Bruce Dowbiggin
We’re Listening: How Unhappiness Went Big Time
“For all practical purposes, a revolution has occurred in the private lives of Americans, who increasingly find themselves depressed and alone.”— Ronald W. Dworkin 2021
The unquantifiable in Covid madness is the psychological impact from its lockdowns, masks and social isolation. The stress on the population— especially the young— created by the harsh medicine of governments and health authorities has only been suggested at for most of the disaster.
But the hints of stress are there. “@EWoodhouse7 Covid-19 did not increase the normal respiratory disease morality burden for teens age 13-18 in 2020. But alcohol- & drug-induced deaths nearly DOUBLED. A 50% increase in this age group, w/this kind of death, is a massive indictment of lockdown & school closure policies.”
Domestic assaults and murders are other byproducts of isolation and fear. According to the CDC the U.S. murder rate is up 30 percent during the pandemic, the highest one-year rise ever. In a recent poll 23 percent of those polled describe themselves as unhappy— the highest such reading since 1972.
Society clearly rests on a knife’s edge as the traditional bonds of friend and family are eliminated by pandemic panic. Coping mechanisms have disappeared. People quake in fear of an impending truck armada from the West. Whom to trust?
Hence the vulnerability and hopelessness in so much of pop culture. And the stigmatizing of traditional strength and self confidence. “Thank you for your service” to military and health workers is a compliment but also a recognition how far much of society has drifted from the notion of personal risk and sacrifice.
This coincides with the radical left pushing to replace police officers with members of the care industry as first responders. While the practicality of sending untrained counsellors on domestic calls— facing deadly weapons— is fraught with danger there are city councils moving in this direction in a number of large urban areas.
The outcome of this policy is still uncertain, but the fact that it is even being considered is testament to inroads the caring industry has made in society. This week’s extensive Let’s Talk campaign on depression and mental illness underlines how the caring industry has largely overtaken the traditional family and friends— inaccessible in the lockdowns— who used to form a support group. It is ubiquitous.
Aiding in this transformation was the 2010 U.S. Affordable Care Act which established parity between mental and physical health in the insurance-reimbursement context. So everyone from credentialed psychologists down to life coaches is now a paid part of the health industry.
Young people today might believe that the caring industry has long been in society. Not so. As Ronald W. Dworkin notes in The Politicization of Unhappiness , “Although the general population of the United States has only doubled since the mid-20th century, this industry has already increased 100-fold… With the old authority figures belittled and real friends and family spread thin or even non-existent, the only people left who can fill the void — and who have the prestige to compel others to follow them down a new road — are caring professionals.
“This industry has emerged as the post-revolutionary successor to our broken social system. As is typical of a revolutionary political party, the caring industry’s components have replaced those of the old order: Its organization has replaced the previous social system, its ideology has replaced traditional culture, and its professionals have taken the place of real friends, relatives, and authority figures.”
As the Let’s Talk policy emphasizes, confessing anxiety or depression to total strangers is now seen as positive. So is acting as a freelance caregiver. Gone is the trusted family member or friend in a private setting. Often the afflicted’s confession is delivered in a group setting where the person must unburden themselves before a cohort indoctrinated in the catechism of caring.
Individuals may respond, writes Dworkin, “but not as individuals, or even as individuals with unique titles, as much as representatives of professional caring, each having been trained in roughly the same way to talk a person through a problem.”
In short, the caring industry has become a political movement with its own orthodoxy and loyalty. With a vested stake in perpetuating itself and its patients’ distress— a process jet-fuelled by the media’s Covid paranoia campaign. Does it help people? In the short term, absolutely. Long term? The jury is still out.
This confessional model has been carried into the political realm through diversity seminars. “Group therapy for addiction — an old caring-professional technique — has become the format for today’s “struggle sessions” and diversity seminars in corporate settings.” White privilege and gender bias must be shed to make progress to “happiness”.
But don’t dare question its purity. Propaganda is crucial to reinforcing the brand, says Dworkin. “Because everyone knows in advance that self-help books are written in conformity with existing prescriptions and rarely contain a single fresh idea, people who seek out these books often buy many of them, and they keep consuming them — not to learn anything new, but to bolster their conviction to act.”
In the end the message is that traditional sources of compassion— family, friends, the church— have failed. You are right to feel alone. And the caring industry— the collective of rehearsed people— is the only thing there to rescue you.
Like the movement to divert students’ education from parents and toward the public education gulag, the end game is a social revolution, one tried with lamentable effect in socialist nations in the past. As Vladimir Putin noted last year, “This is something we saw in Russia. It happened in our country before the 1917 revolution; the Bolsheviks followed the dogmas of Marx and Engels. And they also declared that they would go in to change the traditional lifestyle, the political, the economic lifestyle, as well as the very notion of morality, the basic principles for a healthy society.
“It is with puzzlement that we see the practices Russia used to have and that we left behind in distant past.”
So yes, let us commend the outreach of the caring industry. Let’s Talk has noble goals. But let us also hope people separated from loved ones and friends the last two years rediscover that the greatest unit of strength and nurturing is still the personal one of family and friends.
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
Adin Hill. Jordan Binnington. Logan Thompson. Sam Montembeault. Four goalies considered for Canada’s Olympic mens hockey roster.
One of these players is not like the others. In fact, one of them is unlike anyone else on Canada’s team announced last week. Sam Montembault— who was on the Four Nations roster last February— would have been the only French Canadian player on the roster. The absence of Quebec players marks the first time no Quebeckers made a Canadian Olympic team. (They’ve averaged four players per Olympics post 1998.)
It’s no better at the junior level as only Caleb Desnoyers made Canada’s roster for the 2026 World Junior championships in Minnesota. Who knows if a couple of French players might have saved them from a third-straight ignominious exit at the WJC.
How is it that the province that has produced so many stars is now reduced to no Quebec players representing the country? Montreal author Brendan Kelly called the shutout an “indictment of Hockey Quebec… Why is it that the province is not producing NHL stars any more? Quebec is not producing the goalies like it used to?”
What is surprising is how little competition there is in Quebec for that Olympic berth these days. Hockey is blood and bone (sang et os) in Quebec. Always has been going back to the days of Aurel Joliat. It was built on the legacies of Rocket Richard, Jean Beliveau, Mario Lemieux and Vincent Lecavalier.
On defence there was Denis Potvin, Serge Savard, Jacques Laperriere and Guy Lapointe. There have been great goalies such as Jacques Plante, Bernie Parent and Patrick Roy. Now?
It’s probably safe to say the best French Canadians in the NHL at the moment are Jonathan Marchessault and Pierre-Luc Dubois. But they were hardly favourites to play in Turin. Ditto Calgary’s Jonathan Huberdeau, who once scored 115 points in 2022-23. Last February’s Four Nations Canadian roster had the single Quebec product— and that was goalie Montembeault.
It’s not like the QMJHL doesn’t produce players. Three star Maritimers on the Olympic squad— Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon and Brad Marchand— are products of the Quebec League. Since the NHL began allowing teams to send players to Olympic rosters, Canada has averaged four Quebec-born players per squad and each year featured at least one goalie from the province.
And it’s not like there are no Quebec players in the league. Last year, 6.1 percent of the NHL was Quebec-born players. That was the second-most of any region behind only Ontario (17.6 percent), and it’s up from the 5.3 percent from last season. And yet, you wouldn’t know it if you looked at the overall stats.
To find the root of the drought you can look at the draft where only one French Canadian player— Alex Lafreniere— has been taken No. 1 overall since Marc-Andre Fleury was taken in 2003. (No one seriously considered Lafreniere for Team Canada.) In 2025 three QMJHL players went first round. In 2024 none. In 2023 none. In 2022, two. In 2021 four (one non Quebecker). You get the idea.
Now look back a decade or longer. Only one French Canadian other that Dubois went in the first round in 2016. Just one French Canadian went in the 2017 first round, two in 2015, none in 2014, Drouin and three others in 2013, none in 2012, Huberdeau in 2011 and none in 2010.
As Boston star Michel Bergeron showed, you don’t have to be a first rounder to become a star. It’s also true that prospects are emerging from everywhere in the world, and so French Canadians— who used to have better odds— are having to compete in a far bigger talent pool. But that hasn’t kept the OHL from turning out a motherlode of young stars.
The culture of hockey in Quebec is in turmoil. Former Montreal goalie Jocelyn Thibault resigned as head of Hockey Quebec, citing a “resistance to change” among the regional associations.
There are many other factors in play. Access to elite training, cost, warmer winters eliminating outdoor rinks, cultural preferences for other sports— all play some part. But as we said in 2019, “the days when Canadiens GM Sam Pollock getting the top two French Canadians as protected draftees was considered a steal are long gone.”
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 at https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1069802700
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.” C.S. Lewis
One of the aims of logical positivism has been Boomers’ quest to kill Western religion and the pursuit of faith in order to make room for the state. Symbols are banned. Churches are burned. Infidels are rewarded. Esoteric faith systems applauded. Yet, as 2026 dawns, it appears that, not only is traditional religion not dead, it might just be making a comeback with younger generations who’ve grown skeptical of their parents’ faux religion of self.
How? In an age of victim status, traditional religion is suddenly a cuddly TikTok puppy. Hard to imagine that the force that spread imperialism and war across the globe for centuries being a victim. But yes. Only Christians and Jews are singled out for censure In Carney’s Canada The zeal to repeal God has backfired. Faith is off the canvas and punching back. (And we are NOT talking about the Woke pope.)
The purveyors of “old-time religion” will still find themselves facing a determined opponent well on the way to moral inversion. And a compliant population. As blogger Melanie in Saskatchewan points out, “Canadians were sold a calm, competent adult in the room. What they got was an unelected system engineer quietly converting moral claims into financial constraints. This is not leadership. It is non-consensual governance.
The freedoms that make dissent possible are being used to hollow out dissent. The protections meant to guard against abuse are being used to avoid scrutiny. And the law—stripped of its moral imagination—is asked to do what it cannot: resolve psychic conflict through paperwork.”
The sophistry of the superior class demands submission. C.S. Lewis warned of this inversion in God In The Dock. “To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
In Canada that compliant class has embraced Mark Carney as the great stabilizer. “Canadians keep asking the wrong question about Mark Carney,” says blogger Melanie in Saskatchewan. “They keep asking whether he is a good politician. That is like asking whether a locksmith is a good interior decorator.
Carney is not here to govern. He is here to re-engineer the operating system of the country while the Liberal Party provides the helpful stage props and applause track. And judging by how little scrutiny this government receives, the audience seems perfectly content to clap at whatever is placed in front of them, provided it comes with soothing words like “stability,” “resilience,” and “the experts agree”.
Adds Dr. Andrea Wagner, Canadians “hide behind procedure. Behind policy. Behind institutions. Behind NDAs. Behind committees, processes, protocols. Behind phrases like “we’re reviewing this internally” and “that’s beyond my authority.” They hide behind the pretense of empathy while quietly perpetuating injustice. They hide behind performative busy-ness: “I wish I had time,” “I’m swamped,” “I’ve been unwell.” There is enormous power in powerlessness—and Canadians wield it masterfully.”
The problem, says Melanie in Saskatchewan, is not that Mark Carney in full power is incompetent. The problem is that he is extremely competent at something Canadians never actually consented to. Technocrats redesign the machinery so that the outcome becomes inevitable. No messy debate. No inconvenient voters. No public reckoning. Just “the framework,” “the model,” “the standard,” and eventually the quiet conclusion that there is “no alternative.”
And this is precisely the world Mark Carney comes from. ”He did not rise through grassroots politics or party service. He rose through central banks, global finance institutions, and elite climate-finance bodies that speak fluent acronym and consider democracy an optional inconvenience. The man does not campaign. He architects.”
While the Conservative Party of Canada still polls evenly with the Liberals they are playing a different game, one they— with their traditional tactics— are not wired to win in a battle of systems with Carney. This cringeworthy “Keep It Up” endorsement of Carney by former CPC leader Erin O’Toole speaks to why they are further from power than ever.
The manufactured crisis over indigenous Rez school graves illustrates the method. “To call out intimidation or dehumanization is to risk being reframed as the aggressor. The person who names harm becomes the disturbance; the one who weaponizes grievance becomes the protected party. Justice no longer asks what happened, only who claims injury first. This is not accidental. It is the logical endpoint of a culture that has confused victimhood with virtue and pain with authority.
Suffering, once something to be alleviated, has become something to be curated. Identity now precedes evidence; accusation outruns inquiry. The system does not ask whether harm is real or proportional—only whether it can be procedurally contained. And containment, I am learning, is often preferred to truth.”
There are still some who believe there remains a way out of this. Here’s Paul Wells on Substack with a valid conclusion— which most sentient people reached by the end of Trudeau’s first term. “Canada has spent too long thinking of itself as a warehouse for the world instead of designing and building for itself. It’s time for a shared mindset of ambition quality and real investment in physical and human capital so Canadians become Canada’s designers and builders of livable cities rather than bystanders to our own future.”
But it’s hard to square that with the gap Carney’s already has. “The tragedy is that the Liberal Party is perfectly happy to hand (Carney) the country and then scold the public for noticing. If Canadians want a future where choices are still made by voters instead of algorithms and advisory panels, they are going to have to stop applauding this performance and start asking the one question that truly terrifies technocrats and their obedient political enablers.”
This system monolith taking over life is why the abrasive, defiant Donald Trump emerged. Vast segments of America employ him to defy the EU scolds with their censorship regimes. His defiance is categorical— which is why it frightens Canadians. The man from Mitch & Murray delivered a few truths to them and they soiled themselves. Paradise will never be the same!. Bad Trump! But an almost-octogenarian has little runway left himself. Who can continue the resistance to the Carney system engineers?
In the past organized religion was a refuge from the maelstrom of the secular storm. There was comfort in the message. Thus, the Liberals’ current need to destroy faith. So the epidemic of churches burned is ignored. The intrusive demonstrations of militant Islam are tolerated. (Carney says Muslim virtues are Canadian virtues.) History is re-written. Heroes debunked.
If Soviet Russia is any indication, the traditional faiths can survive and act as a bulwark against the technocrats— if they find their Pope John Paul II.. The Catholic and Orthodox faiths furnished a way out from behind the Iron Curtain. As organizations not co-opted by the state in the West religions can provide a moral backbone to expose and defeat the secular globalists.
Whether you are a believer or not they provide a pushback to restore the moral clarity C.S. described. It’s not too late as 2026 dawns. But if nothing is done in the West — if Canada accepts EU censorship and global ID— then writing this column in 2027 could well be defined as a criminal act.
“That which you most need will be found where you least want to look.” Carl Jung
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 at https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1069802700
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