Bruce Dowbiggin
Pretty Lame In Pink: Single Dad Justin Plays The Pity Card
“Saddened non-binary PM seeks new partner with interest in sequins and pantomime.”
It is said that clothes make the man. In the case of prime minister Justin Trudeau, clothes define the man. In Canada’s bespoke circles few notice nor care that the celebrated follower of fashion is leading his Liberals to electoral disaster. So long as he’s a sharp-dressed man.
In the same week that saw Trudeau formally announce his separation from Idris Elba’s biggest fan, the PM begged the chattering classes to consider his children and refrain from mockery now that the worst-kept secret in Ottawa the last four years has finally snuck out. The story should be allowed to work itself out in private.
That would seem a reasonable request, were it not for the fact that no such pity was extended to the children of the Trucker Convoy participants whom Trudeau labelled as Nazis, anti-science, bigots, puppets of right-wing America, white supremacists and more because they disagreed with Justin’s draconian Covid policies on vaccinations.
PMJT wanted the scarlet letter for those who disagreed with him— and their family and friends. They were cut off from banks and financing, their passports cancelled while the PM called them stains on the nation— while he hid beneath his desk, quaking in fear. When the facts emerged about how dangerous the vaccines have been— and how little risk much of the nation faced from the virus— there was no apology to the families ruined by his actions.
Just more brass from Trudeau as he staged teddy-bear theatre in cemeteries of residential school kids.
Now he wants understanding for his own cratering private life? His self pity is predictable when confronted with his double standard. In his defence, the usual #TrudeauFlacks claim that the Truckers Convoy was an overtly political act and deserving of ad hominems. While the Trudeau domestic drama was private.
After which the private and grieving Trudeau immediately went full Mr. Dressup with his kids in a series of photos released in the days after the separation press release. Garbed in Barbie pink, the rictus-faced thespian dragged his reportedly vulnerable kids into a photo op that belied his desire for privacy.
In fact, the Trudeau kids and their mother have long been (willing?) props in Justin’s Wardrobe Extravaganzas, draped in Bollywood garb and paraded for his personal photog to capture in Dad’s costume dramas. If he wanted privacy there was a way to get it. The same way his father Pierre did when Mama Margaret lit out with the Rolling Stones. PM Pierre projected a sobriety and sadness his dullard son could never grasp. And the media respected it.
Prime Minister Trudeau, Sophie, Xavier, Ella-Grace and Hadrien visit the Swaminarayan Akshardham Temple in Ahmedabad, India. February 19, 2018. ///
Le premier ministre Trudeau, Sophie, Xavier, Ella-Grace et Hadrien visitent le temple Swaminarayan Akshardham à Ahmedabad, en Inde. 19 février 2018.
No such luck with Sonny Boy. You’d think that by now most Canadians would have caught the drift that PMJT likes to dress up rather than reach out. From Pride Parades to foreign trips to indigenous pow-wows, the only thing sharp about him has been the crease in his pants. Where the NYC media swooned in his Happy Ways incarnation in 2015 he’s now a longstanding joke in the G7, the jester to Joe Biden’s incoherent Lear.
But even after this déshabillé, the sneering Family Compact is still tolerant of his foibles, defending him at every turn against the unwashed mass. @stephenlautens “How many people do you know who aren’t smart enough to know the difference between requesting privacy on the subject of his separation and not requiring him to completely disappear from public view on things that aren’t related to his separation?”
Sure, Steve. Go with that. The latest protection racket is the bought-media’s attempt to change the subject and conflate Trudeau’s rival Pierre Poilievre into a far-right ogre. They’ve done hit pieces on his cosmetic makeover, losing his glasses and— brace yourself— wearing makeup in front of the cameras. Yes. The end of civilization.
Then there’s PP’s dastardly campaigning out of season. Noted one online Liberal hack “Well I did notice that Poilievre said ‘we’ once yesterday when he crashed the Caribana party with his political speech. Campaigning outside of an election period. That’s always nice when someone brings their politics to a party and has a captive audience just having fun.”
There’s a reason the sheep are nervous. Current polling showing the CPC likely to form a majority government (leading Trudeau’s Liberals by 10 points) means that the prime minister will now drag out his mandate till the bitter end sometime in 2025. (Or until Elton John requests his wardrobe back.) Hoping that innumerable re-shufflings of this faculty lounge… er, cabinet, and dollops of friendly fire from paid media will turn his Ugly Duckling into a swan again.
Or he could, as is being rumoured now, chuck the whole gig and move onto a new costume change with the WEF? That segment of Ottawa not already sunning itself in the Laurentians is trying to get the scoop on when PMJT falls on his costume sword.
Making this sob-story problematic is the absence of a successor as PM on the Liberal bench who could carry a riding outside the West Island of Montreal. Mark Carney, banker to Global Warming, and Chrystia Freeland, she of the $800 running shoes, hardly excite the Canadian pulse. Meaning PMJT might be convinced to hang on a while longer till Drake or The Weeknd or whomever can be convinced to run HMCS Good Ship Grit.
No matter how you dress him, Trudeau has reached the Box Office Poison phase of his time in office. Morphing from RomCom dandy to late-stage heel may work in an acting career, but it’s not likely Justin will emulate Barbie’s comeback anytime soon.
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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 fifth-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His prize-listed 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
The Toronto Maple Leafs made the “what colour is that green light?” decision to fire their head coach Sheldon Keefe last week. The removal of Keefe after five years followed a dispiriting first-round playoff series loss to a very ordinary Boston Bruins team. Coaching may or may not have been the root cause of that loss. (Keefe himself admitted “teams are waiting for the Leafs to beat themselves”.)
The real reason for the firing is 1967, and we don’t think we need add more than that.
In essence, the management of MLSE— the owner of the Maple Leafs and a lot of other sports stuff in Toronto— needed to throw a body to the baying hounds of disappointment. Also known as Leafs Nation. Newly minted CEO Keith Pelley, fresh from the PGA Tour/ LIV psychodrama, was certainly not going to pay the price.
Nor was GM Brad Treliving who has only been on the job for two seasons. The key decisions on Toronto’s lopsided salary cap were decided long before Treliving occupied his desk. That left two people in vulnerable positions. 1) Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan, who has been drawing an MLSE cheque for a decade. 2) Keefe.
When was the last time you saw a coach fire a team president? Precisely. Keefe joins the list of (briefly) unemployed coaches who circulate in the NHL like McKinsey consultants. Shanahan gets a lukewarm mulligan from Pelley. But after the failure of the Kyle Dubas experiment— “who needs experience?”— and now just a single playoff series win in a decade Shanny’s best-before date has arrived.
Toronto Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan attends a news conference in Toronto on April 14, 2014. Toronto Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan said Peter Horachek will remain the team’s interim head coach until the end of the season. Shanahan met the media Friday for the first time since coach Randy Carlyle was fired on Tuesday. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
Depending on who he and Treliving enlist to coach— remember, Mike Babcock was too tough and Keefe was probably too player friendly— it had better produce instant results. Because Shanny, the pride of Mimico, is out of chances. The coach choice will also be affected by whichever player or players that management decides are superfluous to ending the Leafs’ ridiculous run of misery.
The Leafs brass’ press conference last Thursday did little to shed light on what happens after Keefe’s expulsion. Just a lot of MBA determinism on a bed of baffle gab. A crabby Steve Simmons question/rant briefly threatened the harmony of the moment, but order was restored. And the media bitching switched from the press box to social media and podcasts.
Speaking of the fourth estate, the other unmentioned aspect of this story— indeed every story in the NHL these days— is just how it was revealed to the public. When people sipped their morning Tim’s or Starbucks the (almost) coincident bulletins came down the social media pike about Keefe’s dismissal.
Predictably, Chris Johnston of Sportsnet and Daren Dreger of TSN announced the breaking news within heart beats of each other. While there had been speculation on Keefe’s fate for days, the announcement coming from the networks duo confirmed the story in the minds of the industry. That allowed everyone else drawing a cheque as a hockey journalist to pile in and swarm the dead body.
In today’s sports journalism, where social media has replaced newspapers, scoops are governed by a protocol. There are the heralds— in the NHL it’s currently Johnston and Dreger— and then there are the disseminators. The days of a rabble of reporters all scrambling to get a story bigger than who-will-play-in-tonight’s-game are gone. Today, it’s a very narrow funnel for scoops.
It’s the same in the NFL where Ian Rappaport (NFL Network) and Adam Schefter (ESPN) monopolize the tasty scoops on behalf of their employers, who also happen to be NFL rights holders. In the NBA, Brian Windhorst (ESPN) has the inside rail when it comes to the LeBron James/ Steph Curry scoops. In MLB… it’s probably Ken Rosenthal (The Athletic) but no one cares about baseball anymore, do they?
The leagues like it this way, doling out stories to guys they can trust. None of this is criticism of Johnston or Dreger, who have deftly maneuvered themselves into the coveted “from their lips to your ears” spots. From our own experience we can remember the exhilaration of having the best source or sources on the really big stories. Like Johnston/ Dreger, we worked hard for a long time to develop those sources and only very reluctantly let anyone else horn in on our stories.
It was also our observation that this order of things journalistic suited a lot of reporters who either couldn’t get good sources or didn’t want the stress of being first on stuff. It was enough that, like the Keefe story, they’d get the goods eventually and most fans would not care who was first. So long as you had a take. So be it.
Some resentful types took potshots at our work if it upset their pals in the dressing room or the management suite. On the Stephen Ames/ Tiger Woods story in 2001, we had the late Pat Marsden tell us on air that we’d done a great job on Ames’ criticisms of Tiger. Only to hear him lambaste us— again on FAN 590— only minutes later as we listened driving home from the studio. But we digress.
Many reporters are complacent in playing the game, so long as their bosses didn’t enquire why they are getting scooped all the time by the same few rivals. With the death of daily newspapers that doesn’t happen much any longer. (Many editors today may only see stories when publication brings a libel notice.) For them a salty take is good enough.
The scoop business is also affected by the multiple roles now demanded of sports media types. In addition to their “day job” on a beat they also have to supply digital content and talk-back hits to the Mother Ship. Most also are feeding a weekly podcast, dictating time on air rather than time working the phone. There are only so many hours in a day to chase a story.
Better to play the Breaking News waiting game.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the publisher 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. Now for pre-order, new from the team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin . 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 in paperback and Kindle on #Amazon this week. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/
Have you ever been to a concert where a hot new product like Tesla is mentioned and many in the crowd applaud in approval? Have you been at a dinner party when you say you went to a new Thai restaurant, and everyone at the table explodes in rhapsodic glee? Have you ever been to see a comic and he mentions he has the latest iPhone with the nifty camera and people actually cheer?
You see those people cheering a piece of tech or a style of cuisine? Those are the people who believed Justin Trudeau when he told them to sink everything into real estate when interest rates were near zero. They. Will. Believe. Anything. So long as they think it makes them cool kids. Trudeau could say he can control the weather by stopping cows from farting, and they’ll be wearing a bovine flatulence T-shirts pronto.
Now, we can hear you laughing in derision at our skepticism about the real estate-economy that has taken over the nation— the new economy that Justin fed, watered and then bragged about. (To the exclusion of the other cornerstones of our once-dynamic nation state.) The one that will be going to Market one of these days for a meeting with an air compressor.
Again, you laugh. Despite the housing shortage Justin says we can easily accommodate two million new souls a year, no problem. He says Trump was a vile racist for wanting to exclude unhinged radicals from zombie countries back in 2017. The freshly-arrived from Trump’s “shithole countries” with “shithole value systems” and “shithole economies’ will prop up the value of Canada’s two-million dollar cash-cow bungalow in West Van or Etobicoke. And the Happy People believe.
Why? Because Justin and his cabinet are in Control, and they’ll just rein in these types when they get here and start asking that Jews be exterminated or white people surrender the merit system to DEI droogs. That little dustup at the universities where nervous trust-fund virgins claim to be onside with systemic rape? Justin can stop them anytime. Everything is cool. After all, Canada is the model for a postmodern state.
And that stuff about how the Canadian real estate market being 80 percent propped up by drug money, kleptocracy profits and Blackrock? Pshaw. That is just the Far Right Diagolons trying to panic you into hiding your money from the government which just wants to send it to the “shithole” countries in a kickback loop. If nothing else, the banks will save you— if there’s any shareholder value left after this deranged DEI diversion.
Can’t happen here? We know people who were around the EU in 2008 when the U.S. mortgage debacle cratered economies around the world. For years they’d been served by Poles in the service industry, Spaniards in the restaurant kitchens and Bulgarians doing the physical labour. Life was good. Everyone drove a Beemer and owned a condo overlooking the sea.
Then, one day, they noticed that all the airport parking lots were overflowing with Beemers that went unclaimed. No one had paid rent in months. The banks noticed that all these lovely fellow citizens of the EU had drained their savings, reached their cash credit limit on the Mastercard and skedaddled with the dough. Funny, they all must have gone on holidays to once, no?
No. They were gone. Bye bye. Adios. And the credit bubbles in Ireland, Norway, Iceland, France and other EU worthies popped like the champagne they’d been sipping for years on easy credit and idiotic notions of productivity. Nations like Iceland went bankrupt overnight. Counties in England threw their keys on the table. People’s life savings evaporated.
But Justin says that won’t happen here on his co-watch with Jagmeet the Bespoke. Sure, no one under the age of 40 can afford those two-million dollar cash-cow bungalows in West Van or Etobicoke. But those old Boomer geezers will die soon, and after we tax the daylights out of the estate, the kiddos will inherit the house. Probably after we turn it into a four-plex or fine them for having empty bedrooms because they couldn’t afford kids.
One of the ferocious beauties of market economies is their way of periodically turning on themselves when too many people are getting rich too easily. The Canadian RE economy of Justin Trudeau is one of them. It’s about a decade old without any sign of dropping. Life is good. Everyone drives a Tesla and rents a condo overlooking the sea.
Little wonder. Everything he and his faculty lounge of dimwits like Chrystia Freeland, Melanie Joly and Steven Guilbeault have done this decade has been to prop up the value of real estate owned by their real pals in Asia, Europe, the assorted kleptocracies in Africa or the sub-continent. It was like an ad for Chlorox the way these “investors” blithely laundered their dirty money in Canadian condos and low-rises. When news leaked out that mobsters were using casinos in B.C. (where Justin’s maternal side came from) as a laundering station it was covered up very quickly.
But the clock ticks. Even Justin’s former finance minister Bill Morneau is warning that the bubble is going to pop if Justin keeps printing more money to keep the real estate values so unsupportably high. The entire middle class of Canada, which has ridden the real estate train, will see their life savings evaporate like Jody Wilson Raybould’s political career.
No matter. Justin’s been living in government housing since 2015 (some of it with his Mommy). What does a trust-fund nit know about making rent cheques or a mortgage payment? Without Sophie spending like a dervish, he never needs to look at an America Express card again. He’s got 17 more months to build up credits with his future benefactors, and he’s not applying the handbrake now.
Okay, you can applaud 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. Now for pre-order, new from the team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin . 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 in paperback and Kindle on #Amazon this week. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/
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