Bruce Dowbiggin
How Trudeau Media Skewed The Battle Of Bouncy Castle
“From a positive and unifying approach, a decision was made to wedge, to divide and to stigmatize. I fear that this politicization of the pandemic risks undermining the public’s trust in our public health institutions. This is not a risk we ought to be taking lightly.”— Liberal MP Joel Lightbound
It’s perhaps fitting that Toronto Star publisher John Honderich passed away during the Battle of Bouncy Castle. The paper he and his family fashioned defined Canadian progressivism in the modern age. “With ink running through his veins and a bow tie ’round his collar, John Honderich was one of the titans of Canadian journalism” went the obit.
Give him props. He and his family defined the message in the post-war era, tilting Canada left. Enamoured by American liberal deities such as the Kennedys and Clintons— and welcoming to tens of thousands of Viet Nam deserters and draft dodgers— they (and CBC) created the Eugene McGovern state that Americans rejected in the 1970s.
Canadians now love feeling superior to Americans with their messy, tumultuous politics (even as Canadians took their free defence). Cheering on even the most embarrassing Democrats gave them a sense of identity versus their noisy neighbour. Canada’s worship of the American left drove right-wing competition out of business (Sun TV) or pushed others (The National Post and G&M) hard to the left. To say nothing of what they did to Conservative leaders Erin O’Toole, Doug Ford and Jason Kenney who defied the Star’s agenda.
Their slanting of the Convoy drama is a perfect example of Canada’s aversion to right-wing thought. The media, writes Jen Gerson, “is presenting a version of reality that is wildly at odds with the protesters’ own self conception. It’s also not in line with people who have attended protests in other cities, and have reported to me that the vibe of these things is in fact mostly positive and welcoming. This further erodes trust in media, pushing a faction of the public further into information bubbles and away from mainstream reporting.”
Thus the Globe & Mail, formerly the paper of record for business in Canada, is now the conscience of Avenue Road and Lawrence. In a florid editorial it vilified the mostly peaceful protesters destroying the NIMBY dreams of their Ottawa subscribers. “The Ottawa occupation is the October Crisis revisited. Justin Trudeau must be bold“.
Forget that the 1971 FLQ crisis involved two kidnappings, a murder, escape to Cuba, threats of insurrection and people stoning Trudeau’s father. To the Globe that’s just the same as Bouncy Castles, hot chocolate and some yahoos honking their truck horns in the Glebe and Sandy Hill. Besides there’s a narrative to maintain.
Ottawa’s mayor Jim Watson has seen to that. In one cringing example he linked the protesters to thugs trying to set a fire in an Ottawa condo building. Even when corrected by Ottawa police he has not apologized. Anything to protect the PM’s wobbly authority.
On his behalf Family Compact Media want you to hit the protesters. Hit them hard. Drive them off the streets. Get the law to take their fuel and hotel rooms. Because we can’t let these… things.. make light of us with their impertinence and flannel shirts! This is seasoned with overheated university professors writing tripe about “a dangerous fringe element terrorizing our capital” and not be laughed off the faculty.
While the Mop & Pail gaslights a Costa Gavras political thriller in the PM’s refusal to meet unkempt middle-class truckers, it memory-holes Trudeau taking a PMO meeting with Joshua Boyle— under investigation by the police on multiple criminal charges.
Or that while he calls tax-paying protesters merchants of “antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia” he bestowed $10.5 M big ones on a convicted ISIS terrorist when he came back to Canada. Which is more than unvaccinated Canadians are entitled to.
As Sun writer Lorrie Goldstein asked on Twitter, “As I understand it in Canada, there’s a ‘right’ and a ‘far right’, but there’s only a ‘left’ and not a ‘far left’. Why is that?”
It’s why a prime minister who hides from protesters is now pushing for more restrictive rules on social media content (read: censorship). Having bought off the floundering legacy media he means to move his control to the internet next. All the better to push climate change and gender dysphoria as top agenda items— even as Canadians’ heating bills double, their gas pushes toward $2/ litre and inflation erodes their life savings.
No, the enemy of the state is the Convoy. But as @jengerson points the majority of the participants are not politically sophisticated. “The Freedom Convoy is not setting up a tyrannical blockade by their own lights, but rather an extended street protest-ey party, complete with DJs, bouncy castles, BBQ pits and saunas. They’ve organized camps for themselves, cleared the roads of snow and, by their own reports, ejected racist elements.”
This clashes with the PM’s fever dreams. Liberal MP Lightbound says this dismissal of average citizens has been divisive. “I’ve heard from a lot of people wondering why just a year ago, we were all united, in this together. And now that we have one of the most vaccinated population in the world, we’ve never been so divided.”
Should we be surprised by left-wing victim media love? You probably have noticed that it’s Black History Month in Canada and the U.S. Our one-note media uses it to build a narrative about whites’ oppression of blacks. None of the Jimmy Olsens ever dare to ask the radicals, why it is that almost every murdered black person in Canada is killed by another black person?
Their bias on behalf of Trudeau is inescapable. In a testament to how liberal media have created a no-go zone for social-conservative issues, consider that a whopping 77 percent of Canadians are unaware there is no law governing abortion in the country.
But the Convoy’s persistence has threatened that security. The weakening of Omicron is running out Trudeau’s strategy. As the WSJ writes, “The lesson for the Covid-19 police is that when you’ve lost even Canadians, arguably the most law-abiding people on the planet, you’ve lost the political plot.”
For now it remains to be seen how far Trudeau will go to smash the Bouncy Castle people that he and his purchased press have demonized. Or whether the Liberals finally get off their power trip and move on from vaccine shaming.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Been quite a month for political plot lines, no? Since Joe Biden went full Sling Blade in his debate with Donald Trump to a near-fatal assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania to the Democratic Party staging a Covid-inspired coup against Biden. And now Ms. Montreal, Kamala Harris, being retro-fitted into the Dems’ nominee against Trump while her media pals hastily erase her past.
You rarely get this much red meat from the people who run the American political system. Most of the time the public is encouraged to think that Aaron Sorkin’s version of politics on The West Wing is how it works. Earnest liberals gamely coping with venal right wingers and foreign potentates in airtight 60-minute chunks.
There have been occasional attempts to pierce the fog. Veep showed politics as Benny Hill farce, Wag The Dog showed Hollywood’s staging counter narratives. The Death of Stalin showed the totalitarian state managing leadership succession.
But thanks to mainstream news networks, American politics for the most part is shown as a horse race to the White House, one with show ponies, handicappers and media jockeys. That seems to be the way people wish to consume their constitutional republic. Show business for ugly people.
That’s likely why the naked bones of the process being shown so explicitly since June 27 has upset people. Like the making of sausage, the making of laws is a distasteful sight. Guts and tissue on a blood-stained abattoir floor are hard to un-see. The fainting-goat followers of The West Wing are upset that the man with his hand on the nuclear codes can’t zip his own fly anymore.
Gullible liberals, with their fondness for the Covid administrative state, are most upset with all this honesty. As we wrote in September of 2023 of this Gallup Poll : “It shows that from 1972-2022 that GOP trust of media has plummeted from 41 percent to under 10 percent, while independents have gone from 53 percent to under 36 percent trust. IOW, their former favourite news sources don’t jive with their everyday reality.
But Democrats in the poll have vaulted from 64 percent to 76 percent in trust of media. Why? One reason probably lies with being told the narratives that please them. That give them comfort. These consumers allow legacy media’s fact checkers to sort out what they should know from “disinformation” without getting their hands dirty with the original story.” IOW, give me The West Wing.
The previous occasion when political machinations were so stark was the Western cultural upheavals of 1967-74, when assassinations, race riots, civil disobedience and blatant political chicanery poisoned the culture. Faced with insurrection and Charles Manson’s flower-power insanity, the powers of the time abandoned politesse for bare-knuckled reality. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were dispatched to another realm, LBJ was told to go back to his Texas farm, and sources inside the FBI apparatus stabbed Richard Nixon after the greatest presidential win in U.S. history.
There was little subtlety. Chicago mayor Richard Daley saw to that in Grant Park. CBS reporter Dan Rather was gut punched on camera at the DNC convention for getting too close, and VP Spiro Agnew was canned in favour of the genial Gerald Ford, friend of the donor class and Warren Report booster. He and Jimmy Carter smoothed the anxieties of the urban middle class that went from protest to pacified. Martin Sheen über alles.
By the 1980s Ronald Reagan was crushing the Soviets, and Aaron Sorkin began his soothing epistles to the sanctity of the political process. Ted Turner’s birth of CNN cable news in the ‘80s codified the game. Guard rails were erected to keep news in its place. The true power brokers like donors and PACs were grated anonymity. Anyone defying the rules of the DC Media party— hello, Rush Limbaugh— was sent to the gulag of right-wing radio.
The emergence of brash NYC hotelier Donald Trump was first seen as fodder for the cable-news showbiz narrative. He’d be the sideshow carny to distract zombie voters from the coronation of Hillary Clinton. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough thought he was money, constantly pimping for Trump on his morning show. What a laff riot he’d be.
Then Donald got too close to the untouchables. He discovered there were probably 50 million votes just lying there waiting for someone to pick up. Certainly not the bespoke DEMs. Or the Bush Republicans with their pals in the armaments and pharmaceutical lobbies. It was free money, and when has Don Trump ever left money on the table?
From the instant he started talking about borders, foreign wars and the Swamp he had a target posted on him. Because there is no treachery like class treachery the Swamp sought to destroy him in 2016. Chuck “Schemer” Schumer confirmed it: “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 12: Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) holds a news conference following meetings between Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and GOP congressional leadership at the U.S. Capitol May 12, 2016 in Washington, DC. The Senate Democrats pointed to policies they say that Trump and Republicans in Congress agree on and said they were both operating from the same textbook. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
When he punked Hillary in the voting they employed the FBI, CIA and Barack Obama’s machine in a coup attempt predicated on Russia. While it was a struggle, they managed to keep the real story from their MSNBC/ NYT devotees, who to this day, still recite the Russiagate tropes. To them it was a West Wing plot line in which their liberal friends would persevere.
For all that the game was in still peril. Then came Covid. The Left and Neo-Con Trump haters were able to orchestrate a quasi-election in 2020, replete with historic voting totals and hastily-assembled regulations— hello vote harvesting, unsupervised drop boxes— never seen before.
Aging longtime DEM loyalist Joe Biden “a blowhard senator, a bad guy, a fabulist, corrupt, and a preternatural liar who didn’t hold a single consistent principle in his career” was appointed as place holder till the Obamas and Nancy Pelosi could orchestrate a new Barack in 2024. It almost worked, until Biden’s debate meltdown against Trump advanced the agenda and threatened the donors.
As the world watched in amazement it was out with Joe and in with Kamala. They don’t care who knows. Between now and the election in November expect more Black Swan events to unsettle the public and advance the globalist agenda.
During that time, never forget that confusion and chaos are the calling cards of the Far Left. Far from being a problem, the head-spinning reinvention of normal is their goal. Don’t believe legacy media, they’re happy for this.
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.
It’s unlikely Donald Trump will have time or energy for a post-presidential TV encore. But were he to do so at the age of 85 he might call it You’re Not Fired! In this take on his Apprentice franchise, Trump brings on governments officials and employees who’ve never been fired despair egregious mistakes, many costing lives.
They compete to see which one made the most gargantuan mistake without ever taking responsibility. Bonus points are awarded for players who can say things like “The buck stops here” with the most cloying insincerity as they keep their job. At the end of the episode Trump declares to the winner, “You get to keep your job forever. Better yet, we are giving you a raise.”
It’ll be a smash hit. Certainly he can talk from firsthand experience about government service being the gift that keeps on giving. To its employees and contractors. This past weekend, for instance, a complete cock-up by the Secret Service nearly cost Trump his life in front of a worldwide TV audience. As snipers tried desperately to put down a shooter, Secret Service folks heroically draped themselves over the president’s body. (At least those tall enough to shield Trump from incoming fire.)
The term heroically is key here. While the sunglasses/ walkie-talkie dudes risked their lives in service of the president, their superiors safely back in a DC office were cravenly insisting that they’d do better next time. In an NBC interview, Biden appointee Kim Cheatle claimed the mantle of “the buck stops here.” She promised transparency in finding out why her department had failed so many basic tasks of the raid to almost getting Trump’s head blown off.
What she didn’t do was resign in shame for almost getting the former and likely future POTUS killed. Nor was she asked to resign by her boss at Homeland Security, Antonio Mayorcas. Ditto the Big Boss, Joe Biden. Even when DEI appointee and Jill Biden chum Cheatle tried out a shameless meme about the sniper’s rooftop being unsafe (too severe a slope), no one asked for the keys to her office.
She held tight to her pension even when it was revealed her squad knew the shooter was around hours before the shots that wounded Trump and killed at least one other. That Trump was allowed to take the stage when the sniper’s parents were desperately calling police to find him. That her claim of local police screwing up was debunked. That the crew was undermanned while a more experienced crew worked a Jill Biden function.
Look, this is not to conduct a review of the protocols flubbed and the roofs abandoned. This is about accountability. To say that there is no glory without honour. And from Biden on down, honour has been MIA throughout the years of affirmative hiring and official bungling. They claim glory, but it’s a shattered chalice.
As just one example, DHS head Mayorcas still gets a seat at Joe’s cabinet table despite the total breakdown of border security. So does Kamala Harris, who was named “czar” for border security. Transport secretary Pete Buttiegieg has overseen fatal bridge collapses, train derailments and transit shutdowns without connecting it to his administration of the department.
The same absence of responsibility has ruled in the decade of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government in Canada. While his father earned (and then wasted) some honour by facing down rock-throwing separatists in 1968, Justin has been Brave Sir Robin, high-tailing it to the rear at the first sign he might be asked to show some stones.
While his media toadies downplayed Ol’ Yellow Stain at the time of the Truckers Convoy, most now acknowledge that had he emerged from under his desk at the Rideau Cottage in the early days to confront the protesters the disaster might have been averted. Instead, Skippy sent in the Ottawa Police and the Mounties to do his job, thereby converting a temporary problem into a historic assault on civil rights and the dignity of his office.
Whenever the coast was clear, Trudeau has predictably acted like a schoolyard bully to give himself gravitas. In addition to the Convoy, there was his draconian vaccine assault on the unconvinced, the cemetery pantomime leading to calling his nation genocidal at the UN, the imposition of the Carbon Tax and the honouring of a former Nazi in Parliament to silence his Ukraine critics. To impress his UN, EU and WEF pals he’s dissed Donald Trump at a distance, something that will now haunt him after November.
His cabinet and party quickly learned that they’d never be canned if they polished the PM’s apple. Most recently came the news that a cabinet minister had ordered the military to prioritize his fellow Sikhs in the frantic retreat from Afghanistan. Using the armed forces to protect your kin? Trudeau gave Harjit Singh Sajjat a pass because Harjit thinks (publicly at least) that the Boss is swell.
The Chinese cutouts in his caucus are likewise exempt from accountability, because Justin wants to be loved in Beijing. Why not? When he’s been repeatedly nailed on ethics violations or self-dealing he’s just gone la-la-la-la-la-la and moved on to new catastrophes. Or had a former Governor General whitewash his devious dealings.
In fact, the only way to get in trouble with Trudeau is to DO your job properly. Justice minister Jodi Wilson Raybould, a signature appointee as a woman and native, was canned by Trudeau for insisting the RCMP get to the bottom of a scandal from Quebec-based SNC Lavalin. Bill Morneau was edged out, because his view of a functioning economy didn’t include the top-down imposition of fantasist climate and gender diktats.
Both Biden and Trudeau drone on about restoring people’s faith in government without ever asking whether there are the problem. When your heart is pure, they say, your mission is noble. Now shut up.
Except Biden and later Trudeau are about to find out that their public is in no mood to shut up anymore.
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.
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