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Bruce Dowbiggin

Referee Complaint Department: You Can’t Say That

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Hear us with Peter Mansbridge on The Bridge at SiriusXM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Here’s the link.

Received a call from my old colleague Peter Mansbridge who has been noticing that refereeing criticism has raised its head as the NHL and NBA seasons come to their conclusions. He’d seen the intemperate rant from Raptor Fred Vanvleet about the swagger of certain referees not adding to the credibility of their work.

“I thought Ben Taylor was f—ing terrible tonight,” he riffed. “I thought that, on most nights, out of the three [officials], there’s one or two that just f— the game up. It’s been like that a couple of games in a row.” Vanvleet admitted he was willing to take the fine that came from ripping NBA refs. Sure enough, the league reciprocated by docking him $30 K for his musings. It was as predictable as it was entertaining.

Peter was wondering if the Raptors star had a legitimate beef with a league that has had gambling scandals with referees (hello Tim Donaghy). He’d also noted, as a season ticket holder in Toronto, that the NHL’s referees sometimes act as if they believe they are the reason the fans tune in. This sentiment gained credibility in 2021 when soon-to-be-former referee Tim Peel was caught on mic saying that, to balance a game, he wanted to give a penalty to Nashville regardless of no infraction.

We were unable to reassure Peter that this tension would resolve, as the influence of legal gambling has put results and the men who call them under ever-greater scrutiny. With the new massive revenues coming from casinos and online gambling advertising the leagues have an added imperative to guarantee the integrity of results by creating a surveillance state on refs and players.

The late pass-interference call against Philadelphia in the Super Bowl that swung tens (maybe) hundreds of millions in bets is indicative of the tightrope they now face. You take house money, you had better keep the house happy. Made worse when these calls are handled by part-time NFL referees or NHL refs who never face the media over their calls.

Lamenting the officials’ work is an age-old issue. In an earlier age, the vagaries were put down to “puck luck” or “bad breaks”. With little recourse, coaches, GMs and players bit a lip and hoped next time they’d be the beneficiaries. The gripes increased as leagues began using referees to create more scoring or prevent injuries, manipulating results. Fans noticed, and did not like it.

In December of 2018 we wrote, “It is a cliché in city planning that, adding roads to prevent congestion, in fact ends up in more cars and more congestion. IDLM was reminded of this seeming contradiction while watching another episode of Law & Order: NFL Crappy Refereeing. In this week’s episode, what was considered pass interference on Thursday is Saturday’s “let ‘em play”… Attempts to clarify what constitutes a catch open new vistas for opaqueness. Not a good look.

The reason for much of this confusion lies with the league’s attempt to prevent injuries by adding a new rules to their rule book. As this (manipulation) has done to city streets, the additional nuance and subtext has only produced greater congestion in games. Endless referee conferences. Players dumbfounded. TV announcers criticizing. 

And still the bodies are broken, the injury lists groan with victims and the fans simmer in disappointment. As they like to say, Epic Fail… The NFL has long been lauded for its ability to gerrymander the rules of its sport to encourage scoring and more dynamic plays. The result, however, is a rule book that more resembles the IRS tax code than any sporting competition. 

“As Al Michaels laments, the flow of games is constantly interrupted by a scrum of referees huddling to divine which of the million NFL bylaws been breached. The (now Vegas) Raiders recently chalked up a record 23 (!) penalties accepted in a single game. As a result, games are unwatchable tedious. 

“On most occasions there is some foul detected. But the proliferation of penalties says that the game might be too difficult to play by the Spanish Inquisition standards of the rule book. Any game that has more than five flags per team is a problem the league needs to address. And don’t get us started about consistency from one officiating crew to the next.”

And that was 2018. Multiply the additional rules and complexities inflicted upon referees by leagues. Add in the visibility created by gamblers parsing every minute trend for an advantage. Increase the number of cameras covering a game by ten. Then season with analytics. It’s a recipe for conspiracy theories.

So, yes, Peter, the issues with refereeing have never been more prominent. But blame the leagues, not their employees, for making them worse.

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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, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new 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 http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Award-winning Author and Broadcaster Bruce Dowbiggin's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience . He is currently the editor and publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster website and is also a contributor to SiriusXM Canada Talks. His new book Cap In Hand was released in the fall of 2018. Bruce's career has included successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster for his work with CBC-TV, Mr. Dowbiggin is also the best-selling author of "Money Players" (finalist for the 2004 National Business Book Award) and two new books-- Ice Storm: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Vancouver Canucks Team Ever for Greystone Press and Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion for Random House. His ground-breaking investigations into the life and times of Alan Eagleson led to his selection as the winner of the Gemini for Canada's top sportscaster in 1993 and again in 1996. This work earned him the reputation as one of Canada's top investigative journalists in any field. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013) where his incisive style and wit on sports media and business won him many readers.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Eau Canada! Join Us In An Inclusive New National Anthem

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This past week has seen (some) Canadians celebrating their heritage— now that Mike Myers has officially reinterpreted Canadian culture as a hockey sweater and Mr. Dressup. This quick-change was so popular that Canadian voters even forgot an entire decade of Justin Trudeau.

In the United States, the people who elected Donald Trump– and not Andrew Coyne– to run their nation celebrated Independence Day with stirring renditions off The Star Spangled Banner, although few could surpass the brilliant performance of the song by the late Whitney Houston at the 1991 Super Bowl.

The CDN equivalent is some flavour of the month changing the words to O Canada at the Grey Cup game. Canada’s national anthem has always been open to interpretation by people who may or may not have Canada in their hearts. At the 2023 NBA All Star Game Canadian chanteuse Jully Black became the latest singer to attempt a manicure to the English lyrics of O Canada, penned for the 1880 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony ( Calixa Lavallée composed the music, after which words were written by the poet and judge Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The English lyrics have “evolved” over the years, just like the dress code for the CDN PM..)

Black amended the first line from “our home and native land” to our home ON native land”. Because something-something. But this creative license is nothing new. Unlike Chris Stapleton, Marvin Gaye or Whitney Houston with the Star Spangled Banner, interpreters of O Canada have seen fit to amend the lyrics to their sensibilities. Roger Doucet, famed anthem singer of the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970-80s, tried to add the words “we stand on guard for truth and liberty” in place of the first “we stand on guard for thee”.

In 1990, having nothing better to do, Toronto City Council voted 12 to 7 in favour of recommending that the phrase “our home and native land” be changed to “our home and cherished land” and that “in all thy sons command” be partly reverted to “in all of us command”. (The latter was officially adapted.)

While those attempts had mixed outcomes it appears it’s just a matter of time till Ms. Black’s class-conscious culling of the words is accepted. Being generous we here at IDLM thought we’d short-circuit piecemeal attempts to create a throughly Woke version of the anthem that would last till the latest fad come along. Herewith our 2023 definitive O Canada that even— maybe only— Justin Trudeau could love:

“O Canada” (Ignores the French fact in our culture) Change to “Eau Canada”

“Our home on native land” (ignores indigenous land claims) Change to “Get off our land, settlers”

“True patriot love in all of us commands” (Only true patriot love? There were officially 78 kinds of relationships in Trudeaupia. And commanding love?) Change to “Love the one you’re with”.

“With glowing hearts we see thee rise” (rise suggests triumph of white triumphalist dogma) Change to “Non judgementally we oppose the crushing impacts of Euro-based autocracy”

“The true north strong and free” (How can anyone be strong or free when we support America’s killing fields?) Change to “Heteronormative thinking must be stamped out at our borders. If we even have borders anymore.”

“From far and wide” (Body shaming) Change to “Obesity is a disease that is not helped by putting it in the national anthem.”

“O Canada” (biased against A, B, AB blood types) change to “Science Must Be Believed”

“We stand on guard for thee” (Spreads hate against the non ableist community) Change to “Please remain seated.”

“God keep our land” (God? God? What is this, the Reformation) “Change to “It’s your thing”

”Glorious and free” (Glorious harkens to the bourgeois subjugation of Indigenous thought processes by white Christian priests) Change to “A genocidal state if there ever was one”.

“O Canada we stand on guard for thee/ 

O Canada we stand on guard for thee”  The denial of trans rights is used twice here to emphasize the intolerable burdens faced by people of the LGBTQ2R community as they seek respect and compensation for the evils of the founding oppressors.) Change to “Eau Canada, after 6.5 hours of intensive lectures on the gender, race and dissociative application of class war on your citizens you may someday come to understand that this song is a manifestation of your bigotry and exploitation of minorities— and why rhyming lines like “thee and free” is the work of the devil or J.K. Rowling, whomever comes to mind first.”

There. That wasn’t so tough, was it? Flows trippingly off the tongue like Mark Carney refusing a special inquiry into China buying the electoral process.  Or perhaps we should simply accept a literal translation of the original French lyrics:

“O Canada!

Land of our ancestors

Glorious deeds circle your brow

For your arm knows how to wield the sword

Your arm knows how to carry the cross;

Your history is an epic

Of brilliant deeds

And your valour steeped in faith

Will protect our homes and our rights.”

Yikes. That’s downright fascistic. But it’s Quebec, and we have to allow them their peccadilloes. So circle your brow with glorious deeds, grab a cross and a sword and valour steeped in faith. And remember we must be adaptable in the new era.

Unless it’s Alberta using the adapting to fuel its CO2-belching machines. In which case it’s man the battlements and follow Mike Myers into the fight.

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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Bruce Dowbiggin

Canada Day 2025: It’s Time For Boomers To Let The Kids Lead

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So how did you spend your first Canada Day under new PM Mark Carney? If you’re CBC, freed from the clutches of Pierre Poilievere, you do a fawning  interview with ex-pat comedian Mike Myers, whose Elbows Up appearance on Saturday Night Live and whose partisan hockey sweater appearance with Carney were pivotal moments in the recent election. (Saving CBC from drastic budget cuts— not that they mentioned it.)

After Donald Trump’s bellicose 51st state comments, Myers’ nostalgic harkening to the days of Gordie Howe and Mr. Dressup pivoted Boomers’ voter preferences in Canada. Soft Quebec sovereigntists petrified by Trump abandoned the Bloc for the Liberals. Progressives ditched the NDP for the Grits. And some wobbly Conservatives moved to Carney’s side, too, after the charm offensive by Myers, who hasn’t lived in Canada since the 1980s.

The result? Liberals vaulted 20 points in the polls and barely missed a majority in their fourth consecutive election win. Boomers were exultant. Their subsidized media was joyous. And the rest of the world asked if Canada was a serious country after the Libs naked substitution of Carney for the loathed Justin Trudeau. After all, hadn’t the U.S. Democrats tried the same thing and been summarily spanked by voters?

More to the point, had Canadian voters missed a great opportunity by sticking their heads in the ground on Chinese gangs using Canada as a drug launch pad, Canadian banks being fined billons for money laundering, immigration flooding social services, cratering GDP and Palestinian protests clogging the streets?

This at a time when the under-50 generation has lost faith in its destiny within Canada. As we wrote in March why are 43 percent of 18-36 male CDNs telling pollsters they would accept U.S. citizenship if they were guaranteed full rights and financial protections? Where upper-class products of liberal education— the future professional class— have taken to wearing keffiyehs to the convocations and demonstrations. Where housing is an unattainable goal in most major Canadian urban centres.

It’s not hard to see them looking at the Mike Myers obsession with a long-gone Canada and saying let’s get out of here. The signs are there. Recently former TVOntario host Steve Pakin attended two convocations. The first at the former Ryerson University, which switched its name to Toronto Metropolitan University in a fit of settler colonizer guilt. The second at Queens University, traditionally one of the elite schools in the nation. Here’s what he saw.

“At the end of the (TMU) convocation, when Charles Falzon, on his final day as dean of TMU’s Creative School, asked students to stand and sing the national anthem, many refused. They remained seated. Then, when the singing began, it was abundantly noticeable that almost none of the students sang along. And it wasn’t because they didn’t know the words, which were projected on a big screen. The unhappy looks on their faces clearly indicated a different, more political, explanation.

I asked some of the TMU staff about it after the ceremony was over, and they confirmed what I saw happens all the time at convocations. Then I texted the president of another Ontario university who agreed: this is a common phenomenon among this generation at post-secondary institutions.”

At Queens, where Canadian flags were almost non-existent, O Canada was sung, but the message of unrest was clear: “Convocation sends a message of social stability,” Queen’s principal Patrick Deane  began in his speech.  “It is a ceremony shaped in history. You should value your connection to the past, but question that inheritance. Focus on the kind of society you’d like to inhabit.”

You can bet Deane is not telling them to question climate change and trans rights. As Paikin observes, “if we fail to create a more perfect union, we shouldn’t be surprised when a vast swath of young people don’t sing our anthem the way so many of the rest of us do.” So why are the best and brightest so reluctant to see as future in becoming the new professional class that runs society?

In the Free Press River Page searched the source of their discontent. “If the Great Recession, Covid-19, and the spectre of an artificial intelligence-assisted ‘white collar bloodbath’ has taught the professional class anything, it is that their credentials cannot save them. This insecurity, compounded by the outrageous cost of living in many large cities, has pushed the PMC’s anxieties to the breaking point. 

“Add that to the triumph of identity politics in professional class institutions like universities, corporate C-suites, non-governmental organizations, and media—itself a byproduct of inter-elite competition as many have observed—and what you have is the modern left.

“… they’ve already come to the baffling conclusion that there’s no difference between class struggle and child sex changes. More to the point, the socialist mantra “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has only ever stood the test of time in Anabaptist sects. It requires a religious devotion to self-sacrifice that is not characteristic of this anxious and hyper-competitive class—as many actual socialists have spent the last decade warning.”

As we wrote in March Boomer nostalgia is a dead end. “It’s time that Canada’s aging elite ceded a greater voice in the national debate to younger voices. They need an intervention of the type Trump is now performing on Canadians addicted to sitting in first class but paying economy. He brought them into a room with the chairs and levelled with them about getting the free stuff they assumed was their right. Defence, security, trade, medical access. He’s the first president to do this in half a century.

And like all people addicted, CDN Boomers don’t want the truth. They want performance theatre, T-shirts and hockey games. They blame Trump for their predicament, caught between grim realities. Will they take the 12 steps? Or will their kids have to tell them the facts as they escort them to the home?” Because we’re now seeing the likely answer to that question everywhere in Canadian society.

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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