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Bruce Dowbiggin

Eau Canada! The Anthem As Woke Opera

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One of the highlights of the recent Super Bowl was a heartfelt, unembellished rendering of The Star Spangled Banner by country star Chris Stapleton. So gripping was his unaccompanied version of the song heard a million times that tears flowed freely from the eyes of Philadelphia Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni. The huge crowd was stilled— and no one on either team took a knee.

There is debate about whether the SSB should be the U.S. national anthem. The NFL fed the revisionist spirit with Babyface doing a soulful America The Beautiful and Sheryl Lee Ralph performing the putative black anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing. What can be said is that none of the artists took liberties with the lyrics of the three songs. And all were done with sincerity.

Then there is Canada’s national anthem. At the recent 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.)

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 SSB, 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”.

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 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 are now 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 Trudeau 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.

Or maybe we should  just get Chris Stapleton to sing O Canada the way it was written. And leave it at that.

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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

Ireland Today: The Bittersweet Tradeoff Of Carney Embracing Europe

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Dublin: for those who’ve travelled to Ireland the past 50 years the transition is stunning. Even from ten years ago, when the previous market dip hit the nation, the current iteration is remarkable. For a nation that has historical sites dating from 5000 BC to the present, the claim that these are Ireland’s finest days is plausible.

From Dublin to the rocky outcrops of the Wild Atlantic West, the nation is teeming with people and energy. It’s not even the tourist season yet, but lineups to see Kilmainham Gaol or Blarney Castle or the Titanic Experience are lengthy. In Dublin the streets are positively jammed with locals (many young), tourists and a swath of nationalities from places most Irish can’t locate on a map.

No matter where they’re from they carry the same craic that has made Ireland a joyous place to wile away a day chatting locals. Humour and help are the watchwords. Our Uber drive was a Romanian who’s been in Dublin 35 years, and he chatted our ears off  in his Romanian/ Irish accent en route to the airport. As our Uber driver noted, there’s plenty of work and lots of opportunity.

The old docklands along the Liffey have been ripped up to produce modern office complexes, hotels and arenas that seem more like Geneva than Dublin. Traditional double-deckers still ply the streets, but they share the road with a modern streetcar system. Irish food— so long demeaned as inedible— is now the toast of the gastro world. The NFL plays at the modern Aviva Stadium, and the music scene is flourishing in clubs and stages around this city founded by the Gaels in the 7th century.

The remainder of Ireland is no less impressive. A modern highway network now gets you from Dublin to Galway in two hours and Cork in two-and-a-half hours. Yes, the narrow lane ways and paths that criss-cross the greenery are still quaint. But transportation is not the trial it once was. E-charging stations are omnipresent.

Which leads one to wonder how was the conversion achieved. Ireland is famous for its ability to back losers in politics. From their own nationalists, who ended up at the end of a rope or in front of a firing squad, to the imperial powers— France, Spain, Germany— they hoped would save them from England, Ireland has a bloody past. Its own independent movement launched on Easter weekend in 1916 required a cruel civil war (see Michael Collins) and an equally nasty partition to finally create the Irish Free State.

One benefit of all this self-imposed pain has been Ireland’s withdrawal from most of the 20th century’s carnage. Where a town square in England, Canada or Australia would honour the copious dead from WW I or WW II, in Ireland the town square honours Padraig Pearse, John McBride, James Connolly or Thomas Clarke. With no European wars to prosecute Irish cities were not bombed and their downtowns resemble themselves from centuries ago.

But still you may wonder where has the money come from to spark this turnabout? Well, Ireland stayed with the EU when England voted for Brexit, and the benefits are easy to see. Where there were few or no jobs 25 years ago, the EU has showered Ireland with investment money. It has enabled Ireland to offer lucrative tax deals to multinationals to move to the Emerald Isle. The results are palpable.

The price is less so. And in Ireland one can see a warning for Mark Carney’s Canada. The new PM is a dedicated Europhile. Carney has made no secret of his longing to cut deals with the boys from Brussels. He told Canadians that the traditional relationship with the U.S. was over, and while that was crass electioneering, no one expects him to abandon the values of the EU.

While there will be manna from the EU (should it stay solvent) there will also be a quid pro quo. Canadians who blissfully voted for Carney should realize that means doubling down on the climate extremes of carbon taxes and failed new tech that currently hobble the EU.

As Ireland has learned, in exchange for its money the EU wants you to also accept its gender dysphoria and a brand of immigration politics that sees Ireland today embracing Hamas and the most virulent brand of anti-semitic groups while seeking to silence its former sports hero Conor McGregor when he talks of losing Irish culture to an immigrant wave who neither care nor endorse traditional Irish culture. .

It also means adherence to the censorship regimes of the EU where Germany plans to silence its most popular party, the AFD, for heresies against the new religion of Climate/ Culture. Irish politics is radical, and a Canada that fits itself under the EU influence will find not just a continuation but an extension of the Justin Trudeau disastrous regime. Which will keep Alberta in conflict with the Ottawa mandarins.

So do visit Ireland. The people are wonderful, the land is stunning and the energy is palpable. When you leave bring your memories home with you. But leave Irish/ EU politics behind.

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. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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2025 Federal Election

The Last Of Us: Canada’s Chaos Election

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Show me good loser and I’ll show you a loser— Leo Durocher

There’s an expression that goes, you’re not allowed to die until all the people in your life have disappointed you. That trenchant observation is particularly relevant to those who woke up on April 29 to discover that their neighbours and friends in Canada have opted to give the federal Liberals (under new leader Mark Carney) another four years to continue Canada’s descent into irrelevance.

These are the same Liberals sans Carney who were polling in the low 20s six months earlier. Their cabinet members were quitting in droves. In the finest Wag The Dog tradition, a sure victory for Canada’s Conservatives was then transformed into a humiliating defeat that saw the Tories leader Pierre Poilievre lose the seat he’d represented for 20 years. The debate in the chattering classes now is how much was Poilievre’s fault?

In a minor vindication the Liberals were seemingly denied a majority by three seats (169-144) . How they balance that equation to advance their pet projects on trade, climate, gender, free speech, native rights and Donald Trump was unknowable Which is why the Grits have turned to dumpster diving MPs like Elizabeth May and keffiyeh-clad NDP to achieve a workable majority..

Suffice to say that neophyte Carney, without any support system within the Liberals, is being highly influenced by the Justin Trudeau faculty lounge left behind after the disgraced three-term PM slunk off into the night.

It’s not all beer and skittles. No sooner had the Liberal pixie dust settled than Carney was hit with Bloc leader Yves-Francois  Blanchet announced unequivocally that energy pipelines were still a no-go in electrified Quebec. Alberta premier Danielle Smith lowered the requirement for a separation referendum from 600 K signatures to around 170 K— a very doable mark in pissed-off Alberta.

Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe outlined his demands on Carney if his province is not to join Alberta. And former British PM Tony Blair, who’d worked with Carney in the UK, announced that Carney’s pet project Net Zero was a loser for nations. Finally RBC revealed it was moving beyond diversity toward “inclusion” by removing “unconscious bias” among its upper ranks.

Such is the backwash from April 28. If you listened to the state-supported media on election night you might think that Trump had picked on poor, innocent friend next door Canada. His outrageous 51st state jest did send the Canadian political apparatus into panic. A Liberal party that proclaimed Canada a postmodern state with no real traditions (lowerering flags to half mast for six months to promote their Rez School genocide hustle) suddenly adopted the flag-waving ultra-patriotic visage of expatriate comedian Mike Myers.

Instead the commentariat was spitballing about how to make the House of Commons function more smoothly or if Carney should depart for Europe immediately or in a month to meet his true constituents in the EU commentariat. China? Wassat’? Urban crime? I can’t hear you. Canada as fentanyl capital of the West? Not interested.

Astonishingly, many people who should know better bought it. It was Boomers waking from a long nap to impose their cozy values one final time on the nation they’d created via Trudeau. Comfy ridings like Oakville, Burlington, North Vancouver, Ottawa Centre and Charlottetown mailed it in for another four years. Academic hotbeds like Western (London), Laurier (Kitchener),  Waterloo, UNB (Fredericton),  U Calgary (Confederation) Alberta (Strathcona) and UBC (Vancouver) also kept the radical dream alive.

Meanwhile shrieks of “Panic!” over Trump decimated the Bloc (22 seats) and the NDP (7 seats) with their support transferred to a banker-led party that had been poison to them only six months earlier. You could not have written a more supportive script for a party who had neglected the essentials in traditional Canada while pursuing radical policies to please the globalists of the West.

Speaking of time capsules, you’d have been hard-pressed to find a more retro scene than the one produced by the legacy TV networks. With their emphasis on the horse-race story the tone, the panels, the hosts could have easily been teleported from 1990s. While many were interested in the micro of government finance, most listeners were expecting maybe a word or two on the collapsed state exposed by Trump’s aggressive negotiating.

As we’ve mentioned often before, Canada’s allies are appalled by the takeover of the country by malign actors, drugs traffickers, money launderers, real-estate manipulators and Chinese subterfuge. Trump’s generic reference to the border was a catch-all for the corruption swallowing the election process and the finance of the country.

That avoidance was echoed by pollsters who spent the night talking about how the final figures reflected their findings. Except for those that didn’t— Conservatives vote tally over 41 percent and Liberals well under 200 seats. What was avoided was the cumulative effect of highly inflated Liberal polling during the campaign, the “why-bother?” narrative they sold to voters appalled by the Liberals manipulation of the process to switch leaders and hold a micro-campaign of 36 days.

While Donald Trump has announced he’ll work with Carney on tariffs, it’s still highly likely that this was the final Canadian election fought by the old rules where the have-nots (Atlantic Canada) the haves-but-outraged (Quebec) and the indolent (Ontario) control the math for making government. The money pump (Alberta, Saskatchewan) will seek to attract eastern BC and southern Manitoba to their crew. In the worst case Carney may be the nation’s final PM of ten provinces plus territories.

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. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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