Bruce Dowbiggin
Small But Mighty, Hockey Crusader Susan Foster Belongs In The HHOF
Susan Foster April 26, 1944 – May 7, 2023
The first time I saw Susan Foster’s wonderful smile was in 1991, just after I’d seen Carl Brewer’s legendary scowl. I’d come to their home on Mt. Pleasant Avenue in midtown Toronto to follow a story I was researching about the meagre pensions for retired NHL greats and the corruption of the NHL Players Association under Alan Eagleson.
When I announced my plan, Carl had said— in his measured, sarcastic tone— that he’d had reporters up to here (he pointed to his bald dome). He wasn’t cooperating anymore with media guys who were spies for the owners. I swallowed hard. That’s when Sue (everyone called her Sue) emerged from the back kitchen, beaming her smile.
“Oh Carl,” she chided. “He’s come all the way up here, at least ask him in.” Carl did what he always did when Sue gave his a suggestion. He obliged. When I left their place two hours later I had embarked on a journey that would take almost eight years to complete, a story of intrigue, deceit and discovery to assist my boyhood heroes. Through Carl/ Sue it won me two Gemini Awards.
Of far greater importance, it brought me and my family two enduring friendships. Carl, the imposing rebel of hockey whose heart was always troubled, died in 2001. And Sue, who left us last Sunday, the teacher-turned-social-catalyst who won over even enemies with her sweetness and determination. Small but mighty, she even charmed Gary Bettman, the cold-fish NHL commissioner.
In league with the indomitable Russ Conway of the Lawrence Eagle Tribune we took down a man and a system many thought invincible. It was gratifying and frustrating all the same but, oh, the trails we travelled. In a snowstorm up to our waist in Boston for the announcement of the charges against Eagleton. In Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, to plan more strategy with Russ. In Sue’s backyard where her cats— always she had cats around— walking the fence around her deck while I read the galleys of her book The Power Of Two about her life with the mercurial Mr. Brewer.
BOSTON – 1979: Carl Brewer #28 of the Toronto Maple Leafs skates against the Boston Bruins at Boston Garden. (Photo by Steve Babineau/NHLI via Getty Images)
By the time I met them, Carl and Sue had been chasing the NHL over Carl’s pension since 1980, when he finally stopped playing in the NHL at age 41. When the league refused his personal grievance over a single year’s pension, they declared war on behalf of everyone. They went though, by their own estimation, 22 lawyers who told them to give up before Mark Zigler of Koskie Minsky took on the file that would end with Carl, Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Ted Lindsay, Andy Bathgate and hundreds of others winning their pension lawsuit to retire millions of dollars to their Fund.
It took another four years before Eagleson answered for his scoundrel turn, being convicted in Canada and the U.S. for fraud and other crimes. Carl stood up in Boston court to declare that it was only the United States Justice Department who’d saved hockey players. Typically, Eagleson’s pals like ex-PM John Turner and Supreme Court justice John Sopinka made sure he only served a sliver of what he deserved in a Canadian jail. (He’d have done five years in the jar if he’d been sentenced in the U.S. which had forced Canada to due its duty.)
Through it all, Sue was the discoverer of documents, the one who remembered a letter sent, the recruiter to the cause. With tea and caramel cake she brought us more allies every week while keeping Carl’s head from exploding in outrage at the ill-treatment. Her normalcy charmed media people into finally doing their duty to come aboard. No one could refuse her calls. Only fools underestimated the gentle grandmother.
She taught me how to use the corporations act to explore boards of directors, and land transfers that slowly unveiled the manner in which players had been defrauded by Eagleson and the NHL. Her late-night calls announcing legal hearings and extradition requests kept me and CBC TV Toronto a step ahead of the competition.
A loving mother to Dan and Melanie, she soon adopted my own three kids to her brood. They’d arrive home for lunch to see Carl’s gleaming skull next to Sue pouring tea at our dining table. The gentle giant and the den mother. When the news came of her death from dementia Evan, Rhys and Clare were crestfallen, recalling those simple childhood days on Manor Road East.
I remembered driving in the limousine to Carl’s funeral at St. Michael’s Cathedral on St. Clair. I told her I was nervous, because there’d be about 50 former NHL greats in the pews for my eulogy. A hundred other hockey people were coming too. I’d had about four hours sleep coming in from Calgary on the red-eye. Sue grabbed my arm, smiled and said, “You’ll be fine. That’s why I picked you.” My worries disappeared.
After Carl’s passing— and the Pension issue subsided– Sue turned into advocate for the Original Six survivors, going to charity fundraiser games. And when the retired NHL guys grew too old to play, she attended luncheons where they exchanged notes with Sue on their predicaments. She reviewed lawyers’ letters and pension arcana for them, listening to their weathered stories as if it were her first listening.
One by one, they’ve disappeared, succumbing to age and the inevitable. When their funerals were within driving distance Sue was there to send them off properly. Now it’s her turn, and it breaks my heart I won’t be able to join Melanie (Will) and Dan (Sarah) and their kids Angeline, Marshal, Foster and Hannah this week on Bayview, the scene of so many great days. We will have Dowbiggins there to make she’s remembered properly. Still.
The last time I saw her she was beginning to show the signs of PCA, a rare and debilitating dementia. An inability to use the phone or computer. Difficulty reading. But we still walked a couple of blocks down Mt. Pleasant over to The Homeway for brunch. It was spring, and she noted how the trees were blossoming in tribute. She was still full of chat, maybe a little apprehensive about her memory. But oh, that smile when I kissed her goodbye at the door. It elevated you.
They need to put her in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Now.
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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
This past week has seen (some) Canadians celebrating their heritage— now that Mike Myers has officially reinterpreted Canadian culture as a hockey sweater and Mr. Dressup. This quick-change was so popular that Canadian voters even forgot an entire decade of Justin Trudeau.
In the United States, the people who elected Donald Trump– and not Andrew Coyne– to run their nation celebrated Independence Day with stirring renditions off The Star Spangled Banner, although few could surpass the brilliant performance of the song by the late Whitney Houston at the 1991 Super Bowl.
The CDN equivalent is some flavour of the month changing the words to O Canada at the Grey Cup game. Canada’s national anthem has always been open to interpretation by people who may or may not have Canada in their hearts. At the 2023 NBA All Star Game Canadian chanteuse Jully Black became the latest singer to attempt a manicure to the English lyrics of O Canada, penned for the 1880 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony ( Calixa Lavallée composed the music, after which words were written by the poet and judge Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The English lyrics have “evolved” over the years, just like the dress code for the CDN PM..)
Black amended the first line from “our home and native land” to our home ON native land”. Because something-something. But this creative license is nothing new. Unlike Chris Stapleton, Marvin Gaye or Whitney Houston with the Star Spangled Banner, interpreters of O Canada have seen fit to amend the lyrics to their sensibilities. Roger Doucet, famed anthem singer of the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970-80s, tried to add the words “we stand on guard for truth and liberty” in place of the first “we stand on guard for thee”.
In 1990, having nothing better to do, Toronto City Council voted 12 to 7 in favour of recommending that the phrase “our home and native land” be changed to “our home and cherished land” and that “in all thy sons command” be partly reverted to “in all of us command”. (The latter was officially adapted.)
While those attempts had mixed outcomes it appears it’s just a matter of time till Ms. Black’s class-conscious culling of the words is accepted. Being generous we here at IDLM thought we’d short-circuit piecemeal attempts to create a throughly Woke version of the anthem that would last till the latest fad come along. Herewith our 2023 definitive O Canada that even— maybe only— Justin Trudeau could love:
“O Canada” (Ignores the French fact in our culture) Change to “Eau Canada”
“Our home on native land” (ignores indigenous land claims) Change to “Get off our land, settlers”
“True patriot love in all of us commands” (Only true patriot love? There were officially 78 kinds of relationships in Trudeaupia. And commanding love?) Change to “Love the one you’re with”.
“With glowing hearts we see thee rise” (rise suggests triumph of white triumphalist dogma) Change to “Non judgementally we oppose the crushing impacts of Euro-based autocracy”
“The true north strong and free” (How can anyone be strong or free when we support America’s killing fields?) Change to “Heteronormative thinking must be stamped out at our borders. If we even have borders anymore.”
“From far and wide” (Body shaming) Change to “Obesity is a disease that is not helped by putting it in the national anthem.”
“O Canada” (biased against A, B, AB blood types) change to “Science Must Be Believed”
“We stand on guard for thee” (Spreads hate against the non ableist community) Change to “Please remain seated.”
“God keep our land” (God? God? What is this, the Reformation) “Change to “It’s your thing”
”Glorious and free” (Glorious harkens to the bourgeois subjugation of Indigenous thought processes by white Christian priests) Change to “A genocidal state if there ever was one”.
“O Canada we stand on guard for thee/
O Canada we stand on guard for thee” The denial of trans rights is used twice here to emphasize the intolerable burdens faced by people of the LGBTQ2R community as they seek respect and compensation for the evils of the founding oppressors.) Change to “Eau Canada, after 6.5 hours of intensive lectures on the gender, race and dissociative application of class war on your citizens you may someday come to understand that this song is a manifestation of your bigotry and exploitation of minorities— and why rhyming lines like “thee and free” is the work of the devil or J.K. Rowling, whomever comes to mind first.”
There. That wasn’t so tough, was it? Flows trippingly off the tongue like Mark Carney refusing a special inquiry into China buying the electoral process. Or perhaps we should simply accept a literal translation of the original French lyrics:
“O Canada!
Land of our ancestors
Glorious deeds circle your brow
For your arm knows how to wield the sword
Your arm knows how to carry the cross;
Your history is an epic
Of brilliant deeds
And your valour steeped in faith
Will protect our homes and our rights.”
Yikes. That’s downright fascistic. But it’s Quebec, and we have to allow them their peccadilloes. So circle your brow with glorious deeds, grab a cross and a sword and valour steeped in faith. And remember we must be adaptable in the new era.
Unless it’s Alberta using the adapting to fuel its CO2-belching machines. In which case it’s man the battlements and follow Mike Myers into the fight.
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 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.
Breaking: Drs. Bonnie Henry and Theresa Tam have been appointed to the Order of Canada in recognition of their role in the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
And so the game of covid liar’s poker has more winners. It’s like awarding the captain of the Titanic the Nobel Prize for his work on floatation. As we now know these two— and the other WHO finger puppets in Canada— made the Covid 19 episode worse, not better, with their prescription for panic, positives and punishment. Even as they knew the truth about the limits of the virus and the efficacy of vaccines they continued to spew fallacious PCR data on the extent of the sickness and who was at risk.
Put simply, to protect vulnerable seniors they said kids were also at great risk. Which was unconscionable.
In this they encouraged Justin Trudeau in his worst instincts, combining his father’s insouciant disregard for civil rights (sending in the police) with his mother’s mental stability. Propped up by Team Tam and its U.S. allies such as Anthony Fauci, this hysteria peaked with a sequestered PM crushing the Truckers Convoy’s vaccine protest with emergency measures and destruction of civil liberties.
Lest you wonder, this overreach was recognized at the time. Justice Maclean wrote at the trial of Convoy organizers, “Defendants & other persons remain at liberty to engage in a peaceful, lawful & safe protest”. On Feb. 16, he continued a no-honking order, again writing: “Defendants & other persons remain at liberty to engage in a peaceful, lawful & safe protest.”
The leaders of the Convoy, lynched by Canadian media’s phoney claims of right-wing American interference, are still fighting jail time on charges of nuisance. While violent criminals are routinely released on bail or absolved.
Justice Richard Mosley later concluded that while the convoy was a disruption of public order, it didn’t constitute a national emergency and invoking the act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility.” But in real time Team Tam made no attempts to correct the wilder misgivings about Covid (lockdowns, mandatory vaccines). Trudeau was given a hall pass. Needless to say the purchased media made things infinitely worse regurgitating these mistakes.
In short, they knew better but hid the truth. But why pick on Henry and Tam? Under Trudeau and his wingman Jagmeet Singh this was the golden age of lies and prevarications in Canada and the U.S. No apologies were ever offered when the truth emerged.
As we’ve noted before, Trudeau cried with a teddy bear carefully positioned over 751 alleged unmarked graves in a known Catholic cemetery that the local Cowessess band abandoned. The Liberal government knew the claim of 215 “children’s graves” was false, and still ran with it to get Trudeau his photo-op. Naturally the CBC Media Party played (and still plays) accomplice in this farce as the Canadian flag was lowered to half-mast for six months and Trudeau ratted out Canada at the UN as a genocidal state.
There were more, plenty more Trudeau scandals that media endorsed and then stood by even as the truth was revealed. SNC Lavalin. We Charity. Arrive Can app. Firing indigenous justice minister. Chinese drug infiltration/ money laundering. Nazi Celebrated in Parliament. Welcome To Canada immigration. Nova Scotia massacre. McKinsey Consultation. Blackface. And so on.
And were there apologies when it came time to make the Trudeau Liberals accountable? No, they staged a media circus over Donald Trump’s assertion of 51st state. All the fake news and deliberate lies went poof, allowing Mark Carney to seamlessly assume the PM job.
Lest We Forget Pt. 2 it was not exclusive to Canada. As we are now learning: Barack Obama and Joe Biden sat in an August 3, 2016 Situation Room briefing and said, yeah, let the highest officials in our administration fabricate evidence to frame the opposing party candidate Donald Trump. Obama. Biden. Comey. McCabe. Strzok. Page. Rice. Etc.
Knowingly using the faked Clinton campaign ‘Steele Dossier’ hoax, they launched a federal investigation into the Trump presidential campaign that lasted three years after Trump was sworn in as the nation’s 45th President. Arresting and jailing his partners and colleagues. Inventing fake stories for their media enablers. Let’s repeat that. Saint Obama knew there was criminal activity in the process but let his henchmen try to fix an election.
And when the ruse was uncovered no one apologized. No one in authority was fired or jailed. The Pulitzer Prizes awarded to the NT Times and Washington Post for disseminating the DEMs scandal were not rescinded. Nor were they given back by the lying newspapers.
The concerted frauds of the same U.S. DOJ, FBI and State Departments were fed by media and accepted by gullible publics in Canada and America. The fantastical 2020 election results were likewise drummed into the public irrespective of the sudden “appearance” of 27 million new votes during a pandemic.
It was all a fitting preamble to the 2020-2024 Biden senility scandal with Democrats running a man they knew was in full dementia. In the 2020 election Biden was hidden from public view, the better to let media attack Trump for spurious charges launched by partisan DNC attorneys in Georgia, New York and DC. Even then it took the suppression of Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop just prior to the election to get his father elected.
The dance of denial continued in Biden’s term as he physically and mentally deteriorated before the American public. But inquiries about who was running the government if not Biden were harshly suppressed. Media lackeys noted he was sharp as a tack mentally and in tip-top physical condition when he wasn’t falling down stairs.
It took the stunning 2024 debate debacle with Trump to strip away the lies about Biden’s health, now said to be advanced prostate cancer and Parkinson’s. The media, caught in their own lies about Biden’s condition, offered no apologies and tried to blame Biden’s stutter for the performance.. Right.
These were the two greatest U.S. hoaxes from people who’d cried hoax incessantly. They were hardly the only abuse of public trust. Some of the perpetrators are said to now be under investigation— even as they hand out awards to each other. The media’s credibility is shattered and yet they still blame others. Jaded voters are taking a “we’ll see” approach. But expectations of any change in DC or Ottawa are limited.
As Stephen Taylor posted on X: “Turns out for Liberals, ‘elbows up’ just means ‘noses up’ like it always has.”
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 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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