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Bruce Dowbiggin

Dead-End Streets & Empty Graves: Faking The Past

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The problem with history is that you can attach your name to passing fads— say, Ukraine flag emojis— and be considered one of the cool kids. For a while. But eventually truth catches up with you. (Just ask Joe Biden.) And if you cannot defend your attachment to banning Dundas Street or calling Canada genocidal you will eventually find yourself on the wrong side of history, mocked, disparaged and rightfully ignored by future generations.

If you are Stalin or Mao in such a bind you simply shoot everyone who points out your gross inaccuracies. But if you live in a less blood-soaked tyranny, you’d better be prepared to face your critics.

Which brings us to the virtuous folks at Toronto City Hall who want to remove the name of Scotsman Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, from the 23-kilometre stretch from Mississauga to Scarborough that bears his name. In the same rush of blood to the head that saw radicals change the name of Ryerson University to the Anodyne School of Nothingness, these crack researchers decided Dundas was an active proponent of slavery in the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries.

The proposal they’ve presented to Toronto City Council would cost (their estimate) $8.1 M to remove his name from the endless street. This at a time when the Gardiner Expressway is set to collapse. And city parks are filled with drug addicts and mental health patients. And getting a building permit is only slightly less difficult than the Egyptians creating the pyramids. Priorities!

But we digress. The cost to every person, business or church located on that span or to those doing business with, sending a parcel to or planning a transit trip on Dundas dwarfs that estimate. But Wokeness must be served. Dundas had tried to prevent the anti-slavery forces in England from banning the practice universal in the world at the time. Smart guys say so.

Now—saints preserve us— three former Toronto mayors beg to disagree. They’ve actually read the history of Dundas that the civil servants misrepresented, and they want new lefty mayor Olivia Chow to stop the Dundas Street purge. Turns out Dundas was a LEADER in ending slavery in the British empire, after all. Oops.

For media slappies— you know who you are— who embraced the demise of Dundas much as they embraced the defrocking of Egerton Ryerson, Joseph Brant and Sir John A. this creates whiplash. How to stay onside with the real history after going balls-deep on the slavery devil narrative?

The easy answer is to— look at that shiny object— refer to the handy list of other street names still to be banned by city hall. Yonge Street. Wellesley Street. Simcoe Street. Even Baby Point Road. Go hard on them. Sure, you’ll run out of tyrants and racists eventually, but by then everyone will have forgotten how you libeled Dundas and Sir John A.

A similar rethink is also underway in regards to the “Mass graves/ Genocidal Canada” story promoted by PMJT. You remember? Skippy clutching a teddy bear in a Kamloops cemetery that was rumored to contain the graves of children who met a bad end in the care of the Church or residential school? Then cancelling Canada Day and leaving flags at half mast for months. And telling the UN that Canada is genocidal, because x-rays showed what could have been dead babies underground. Or just rocks.

Forget that no parent of a Rez school child had ever reported a child missing or alleged murder or exorcism, the PM cast his lot with the murder meme. In several cases Trudeau was told by chiefs that the locals knew precisely who was buried in those graves. Cowessess First Nation band member Irene Andreas . “There is no ‘discovery’ of graves.  We buried our dead with a proper funeral. Then we allowed them to Rest In Peace…To assume that foul play took place would be premature and unsupported… So please, people, do not make up stories about residential school children being put in unmarked graves. No such thing ever happened.”

Trudeau was unrepentant. It was Teddy bear or bust. As we wrote in June, the narrative was furthered by the absence of any exhumed graves. Critics— labelled as deniers— were forced to disprove the story. Former Indigenous Affairs Minister Marc Miller described as “ghouls” those who pointed out that residential school indigenous children died of the diseases of the day. As a few brave souls discovered, crossing Miller was a ticket to non-person status.

Until now. Turns out that Brandon University excavators examined a site under a Manitoba church identified as problematic by x-ray. The ground search cited 57 abnormalities. Their finding? Nope. Just rocks.

Which should be good news. Except if, like Trudeau’s chum Miller, you’re invested in Justin’s Genocidal narrative. Then it’s very bad. Pine Creek nation chief Derek Nepinak took great pains in announcing the discovery to stress, like Yosemite Sam, that I-don’t-know-how-they-done-it, but-I-know-they-done- it.

Nepinak’s preamble: “As a community we were preparing for more than one possible outcome, which meant we would prepare for the worst but hope for the best.” This suggested no remains was a positive.  https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/excavation-after-14-anomalies-detected-at-former-residential-school-site-found-no-evidence-of-graves-manitoba-chief

Guess again. “The results of our excavation under the church should not be deemed as conclusive of other ongoing searches and efforts to identify reflections from other community processes including other (ground-penetrating radar) initiatives… “This does not mark the end of our truth-finding project.”

No kidding. Except the very limited excavations done so far have revealed none of the alleged murdered children so desperately conjured up by the Trudeau media and the radicals in the Indigenous community. Barring forensic evidence we are left with stories from elders and the lurid tales at the reconciliation committee.

That standard may be fine for the Indigenous community, but in the outside world those journalists who described scenes of horror and Canada’s role in it should disappear for a while. Fat chance. That would include David Butt, a Toronto criminal lawyer writing in the Globe and Mail, claiming “The discovery of thousands of unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the sites of former residential schools…looks and smells like criminal activity.”

Activist firebrand Robert Jago said anyone questioning the validity of his own genocide allegations should be considered equivalent to “Holocaust denial” and punished as a hate-speech purveyor. And then there’s Trudeau cabinet hacks like Miller echoing The Boss.

So don’t expect a reckoning. There are truths, and then there are truths. As former CRTC vice chair Peter Menzies observed: “The one thing this process has made abundantly clear is that the interests of anyone outside their club are irrelevant to all inside it.”

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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

Come For The Graduate Studies, Stay For The Revolution

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Just In: The Trudeau government intervenes at last minute to save a convicted climate agitator from deportation. The Pakistani co-founder of Save Old Growth— who first came to Canada in 2019 on a study permit— has been arrested at least 10 times and convicted of mischief. Zain Haq was due to be deported to Pakistan on Monday.

Despite a judge’s ruling denying his last hope of staying , Haq got a call from his Liberal MP’s office saying he gets to stay in B.C. after all. Good, because we’d hate for him to feel  oppressed by the country in which he’s squatting. The news thrilled the nepo babies who have B.C. by the throat.

So Haq goes from unrepentant jerk to Christ crucified. Naturally. Victim politics have become the animating impulse in Western society. Attaching yourself to a forlorn cause like Haq is grounds for beatification  And make no mistake, there are legions in identical little tents on campus quads who are cheering a non-Canadian defying The Man.

To generations brought up on the travails of feminist oppression, climate degradation, indigenous grievance and gender dysphoria there is nothing so sacred as a victim is all his purity, crushed by the Great White Satan of western culture.  Haq is just the latest in a police lineup of wobbly performance artists taking a rhapsodic bow before the Liberal/ NDP/Green clique. While thumbing his nose at Canadians.

That’s why the current fetish for Palestinian outrage has such legs as it spreads across campuses and governmental buildings in the West. Anyone (but a white, straight male) can apply for the designation of victim. Join the party! And what a model it is! While many have tried to emulate them, none have managed the nihilist hat trick of violence, obstinacy and craven guilt quite like the Palestinians who’ve been pushing this agenda since the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Having eschewed frontal military attacks on Israel and western targets as ineffective, the PLO and its successors discovered that the more grisly the attack, the more black their message — in Munich they massacred 11 Israeli athletes— there was a segment of leftist Western culture that couldn’t get enough of their heinous tactics. (Stephen Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich pitied his fellow Jews killed in Munich but concluded that all this revenge stuff was a dead end.)

Huh. Their Arab neighbours want nothing to do with Arafat’s Children. Egypt has a wall preventing Gazans from entering their county, Jordan has expelled them for counter-insurgency, Saudi Arabia ignores them. Only Qatar offers refuge. And then only to the billionaire kleptocrats who run Hamas from penthouses in Doha.

The Oct. 7 massacre is just the latest in this dance of death with western liberals. People of a certain age will recall the Marxist-besotted Vanessa Redgrave brandishing a Kalashnikov while dancing with the PLO and its rascally leader Yasser Arafat.  Her 1977 film The Palestinian was an orgy of guilt and hatred toward Israel. She’s had plenty of imitators in the media ever since.  In 2021 over 100 actors— including Richard Gere, Claire Foy, Tilda Swinton, and Susan Sarandon— slammed the terrorist designation of Palestinian “rights groups”.

The same apologists are now saying that, sure, Oct. 7 went a little too far, but Palestinian repatriation means a few eggs are going to get smashed in the making of a terror state. They want a cease fire with good taste.

Were the PLO successors in Hamas and Hezbollah able to articulate some coherent vision of the future beyond slaughter then these western struggle sessions might seem justified. It’s no surprise that Arafat was the epitome of “never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity” in negotiations. If there’s one constant in the multiple denials of treaties with Israel it is their unflinching demand that Palestinians  throw every Jew they encounter into the Mediterranean on a march from “the river to the sea”.

The implacable marriage with extreme violence and racial hatred is their one and only position. Non-negotiable. None of this has any effect on the hot-house Marxists and anarchists who’ve set up shop in the universities and colleges of the West. In their protected status among the leafy tendrils of the Ivy League, a little brush with terror seems to titillate them. Occupying the quad in identical tents suppled by unnamed international groups dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism is their bougie weekend of roughing it in the bush.

Most probably wish they could experience a little of the martyrdom like the Palestinians (a gentle martyrdom naturally) or at the very least a cinematic clash wth authority such as their parents experienced at the hands of Chicago mayor Richard Daley during the 1968 Democratic convention. A tender tussle covered by their parents Medicare.

Who will stand up to these playtime antisemites? Alas, the grownups in the schools administration and in governments are cut from the same cloth. Having created safe spaces from micro aggression on their campus , they excuse the youthful exuberance of their students. (If your politics are radical, that is.)   Like president Joe Biden they do the suck-and-blow of modern debate. They decry antisemitism while cautioning that we just don’t understand the depths of Palestinian oppression. Evan as students call for a new Holocaust.

Having it both ways with Hamas means a one-way invitation to more chaos. Because there is no agenda beyond the performative terror extolled by demonstrators against Israel there is no way to rationally critique Hezbollah or Hamas. At least the Nazis proposed some freakazoid homeland for their people as they heartlessly slaughtered anyone who got in their way.

So it all becomes mob mentality packaged for feckless media. The Hamas doctoral groupies don’t demand anything from Hamas beyond their faux-serious chants and designer kaffiyehs in the House of Commons. No doubt Zia Haq will be joining them again soon in the struggle. If Stephen Guilbeault can go from criminal to cabinet, Canada is wide open to him now.

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. New from the team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin now for pre-order: 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. Launching on paperback and Kindle on #Amazon this week.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Coyotes Ugly: The Sad Obsession Of Gary Bettman

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It came to this. Playing in the 6,000 seat Mullet Arena on the campus of Arizona State. Owned by a luckless guy who eschewed the public spotlight. Out of the playoffs, their bags packed for who knows where, the Arizona (née Phoenix) Coyotes gave an appreciative wave to the tiny crowd gathered to say  Thanks For The Memories.

With that they were history. Although NHL commissioner-for-life Gary Bettman has promised the last in a set of hapless owners that he can revive the franchise for a cool billion should he build the rink that no one was willing to build for the Yotes the past 20 years.

The Arizona Republic said good riddance. “Metro Phoenix lost the Coyotes because we are an oversaturated professional and college sports market with an endless supply of sunshine and recreational choices. Arizona may have dodged a slapshot:

We have the NFL Cardinals, the MLB Diamondbacks, the NBA Suns, MLB spring training, the WM Phoenix Open, the Phoenix Rising, the WNBA Mercury, the Indoor Football League Rattlers and the Arizona State Sun Devils. There hasn’t been a household name on the Coyotes since Shane Doan, and half of Phoenix probably doesn’t know who he was”.

Likely they’ll be a financial success in Salt Lake City where there’s a viable owner, lots of money and a will to make it work. They’ll need a will because— stop me if you’ve heard this before about the Coyotes—  the rink they’ll play in this fall has only 12,500 unobstructed views for hockey.

Watching this farce we recalled getting a call from Blackberry co-founder Jim Balsillie in 2008, shortly after our book Money Players was a finalist for the Canadian Business Book of The Year. We’d written a fair bit about the Coyotes in our work and someone had told Balsillie we might be the ones to talk to about a plan he was concocting to buy the bankrupt Coyotes and eventually move them to Hamilton.

Balsillie was salty over the way he’d been used as a stalking horse in the financial troubles of the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1990s. Flush with money from the huge success of RIM, Balsillie offered to buy the Pens, with an eye to moving them to southern Ontario if Pittsburgh didn’t help build a new arena for the team.

In time, Balsillie saw that Bettman was only trying to protect the investment Mario Lemieux and others had in the Pens. Balsillie was the black hat who eventually spooked Pittsburgh into giving the current owners what they wanted. At the end of the day, Mario got his money and Balsillie was given a “thanks for trying”: parting gift of nebulous promises.

Still smarting, Balsille vowed not to be used again. in his desire to bring the NHL to southern Ontario. So when the Coyotes owner Jerry Moyes threw the keys to the team on Bettman’s desk, he saw an opening in the bankruptcy that followed. Seeing Bettman as the impediment, Balsillie decided to buy the team out of bankruptcy, a process the NHL could not legally prevent.

What Balsillie wanted to know was “What then? How would Bettman fight back?” We told him that no one flouts Bettman’s authority within the NHL. (All the current owners since 1993 have come aboard on his watch.)  And that he’d have to get the Board of Governors to approve his purchase. Odds: Nil.

That’s what happened. Rather than admit that the Valley of the Sun was poisoned for hockey, Bettman found another series of undercapitalized marks to front the franchise while the league quietly propped up the operation. No longer was the Coyotes’  failure about the fans of Arizona. It was about Gary Bettman’s pride.

Protestors stand outside a press conference in Tempe featuring Arizona Coyotes executives discussing propositions related to a new arena and entertainment district. (Photo by Brooklyn Hall/ Cronkite News)

Where he had meekly let Atlanta move to Winnipeg he fought like hell to save Arizona. And his power. (His obstinacy on U.S. network TV is another story.)

Fast forward to last week and the abject failure of that process. The Arizona Republic naively fawned on Bettman for his many attempts to save the team. In fact, they were just attempts to buttress his grip on the league. While the Coyotes may have been a mess, Bettman has succeeded in preserving the investments of most of the business people who bought his NHL business prospectus.

Sometimes it meant riding into Calgary to chastise the locals for their parsimony in not giving the Flames a new rink. Ditto for Edmonton. Ditto for Winnipeg  and other cities. Other times it was to shore up weak partners to protect the equity of other prosperous cities.  Sometimes it was to tell Quebec City, “Not gonna’ happen.”

For his loyalty to the owners and through some luck— Gretzky to the Kings— Bettman has made the NHL work in places no one might’ve imagined. Nashville. Raleigh. Tampa. Las Vegas. Dallas. Not at the level of the NFL, NBA or MLB, but at a comfortable equity-affirming status. Nothing happens without his say-so in the NHL. Or without him getting credit. Secondary NHL execs who wanted credit for their innovations were quietly punted.

When Houston finally gets a franchise from Gary they’ll part with $1.5 billion for the honour. While the commissioner has played down new franchises and expanded playoffs, you can bet your last dollar that he’s told owners they’re in line for more expansion cash— cash they don’t have to split with players in collective bargaining.

One more certainty. As long as Bettman rules the NHL you won’t see an NHL team back in Arizona.

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 brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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