Bruce Dowbiggin
The PM Who Tells “Made-Up” Stories To The World
Here’s a pro tip for Erin O’Toole if he wants to become PM. Promise you will never, under any circumstances, fly the flag at half mast on Canada Day.
Seems like a no-brainer, right? Well, not if you’re Justin Trudeau in the throes of white liberal guilt over residential schools. On July 1 he ordered that the national colours be taken to half-mast to honour the rez children who he said had recently be “discovered” in unmarked mass graves.
To emphasize the “perfidy” of the people who’d abandoned these children to the cold earth the trust-fund product posed, head bowed, with a teddy bear at a Saskatchewan cemetery. This was to underline the message he’d been pitching for years to the international community: Canada had executed a genocide on the native peoples of Canada. His nation was inherently evil.
That’s the way his paid-off media pals saw it, too. In the papers and on electronic media there were anguished calls for criminal charges, investigations of the Catholic Church. The suddenly uncovered “mass graves” (sudden to them at least) were proof of denying the past. Woke Toronto journalists competed for who could damn the killers of the Rez kids, who’d supposedly been murdered and dumped in shallow graves behind the school at midnight.
David Butt, a Toronto criminal lawyer writing in the Globe and Mail, claimed “The discovery of thousands of unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the sites of former residential schools…looks and smells like criminal activity.” Activist firebrand Robert Jago said anyone questioning the validity of his own genocide allegations should be considered equivalent to “Holocaust denial” and punished as a hate-speech purveyor.
International media— pumped by Canadian activists— jumped at the story, too. Here’s the UK Independent headlining “mass graves” being discovered and hinting darkly that TB deaths at rez schools wasn’t accidental.
Just one problem. The 751 graves in Saskatchewan are well known and may contain white families, too, says Cowessess First Nation band member Irene Andreas . “There is no ‘discovery’ of graves. We buried our dead with a proper funeral. Then we allowed them to Rest In Peace…To assume that foul play took place would be premature and unsupported.
“All your elders have knowledge of every grave. The Band office has records from the Bishop’s office, the Church board and from cemetery workers who were in charge of digging graves and burials… So please, people, do not make up stories about residential school children being put in unmarked graves. No such thing ever happened.”
In his brilliant analysis of the evidence that Trudeau and Singh hype, Hymie Rubenstein (who taught and wrote about Indigenous and other cultures at the University of Manitoba for 31 years) says there has never been verified proof of even a single child killed in the century-plus the residential schools operated. No name, no body, no second-hand witnesses.
Furthermore, the sobering death rates of Rez children were in line with the terrible mortality rates for children from all causes in the years the schools were employed from 1870-2000 . (For example, researchers found that all the Alberta native children waiting for entrance into residential schools in 1912 carried TB.)
As for the charge of secretive burials, children who attended the schools testified to having attended Christian burials for children who died. There was no disrespect in their burials. On the the issue of “unmarked graves’, native bands rarely marked graves after mourning the dead both young and old. That’s if they marked them at all. Chief Joe Pierre of the ʔaq’am in Cranbrook, explained, “Graves were traditionally marked with wooden crosses and this practice continues to this day in many Indigenous communities across Canada. Wooden crosses can deteriorate over time due to erosion or fire which can result in an unmarked grave.”
No matter. Trudeau is happy to foment international rage against the Church and the politicians of the day if it helps him get re-elected in September. His teddy-bear stunt served to deflect from his abject failure on the indigenous-peoples file and his high-profile firing of Kwak’wala member Jody Wilson Raybould as his justice minister. As always he knew a sympathetically curated media lie would be around the world before the facts (in Churchill’s words) could ever get their pants on. His purchased press would see to that.
The man who wants another mandate as PM so he can vilify Canada to the world has plenty of political cover. The NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, the bespoke socialist, visited the Saskatchewan cemetery to claim, “This is a crime of genocide, the worst crime possible. And what we need to do is prosecute it like a crime.” Looking to create an election issue he demanded an independent prosecutor.
There is bad news for Singh’s pandering demand that charges be laid now using modern ground-penetrating technology. Kisha Supernant of the University of Alberta explained to the National Post, “What the ground-penetrating radar can see is where that pit itself was dug, because the soil actually changes when you dig a grave.” But bodies or evidence of foul play? As Supernant notes, the technology “doesn’t actually see the bodies (or coffins). It’s not like an X-ray.”
The final and most damning charge levelled by Trudeau and the radicals against their own nation is that of genocide. That from 1867- present Canada conceived and perpetrated a slaughter on the order of the Nazi Holocaust (1940-45) or the Armenian massacre (1915-17) or the Rwandan mass killing of Tutsis (1994). Despite the fervent support of progressive media they have fallen short.
According to the UN Convention’s formal post-1948 commentary, “To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice.” The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report, in 2015, tried hard to equate the treatment of natives in residential schools with genocide, before settling for the legally inert term cultural genocide, one Trudeau, Singh and the Canada haters immediately abridged to genocide.
While that has spurred radicals to destroy the name and statues to John A. Macdonald, the facts don’t support a charge of genocide against him and successive government. As Rubenstein points out, “Macdonald quadrupled Ottawa’s native budget to deal with the crippling Western famine in the early 1880s. This event was caused by the collapse of the Prairie bison herds, an outcome over which Canada had absolutely no control; nonetheless, Macdonald mustered substantial government resources to meet the challenge.
“Consider also that Ottawa successfully vaccinated almost the entire native community against smallpox at great expense and effort, virtually wiping out this highly contagious killer among a people with no natural immunity to the disease.” Hardly sounds like the actions of a government intent on genocide.
This led Irwin Cotler, chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, to note, “If we say everything is a genocide, then nothing is a genocide.”
Certainly the pain and tragedy felt by many Rez school children was real. And their treatment in regards to cultural and language issues, in the fullness of time, looks unacceptable by today’s standards. Like the 100,000 British Home Children shipped to Canada in the same era to work as indentured slaves to farmers and others— often against their parents’ wishes— there are many unknown graves of those who didn’t survive. It is a period we devoutly wish we had to do over again.
But the memories of those children are stained by the self-serving political theatrics of today’s politicians who seek to run a country they’re spent years denigrating to the world. Remember on September 20 that a vote for Trudeau and Singh is a vote for those who exploit innocent dead.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Just In: The Trudeau government intervenes at last minute to save a convicted climate agitator from deportation. The Pakistani co-founder of Save Old Growth— who first came to Canada in 2019 on a study permit— has been arrested at least 10 times and convicted of mischief. Zain Haq was due to be deported to Pakistan on Monday.
Despite a judge’s ruling denying his last hope of staying , Haq got a call from his Liberal MP’s office saying he gets to stay in B.C. after all. Good, because we’d hate for him to feel oppressed by the country in which he’s squatting. The news thrilled the nepo babies who have B.C. by the throat.
So Haq goes from unrepentant jerk to Christ crucified. Naturally. Victim politics have become the animating impulse in Western society. Attaching yourself to a forlorn cause like Haq is grounds for beatification And make no mistake, there are legions in identical little tents on campus quads who are cheering a non-Canadian defying The Man.
To generations brought up on the travails of feminist oppression, climate degradation, indigenous grievance and gender dysphoria there is nothing so sacred as a victim is all his purity, crushed by the Great White Satan of western culture. Haq is just the latest in a police lineup of wobbly performance artists taking a rhapsodic bow before the Liberal/ NDP/Green clique. While thumbing his nose at Canadians.
That’s why the current fetish for Palestinian outrage has such legs as it spreads across campuses and governmental buildings in the West. Anyone (but a white, straight male) can apply for the designation of victim. Join the party! And what a model it is! While many have tried to emulate them, none have managed the nihilist hat trick of violence, obstinacy and craven guilt quite like the Palestinians who’ve been pushing this agenda since the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Having eschewed frontal military attacks on Israel and western targets as ineffective, the PLO and its successors discovered that the more grisly the attack, the more black their message — in Munich they massacred 11 Israeli athletes— there was a segment of leftist Western culture that couldn’t get enough of their heinous tactics. (Stephen Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich pitied his fellow Jews killed in Munich but concluded that all this revenge stuff was a dead end.)
Huh. Their Arab neighbours want nothing to do with Arafat’s Children. Egypt has a wall preventing Gazans from entering their county, Jordan has expelled them for counter-insurgency, Saudi Arabia ignores them. Only Qatar offers refuge. And then only to the billionaire kleptocrats who run Hamas from penthouses in Doha.
The Oct. 7 massacre is just the latest in this dance of death with western liberals. People of a certain age will recall the Marxist-besotted Vanessa Redgrave brandishing a Kalashnikov while dancing with the PLO and its rascally leader Yasser Arafat. Her 1977 film The Palestinian was an orgy of guilt and hatred toward Israel. She’s had plenty of imitators in the media ever since. In 2021 over 100 actors— including Richard Gere, Claire Foy, Tilda Swinton, and Susan Sarandon— slammed the terrorist designation of Palestinian “rights groups”.
The same apologists are now saying that, sure, Oct. 7 went a little too far, but Palestinian repatriation means a few eggs are going to get smashed in the making of a terror state. They want a cease fire with good taste.
Were the PLO successors in Hamas and Hezbollah able to articulate some coherent vision of the future beyond slaughter then these western struggle sessions might seem justified. It’s no surprise that Arafat was the epitome of “never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity” in negotiations. If there’s one constant in the multiple denials of treaties with Israel it is their unflinching demand that Palestinians throw every Jew they encounter into the Mediterranean on a march from “the river to the sea”.
The implacable marriage with extreme violence and racial hatred is their one and only position. Non-negotiable. None of this has any effect on the hot-house Marxists and anarchists who’ve set up shop in the universities and colleges of the West. In their protected status among the leafy tendrils of the Ivy League, a little brush with terror seems to titillate them. Occupying the quad in identical tents suppled by unnamed international groups dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism is their bougie weekend of roughing it in the bush.
Most probably wish they could experience a little of the martyrdom like the Palestinians (a gentle martyrdom naturally) or at the very least a cinematic clash wth authority such as their parents experienced at the hands of Chicago mayor Richard Daley during the 1968 Democratic convention. A tender tussle covered by their parents Medicare.
Who will stand up to these playtime antisemites? Alas, the grownups in the schools administration and in governments are cut from the same cloth. Having created safe spaces from micro aggression on their campus , they excuse the youthful exuberance of their students. (If your politics are radical, that is.) Like president Joe Biden they do the suck-and-blow of modern debate. They decry antisemitism while cautioning that we just don’t understand the depths of Palestinian oppression. Evan as students call for a new Holocaust.
Having it both ways with Hamas means a one-way invitation to more chaos. Because there is no agenda beyond the performative terror extolled by demonstrators against Israel there is no way to rationally critique Hezbollah or Hamas. At least the Nazis proposed some freakazoid homeland for their people as they heartlessly slaughtered anyone who got in their way.
So it all becomes mob mentality packaged for feckless media. The Hamas doctoral groupies don’t demand anything from Hamas beyond their faux-serious chants and designer kaffiyehs in the House of Commons. No doubt Zia Haq will be joining them again soon in the struggle. If Stephen Guilbeault can go from criminal to cabinet, Canada is wide open to him 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. New from the team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin now for pre-order: 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 on paperback and Kindle on #Amazon this week.
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.
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