Sports
New Brunswick pulls plug on 2021 Francophonie Games, blames Ottawa
FREDERICTON — New Brunswick has abandoned plans to host the 2021 Francophonie Games, throwing the international event into turmoil and escalating a feud with the federal government.
Premier Blaine Higgs blamed a lack of financial support from Ottawa on Wednesday, but some federal and provincial politicians say his minority Progressive Conservative government never intended to allow the Games to proceed.
Cost estimates ballooned to $130 million from the original bid of $17 million, and Higgs said the province will withdraw because Ottawa’s funding formula was inadequate.
“This was a very difficult decision. We wanted these Games to go forward,” Higgs said.
“Without additional funding from the federal government hosting an event that could cost up to $130 million is irresponsible.”
The province’s decision to pull the plug brought immediate blowback from federal officials, but Dominic LeBlanc, the federal minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and a New Brunswick MP, said he wasn’t surprised by it.
“I think they planned all along to scuttle the Games,” he said.
“We had a number of conversations that I think led me to conclude that Mr. Higgs never had any intention to come up with a serious proposal that would have allowed the Government of Canada to meet its longstanding commitment of 50 per cent.”
Higgs, who took power in November, had previously said the province would cover only its original commitment to spend $10 million on the Games.
He said his government recognizes the Games are an important sports and cultural event, and they’d be happy to host if Ottawa paid for them.
“We need to look at these as a national event with events that could happen in different provinces, with a contribution such as we’re willing to make here, but it’s got to be a different process because this is more than a province can take on,” Higgs said.
The ninth Games of La Francophonie were scheduled to be held in the summer of 2021, attracting 3,000 athletes and artists from more than 50 member states that have French as a common language.
During an event in Quispamsis, N.B., last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Ottawa would only match provincial spending dollar-for-dollar.
On Wednesday, Trudeau called New Brunswick’s decision “unfortunate.”
“The Francophonie Games are important not just for francophone communities across this country but indeed around the world, and the athletes who were always looking forward to participating, of course, will be disappointed,” Trudeau said.
The original bid would have seen Ottawa and the province paying up to $10 million each, with the two host municipalities, Moncton and Dieppe, paying $750,000 each and the balance coming from ticket sales.
However, a federal consultant’s report pegged a reasonable cost at between $72 million and $115 million.
New Brunswick has a net debt of $13.9 billion and the Progressive Conservatives have vowed to get finances under control.
Kirsty Duncan, the federal sports minister, said they had hoped for further discussions on a funding proposal, but the province never offered one.
“Unfortunately despite productive talks at officials’ level yesterday, they have chosen not to bring forth any resolutions to be a willing and open partner, and instead have allowed their self-imposed deadline to expire for their own bid,” she said in a statement Wednesday.
“Once again, the Higgs government is leaving federal dollars on the table.”
She noted that New Brunswick is an independent member of the Francophonie and said she hopes it is taking steps to ensure the Games can occur elsewhere.
The New Brunswick Acadian Society said the announcement represents a fundamental challenge not only to New Brunswick’s place in Canada, but also Acadie’s place in the Francophonie.
Peoples Alliance Leader Kris Austin, whose party has been supporting the Tories, said he believes the government made a prudent decision.
“As much as I’m an elected official, I’m also a taxpayer, so I can’t say I’m disappointed. I pay federal taxes as well and I’d much rather see federal money going to things that are needed in New Brunswick, and I just don’t see games as one of them,” Austin said.
But Kevin Arseneau, a francophone and Green member of the provincial legislature, said the Tories did not seem to want the Games in the province.
“The message that Higgs just gave New Brunswickers is that we’re too small to do big things here,” Arseneau said.
The City of Moncton issued a statement Wednesday, saying it was unfortunate that the federal and provincial governments could not reach a deal on funding.
“As a host city, we believe the cultural, sports and economic impacts the Games could have on our region and our province are significant.”
Federal Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor, the MP for the Moncton area, said it’s a lost opportunity to showcase the region.
“The federal government is not in a position to pay 100 per cent of the Games because it just doesn’t meet our funding formula.”
New Brunswick — one of 84 member states and governments that belong to the International Organization of the Francophonie — was awarded the Games in 2015.
The website for the Games still had a countdown clock ticking away Wednesday towards the start of the games.
The International Organization of the Francophonie issued a statement saying it regrets New Brunswick’s decision two years before the event.
It said members of the orientation committee would meet in Paris to discuss the situation on Feb. 14-15.
The Games include eight sporting events and 12 cultural events, including singing, storytelling, traditional dance, poetry, painting, photography and sculpture.
The Games, which Canada hosted in the Ottawa-Gatineau area in 2001, are held every four years in the year following the Olympic Summer Games.
Kevin Bissett, The Canadian Press
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.
From LifeSiteNews
If female athletes came together and demanded, with one voice, that female sports be protected, they would be pushing at an open door.
What happens when obvious truths about the differences between the sexes are denied by the elites at the behest of the transgender movement? And what happens when female athletes discover that their rights mean less than the newly invented “rights” of trans-identifying men to invade their spaces?
We’ve seen the answer to that play out over the past few years. This month alone, a trans-identifying male beat his female competitors at an Oregon track meet by a full six seconds, with the video of him zipping across the finish line sparking outrage; a trans-identifying marathon runner announced that he will be competing in the full set of six marathon majors in Boston in the male, female and “non-binary” categories; and courts in West Virginia and Ohio ruled that trans-identifying males can compete on female sports teams.
In the meantime, U.K. culture secretary Lucy Frazer called for a ban on males in female sports after meeting with representatives of a number of female sports leagues, writing:
In competitive sport, biology matters. And where male strength, size and body shape gives athletes an indisputable edge, this should not be ignored. By protecting the female category, they can keep women’s competitive sport safe and fair and keep the dream alive for the young girls who dream of one day being elite sportswomen.
She concluded, “We must get back to giving women a level playing field to compete. We need to give women a sporting chance.” Refreshingly, she called on sporting bodies to take an “unambiguous position” on the matter.
That, of course, is common sense. What makes Frazer’s statements significant is that she does not, like most politicians trying to thread the needle by accepting transgender ideology but rejecting the inevitable conclusions thereof, make multiple references to “transgender women.” She instead refers to keeping male bodies out of female sports, much to the outrage of trans activists, who insist that males who identify as females are females, and thus have female bodies, because they said so.
Over the past several years, it has fallen largely to the few female sportswomen who dared to risk the opprobrium of the LGBT movement to speak for the majority and point out the unfairness of allowing males to invade their sporting domains; now, an increasing number are willing to speak out. A recent study conducted by Manchester Metropolitan and Swansea universities, published April 17 in the Journal of Sports Sciences, indicates that the majority of female athletes want women’s sports to be categorized by sex rather than “gender identity.”
Fifty-eight percent of respondents in the study of elite female athletes wanted categorization by biological sex; that rose to 77 percent among those classified as “world-class athletes” who had competed in Olympic or world championship finals. Researchers surveyed 175 “national, elite and world class female athletes – current and retired – from a range of sports and countries” and included “26 world champions, 22 Olympians and six Paralympians,” making it the largest study of its kind conducted thus far. A BBC Sports study last month found that over 100 elite U.K. female athletes “would be uncomfortable” with trans-identifying males competing in the female categories of their sports.
According to the study, there is one exception to the rule: the “majority of athletes competing in non-Olympic sports believe changing category should be allowed, with the highest rate of 74% among those in ‘precision’ sports such as archery.”
In short, the higher female athletes climb, the more likely they are to object to trans-identifying males competing in their categories. Most of these athletes, of course, remain unnamed. Imagine if they came out together and demanded, with one voice, that female sports be protected. It would constitute a cultural sea change – and I suspect the moment is right for them to do so. If they pushed, they would be pushing at an open door.
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