels minors onto puberty blockers, cross-gender hormones, and in some cases, surgery — is essentially non-existent. That’s why the United Kingdom’s Conservative government, in the aftermath of the exhaustive four-year-long Cass Review, which laid bare the lack of evidence for that model, and which shone a light on the deeply troubling potential for the model’s irreversible harm to youth, initiated a temporary ban on puberty blockers — a ban made permanent last December by the subsequent Labour government. And that’s why other European jurisdictions like Finland and Sweden, after reviews of gender affirming care practices in their countries, have similarly slammed the brakes on the administration of puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones to minors.
It’s not only the Europeans who have raised concerns. The alarm bells are ringing loudly within our own borders: earlier this year, a group at McMaster University, headed by none other than Dr. Gordon Guyatt, one of the founding gurus of the “evidence-based care” construct that rightfully underpins modern medical practice, issued a pair of exhaustive systematic reviews and meta analyses that cast grave doubts on the wisdom of prescribing these drugs to youth.
And yet, the CMA purports to be “deeply concerned about any government proposal that restricts access to evidence-based medical care,” which begs the obvious question: Where, exactly, is the evidence for the benefits of the “gender affirming” model of care? The answer is that it’s scant at best. Worse, the evidence that does exist, points, on balance, to infliction of harm, rather than provision of benefit.
CMA President Joss Reimer, in the group’s announcement of the organization’s legal action, said:
“Medicine is a calling. Doctors pursue it because they are compelled to care for and promote the well-being of patients. When a government bans specific treatments, it interferes with a doctor’s ability to empower patients to choose the best care possible.”
Indeed, we physicians have a sacred duty to pursue the well-being of our patients. But that means that we should be putting forward the best possible treatments based on actual evidence.
When Dr. Reimer states that a government that bans specific treatments is interfering with medical care, she displays a woeful ignorance of medical history. Because doctors don’t always get things right: look to the sad narratives of frontal lobotomies, the oxycontin crisis, thalidomide, to name a few.
The thalidomide saga is particularly instructive: it illustrates what happens when a government drags its heels on necessary action. Canada was the last developed country to pull thalidomide, given to pregnant women for morning sickness, from its shelves, three months after it had been banned everywhere else — three months during which babies continued to be born in this country with absent or deformed limbs, along with other severe anomalies. It’s a shameful chapter in our medical past, but it pales in comparison to the astonishing intransigence our medical leaders have displayed — and continue to display — on the youth gender care file.
A final note (prompted by thalidomide’s history), to speak to a significant quibble I have with Alberta’s Bill 26 legislation: as much as I admire Premier Danielle Smith’s courage in bringing it forward, the law contains a loophole allowing minors already on puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones to continue to take them. Imagine if, after it was removed from the shelves in 1962, government had allowed pregnant women already on the drug to continue to take thalidomide. Would that have made any sense? Of course not. And the same applies to puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones: they should be banned outright for all youth.
That argument is the kind our medical associations should be making — and would be making, if they weren’t so firmly in the grasp, seemingly, of ideologues who have abandoned evidence-based medical care for our youth.
J. Edward Les is a Calgary pediatrician, a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, and co-author of “Teenagers, Children, and Gender Transition Policy: A Comparison of Transgender Medical Policy for Minors in Canada, the United States, and Europe.”
The wonderful people who brought you Elbows Up and Don’t Shop At Home Depot! are now on to Edmonton Oilers Bring Home The Cup. In response to no Canadian-based team winning the Stanley Cup since 1993 the corporate nostalgia folks are linking arms with Connor McDavid & Co in their struggle with the dastardly Florida Panthers. The Oil are now Canada’s team!
In one bit they were taking ice shavings from McDavid’s home rink in southern Ontario to mix with the frozen Zamboni water of Edmonton’s Rogers Place arena. Okay, they have eight players on the Oilers roster who aren’t Canadian (hello Leon Draisaitl), and the stars now killing it for the Panthers, Sam Bennett and Brad Marchand, are from Ontario. But never mind. Like playing Mr. Dressup trivia with Mike Meyers it’s just too good an idea to waste.
The outcome of all this patriotic wind therapy will be determined Tuesday— or Thursday at the latest. But it will have achieved the desired goal of warming the cockles of all those Canadians who turtled in the election, flipping back to Mark Carney’s Liberals when the going got a little rough with Donald Trump. Resulting in a maximum four more years of Carney’s faculty lounge of dunces and Kamala Harris clones.
While the marketers were playing the Maple Syrup March over the Stanley Cup Final they missed an even better opportunity to marry Canadian patriotism with sport. We speak, of course, of the inevitable crowning of Canadian stars as champions of the NBA. In fact the entire progress of the postseason in the sneaker league has witnessed great Canadian results.
Not least of which: Hamilton’s Shai Gilgeous Alexander winning the NBA MVP while leading his Oklahoma City Thunder to the brink of the NBA crown. For those distracted by Stu Skinner and Corey Perry, SGA is a revelation, If you missed him leading Canada back to the Olympics last year the wiry 26-year-old is a lithe, unstoppable chinook who routinely scores 30 points a game.
He has help from another Canadian, Montreal’s Lu Dort, a finalist for NBA defensive player of the year, who also led Canada to the Olympics. As unstoppable as SGA is, Dort is immovable. But that’s not all the Canadian content. In the Finals they are up against two more Canadian teammates from last year. Aurora Ont.’s Andrew Nembhard is the back-court catalyst for Tyrese Haliburton’s Indian Pacers, taking them to the Eastern title and within two wins of the NBA title. He’s assisted by another Canadian, Montreal’s Benedict Mathurin, the hero of the Game 3 win for the Pacers. They’re now household names.
The Canadian content didn’t end there, either. In the semifinals, the Thunder beat the Minnesota Timberwolves featuring SGA’s cousin Nickeil Alexander-Walker , another alumnus of the CDN national team. At one point the two close friends were anything but friendly, shoving each other under the basket.
They had Canadian company in the postseason. In earlier rounds R.J. Barrett and the New York Knicks made it to the second round in the East, Jamal Murray’s Denver Nuggets fell to the Thunder in Round Two, while the Houston Rockets and Mississauga’s Dillon Brooks, a tenacious physical presence, lost to Steph Curry’s Golden State Warriors . Meanwhile, Corey Joseph’s Orlando Magic lost in the first round to Boston.
But the Canadian content didn’t end there. The Toronto Raptors, NBA champs of 2019, are now spread throughout the league, affording nostalgic Canadian fans a rooting playoff interest in players such as Pascal Siakim, who’s pairing with Nembhard and Mathurin to push the upset-minded Pacers, shooting guard OG Anunoby teamed with small forward R.J. Barrett on the Knicks and point guard Fred Van Vliet of the Rockets. All harkened back to the Raptors’ greatest days.
But in the heat of Elbows Up marketing these great performances don’t seem to get a sniff from marketers looking to promote Canadian unity in these fractious days. While the sports networks give airtime to the stories in the Association. the general public and advertisers have little time or inclination to draw patriotic strength from these young men.
Before we completely condemn Canadian marketers it should be noted that the interest in the NBA in general is waning. The NBA has lost 75 percent of its TV audience since the Michael Jordan peak while many other sports — NFL, men’s & women’s college basketball, college football — have set record TV ratings. Yes, TV ratings in many fields have dropped since the 1990s. Still, it seems significant.
The problem for the NBA in a Time of Trump is its embrace of hard-left politics. Whether it’s LeBron James defending Chinese shoe manufacturers, the slavish devotion to #BLM even as its corruption is revealed and a maniacal obsession with Donald Trump (and embrace of Kamala Harris) the NBA has made its bed with radical political and cultural elements. It’s as if the Trump election and cultural shift never happened.
In this wilful blindness they are supported by their media partners whose own credibility is at an all-time low after carrying water for the Biden farce and Kamala’s erasure. Ironically, this is the same political crash car running Canadian politics at the moment. You’d think that would make the NBA— and its sister Women’s NBA—like catnip to the Canada Not For Sale crew.
So far the hockey quest is foremost in their minds. But perhaps when SGA holds the Larry O’Brien Trophy they might just achieve the symbiosis that the sport has always coveted.
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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