And you thought Elbows Up was just a hockey thing? Ha! The folks who marketed the Mike Myers hockey election campaign to use Donald Trump to distract Canadians have decided that baseball fans must too be swept up in patriotic fury to support the governing Liberal minority. All over a baseball team with zero Canadians on its roster.

This from the nation that half an hour ago was telling the world Canada was a genocidal settler tyranny burying murdered babies in the moonlight. Go figure.

Rogers Media is running commercials during the Blue Jays AL Divisional Series boasting in Liberal red and white “Proud owners of Canada’s national team”. (What team owner has ever put itself above the title on a sports team?) If you haven’t caught that ad there are others Rogers’ ads extolling its magnificence in giving Canada the highest telephone bills this side of Botswana. Oh wait… They say, Go Jays Go, Canada’s national team. Sorry about that.

The team’s announcers are also being made to read verbatim prefab trite slugs about the story of the Blue Jays not being written yet. (We counted three doing the hype before Gm. 1.) Watching the proud-as-punch onslaught from the team’s owner one would think this has to be more than Vlad Guerrero uber alles. And, of course, there is. Rudyard Griffiths, publisher of The Hub, calls it part of the “soft, silent takeover of the nation’s press”. Having used public money to bribe… er, support even the richest media in the country Liberals can count on their support for tongue bathing of Mark Carney’s faculty lounge.

The intro for Game One of the ALDS lathered the “Canada’s team” lard. You’re supposed to think its the 1992-93 World Series all over again. Don’t pay attention to those MAGA cranks in the corner. Rogers is not alone. Much of the advertising during the Jays/ Yankees equates Canada’s team and Canada proud. The advertisers on the games are punctuating ads with a “made in Canada by Canadians” angle (even as jobs flee the country).

But never has the Laurentian Elite of Canada needed a distraction from the mess of Canada’s Liberal hegemony. It can’t be seen that Trump was correct stating it was a better deal being part of the U.S. Samples of Elbows Down:

Canada has no mail system.

“Hollywood North” just got torpedoed by Trump.

Government financial watchdog said the economy is “unsustainable”

Country is in cost-of-living, unemployment and housing crises.

Imperial just let go 1,000 employees and sold its Calgary HQ.

There’s plenty more. Like the virtuous refusing to visit the U.S., the Jays’ insertion into the mindset of Boomer Canada is providential to advertisers who make a living pitching the Liberal brand. Almost as precious as “Our” team is the concept of the Blue Jays as a national team. It seems like only yesterday they were deposing the previous national team, the Montreal Expos. The ‘Spos had aided Toronto in getting a franchise in 1977. When Toronto sputtered in the early days the Expos gave them oxygen. But as we wrote in July of 2023, the newcomer turned on their National League cousins.

“As the Jays went from weak sister to equal partner to dominant team on the field winning the 1992-93 World Series, their tone about letting Expo games generate income in their territory grew less than cordial. Labatt Breweries owned the biggest, most lucrative market in Canada. And only they should profit from it.

This exposed the fundamental weakness of the Montreal franchise. The Olympic Stadium was proving to be a cold, fan-unfriendly disaster. Hundreds of thousands of English speakers had left the province when the Parti Québecois took power. At the same time as initial owner Charles Bronfman was tiring of coming up short on the field and repeated labour stoppages, the Expos were threatened with a severe hit to their broadcast revenues.

Their friendly sharing of MLB in Canada with the Jays now appeared naïve.  MLB said the Expos could control Quebec and the Maritimes, but it would have to stay out of southern Ontario. McHale could see the writing on the wall. Owner Bronfman appealed to then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn for relief, saying this ruling would “ghettoize” the team within Canada. His intent on buying the club in 1969 had been to “bring Quebec into the nation”. Instead, the team he’d encouraged to join MLB was freezing the Expos out of the large English speaking markets.

After hearing from the Jays, MLB commoner Bowie Kuhn allowed the Expos to show 15 TV games a season in Ontario. McHale and Bronfman knew this was inadequate. As the Jays started getting into the postseason in 1985 and the Expos sank in the NL the die was cast. Making it worse, the Canadian dollar began its plunge that ended with a 62-cent dollar versus the U.S.

The 1994 season, in which Montreal had the best record in MLB, was cancelled. Bronfman sold the club to a consortium of owners without Bronfman’s means. By 2000, attendance nosedived as the Expos dumped their great core of Walker, Pedro Martinez, Moises Alou and John Wetteland. By the early 2000s, new American owner Jeffrey Loria was actively trying to sell the team to investors who’d move it  to the U.S.

By 2005, the Expos were sold to new owners in Washington who renamed the club the Washington Nationals. Loria, meanwhile, was allowed to buy the Florida Marlins franchise, which he ran into the ground as he’d done to the Expos.

The Blue Jays, meanwhile swept in to capture the entire Canadian sports TV audience. They are today valued by Forbes magazine at a cool $2.1 billion. There was talk of transferring the Tampa Bay Rays to Montreal but that evaporated when local Florida politicians promised lawsuits. MLB is now talking about possibly returning to Montreal as an expansion club should they build a proper ball park.

Although who in Quebec has a billion to throw at a baseball stadium is unclear. And how they’d get past the Blue Jays monopoly on broadcast rights in English Canada is also a huge question. Just remember, however, that you needn’t look far to see who had a large hand in killing the Expos.

It was the Toronto Blue Jays.”

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.

The 2025-26 NHL season opens this week with one overriding issue: Connor McDavid. Will the best player in this generation stay in Edmonton or go elsewhere? It’s a question that will be asked every day till the playoffs end or McDavid is traded. Naturally Edmonton is having a meltdown. Some are resigned to losing him. Others feel he could sign a bridge deal.

When it comes to losing their stars, Oilers City has been there before. The trade that always gets top billing is the 1988 Gretzky deal to the L.A. Kings, the seismic re-organization of hockey in the late 20th century. Less talked about— but more impactful on the ice— was a trade made this week in 1991 that sent Mark Messier to the New York Rangers. Messier led the Rangers their first Stanley Cup in 1994— their first since 1940. Gretzky never won a Cup away from Edmonton.

Here’s how Messier described the deal in our most recent book Deal With It: The Tales That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey:

Calling up GM Glen Sather a couple of months after the 1991 postseason ended to tell him he wanted to move, Messier years later recalled “phoning him was a tough thing. I think it was mid-July. I’d been thinking of this for a while. It wasn’t just the money. I’ve made it clear their offer was pretty good. Certainly enough, where I’d never have to worry again… But I had a gut feeling I wanted to make a change, to go. To try for a new challenge and grow a bit.” 

Both sides knew it was just business of course. Messier was correct in assuming he would not enjoy anything close to a sixth Cup if he stayed for a lucrative offer in Edmonton.

“I was delighted with Mark,” Sather would admit about the parting of ways. “He’s a terrific guy to be with and a great player, and it’s sad for me to have to trade him. But it becomes more complicated than that, because of what we’re trying to do here now. I don’t want to be caught in a situation where we’re going to be struggling for five or six years, depending on the draft to get us competitive again. If you analyze the way teams in this league have worked, they’ve all run on cycles. You peak for three or four years, and then go downhill and try to get back up again. And if you don’t trade players you can recover with, then you’re never going to recover. You only have so many assets to make deals with.

Neil Smith, the Rangers general manager who had seen his team endure back-to- back playoff disappointments (beaten both times by the Capitals), got wind of the possibility of landing the great “Moose” over the summer that year. Haggling for weeks toward an eventual deal, Sather would later point out the discrepancies between markets that were tearing apart the NHL at that time, bemoaning that “Maybe they’ll pay (Mark) in New York, maybe Mark is the kind of guy that can attract enough attention to do that. I mean, he’s going to be the matinee idol, he’s Madison Avenue, he’ll be terrific there. He’s the first big superstar they’ve had since Rod Gilbert, so they can afford to pay him whatever they want to pay. We don’t have MSG behind us.”

Edmonton’s training camp in 1991 went on with Messier absent, while he headed to Hilton Head to play golf with his father and brother following the 1991 Canada Cup win. Messier’s sabbatical in the sun ended on the day Edmonton’s season had started. On October 4, 1991, Messier got the call on the 16th tee box at Palmetto Dunes in South Carolina. It was Sather telling him he was headed to Broadway. In the deal, Bernie Nicholls, Steven Rice, Louie DeBrusk and future considerations (completed when the Rangers snagged Jeff Beukeboom for David Shaw) would be coming over in exchange for the vaunted Oiler captain. In the aftermath, an elated Smith hyperbolically called it “the biggest day in the 66-year history of the New York Rangers.” Hundreds and hundreds of miles away to the Northwest, reactions were considerably less enthusiastic.”

The rest was legend. With the media pressure and criticism mounting in the 1994 Conference Final, Messier was asked before the pivotal Game 6 matchup if he guaranteed a win. Responding, “Yes, we will win tonight,” he made what seemed like an innocuous comment at the time. But it was used by a NYC sports media that still lionized when “Broadway” Joe Namath had guaranteed his Jets would pull off the upset of the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III in 1969. Newspaper headlines honed in on Messier’s “bold guarantee.” The bravado would fall flatter than a pancake if this bulletin-board quote instead got the Rangers eliminated. Instead, Messier’s performance solidified his legacy as one of the great leaders/captains the sport had ever seen.” And the Rangers carried off the Cup, besting longtime whipping boys Vancouver in seven games.

Will McDavid win a Cup in Edmonton in 2026? Will he, like Messier, get his Cup with a large market team? Or will he be like Gretzky, doomed to play for three more teams without the big prize? This week we start the engines on Edmonton’s worst nightmare.

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.