News
“Arguably the best Canadian Derby field ever assembled”
The 90th’s running of the Canadian Derby takes place on Sunday at Century Mile next to the Edmonton International Airport. Doors open at 11 am and the first race is set to begin at around 1:30. Here is a story supplied by Horse Racing Alberta – written by Curtis Stock
Earlier this year Final Jeopardy was considered strong enough to be on the Derby Trail. Only that was the Kentucky Derby Trail. Now, Final Jeopardy is back on the Derby Trail. Only this time it’s Sunday’s $250,000 Canadian Derby Trail at Century Mile and then the $250,000 B.C. Derby in Vancouver.
In what is arguably the best Canadian Derby field ever assembled with a classy group of 12 entered, Final Jeopardy would still – despite all the talent on each side of him – appear to be the much the best. After all, Final Jeopardy, now owned by Peter and James Redekop of B.C., is a horse that ran second to Code of Honor in his last appearance in the Grade 3 Dwyer Stakes at Belmont, New York.
If you aren’t familiar with Code of Honor you should be. Code of Honor just happens to be one of the top three-year-olds in North America. He was placed second in the Kentucky Derby; he won the Grade 2 Fountain of Youth in Florida and he ran third in the Grade 1 Florida Derby. Furthermore, Code of Honor is one of the main threats in next week’s Travers Stakes.
Talking about the Dwyer which Final Jeopardy lost by just over three lengths, Final Jeopardy’s jockey Irad Ortiz told Blood Horse magazine “He ran so good. I don’t have any excuse, we just got beat by a better horse. We were second-best today. He never gave up. It’s just that the winner is a good horse, too. He gave me everything he had.”
“He should be favoured,” said Dr. Bryan Anderson, racing manager for the Redekops. And he is with the morning line on Final Jeopardy set at 8-to-5.
Another Vancouver horse, Explode, who won the last local prep for the Canadian Derby, is the second favourite at 4-1. Miltontown, one of two horses that trainer Robertino Diodoro has sent to Alberta is next at 6-1 while Journey Man, who has won his last two starts at Arlington Park in Chicago, is the fourth choice at 8-1.
But the story line is still all Final Jeopardy, who as well as running second in the Dwyer in his last start, July 6, also finished fourth in the Peter Pan. He was also good enough to be entered in the Wood Memorial, one of the Kentucky Derby’s main prep races. Final Jeopardy ran sixth in the Wood but he had excuses getting squeezed at the start of the race.
“He looks like a monster,” said Diodoro, who has won three of the last six Canadian Derbies which would have been four of the last six until a judicial review by Madam Justice J.M. Ross disqualified 2017 Derby winner Chief Know It All on Tuesday afternoon. “On paper Final Jeopardy looks to be five to six lengths the best horse,” said one of Miltontown’s owners, Clayton Wiest, who also co-owned Chief Know It All and last year’s winner Sky Promise. “If you ran the race 10 times, maybe Final Jeopardy wins it nine times,” said Wiest, hoping that the tenth time is going to go Miltontown’s way.
How exactly does a horse like Final Jeopardy wind up in Edmonton? “We heard the horse was for sale,” said Anderson. “The previous owners, Gary and Mary West, have too many horses. They buy 50-60 babies a year at auction and they are almost only looking for Grade 1 and Grade 2 winners. “Our main veterinarian happened to be in the area; he looked at him and liked what he saw. Then trainer Phil Hall went down and looked at him and he liked what he saw too.” A sales price was not disclosed but sources indicate it was around $450,000.
Another reason why Final Jeopardy is in Edmonton is the $250,000 Derby purse which is up $50,000 from last year and $100,000 from two years ago. “I’m sure the purse had quite a bit to do with it,” said Hall. “And the Derby distance – a mile and a quarter – should help too. Jason Servis, who was Final Jeopardy’s previous trainer said a mile and a quarter wouldn’t be a problem.
“He’s a Cadillac,” said Final Jeopardy’s exercise and work rider Brad Cuthbertson, son of the great W. Canadian jockey Alan. “He’s a very nice horse. He’s big. He’s strong. He’s got a nice move to him. He just looks the part of a good horse. Horses like him have confidence; they know they’re the best.”
While post positions don’t mean a lot in a mile and a quarter race on a one-mile track like Century Mile, Final Jeopardy drew post eight at Wednesday’s post draw.
From the rail out the posts are:
- Call It a Wrap. Owned by the powerful Riversedge barn and conditioned by Alberta’s leading trainer, Tim Rycroft, Call It a Wrap finished second in his last three starts including the Manitoba Derby in his most recent appearance and then twice to Alberta’s top three-year-old Sharp Dressed Beau. A contender to finish in the top 5.
- Parking Permit. Third to Sharp Dressed Beau in the Count Lathum two starts ago. A definite longsot.
- Karizanga. Missed by a nose in his most recent start at Indiana Downs. Won a starters allowance at Churchill Downs. Should challenge for the show position.
- Ranger Up. Still a maiden but finished second in straight maiden races at Monmouth Park, Kenneland and Gulfstream. In the middle mix and could surprise for a bigger piece.
- Miltontown. Claimed for $50,000 at Churchill Downs expressively for this race. Same connections won last year’s Derby with Sky Promise. Trainer Diodoro said to throw the last race out as the horse got caught too far behind a speed-biased track and had traffic problems. Hard to ignore the Diodoro factor and gets the services of jockey Rico Walcott. Has been working extremely well including a half mile work in :47 seconds flat. In the top 4.
- Explode. Has won five of his last six starts easily taking two open stakes at Hastings Park and then completing the hat trick at Century Miles when he just got up in the mud in a race where he was looking around down the stretch and appeared to jump the starting gate tractor tires. Main contender.
- Journeyman. Never worse than third in six starts including back-to-back wins at Arlington. Third choice.
- Final Jeopardy. Top choice for obvious reasons.
- Equivocal. Scored a nice allowance win at Century Mile two starts ago but showed no run last time out. A longshot.
- Senor Friday. The other Diodoro pupil. Won the Harry Jeffries in Winnipeg in his last start. Earlier this year won the Turf Paradise Derby by open lengths in Phoenix. Middle threat.
- Flatout Winner. Had excuses in the mud in his last appearance when he was bumped hard leaving the starting gate losing several lengths at the break, made a good wide move down the backstretch before being taken back to the rail where he flattened out. Moved off the rail again he started to run again. The longshot play.
- Sharp Dressed Beau. Won the Western Canada and Count Lathum stakes at Century Mile looking very impressive. Third in the mud to Explode last time out. Distance is the question and post doesn’t help. In the middle mix too.
STOCK REPORT– There are three other stakes races this weekend. All powerful races. On Saturday there is the $75,000 Northlands Distaff for aged fillies and mares and the $100,000 Century Casinos Oaks for three-year-old fillies. In the former, Good Luck to You heads a strong field of nine. In the latter, Summerland makes the trip to Edmonton. She has won eight of 10 lifetime starts including a six-for-six run. Throw out the last race where she had breathing problems. Looking to topple her is Im Evin Im Leavin, who came so close to knocking off Exploded and the boys in her last trip. Throw out the Sonoma start where he really acted up in the starting gate. Also a factor is the well-conditioned Exactly sent out by Elige Bourne.
On Sunday in addition to the Derby is the $75,000 Century Mile which attracted a very solid field of 11 including Sir Bronx, who drew the outside post. Sir Bronx was last year’s champion sprinter and aged horse and he appears to be even better this year. The morning line favourite is Gato Guapo, whom Diodoro has also brought to Century Mile. Gate Guapo rarely misses a cheque.
Post times for the first race on Saturday and Sunday is 1:45 p.m. The Derby is the 10th of the 10-race card.
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Follow me on Twitter at CurtisJStock
By Jen Hodgson
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is using taxpayer money to pad its bureaucracy, while reducing the number of journalists on staff, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
“CBC defends its very existence based on its journalism, but its number of journalists are going down while its bureaucracy keeps getting bigger and taxpayer costs keeps going up,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Why does the government keep giving CBC more taxpayer money if barely anyone is watching and its number of journalists keeps going down?”
The CBC employed 745 staff with “journalist” or “reporter” in their job title in 2021. That number dropped to 649 by 2025, the records obtained by the CTF show. Of the 6,100 total employees disclosed by the records, just 11 per cent of CBC staff had “journalist” or “reporter” as their job title in 2025, according to the records.
Even journalist roles such as editors, producers and hosts declined between 2021 and 2025.
While the number of journalists employed by the state broadcaster fell, the number of other bureaucrats grew. The total number of CBC management positions increased to 949 in 2025, up from 935 in 2021.
Bureaucratic roles such as “administrators,” “advisors,” “analysts” and sales staff all increased steadily during the same period.
Management positions saw the steepest growth, with titles like “national director,” “project lead,” “senior manager” and “supervisor” leading the surge.
These trends undermine the CBC’s long-standing claim that its frontline journalism justifies its existence. Despite bureaucratic bloat and fewer journalism positions, the CBC continues to promote its news coverage as a reason it deserves more than $1 billion in annual taxpayer funding.
Separate access-to-information records obtained by the CTF show further proof of CBC’s bloated bureaucracy.
The CBC has more than 250 directors, 450 managers and 780 producers who are paid more than $100,000 per year.
The CBC also employed 130 advisers, 81 analysts, 120 hosts, 80 project leads, 30 lead architects, 25 supervisors, among other positions, who were paid more than $100,000 last year, according to access-to-information records. The CBC redacted the roles for more than 200 employees.
CBC’s CEO Marie-Philippe Bouchard insists the broadcaster is a “precious public asset” that provides “trustworthy news and information.”
CBC’s previous CEO, Catherine Tait, made similar comments throughout her 6.5-year tenure.
“A Canada without the CBC is a Canada without local news [in some places],” Tait said in 2022. If funding were withheld, there would be “fewer journalists to hold decision-makers at all levels to account.”’
“Local news is absolutely at the core of what we do,” Tait said in a 2020 interview. “Canadians are coming to the CBC in numbers like we’ve never seen before.”
However, CBC News Network only accounts for about 1.8 per cent of TV audience share, according to its own data.
Meanwhile, taxpayer funding to CBC will surpass $1.4 billion this year, according to the federal government’s Main Estimates. The broadcaster has spent about $5.4 billion of taxpayers’ money over the last five years, according to the government of Canada.
Prime Minister Mark Carney claimed “our public broadcaster is underfunded” during the federal election. He pledged an initial $150-million annual funding increase and said that number could rise even higher.
CBC paid out $18.4 million in bonuses in 2024 after it eliminated hundreds of jobs. Following backlash from across the political spectrum, CBC ended its bonuses and handed out record high pay raises costing $37.7 million.
“Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for an office full of middle managers pretending to be reporters,” Terrazzano said. “The CBC’s own records prove it has fat to cut and if Carney is serious about saving money, he would force CBC to cut its bureaucratic bloat.
“Or better yet, Carney should defund the CBC.”
Internet
It’s only a matter of time before the government attaches strings to mainstream media subsidies
Misinformation is not exclusive to alternative online news organizations
In a previous world, whether they succeeded or failed at that was really no one’s business, at least provided the publisher wasn’t knowingly spreading false information intended to do harm. That is against the law, as outlined in Section 372 of the Criminal Code, which states:
“Everyone commits an offence who, with intent to injure or alarm a person, conveys information that they know is false, or causes such information to be conveyed by letter or any means of telecommunication.”
Do that, and you can be imprisoned for up to two years.
But if a publisher was simply offering poorly researched, unbalanced journalism, and wave after wave of unchallenged opinion pieces with the ability to pervert the flow of information and leave the public with false or distorted impressions of the world, he or she was free to do so. Freedom of the press and all that.
The broadcasting world has always been different. Licensed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), content produced there must, according to the Broadcasting Act, be of “high standard”—something that the CRTC ensures through its proxy content regulator, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC).
Its most recent decision, for instance, condemned Sportsnet Ontario for failing to “provide a warning before showing scenes of extraordinary violence” when it broadcast highlights of UFC mixed martial arts competitions during morning weekend hours when children could watch. If you don’t understand how a warning would have prevented whatever trauma the highlights may have caused or how that might apply to the internet, take comfort in the fact that you aren’t alone.
The CRTC now has authority over all video and audio content posted digitally through the Online Streaming Act, and while it has not yet applied CRTC-approved CBSC standards to it, it’s probably only a matter of time before it does.
The same will—in my view—eventually take place regarding text news content. Since it has become a matter of public interest through subsidies, it’s inevitable that “high standard” expectations will be attached to eligibility. In other words, what once was nobody’s business is now everybody’s business. Freedom of the, er, press and all that.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith
Which raises the point: is the Canadian public well informed by the news industry, and who exactly will be the judge of that now that market forces have been, if not eliminated, at least emasculated?
For instance, as former Opposition leader Preston Manning recently wondered on Substack, how can it be that “62 per cent of Ontarians,” according to a Pollara poll, believe Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to be a separatist?
“The truth is that Premier Smith—whom I’ve known personally for a long time—is not a separatist and has made that clear on numerous occasions to the public, the media, and anyone who asks her,” he wrote.
I, too, have been acquainted for many years with the woman Globe and Mailcolumnist Andrew Coyne likes to call “Premier Loon” and have the same view as Manning, whom I have also known for many years: Smith is not a separatist.
Manning’s theory is that there are three reasons for Ontarians’ disordered view—the first two being ignorance and indifference.
The third and greatest, he wrote, is “misinformation—not so much misinformation transmitted via social media, because it is especially older Ontarians who believe the lie about Smith—but misinformation fed into the minds of Ontarians via the traditional media” which includes CBC, CTV, Global, and “the Toronto-based, legacy print media.”
No doubt, some members of those organizations would protest and claim the former Reform Party leader is the cause of all the trouble.
Such is today’s Canada, where the flying time between Calgary and Toronto is roughly the same as between London and Moscow, and the sense of east-west cultural dislocation is at times similar. As Rudyard Kipling determined, the twain shall never meet “till earth and sky stand presently at God’s great judgment seat.”
This doesn’t mean easterners and westerners can’t get along. Heavens no. But what it does illustrate is that maybe having editorial coverage decisions universally made in Hogtown about Cowtown (the author’s outdated terminology), Halifax, St John’s, Yellowknife, or Prince Rupert isn’t helping national unity. It is ridiculous, when you think about it, that anyone believes a vast nation’s residents could have compatible views when key decisions are limited to those perched six degrees south of the 49th parallel within earshot of Buffalo.
But CTV won’t change. Global can’t. The Globe is a Toronto newspaper, and most Postmedia products have become stripped-down satellites condemned to eternally orbit 365 Bloor Street East.
The CRTC is preoccupied with finding novel ways to subsidize broadcasters to maintain a status quo involving breakfast shows. So we can’t expect any changes there, nor can we from the major publishers.
Which leaves the job to the CBC, whose job it has always been to make sure the twain could meet. That makes it fair to assume Manning will be writing for many years to come about Toronto’s mainstream media and misinformation about the West.
(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, a former vice chair of the CRTC and a National Newspaper Award winner.)
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