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Bruce Dowbiggin

The Apple Interview: Pierre Poilievre Makes The Media Party Crazy

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“You don’t pull on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger. And you don’t mess around with Jim.”— Jim Croce

In modern five-second sound-bite journalism viewers seldom hear the reporter’s question (often it’s just an assertion) that prompted the clip. Whether a cornered politician or a humbled athlete, the game’s the same. Get a clip, score a click. So gotcha’ journalists rarely are exposed for the inadequate job of news-generating they often do with their closed-end, cliché-riddled efforts.

(Everything we know on the subject of interviewing we owe to the brilliant John Sawatsky who for decades has coached proper interview techniques —all of them ignored by the subject of this column.)

The job in gotcha’ journalism is to draw blood and win the applause of your peers. This goes for right-wing journalists, too. But mainstream media is saturated by left-wing, progressive water carriers, so the overwhelming army of CBC insinuators and Toronto Star whaddabout’ scribes have a disproportionate effect on the issues. Seeing as how they only talk among themselves they can’t imagine a parallel universe where PMJT is not a beneficent, wise leader.

To wit: the apple exchange gone viral between CPC leader Pierre Poilievre and Don Urquhart, editor of the Kelowna Times Chronicle. Mr. Urqhart went hunting for a big game with the CPC leader and wound up the main dish himself. Here’s the tale of the tape:

URQUHART: Uhmm, on the topic, I mean, in terms of your, sort of, strategy currently, you’re obviously taking the populist pathway …

POILIEVRE: What does that mean?

URQUHART: (nervous chuckle) Well, appealing to people’s more emotional levels, I would guess

POILIEVRE: Whaddaya mean by that? Give me an example.

URQUHART: Certainly you, certainly you tap, ah, very strong ideological language quite frequently.

POILIEVRE: Like what?

URQUHART: Uhh, left wing, y’know, this and that, right-wing, they, you know, I mean, it’s that type of (unintelligible) —

POILIEVRE: I almost never talk about — I never really talk about left or right. I don’t really believe in that.

URQUHART: A lot of people would say that you’re simply taking a page out of the Donald Trump, uh, book —

POILIEVRE: A lot of people? Like which people would say that? (puzzled chomp)

URQUHART: Well, I’m sure — a great many Canadians, but …

POILIEVRE: Like who?

URQUHART: Haha, uh, I don’t know who, but …

POILIEVRE: Well, you’re the one who asked the question, so you must know somebody.

URQUHART: He-

heh, okay, I’m, I’m sure there’s some out there, but anyways, the point of this question is, why should, why should Canadians trust you with their vote, given … y’know … not, not just the sort of ideological inclination in terms of taking the page out of Donald Trump’s book, but, also —

POILIEVRE: (incredulous) What are you talking about? What page? What page? Can you gimme a page? Gimme the page. You keep saying that …

URQUHART: In terms of, in terms of turning things quite dramatically, in terms of, of Trudeau, and, and the left wing, and all of this, you make quite a, you know, it’s, it’s quite a play that you make on it. So. I’m. Just wondering…

It continued on this way for a short while longer when a dazed Urquhart finally ran out of PMJT talking points to hurl at Poilievre, and Poilievre moved on. It was cold. It was spontaneous. Like the making of sausage, it was something the public rarely sees.

A clip of the interview was quickly shared by Poilievre’s comms team. “How do you like them apples?” was the caption on Poilievre’s post. Within days the interview had gone global, a rebuke around the globe for earnest-but-inept Jimmy Olsens and Lois Lanes of the liberal press corps. Conservatives cheered. “Can we get him in our country?” asked U.S. podcaster Meagan Kelly.

In the friendly confines of liberal 416/613 media, however, Poilievre was quickly labelled a bully for exposing one of their fellow travelers. In the Globe & Mail Shannon Proudfoot played the sad trombone for Urquhart, declaring it bad form for Poilievre to not assist a guy who was looking to skewer him.

Proudfoot’s moist G&M colleague André Picard also mounted the “punching-down” defense. “Getting to the core of  @PierrePoilievre’s biting B.C. interview. Kicking a journalist in the shins over and over  then turning the exchange into a social-media flex is telling on yourself…” Venerable CBC panelist/ Star columnist Chantal Hébert (who should know better) echoed the pauvre p’tit  take about Urquhart. “Agreed”.

Naturally the sob-sister line brought huzzahs from the wettest wet in Wet Town, Bruce Arthur of the Star. He embraced the bully pose even as he bullied Poilievre. “Kick-ass piece. “Making yourself a far-right hero by crapping on a small-town reporter is petty, and pathetic.” (So’s he defending someone who just disgraced his profession? Have we got that straight?)

Former Edmonton journalist Bill Doscoch also defended the indefensible.  @billdinYEG “Picking on a local reporter when you’re a national political leader is like pushing around a junior high student when you’re a high school senior. It was great entertainment for mean-minded conservatives, but telling for the rest of us.”

There were plenty more crying towels for Uquhart from the usual suspects. All ending with predictable Trumpian screeds against the UPC leader going after a small-fry in the hinterlands. What they spackled over is that Urquhart was the adult editor of the paper, not an errand boy out of J-School. He went looking for a home run on the national, not local stage. He’d have scored a national scoop if Poilievre hadn’t schooled him.

Instead he struck out on three straight fastballs. He was neither innocent. Nor was he prepared to do his job. But he cashed in his Pity Party points to win sympathy from the fainting goats of the left— who normally remind us that journalism is a blood sport.

If CPC comms folks had tried to stage an episode to expose the herding instincts of Canada’s cloistered legacy media trying to stay relevant on the public purse, this was it. 1) Assumption that his back was protected if he just used approved “far-right-wing” buzzwords 2) Assumption that everyone hates PP already. 3) Incompetence tolerated by corrupted, failed outlets. 4) Truth its dependent on what jersey you wear. 5) Lather, rinse, repeat.

Unsurprisingly, Urquhart himself thought he’d done a swell job. When time came to write up his fateful orchard convo, he had his own self-serving take. “When asked why Canadians should trust him with their votes given his demonstrable track record of flip-flopping on key issues and what some consider his use of polarizing ideologically-infused rhetoric suggesting he simply takes pages out of the Donald Trump populist playbook, Poilievre became acerbic.”

No, Bill, he ate an apple. Proving he learned nothing and will pollute younger journalists with this bilge. So it’s no shock that recent polling contains what should be a surprise— but isn’t. Despite a decade of Justin Trudeau the abysmal-polling Liberals are still expected to win 90 seats of the 335 seats in parliament. That speaks volumes on the loyalty of his base.

A base that still sees Poilievre’s “polarizing ideologically-infused rhetoric”— in Urquhart’s infelicitous description— as a right-wing Trumpian intrusion into Trudeaupia . And will use any means— even their own professional failure.— to protect their jobs and worldview.

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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

Canadians Thinks America Owes Them. Trump Has Other Ideas

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Breaking: It’s now being reported that in the 2024 U.S. election, zero Canadians voted for Donald Trump. In fact, zero Canadians voted for anyone on the ballot. They’re not allowed to. And yet rage monkeys in the Canadian media seem to have the idea that Canada is— and should be— an immediate priority of POTUS 47.

Here’s Globe & Mail/ CBC wind therapist Andrew Coyne about ten exits past normal on the idea of Donald Trump on Canadian soil. Okay, on Alberta soil. “We’re going to roll out the red carpet for the wannabe dictator of America at the very moment he is moving to suppress dissent with armed force?” (You mean like the Truckers Convoy?)

Cartoonist Michael DeAdder, who likely cries if you use improper pronouns, says “Hold my kombucha”. His latest etching has Trump asking a veteran what he did in the war. The witty retort is “Fought against people like you”. Get it? Trump murders six millions Jews. But The Hill keeps this guy working, and the laughs just keep on coming. Free speech!

The presumption is jaw-dropping. Even as Trump’s approval rating hits 53 percent, Canadians online were echoing Democrats’ fever dreams of forming a shadow government to take over from Trump via coup. This sense of impunity at a distance is why the Canadian government— along with other drive-by virtue signallers UK, Norway, New Zealand, and Australia— have imposed sanctions on two sitting members of the Israeli cabinet. They know it will rile Trump’s America.

For ordinary Canadians, Trump became a post-it note to justify giving Team Liberal another swing at ruining the nation. “We used to be such friends! He’s a tyrant.!” This just in: Love him or hate him Trump is employed by Americans to do their bidding. He’s not a sentimental buddy of Canada who’ll cut us some slack for old time’s sake. He has no remittance from Canada to please the Laurentian elites. If your defence is non-existent and your military gender-obsessed: you had it coming.

Are his policies jostling Canada? Absolutely. Read Art of the Deal. The 51st state jibe when Justin soiled himself was rude. But it worked on pliant Canadian liberals. Now the The Little Banker is disavowing the dissolute decade of Trudeau while employing Conservatives’ policies on defence spending, inter-provincial trade and border security. Hell, he’s naming longtime Tories to his personal staff.

In the end Carney knows this ain’t mock Parliament. That his dossier begins and ends with satisfying the beast to the south. None of this should be a surprise. Yet Canadians dozed when Trump made clear in his election campaign that the American economy is the greatest in the world. If you want to fish in that pond it’s not going to be for free. That means tariffs for a range of U.S. industries that couldn’t compete in a Biden world.

We can argue how well tariffs work, but Trump wants them to reduce taxes on the people who elected him. Not the Canadians who fly first class but pay economy. And who have pushed his approval ratings into the 50s, higher than ever before. (Likely to spike higher after the No Kings Riot season peters out.)

No wonder Canadians preferred the guy before Trump, the senile sock puppet whose government was run by anonymous figures using the auto-pen. Sleepy Joe let Canada slide into mediocrity and financial peril without any judgement. It was comfortable. Then The Donald had the nerve to expose the ditch Canada was in.

Canada, Trump pointed out,  was delinquent on its defence, harbouring Chinese drug lords, printing money like Canadian Tire and its banks were involved in money laundering. That was the nice stuff. Try Organized fentanyl networks operating with impunity in the largest cities of the nation So dumping on Trump in salty cartoons allows Canada’s Mod Squad to ignore the real issues that should have been litigated in the April election.

We have written extensively about the ruse that was played on gormless Canadians in  “U.S. Voters Smelled A Rat But Canadian Voters Bought The Cheese” We have catalogued Canada’s drug and money laundering disgrace in “Chinese Gangs Dominate Canada: Why Will Voters Give Liberals Another Term?” We’ve described the real-estate bubble economy created by Trudeau and sidekick Carney that threatens to crash the economy and ruin seniors’ pensions in

In the end, it is still la-la-la-la We Can’t Hear You. Trump-obsessed Boomers more concerned with the equity in their jumped-up bungalows gave the finger to the next generations and blamed it all on Orange Man Bad. In the monotone of Canadian political comment it all seemed so easy. Turn against Trump. Cash another dividend. Cheer on MSNBC and CNN bitch sessions.

The Family Compact don’t get it. Their Antifa heroes down south plan demos and “nonviolent” activity to crater the public resolve. In Canada that still works. But in the U.S. the Covid reverb is hitting the natural governing class of the nation. While they craft fine phrases about democracy the consumers remember them using a virus to stop society.

The appetite for Gavin Newsom blovaitors and Jen Psaki fart catchers is crashing in America. Riots may be coming in the U.S., but it won’t be like  George Floyd and Covid and the pussy hats. At some point Canada’s docile classes better wake up, too. America owes them nothing. They need to earn the respect.

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

Simone Biles Fails To Stick The Landing Going After Riley Gaines

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Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them. George Orwell

Or, in the case of Olympic legend Simone Biles, only gymnasts believe in the incendiary issue of trans men competing in women’s sports. Biles, who has made a secondary career as an object of pity, took exception when former swimmer Riley Gaines, an opponent of trans men competing against women, sent a picture of Minnesota softball team that recently won a state title with a pitcher who is reported to be transgender.

“Comments off lol,’ Gaines wrote in response to the post which wasn’t permitting any comments from the public. “To be expected when your star player is a boy.”

That brought Biles into the fray. ‘You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser. ‘You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive OR creating a new avenue where trans feel safe in sports. Maybe a transgender category IN ALL sports!! ‘But instead… You bully them… One things for sure is no one in sports is safe with you around!!!!!’

She then poked Gaines again, saying: ‘Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.” (Gaines husband is 6-foot-4)

The loser reference was to Gaines having lost to a trans swimmer in an NCAA race. Since then Gaines has launched a campaign to outlaw biological males from competing with cisgendered girls and women. She has testified in the U.S. Congress and has appeared in numerous interviews espousing a position supported by the vast majority of Americans.

One might think the proof of this position— unquestioned as recently as a decade ago— would be obvious. But Biles and  gender radicals who’ve tried to make trans into the Emancipation Proclamation of the 21st century are not giving up the fight.

Here’s someone named Nancy Armour in USA Today. “There is no scientific evidence that transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over cisgender women athletes, but that hasn’t stopped Gaines from claiming they do..” When legislation banning trans men in girls/ women sports was presented in the U.S. Congress 106 Democrats voted against the motion. The chattering class on CBC, MSNBC and CNN likewise have a cohort of those opposing the ban.

But it was the outburst from Biles that most appalled fans who’d worshipped her as the GOAT of Olympic gymnastics and then sympathized with her victimization by Dr. Larry Nasser. Even when she bailed on her teammates at the 2024 Games they cut her slack. But suddenly a woman who’s preached against body shaming and intolerance was deriding a fellow athlete’s body and mocking her complaints.

Critics were quick to post Biles’ hypocrisy about compassion, citing her own tear-stained testimony about how she was taken advantage by a doctor. Here’s how we described her psychological distress last August during the Olympics. “Prominent among them was gymnast Simone Biles who described the abuse she’d suffered from a male trainer and on social media as the greatest female gymnast in history. Even as she added more golds to her mantle she’d seemed unable to find peace in her accomplishments.

“Due to mental blocks, she’d had to step away from the sport for a time to get her head straight. She had a lot of company from fellow competitors who described sexual harassment and intimidation on social media for their unhappiness. (Hence the constant mental health commercials on the TV broadcasts.)”

Now the same role model is mocking Gaines? It seems unthinkable. As for the claims that men have no advantage against women, it was pointed out that there are zero women who try to reverse the equation, going into men’s sports. They show the hard truths about competitive records of men versus women in a range of sports. They describe the physical risks for women playing against larger, stronger men. Here. Here. And here.

It’s still stunning to see Biles toeing the radical LGBTQ line while asking for traditional pity of a victimized woman herself. Or the amount of support that the cause has garnered from progressives throughout society. When did people became so obtuse about the growth this societal contagion?

We wrote earlier this year about how such notions take hold. MacDonald Laurier Institute fellow Mia Hughes charted a history of similar social contagions such as bulimia and multiple-personality disorder. “In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next seven years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition. In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa….

“Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire… affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women. The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘semantic contagion’ – how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this same way… Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions.”

The new contagion is trans athletes. USA Today is just one example of how influencers try to legitimize campaigns to boost their own self esteem. As the battle to reverse the trans incursion shows, there are only too many willing to play politics in the gender debate. Like the pro-Palestinian movement in North America the trans athlete hoax exists is a bubble where reality and fiction can co-exist, knowing they’ll never be put to the test.

Orwell called it doublethink “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Biles and the liberal elites have it mastered. Nursing their grievance while finding it a fault in others.

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, Bruce is regular media contributor. The new book from there team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin is Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey. From Espo to Boston in 1967 to Gretz in L.A. in 1988 to Patrick Roy leaving Montreal in 1995, the stories behind the story. In paperback and Kindle on #Amazon. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/

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