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Bruce Dowbiggin

The Apple Interview: Pierre Poilievre Makes The Media Party Crazy

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“You don’t pull on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger. And you don’t mess around with Jim.”— Jim Croce

In modern five-second sound-bite journalism viewers seldom hear the reporter’s question (often it’s just an assertion) that prompted the clip. Whether a cornered politician or a humbled athlete, the game’s the same. Get a clip, score a click. So gotcha’ journalists rarely are exposed for the inadequate job of news-generating they often do with their closed-end, cliché-riddled efforts.

(Everything we know on the subject of interviewing we owe to the brilliant John Sawatsky who for decades has coached proper interview techniques —all of them ignored by the subject of this column.)

The job in gotcha’ journalism is to draw blood and win the applause of your peers. This goes for right-wing journalists, too. But mainstream media is saturated by left-wing, progressive water carriers, so the overwhelming army of CBC insinuators and Toronto Star whaddabout’ scribes have a disproportionate effect on the issues. Seeing as how they only talk among themselves they can’t imagine a parallel universe where PMJT is not a beneficent, wise leader.

To wit: the apple exchange gone viral between CPC leader Pierre Poilievre and Don Urquhart, editor of the Kelowna Times Chronicle. Mr. Urqhart went hunting for a big game with the CPC leader and wound up the main dish himself. Here’s the tale of the tape:

URQUHART: Uhmm, on the topic, I mean, in terms of your, sort of, strategy currently, you’re obviously taking the populist pathway …

POILIEVRE: What does that mean?

URQUHART: (nervous chuckle) Well, appealing to people’s more emotional levels, I would guess

POILIEVRE: Whaddaya mean by that? Give me an example.

URQUHART: Certainly you, certainly you tap, ah, very strong ideological language quite frequently.

POILIEVRE: Like what?

URQUHART: Uhh, left wing, y’know, this and that, right-wing, they, you know, I mean, it’s that type of (unintelligible) —

POILIEVRE: I almost never talk about — I never really talk about left or right. I don’t really believe in that.

URQUHART: A lot of people would say that you’re simply taking a page out of the Donald Trump, uh, book —

POILIEVRE: A lot of people? Like which people would say that? (puzzled chomp)

URQUHART: Well, I’m sure — a great many Canadians, but …

POILIEVRE: Like who?

URQUHART: Haha, uh, I don’t know who, but …

POILIEVRE: Well, you’re the one who asked the question, so you must know somebody.

URQUHART: He-

heh, okay, I’m, I’m sure there’s some out there, but anyways, the point of this question is, why should, why should Canadians trust you with their vote, given … y’know … not, not just the sort of ideological inclination in terms of taking the page out of Donald Trump’s book, but, also —

POILIEVRE: (incredulous) What are you talking about? What page? What page? Can you gimme a page? Gimme the page. You keep saying that …

URQUHART: In terms of, in terms of turning things quite dramatically, in terms of, of Trudeau, and, and the left wing, and all of this, you make quite a, you know, it’s, it’s quite a play that you make on it. So. I’m. Just wondering…

It continued on this way for a short while longer when a dazed Urquhart finally ran out of PMJT talking points to hurl at Poilievre, and Poilievre moved on. It was cold. It was spontaneous. Like the making of sausage, it was something the public rarely sees.

A clip of the interview was quickly shared by Poilievre’s comms team. “How do you like them apples?” was the caption on Poilievre’s post. Within days the interview had gone global, a rebuke around the globe for earnest-but-inept Jimmy Olsens and Lois Lanes of the liberal press corps. Conservatives cheered. “Can we get him in our country?” asked U.S. podcaster Meagan Kelly.

In the friendly confines of liberal 416/613 media, however, Poilievre was quickly labelled a bully for exposing one of their fellow travelers. In the Globe & Mail Shannon Proudfoot played the sad trombone for Urquhart, declaring it bad form for Poilievre to not assist a guy who was looking to skewer him.

Proudfoot’s moist G&M colleague André Picard also mounted the “punching-down” defense. “Getting to the core of  @PierrePoilievre’s biting B.C. interview. Kicking a journalist in the shins over and over  then turning the exchange into a social-media flex is telling on yourself…” Venerable CBC panelist/ Star columnist Chantal Hébert (who should know better) echoed the pauvre p’tit  take about Urquhart. “Agreed”.

Naturally the sob-sister line brought huzzahs from the wettest wet in Wet Town, Bruce Arthur of the Star. He embraced the bully pose even as he bullied Poilievre. “Kick-ass piece. “Making yourself a far-right hero by crapping on a small-town reporter is petty, and pathetic.” (So’s he defending someone who just disgraced his profession? Have we got that straight?)

Former Edmonton journalist Bill Doscoch also defended the indefensible.  @billdinYEG “Picking on a local reporter when you’re a national political leader is like pushing around a junior high student when you’re a high school senior. It was great entertainment for mean-minded conservatives, but telling for the rest of us.”

There were plenty more crying towels for Uquhart from the usual suspects. All ending with predictable Trumpian screeds against the UPC leader going after a small-fry in the hinterlands. What they spackled over is that Urquhart was the adult editor of the paper, not an errand boy out of J-School. He went looking for a home run on the national, not local stage. He’d have scored a national scoop if Poilievre hadn’t schooled him.

Instead he struck out on three straight fastballs. He was neither innocent. Nor was he prepared to do his job. But he cashed in his Pity Party points to win sympathy from the fainting goats of the left— who normally remind us that journalism is a blood sport.

If CPC comms folks had tried to stage an episode to expose the herding instincts of Canada’s cloistered legacy media trying to stay relevant on the public purse, this was it. 1) Assumption that his back was protected if he just used approved “far-right-wing” buzzwords 2) Assumption that everyone hates PP already. 3) Incompetence tolerated by corrupted, failed outlets. 4) Truth its dependent on what jersey you wear. 5) Lather, rinse, repeat.

Unsurprisingly, Urquhart himself thought he’d done a swell job. When time came to write up his fateful orchard convo, he had his own self-serving take. “When asked why Canadians should trust him with their votes given his demonstrable track record of flip-flopping on key issues and what some consider his use of polarizing ideologically-infused rhetoric suggesting he simply takes pages out of the Donald Trump populist playbook, Poilievre became acerbic.”

No, Bill, he ate an apple. Proving he learned nothing and will pollute younger journalists with this bilge. So it’s no shock that recent polling contains what should be a surprise— but isn’t. Despite a decade of Justin Trudeau the abysmal-polling Liberals are still expected to win 90 seats of the 335 seats in parliament. That speaks volumes on the loyalty of his base.

A base that still sees Poilievre’s “polarizing ideologically-infused rhetoric”— in Urquhart’s infelicitous description— as a right-wing Trumpian intrusion into Trudeaupia . And will use any means— even their own professional failure.— to protect their jobs and worldview.

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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

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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

Hunting Poilievre Covers For Upcoming Demographic Collapse After Boomers

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For those not familiar with hunting seasons in Canada it may come as a surprise that the nation has a year-round hunting season. That would be the targeting of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre by the massed army of Liberals, their bots and the richly endowed media pack. Forget he’s never held power. He’s to blame for the ills in Canadian society.

It has been a good hunt. After floor-crossing by dissident CPC, the Liberals are one seat from the majority that Canadian voters denied them in the spring. (They’ll likely get the majority soon.) MPs who a day earlier were at Conservative Xmas parties suddenly sang the praises of Carney. MPs in ridings targeted by the Chinese suddenly joined Team Elbow Up.

All the while the media corps landed blows from their perch. Robert Benzie: “I know that Premier [Danielle] Smith is very unhappy privately with Pierre Poilievre because she thinks that [MOU motion] is undermining this [pipeline] project.” The nadir of the media dog pile was formerly eminent scribe Robert Fife who sniped, “Conservatives persist with cute legislative tricks, while the government tries to run a country.” Run a country. That’s rich.

From his lips to Liberal brains, however. “.@CBCNews and @AlJazeeraWorld viewers consider themselves uniquely informed, says @ElectionsCan_E report. The two TV networks were named by self-described “informed” voters when asked where they got their news.

It is, seemingly, a great time to be a Liberal. Or not. While Operation Poilievre was gathering steam for Xmas polling revealed that Liberals and Conservatives remain locked in a tie, and Canadians continue to express ambivalence about the country’s direction, mixed feelings about their leaders, and sharp divides by generation, region, and policy concern. These generational discrepancies continue to be buried.

As was the case in the spring, the Liberals are supported only by the Boomer generation that swallowed Elbows Up nostalgia like a fat man on a donut. The under 60s demo at every level shows the current Carney agenda is a loser for them. In the segment of house-rich Boomers the Libs lead 50-31 over CPC. But in every other category it’s “how can I get out of here faster?”

The 45-59 demo it’s 46-36 Conservatives; 30-44 it’s a whopping 48-31 CPC; 18-29 it’s 40-39 CPC. A healthy chunk of Liberal supporting from the collapse of NDP vote. Where they used to poll in the 20s, the highest demo shows 11 percent support. Otherwise Poilievere would be PM.

Meanwhile, research now finds that 54 percent of Canadians say the growing number of newcomers to the country threatens our traditional customs and values— an increase of sixteen points since 2020. Over the same period, the share of Canadians who say immigration strengthens our society fell thirteen points to 35%

In short, the Carney Circus of marrying Canada to China and the EU is a card trick that will be exposed shortly. But where do we see the Ottawa press corps attention to this impending demographic snow plow? As we wrote in March  “It’s not hard to see the (under 60s)  looking at the Mike Myers obsession with a long-gone Canada and saying let’s get out of here. 

Recently former TVOntario host Steve Pakin attended two convocations. The first at the former Ryerson University, (switched to Toronto Metropolitan University in a fit of settler colonizer guilt.) The second at Queens University, traditionally one of the elite schools in the nation. Here’s what he saw.

“At the end of the (TMU) convocation, when Charles Falzon, on his final day as dean of TMU’s Creative School, asked students to stand and sing the national anthem, many refused. They remained seated. Then, when the singing began, it was abundantly noticeable that almost none of the students sang along. And it wasn’t because they didn’t know the words, which were projected on a big screen. The unhappy looks on their faces clearly indicated a different, more political, explanation.

I asked some of the TMU staff about it after the ceremony was over, and they confirmed what I saw happens all the time at convocations. Then I texted the president of another Ontario university who agreed: this is a common phenomenon among this generation at post-secondary institutions.” 

At Queens, where Canadian flags were almost non-existent, O Canada was sung, but the message of unrest was clear: “Convocation sends a message of social stability,” Queen’s principal Patrick Deane  began in his speech.  “It is a ceremony shaped in history. You should value your connection to the past, but question that inheritance. Focus on the kind of society you’d like to inhabit.”

You can bet Deane is not telling them to question climate change and trans rights. As Paikin observes, “if we fail to create a more perfect union, we shouldn’t be surprised when a vast swath of young people don’t sing our anthem the way so many of the rest of us do.” So why are the best and brightest so reluctant to see as future in becoming the new professional class that runs society?

In the Free Press River Page searched the source of their discontent. “If the Great Recession, Covid-19, and the spectre of an artificial intelligence-assisted ‘white collar bloodbath’ has taught the professional class anything, it is that their credentials cannot save them. This insecurity, compounded by the outrageous cost of living in many large cities, has pushed the PMC’s anxieties to the breaking point. 

“Add that to the triumph of identity politics in professional class institutions like universities, corporate C-suites, non-governmental organizations, and media—itself a byproduct of inter-elite competition as many have observed—and what you have is the modern left.

“… they’ve already come to the baffling conclusion that there’s no difference between class struggle and child sex changes. More to the point, the socialist mantra “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has only ever stood the test of time in Anabaptist sects. It requires a religious devotion to self-sacrifice that is not characteristic of this anxious and hyper-competitive class—as many actual socialists have spent the last decade warning.”

The tsunami over immigration has caused severe dislocations— as PM Steven Harper predicted in the 2015 election debate. He was shouted down by the dopey dauphin Justin Trudeau who opened the sluice gates to every kind of progressive nonsense. Which is now evident.

Like all people addicted, CDN Boomers don’t want the truth. They want performance theatre, T-shirts and hockey games. They blame Trump for their predicament, caught between grim realities. Will they take the 12 steps? Or will their kids have to tell them the facts as they escort them to the home?” We’re now seeing the likely answer to that question everywhere in Canadian society.

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 2025 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 new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books

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Bruce Dowbiggin

NFL Ice Bowls Turn Down The Thermostat on Climate Change Hysteria

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Oh, the weather outside was frightful. But the football was so delightful. Week 15 of the NFL season was a cryogenic success of snow and sub-zero temperatures. Here were the temperatures at game time this weekend.

Chicago: -11 degrees C.

Cincinnati: -12 degrees F.

Kansas City: -8 degrees C.

New England: -2 C (with an 87 percent chance of snow).

Philadelphia: -2 degrees C.

New York -1 degree C.

Pittsburgh: -7 degrees C.

For fans of NFL football none of this seemed out of character with late-season football. There are legendary games played in arctic conditions. The windchill for the 1967 Dallas/ Green Bay NFC championship was -25 C.

Chargers at Bengals: Jan. 10, 1982 (-24 C, feels like -39 C).

Seahawks at Vikings in NFC wild-card matchup Jan 10, 2016. -21 C with wind chill -25C

Dolphins at Chiefs: Jan. 13, 2024 (-4 degrees, feels like -27 degrees)

As recently as last week’s Bills win over the Bengals games are often played with drifts of snow on the field and the mercury bottoming out. While Canada’s Grey Cup game is played at the end of November it’s still had some brutal weather history of its own.

The point of this meteorology meandering is that, according to our good King Charles III and many other doomsday cultists the concept of snow and cold was supposed to be a figment of the past by now. For almost half a century Michael Mann and the climate prophets of IPCC have been predicting the end of snow and the onset of warmist floods and burning forests. They gambled trillions of the public’s dollars on the certainty that the public would buy computer modelling and data-distortion predicting doom.

For decades it has worked. The careers of people like critic Mark Steyn have been ruined, heretics declared and fortunes dissipated by the trust-fund fanatics who bankroll wackadoodles like Stephen Guilbeault, the convicted felon who Trudeau made Minister of the Environment. No matter how absurd or devious the source, it was a gospel that the fiery inferno was coming next Tuesday. But the weather has remained stubbornly resistant to Elizabeth May’s catechism of climate.

Yet, some dedicated climate advocates and their followers are finally changing their tune in the face of their own observation of lying liars like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. The share of Americans who say climate scientists understand very well whether climate change is occurring decreased from 37 percent in 2021 to 32 percent this year. A similar October study from the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute found that “belief in human-driven climate change declined overall” since 2017.

Reports the uber-liberal L.A. Times: “The unraveling of climate catastrophism got another jolt recently with the formal retraction of a high-profile 2024 study published in the journal Nature. That study — which had predicted a calamitous 62% decline in global economic output by 2100 if carbon emissions were not sufficiently reduced — was widely cited by transnational bodies and progressive political activists alike as justification for the pursuit of aggressive decarbonization. 

But the authors withdrew the paper after peer reviewers discovered that flawed data had skewed the result. Without that data, the projected decline in output collapses to around 23%. Oops.”

Even stalwart media apologists for climate hysteria like the Times are starting to have doubts. Under the headline “The left’s climate panic is finally calming down” they describes “Erstwhile ardent climate-change evangelist Bill Gates published a remarkable blog post addressing climate leaders at the then-upcoming COP30 summit. Gates unloaded a blistering critique of what he called ‘the doomsday view of climate change,’ which he said is simply “wrong.”

Trump-besotted American Democrats seeking to soften their Woke image before the 2026 midterms are likewise carving out more moderate positions on climate “that could well deprive Republicans of a winning political issue with which to batter out-of-touch, climate-change-besotted Democrats. But for the sake of good governance, sound public policy and the prosperity of the median American citizen, it would be the best thing to happen in a decade.”

Sadly Canada under Mark Carney remains a staunch climate warrior. The removal of Guilbeault as federal Environmental Minister may have seemed a step toward sanity, but there is no hint that the billions of dollars from hidden money spigots will be closed down any time soon. The B.C. government’s acquiescence to the climate propaganda of Indigenous bands shows no sign of abating. Indeed, it is just ramping up in the land claims that threaten to make home ownership a thing of the past.

PM Mark Carney is a dedicated temperature fabulist going back to his days as governor of the Bank of England. His first fights in Canada were over taxing carbon and hobbling her energy industry. As we wrote in this November 2024 column, the certainty in which the Canadian Left revels is actually dividing, not uniting citizens.

So perhaps if enough citizens spend an afternoon shivering in the stands of a wintertime football game we might achieve a small piece of sanity and learn that that , while climate is always changing, it’s not worth the price we’ve paid this century.

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 2025 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 new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books.

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