Bruce Dowbiggin
Hockey’s Image Problem: The Commissioner Who Won’t Leave
We once had a former MLB player/ media type tell us that if he were a manager he’d prefer his players go to their hotels after the game, smoke a little weed, play video games and get proper sleep. Especially now that smoking weed is legal in large parts of the continent. Staying up till 3 A.M. chasing girls in bars was the road to ruination, he said.
Apparently the NBA agrees. It is announcing that it will no longer test for marijuana as part of its drug-testing protocols. In its new collective bargaining agreement the NBA has dragged sports into the 21st century. By that we don’t mean the NHL will follow.
Gary Bettman’s NHL never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity at modernizing its product. Stasis would be the best word to describe the hermetically sealed snow globe that is the NHL. Even when it embraces change it does so in a way that tarnishes the League. See: Non-binary hockey and Pride Nights. So you know that the NHL will only drop testing for weed when it can be used as a weapon in future CBA tong wars against new NHLPA executive director Marty Walsh.
To grasp how sluggish the development of the NHL has become under The Commissioner Who Won’t Go Away, one need only look to the NBA which this weekend announced its new collective bargaining agreement with its players. The NBA CBA was done without even the threat of a work stoppage and is full of innovations and progressive ideas on how a sports league with a salary cap needs to operate.
In the NHL a collective agreement is never reached till Bettman has wiped out large segments of the season, necessitating class warfare with his product, the players. While pissing off the consumers of his sport and the networks who carry the games. [We remain opposed to salary caps in a global sports market, as we documented in our 2018 book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports and Why The Free Market Could Save Them.]
What does this deal say? First, the league is responding to the popularity of soccer’s many midseason competitions and the successful recent World Classic Baseball by committing to a midseason “tournament”. To qualify, teams will participate in pool games already on the regular-season schedule. Eight teams will get into the final play-down in “December Madness”, which will receive buckets of media exposure. Winning players and coaches will get extra money, which should help increase their motivation.
The reason behind this is simple, as we stated in Cap In Hand. In a global sports market, fans don’t want to wait for six months to see their favourites play meaningful games. They also want to see best-on-best as often as possible. Witness: Soccer’s Champions or Europa Leagues that play concurrent with the Premiership or La Liga schedule. We had a former NHL executive promote this ideas to us over a decade ago.
Of course, Bettman, the Herman Roth of commissioners, ignored him. He still believes Columbus versus Winnipeg on a January night is enough to keep the fans happy. Under his watch international play— once the crown jewel of the sport— has withered and died. World Cup? That’s a whole lot of bother for owners who like the Bettman formula they bought into. Right now there is one Stanley Cup winner and 31 losers.
There will no doubt be some bumps as NBA fans get the hang of the tournament formula. There are those who will moan about how the NBA CBA does nothing for mid-sized markets. “Players lose again … Middle and Lower spectrum teams don’t spend because they don’t want to,” Golden State’s Draymond Green posted to Twitter. “They want to lose… And this is what we rushed into a deal for?” (Draymond, outside of local markets no one cares about mid-sized teams any more.)
But it says here that the fans will grab onto the December Madness tournament formula. As will the exploding betting industry. But the NHL won’t touch this novel project— or Olympics or World Cups— till Bettman squeezes the NHLPA at the next CBA session.
The NBA CBA, which runs till 2030, also says players will have to play 65 games to qualify for season-ending awards, cutting back on “maintenance days” for superstars. It also will allow players making ga-jillions to now be owners of teams, invest in other sports franchises or lose all their money… er, invest in the cannabis industry. Having players learn the other side of the business can only be a positive. Under Bettman’s rule the top players never make near their worth, so this would be moot in the NHL.
The only threat to Bettman’s status quo is the financial collapse of many regional sports networks in the U.S., the backbone of his U.S. strategy. They are being hammered by the cord-cutting trend in cable TV. As we wrote here in January, for a league like the NHL that has counted heavily on regional revenues the past 30 years cord-cutting is a disaster. “Greg Boris, a sports management professor at Adelphi University summed up the looming disaster: RSNs have ‘been a golden goose. You remove cable TV from the scenario, and franchises are worth a fraction of what they are today, players make a fraction of their salaries today…”
In March, Bally Sports— which operates 14 regional sports networks in the U.S. (covering 12 NHL clubs)— filed for bankruptcy protection to eliminate about $8 B in debt. The hope is that Chapter 11 will give them time to re-organize. But that won’t change the collapsing numbers of subscribers who bail on services for channels they never watch. Already, Bally is looking to reject the contracts of four MLB teams as part of the bankruptcy.
Time Warner Discovery, too, has said they are looking to exit the regional sports network business. While leagues like the NHL might move to streaming services, there is little expectation that it will produce the same revenues. Ergo, financial collapse.
Maybe a ruinous TV contract might finally send Bettman into retirement and the NHL into an enlightened age. Till then everyone probably needs a little weed to get through the process.
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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
Most living in Canada would agree that a crumbling infrastructure and healthcare shortages could justify adding bodies to the public rolls. But a deep dive into those jobs extolled by the PM shows an explosion of new positions, not in public works or the military, but in the vanity areas of DEI, gender equality and climate change.
In the tsunami of miserable economic and political news generated by the Trudeau government the past decade, party flacks have always tried to point to job growth in the economy as a sign that they’re doing something right.
But if you look carefully at the numbers of full-time jobs “created”, it soon becomes apparent that most of the highly touted “new” jobs are public-service positions. At all three levels of government the number of workers in Canada’s public sector has soared in recent years, far outpacing the hiring in the private sector.
For example, the federal public service has grown by 38 per cent since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015, according to MEI, a Montreal-based think tank. During the Covid years, nine out of every ten jobs created was in the public service.
Here was Trudeau in 2022 cheering on his aggressive hiring processes, which have also included a similar growth in the use of consultants. “Thanks to your hard work and the hard work of Canadians across the country, Canada’s unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since the start of the pandemic. In fact, more than 154,000 jobs were created last month — and … in the COVID-19 Era, more than one million jobs have been recovered.”
Most living in Canada would agree that a crumbling infrastructure and healthcare shortages could justify adding bodies to the public rolls. But a deep dive into those jobs extolled by the PM shows an explosion of new positions, not in public works or the military, but in the vanity areas of DEI, gender equality and climate change.
With their generous pensions and benefits these new employees are an expensive drag on the public purse. In addition, except for the very top of the pay scale, government salaries are typically higher than those in the public sector. Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland give Canadians the impression that their massive hiring binge— paid for by increasing debt— means a healthy growing economy. But the money that is moved from the private economy to public economies chokes productivity and creates inflation.
As a result, Canada’s GDP is lowest in the leading Western nations while its borrowing now sits at an unsustainable $713 billion. Carrying the debt is expected to cost the federal treasury $60.7 billion in 2028-29, according to the government’s own economic statement.
No wonder economists warn that this growth of government jobs is not sustainable in the long run. “If you look at how the private sector’s trending, it’s sharply decelerating,” Beata Caranci, chief economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank,
As just one example of runaway government hiring, listen to Kareem Allam, former Vancouver city budget chief, who went on Vancouver’s CKNW recently to describe how runaway hiring has affected his city. “We had 1,200 city employees in 2008. We have about 9,000 now. There are 700 people in the city of Vancouver staff that work full-time on climate change. And (yet) our GHG emissions keep going up.”
While Americans are experiencing the same bloating of the civil service, Allam points out that they are more efficient than Canadians. “Dawn Pinnock is the head of the Civil Service in the city of New York. She’s their city manager. And not only is she responsible for being the city manager, she’s also got the same responsibility as (Vancouver’s) Translink, but in New York.
And it’s a city that has thirteen times the population of Greater Vancouver. Dawn makes US$ 240,000 a year. Our CEO of Translink, our CEO of Metro Vancouver, and our city manager combined make $1.4 million. The executive from New York doing the job of essentially three executives here in the lower mainland, and yet making a fraction of what they make here.”
Naturally these salaries have to come from somewhere. That somewhere is tax. “It is unbelievable the amount of money that is pouring into city hall and the lack of accountability we’re seeing around how that money was being spent,” says Allam. “When Gregor Robertson first got elected as mayor in 2003 the city budget was $894 million. It’s going to be well over $2.4 billion this year.
“That’s almost a tripling of our taxes. Is anyone in Vancouver thinking that we’ve gotten a triple in the benefit of services? Are potholes getting better?”
There are some exceptions to the bloating of the public service and its budgets. In Calgary, the multi-billion Green Line transit system has been chewing through hundreds of millions without any progress. The original estimate of track was shrinking with the southeast part of the plan mothballed. Now the unpopular Green Line has been stopped by the provincial UCP government of Danielle Smith.
Assessing the project as a “boondoggle” Transportation minister Devin Dreeshen said, “This is unacceptable and our government is unable to support or provide funding for this revised Green Line Stage 1 scope as presented in the city’s most recent business case… throwing good money after bad is simply not an option for our government.” Calgary’s progressive city council is seeking to find alternatives (they could always build a direct link to the airport) before they’re tossed out of office in the next municipal elections.
Would that Ontario and Toronto governments had paused before creating their Metrolinx Crosstown subway line, the 25-stop, 19-kilometre project. Work began in 2011 and Metrolinx previously announced completion dates of 2020 and 2021. Its budget has now soared to $13 billion with stories emerging of 260 cases of quality control issues still pending at the start if the summer.
One of Pierre Poilievre’s favourite attack lines against the federal Liberals has been getting control of spending, making government live within its means as taxpayers do. No one expects him to slay the dragon as Javier Milie has done in Argentina. But Canadians will be looking to him to at least change the Trudeau Spend, Spend, Spend philosophy before it ruins the nation.
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. 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.
From the Brownstone Institute
No data is 100% secure, and this is mental health data. Data that might be extremely embarrassing, career-damaging, or has the potential to disrupt family relationships. Remember, no one knows what new laws, regulations, or more might come to pass years from now.
True Story: The Health app built into iPhones is now collecting as much personal information on the mental health of each and every one of us as they can get a hold of.
Yet, a search on Google and Brave yielded no results on the dangers of sharing such information over the phone or the internet. Seriously, no single MSM has done an article on why such data sharing might be a bad idea?
To start, in sharing such data, you aren’t just sharing your information; iPhone knows exactly who your family members are. In many cases, those phones are connected via family plans.
iPhone mental health assessments not only ask questions about your mental health but can also infer the mental health status of family members, as demonstrated by the image publicly shared by phone on the benefits of a phone mental health assessment.
What could possibly go wrong?
Although the iPhone has historically been known to keep user data “safe,” this is not a given, and there have been hacks and data breaches over the years.
CrowdStrike happened – from just a simple coding error. In 2015, all of my confidential data given to the DoD and the FBI in order to get a security clearance was harvested by the Chinese government, when they hacked into the government’s “super-secret,” and “super-secure” government data storage site. In response, the government offered me a credit report and monitoring of my credit score for a year. Yeah – thanks.
The bottom line – no data is 100% secure, and this is mental health data. Data that might be extremely embarrassing, career-damaging, or has the potential to disrupt family relationships. Remember, no one knows what new laws, regulations, or more might come to pass years from now. This type of information should not be harvested and stored.
Stay Informed with Brownstone Institute. Sign up for updates.
Furthermore, trusting that Apple will never sell that data or pass it off to research groups is very naive. In fact, mental health data is already being mined.
Apple has partnered with various health organizations and academic institutions to conduct health-related studies, such as Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the University of Michigan on various health studies. Apple also collaborates with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on a Digital Mental Health Study. This study likely utilizes data collected through Apple devices to investigate mental health patterns and outcomes. Trusting that the user identifiers have been completely stripped before that data is passed on is a risk that one takes when entering such information into an iPhone.
“Connect with resources.”
So how does Apple benefit? At this time, it appears that Apple is selling advertising of various mental health services by “connecting” services to people’s phones. Apple writes that “These assessments can help users determine their risk level, connect to resources available in their region, and create a PDF to share with their doctor.”
That might mean that if one presses the depressed button in the mental health assessment, Apple will place ads on the search engine for anti-depressants or physicians that prescribe them.
Why would that example be relevant, and which pharmaceutical companies might benefit?
iPhone has developed their mental health assessment with an “educational grant” from Pfizer!
Pfizer manufactures and sells Zoloft, Effexor, Pristiq, and Sinequan formulations. Together the sales revenue for these drugs is in the billions each year:
From 2015 to 2018, 13.2% of American adults reported taking antidepressant medication within the past 30 days, with sertraline (Zoloft) being one of the most common. Even off-patent, there were 39.2 million prescriptions filled with an annual sales revenue of 470 million.
Effexor XR is an antidepressant medication that was originally developed by Wyeth (now part of Pfizer). In 2010, when the first generic version of Effexor XR was introduced in the United States, the brand name product had annual sales of approximately $2.75 billion. By 2013, due to generic competition, Pfizer’s sales of Effexor XR dropped to $440 million.
According to IMS Health data, in 2016, Pristiq (desvenlafaxine) had annual sales of approximately $883 million in the United States, although sales appear to have fluctuated over the years.
The bottom line is that Pfizer is not supplying educational grants to develop mental health assessment software for Apple out of the “goodness of their heart.” Mental health inventions via medication are a big business, and these companies are looking to profit.
This is just one way that Apple is using surveillance capitalism by data mining mental health status and then selling access to that data to Big Pharma, Big Tech, physician and insurance companies, etc.
How this information, which once released or leaked, can never be returned with privacies intact, will be used in the future is unknown.
If the setting for sharing research on health conditions has not been deactivated, this information will go into a database somewhere. It is only Apple’s assurance that your identification has been stripped from the data. Further, your mental health information will be uploaded to the cloud and will be used as a behavioral future. To be shared, packaged, sold, used to influence your decision-making, etc.
I am wary of the highly profitable industry that has been built up around “mental disorders.” Over the years, the American Psychiatric Association and the fields of psychology and psychiatry have hurt individuals and families by both classifying diseases and disorders incorrectly and by developing treatments and therapies that were and are dangerous. Many are still in use. Here are a few examples:
- There are estimates that 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States, with most occurring between 1949 and 1952. In 1949, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to António Egas Moniz for his development of the lobotomy procedure.
- Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder in 1952 with the publication of the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). It was listed under “sociopathic personality disturbance.” This classification remained in place until 1973.
- Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) are a widely prescribed class of antidepressant medications. There is a link between SSRIs and increased risk of violent crime convictions, and other research has shown an increase in self-harm and aggression in children and adolescents taking SSRIs.
- The APA supports access to affirming and supportive treatment for “transgendered” children, including mental health services, puberty suppression and medical transition support.
- The APA believes that gender identity develops in early childhood, and some children may not identify with their assigned sex at birth.
- Asperger’s syndrome was merged into the broader category of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the DSM-5 in 2013. Since then, a large number of people have faced discrimination and barriers to entry into higher-paying positions. Children handed such a diagnosis also can suffer a lack of confidence in their ability to manage relationships effectively, which can easily carry on to adulthood.
These are just a few of the many, many ways the American Psychiatric Association and the fields of psychology and psychiatry have gotten things very wrong.
- A survey of more than 500 social and personality psychologists published in 2012 found that only 6 percent identified as conservative overall, implying that 94% were liberal or moderate.
- At a 2011 Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting, when attendees were asked to identify their political views, only three hands out of about a thousand went up for “conservative” or on the right.
The liberal bias in psychology influences findings on conservative behaviors.
To bring this back to the use of software applications and the iPhone mental health app in particular, be aware that these software programs are being developed by people with a liberal bias and who will view the beliefs of conservatives negatively. What this means for future use of this data is unknown, but it can’t be good.
If you do choose to use the mental health applications, which mainstream media has nothing but praise for, be aware – there are alligators in those waters.
But sure that the data sharing mode, particularly giving data access to researchers is turned off. But even then, don’t be surprised if your phone begins planting messages about the benefits, SSRIs, or other anti-depressant drugs into your everyday searches. Or maybe your alcohol use or tobacco use data will be used to supply you with advertisements on the latest ways to reduce intake or how to find a good mental health facility. These messages may very well include neuro-linguistic programming methods and nudging, to push you into treatment modalities. But honestly, it is all for your “own good and for the benefit of your family.”
Now, the iPhone and the watch can be valuable tools. The EKG, blood oxygen, and heart rate monitoring are fantastic tools for those who suffer from cardiac disorders. I have found them to be extremely helpful.
My wife, Jill is often motivated by getting more walking steps each week via her iWatch tracker.
Just be aware that these programs can be invasive. Data is never 100% secure and it is being used. We just don’t know all the details.
Republished from the author’s Substack
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