Bulletin: “MAiD now accounts for 5.1 percent of all deaths in Canada – one in every 20 deaths was due to MAiD in 2024— with a total of 76,475 MAiD deaths reported by Health Canada since 2016.”

When Elbows Up Canadians brag about their moral superiority over Americans the introduction of Medical Assistance in Dying ranks with single-payer health care and one-dollar coins on the list of bragging points. Launched with his usual hubris by PM Justin Trudeau in June of 2016, the MAiD procedure is now considered a staple of Canadian life— and death.

By contrast, when told about MAiD’s availability Americans, who remain more religious than Canadians, are shocked that the state would assist people in ending their lives. But for secular Canadians the voluntary curtailing  of life is now seen as a blessing. Religious constraints are secondary to the legal ending of pain and distress. As the numbers demonstrate, there has been a surge in its use as Boomers enter their end years.

However as the rollout continues, people with loved ones are discovering the law of unintended consequences. New side effects have arisen. Namely, if you seek the service you’d better be ready to take it before you might prefer. Under MAiD, persons must be of sound enough mind to consent to the process. This is to protect the old, ill and enfeebled from being eliminated by heirs who want their inheritance or their freedom sooner. That’s beneficial.

But the side effects are not. In several instances we’ve seen, the person asking for MAiD has slipped into dementia or a similar condition before taking the service. Once this happens, pre-written Living Wills or care instructions are moot. The patient is kept alive to await a natural death. Often this can extend for a lengthy period, stressing the patient and the family even more.

But an earlier-than-desired death is also stressful for the patient and the family. Families and friends of a person still alert and aware witness a premature death for persons with some positive life left— a regrettable and stressful result. 

In the early days of MAiD the approved conditions were limited to physical diagnoses. There were numerous stories of families fighting with loved ones who had received a terminal diagnosis and wished to “end it all” quickly. But the conditions were physical. 

Then came legal MAiD approval for people suffering psychological distress. Warned of this possibility by ethicists in the early days of the legislation, this expansion of conditions has completely re-arranged the landscape. People simply depressed are asking for MAiD. Or healthcare organizations rationing their dollars might be talking a marginally stricken candidate into the process.

Here a lawyer says MAiD for mental problems is the only antidote to suicide.

We are now seeing reports of a liberal, even cavalier use of MAiD by healthcare professionals. A recent panel urged Parliament to lower the MAiD age to “at least 12,” claiming children should be able to make decisions about their own deaths.

There have also been prominent stories of aging victims arriving at the hospital for health issues being offered MAiD upon admittance. This 84-year-old woman had back pain but the attending doctor offered her MAiD as she arrived at hospital.

Famously, Canadian paralympian Christine Gauthier claimed she was recommended for MAiD when she was unable to obtain a wheelchair ramp for her home.

There are also concerns with how badly MAiD is being applied in Canada. Up to two hours to die.  No training— just a "fee code." Not using anesthesiologists. Only 25 percent are getting the proper shot. Not quick, not dignified, and not necessarily painless— leaving many doctors wanting “nothing to do with the process.”

The increased enthusiasm for pushing MAiD is not surprising in cash-strapped facilities. According Dr. Ian Dowbiggin in “A Merciful End”, there is a relationship between the birth control, abortion rights, eugenics, and euthanasia movements which facilitates acceptance of MAiD by the public. While all are concerned with “the responsible care of human life,” from the beginning to the end, Dowbiggin asks “Where does the freedom to die end and the duty to die begin?” 

While Americans with their widespread religious beliefs largely reject MAiD, secular Canadians— especially in Quebec— have no such constraints. Since Quebec abandoned the Catholic Church in favour of the church of government, any suggestion of organized religion has been verboten in the chattering classes in Ottawa. For instance, Liberal and NDP MPs were horrified that Conservative members carried bibles with them into the Commons.

Immediately they denounced the imposition of American-style Christianity. Liberal rent-a-fool Marc Miller, a Montreal MP, said that some passages in the Bible were “hateful” for what they said about homosexuality and that those who recited them should be jailed. “There are clearly instances in these texts where these statements are hateful,” Miller said. “They should not be used as an invocation or defense,”

What Miller and the secularists cannot recognize is that they impose their own worship of worldly idols of the religious. They flaunt their own beliefs ad nauseum. Voters are expected to dutifully worship the scientific Covid dogma and trans psycho therapy obsessions which are thrown in Canadians’ faces every day.

When it comes to Canada’s progressive Woke army, introspection is only for those they oppose. And as long as Quebec wants something the federal government will be only too happy to oblige in a now-majority Parliament.

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 2023 book Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, was voted a Top 20 greatest professional hockey books of all time by bookauthority.org . https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1770415300?linkCode=gs2&tag=uuid0a1-20 His previous book with his son Evan, Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books at https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1069802700

“You like pretty men to tell you all those pretty, lies pretty lies. When you gonna realize they're only pretty lies.” Joni Mitchell, Last Time I Saw Richard

It was a day we had hoped would never come. Joni Mitchell, one of the great creative artists anywhere the past three generations, used as a prop by the grasping Liberal party. As Joni might have said, “It's a shame, it’s a shame, it's a crying shame.” 

From her earliest appearances in black-and-white 1960s CBC films to today she has taken the genre of singer/composer. and made it an art form. Ladies of The Canyon. Blue. For The Roses. Court and Spark. Hejira. Mingus. The output is prodigious. And it still sounds fresh today. 

It’s hard to precisely quantify her originality, but almost every female singer/songwriter/artist owes her a debt for breaking through the inanity of Top 40 records to create the album form. Yes, The Beatles were creative, but their peak lasted less than a decade. From her beginning in Fort McLeod Alberta, Joni has made original music and painting for over a half century. 

The money-making machine known as Taylor Swift is the latest woman to till the ground that Joni opened up— with a fraction of the talent. Fifty years from now Joni will still be mentioned. Taylor will be wallpaper. We can still remember first hearing her album Blue when travelling in Algeria in 1974. [Our poem about that night is in our new book In Other Words.]

For much of her early work Joni was involved with 60s U.S. politics, the energy of the times in Nixon’s America. Ohio, Big Yellow Taxi and They Paved Paradise are samples of the material. But at some point she veered away to construct her own art, incorporating jazz and painting into something totally unique. Unlike Carney, who clung to her Suinday, she was the definition of a free spirit, often imitated but never duplicated.

So it was with utter chagrin that we saw this towering figure used as a prop by the cynical governing party of Canada, a background figure to legitimize Mark Carney at the Junos. Ostensibly lured into this trap to be rightly honoured for her career, she— seated next to the Elbows Up man—  was an adjunct to Carney’s drive to win by-elections and gain a majority in the Commons. 

Hosted by a predictably they/ them comedian, the current edition of Juno DEI darlings wobbled and wailed with throat singers and pretentious Gen X mannequins. But Joni sat placidly among the opportunists such as Carney kept inserting his smug countenance into the shot. When brought on stage by Carney Joni politely complimented him. Then she supplied a pro-forma-left Liberal excoriation of Trump’s America and praise for a Canada that disappeared with Justin Trudeau’s daddy. 

That brought out critics @frankgrimes_jr “Man who hasn't lived in Canada in over a decade presents woman who doesn't live in Canada an award, woman criticizes the United States, the country she chooses to live in instead of Canada, and praises the man who left Canada to make more money internationally.”

All true.

And avoidable for the 82-year-old who nearly died in 2015 from a brain aneurysm. She doesn’t need this manipulation or criticism at this stage in her life. But there you have Canada in 2026 where everything is now a Liberal party infomercial. Hey, what’s Mike Myers doing? Get the old lady Joni up there to say nice things about a guy who talks of partnering with there thugs in China. 

If that didn’t cause despair this past weekend the public self destruction of Canada’s third used-to-be major party completed the sordid portrait of a nation coming unglued. Already video clips of the NDP’s coronation of radical Avi Lewis are flooding social media internationally. Here’s just one of the struggle-session comrades engaging with someone who may or may not be a fake.

And here is a selection of the Pokemon Equity cards the delegates are trading in hopes of finding a socialist paradise. With a bottle-blond Chair-thingy sporting a Hitler hair style and lineups of ultra-empathetic delegates crying about being passed in the speakers’ line, the NDP meltdown was a humourless testament to self indulgence, not a policy proposition for Canada. In case the people who popularized safe spaces weren’t safe enough, the organizers had a food court of quiet rooms for those overwhelmed by life. 

Will anyone in Canada suggest, “Hey, this is what the country really needs”? No. When the very white man Lewis vowed to assist the election of Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi, Nenshi couldn’t get away fast enough from the Fellini parade of  dysphorics and deadbeats.

The source of all their anxiety was not how Carney was shoe-horned into office but that fellow delegates are talking too fast for the translation software. Into this Oompa-Loompa Land delegates paused to thank the man who accelerated the NDP slide to oblivion. Elected as a “visible minority” Jagmeet Singh’s choice only highlighted that many of the new citizens of Canada hate each other from grudges going back to the old world. 

When Jagmmet’s work was done a party that held official opposition status as recently as 2015 was reduced to just six seats and dropping. But he was empathetic and, for this party, that’s enough. Provinces voting to separate? Pshaw.

Which leads us to the 2025 love note delivered by singer Jann Arden to her fellow Albertans considering getting a better deal outside Confederation. “"Hey, Alberta. Hey, you bunch of fu-king separatist wackos…” It doesn’t get more conciliatory than that. The woman who is known for the song Insensitive then orders Albertans to perform unspeakable sexual acts with a side helping of vulgarity. 

In an earlier Canada it would have bee a career killer. But in Carney’s Canada— where trans is supreme— it’s just marking time till the nations of the world pick off a bankrupt Canada like a rummage table.  

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 Top 20 greatest professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1770415300?linkCode=gs2&tag=uuid0a1-20 His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books at https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1069802700

“Yeah, I think a dumpster fire is a kind way to describe what is before us here… There's a Liberal government that's been in place for over a decade... it is at their feet.”— Amanda Galbraith, Crisis manager

Canada’s attitude to America is characterized by periods of condescension to its southern neighbours. Or, as we’ve called it, Sometimes An Ingrate Nation . The lofty tone suggests the U.S. is Chris Farley and in need of Canada’s measured wisdom. This became pronounced with Pierre Trudeau’s pecksniff dismissals of U.S. democracy during the Viet Nam era. 

As a result, reducing the American political process to The Gong Show has played very well for Canada’s media. For proof see Pierre Poiievre’s recent visit to Joe Rogan’s enormously popular and influential podcast in Texas. Having reduced PP to a MAGA troll with a volcanic temper— to shoehorn globalist errand boy Mark Carney into the prime minister’s job— the press corps acted as if they were a parent sending a child off to a Kendrick Lamar concert.

On CBC, Chantal Hébert described Rogan, the MMA promoter and standup comedian, as a a Trump acolyte and purveyor of disinformation about Covid. On CTV a persnickety Scott Reid, already miffed that a Canadian politician would go to the U.S. amidst their anti-American fatwa, described the two-hour show (#1 rated in the U.S.) as a risk that would only cement Poilievre’s status as a Trump troll— a status created and embellished by Reid. 

Those who did watch the podcast saw something entirely different, of course, as Poilievre declined to rip Carney “on foreign soil”, remained measured and sober throughout and awarded Rogan a Canadian kettlebell weight for his gym. The CPC leader refused to bitch about how he’d been crushed by Trump’s 51st state remark. By the end, he was interviewing Rogan about mixed martial arts, Georges St. Pierre and the Calgary Stampede. 

In short it was the plucky mid-level bureaucrat tone that took him to a 20-point lead over Trudeau’s son Justin and then saw him pummelled when the Trump-deranged NDP flocked to Carney’s Elbow Up promotion. The man derided as a political barnacle by Liberal media and bots— who have no lives outside of Parliament Hill themselves— lost his opportunity to remove funding for CBC and media. Whether the chat ever results in Poilievre becoming PM is doubtful, but he was authentic.

Some saw it for what it was. After the Rogan show (and PP’s speech to the Harvard Club in NYC) former NDP leader Tom Mulcair commented: "I thought it was an outstanding piece of political communication, and it was bookended by ... frankly one of the best political speeches I've heard any Canadian political leader give on Canada-US relations in a long time.” Hébert gave the Rogan talk a grudging passing grade on the At Issue Panel.

His critics, many of whom would lose jobs under a Polievre administration, described him as sucking up to Rogan. "Pierre Poilievre's got to be careful that he doesn't look like he's vying for the position of MAGA's most preferred Prime Minister of Canada,” sniped Reid. “Because that ain't going to play with Canadians.”

CBC’s 22 Minutes spoofed a flustered, irritable Poilievre and the kettlebell episode on Rogan— which in another time might have been seen as funny. In this context it was simply more of the federally funded network’s snark. And here’s a CBC news lineup the day after Rogan and Poilievre talked MMA and gyms. White supremecists anyone?

They certainly were not mentioning how the prime minister’s wife Diana Fox Carney , former Liberal bag man Gerald Butts and current cabinet minister Evan Solomon worked together in NYC for Ian Bremner’s Eurasia Group consultants— which continues to receive millions in federal contracts.

Former CRTC vice-chair Peter Menzies says selective media have a crisis of credibility. When CBC invited Bremmer to get his take on the Iran war, CBC saw no need to mention any of these connections. “Don’t get me wrong. Bremmer’s a smart guy and brings value to the conversation. But when making such a selection, the CBC owes it to its audiences to mention the connections outlined.

“There’s growing concern that legacy media outlets—now financially dependent on government support—may struggle to maintain objectivity, particularly during national elections,” he wrote on Substack. “This dependency risks undermining the media’s role as a watchdog of democracy.” 

A recent Pollara Trust in Media study showed that CBC trails The Weather Network as Canada’s most-trusted media organization for the third consecutive year. The study then found levels of trust in TV networks CBC (72 percent trusted), CTV (67 percent trusted), and Global (65 percent trusted). With such a concentration on government-dependent sources it’s little wonder Canadians see Trump as the devil incarnate and truckers as threats to national safety.

Now, bias is acceptable so long as it’s acknowledged. As private networks, CTV and Global are entitled to express opinions so long as they are fact-based. CBC, however, is a different story. Receiving a $1.5B budget from Carney’s government funding is increasingly seen as an anachronism. Why in this age of mass communication in Canada is there still a need for a public broadcaster anymore when you have CTV, Global , major daily newspapers and social media?

The numbers say the audience just aren’t there anymore. In Toronto the local CBC news is watched by 49,000 people, 0.74 percent of the population of the city. Calgary had 4,000 viewers, 0.25 percent. Vancouver had 0.4 percent watch the news. Local radio does better. So why is the Liberal government is continuing with CBC if not ads a propaganda arm?

Cabinet minister (and former Trudeau groomsman) Marc Miller offered up weak sauce for 23 CBC/ Radio Canada stations across Canada getting an additional $17 million to. He called the radio funding “critical… because these stations often broadcast to remote communities where they might not get news from other sources.” Um, perhaps the honourable minister might consult Starlink satellite service to aid those in far-flung places.

The solution? If, as CBC groupies say, the network has an audience then the government should sell it someone whom can make a profit from the content. If no one takes the opportunity then you have your answer about the value of CBC. 

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

“The big moment on “Intervention” is when family and friends of the alcoholic or drug addict confront him or her… The addicts are usually in full blossom, drunk or high or on the nod. “What the hell . . . ?” they’ll say, looking around at their parents, their brothers and sisters, their wives or husbands, all together, seated in a semicircle.

The subjects of the intervention already feel ambushed, so steps are taken to keep them from feeling attacked as well. It’s easy to lose one’s temper in this situation…. The heartiest of the (subjects)  are revisited several years down the line, still sober, many with jobs now, and children. “All that time I wasted,” they say. “What on earth was I thinking?”— David Sedaris Intervention

Canadians may not know it, but they are in the midst of an intervention. If they do think about confrontation at all they probably imagine they are the ones confronting the addict in Donald Trump. But the reality is that Elbows Up is the one saying “What the hell?…” as their friends prepare to give them a reality sandwich. 

Sure, January 2026 new car sales in Canada fell by 18.2 percent over last year. Its real estate bubble is about to blow. China owns Canada's only antimony mine. The PM is on “holiday” in Europe, visiting his money. That’s no reason for the turncoats administering this session turning being Canada’s friends for a long, long time.

The intervention began in the 2024 Americans Thanksgiving weekend when Pippy Bright Stockings, aka Justin Trudeau, and his finance frau Chrystia Freeland were summoned to newly re-elected POTUS Donald Trump. They arrived at Mar A Lago “in full blossom, drunk or high or on the nod”. Everyone smiled at them. Life seemed grand, despite the Libs’ killer polling. 

The “Time’s Up” intervention that then followed from Trump was rude. Like all addicts, Canada’s Laurentian elite reacted with shock to being confronted. “Us? You’re being harsh with your best buddies?” Yes, he was. After a decade of Trudeau smashing the furniture and generations of Canadian liberals taking America for granted, Trump was calling their bluff on tariffs. And on things like the RCMP being so difficult to work with in stopping organized crime that American agencies have stopped sharing intelligence with them.

As recently as Wednesday, VP J.D.Vance was in Michigan repeating the Canada-as-mooch theme. Now, intervention experts will tell you Trump’s approach of suggesting Canada become the 51st state and Trudeau be called Governor was a tad unsubtle. But Trump understood that Canada’s addiction was deep. Its social-progressive kabuki was no longer acceptable to the 77 million Americans who’d elected him.

Having China place surveillance camps on the northern border while laundering its dirty money from shipping fentanyl— all while Canada went ho-hum— is unacceptable. Importing radicals to foment terrorism in North America is a no-go. So is “I will pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” approach to defence spending. Trump drew the line at having pet industries like dairy and forestry exempted from trade talks any longer. In Orange Man’s impeccable phrase, “They had no cards to play”. Shock therapy was needed.

The denial was such that the Liberals immediately joined China in declaring tariff war on the U.S. They manufactured a compromise deal to switch from tainted Trudeau to banker-to-the-world Mark Carney. Not switch policies, mind you. No, Carney created the Elbows Up defiance. Liker a pee in a blue suit, it gave Elbows Up a warm feeling and no one else noticed.

Having switched from meth to heroin, Canadians then gave Carney a massive mandate to reject its neighbour’s sober advice. Anyone attempting to reduce the tension by talking to the American administration— hello, Danielle Smith— was a “traitor”, according to Ontario’s Doug Ford. 

We remain in this standoff 18 months later. Judging by polls showing Liberals with huge lead in polls, denial reigns. Like the defiance of an addict who thinks he can handle his problem, Canada now lives by the methadone of Carney’s Davos speech urging that he lead a coalition of middle-ranked powers to counter Trump. Or suggestions from France that Canada become the 28th EU member.

 He seeks approval for the ruling class’s addiction by co-opting the moribund NDP. The delusion is underpinned by the “threat” of a Trump invasion of Canada. 

The denialist behaviour is assisted by Canada’s purchased media party that hammers Trump Derangement Syndrome on a daily basis, diverting attention from the Madness of King Justin or Carney’s Carnival. It has made Carney acceptable by maklng Trump a pariah in Canada. The mission of the co-opted press is to pretend that the current Canada of performative insanity is the same nation handed to Trudeau by Stephen Harper. The Canada of the Vancouver Olympics, the Confederation Year, the WW II heroes. 

Now it’s the nation of Diversity®, a crab boil of cultures, languages and, in Gad Saad’s words, suicidal empathy. Its sensibilities are victimization, guilt and land acknowledgements. The arbiters of this society are CBC and CTV, the Toronto Star and Globe & Mail, a hundred preposterous cultural outlets funded by government. And American mainstream culture.

It celebrates “Ben Bogart (they/them) a neurodivergent non-binary agender adisciplinary artist who enjoys tickling various mosses, can eat a lemon slice including peel without flinching, and if they had to be a bird would love to be a swallow”. He works where? On the “unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̍əm (Musqueam), Sk̠wx̠wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil- Waututh) First Peoples, also known as Vancouver’.

Like an addict Canada lives day to day, month to month, in fear of being found out for the nation Trump said it was. If that means 84,000 jobs lost in the month of February the glee-club in the press says that’s just the price of being free. If that means normalizing a partnership with China or reading land acknowledgements before meetings of the book club it’s okay.

If unemployment hits 1.5 million Canadians or shares of subprime lender Goeasy fall 50 percent on guidance of surging loan defaults and write downs, it’s the trade-off to keep milk at $6 a litre. If citizens are facing an average emergency-room wait time of 21 hours, you’re fighting Trump so you’re going to break a few eggs.

None of this is Carney’s fault, of course. Or so says the addicted Elbows Up media chorus. Even though his mandate has little support in polls of Canadians under 50 years of age. Or Stats Canada reports that the total exit in capital for 2025’s second quarter was $43.7 billion—a similar outflow from the first quarter. Or, businesses across the country hitting the pause button on everything pending CUSMA’s first major review in July 2026.

For the moment, Carney is King. of the quivering masses. The question for Canada is, will it be an addict that never gets off the junk or will it be among the lucky ones who later reflect, “What on earth was I thinking?”

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

This past week marked the third anniversary of the death of my friend Rob Bennet from ALS. But his memory still burns bright in the minds of the great musicians and artists he brought to Canada. And to those of us who knew the total man. Here’s how I marked his passing on March 14, 2023.

Robert Bennett: 1952-2023

This is a column I hoped I’d never have to write. But my best friend Rob Bennett has lost his fight with ALS. And my life has a void that can’t be filled. Most people know Rob as one of the country’s top music promoters for more than 35 years. From James Taylor to Robin Williams to Raffi my pal knew them all. One night he even threw snowballs with Bruce Springsteen atop Mount Royal . 

My own memories of the man are more personal. We met as U of Toronto students working the 1974 Christmas season at the LCBO on Dupont at Huron. These were the days where patrons filled out a coupon and we runners fetched their order in the back of the store. This gave us lots of time to chat about sports, music, politics and wine. If there’s anyone who was more of a cultural clutter box than me it was Rob. 

He told me he was working at the Victoria College coffeehouse Wymilwood, doing gopher work for The Bernies— Fiedler & Finkelstein— who owned True North Records and managed the iconic Riverboat in Yorkville. They also managed, among others, Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLauchlan. It all seemed like exciting stuff. 

Xmas ended, and we went separate ways. When we next ran into each other I was at the U of T Student Housing service looking for a place for me and my girlfriend at the time. As I pursued the board I saw this guy posting an opening for a place on Albany Avenue. It was Rob. In no time flat I was installed as the third occupant of Mr. Rosen’s walkup rental. It became pizza boxes, newspapers and rotating Dowbiggin roommates for several years.

By this point Rob was getting more and more work from the Bernies. And more releases from the record companies. One day I remember him dashing into the living room, insisting I listen to this hot new record. It was “You Make Me Want To Be” by Dan Hill, who’d been a waiter at The Riverboat. As ever, Rob’s enthusiasm was infectious, and he played the 45 over and over. Another night in 1977 it was Fleetwood Mac’s game-changing Rumors, as we were awed by the new clean, crisp California production sound it represented. 

When living in the Albany walkup got to be old, Rob and I took off to his grandmother’s now-vacant bungalow across from Taylor Creek Park in East York. My girlfriend was gone, but Rob was now installed with Lesley, his longstanding girlfriend at the time, and my two cats in our Three’s Company takeoff. For some strange reason he objected to the half-eaten rabbits, birds, snakes and critters my cats brought in each morning. 

Having moved from the downtown Rob bought himself a used Renault to get around town. Typically he did zero maintenance on the car as he travelled on tour. One day I heard noises coming from under the hood. I propped it open. Squirrels had moved in. Another time an open basement window allowed a skunk to vaporize our basement for two weeks. It was pure bachelor stuff.

 We were also political junkies. I recall us watching the provincial Liberal convention that elected unknown Stuart Smith as (star-crossed) leader in 1976. We saw Smith’s election as transformative. We were wrong. A born and bred Ontarian— Rob never lived outside the GTA— he liked to colour inside the political lines. I was more inclined to contrarian views— which became more pronounced as I settled into Alberta.  His political bent made him conversant with the young student politicians at U of T Student Council (SAC). Rob was a mentor and a friend who gave them a touch of the big time.

I finished my degree, edited the student paper at what was then Erindale U of T campus, and had a play produced at Tarragon Theatre’s writer’s workshop. Then I headed off to travel around the world in 1976-77. Rob, meanwhile was getting more independence from The Bernies. He’d worked a deal with SAC to promote shows at Convocation Hall. I’ll never forget his fledgling show with the late Steve Goodman. We were so excited for him. After the show we were invited to Gordon Lightfoot’s place where I ended up at Gordon’s dining room table examining blueprints for his new yacht with him. It was great to be young and alive, and Rob was bringing us along for the ride.

The unique thing about Rob was his eclectic taste. He loved the music as much as the  action of betting on which acts would sell. While CPI did the megastar arena shows at Maple Leaf Gardens, Rob stuck to more intimate venues like Con Hall and Massey Hall. His roster of acts was so diverse. John Prine, Pat Metheny, Tom Waits, Lyle Lovett, J.J. Cale, John Hiatt, Ry Cooder, Maria Muldaur, the McGarrigles, Leon Redbone, Levon Helm, Steeleye Span, George Thorogood, Peter Tosh, Jesse Cook, the Gypsy Kings and so many more were on the bill. Fans knew it was more than a payday when Rob presented. It was always a musical event of acts Rob wanted the public to know. 

His onstage intros for the acts— the bearded guy in the beret— and his chiding customers about smoking in the bathrooms were vintage Rob. (Once he let me introduce Jay Leno who rode his motorcycle onto the stage!) So was the affection from the young people at SAC who worked with Rob and got the frisson of showbiz in addition to running student government. (I know this sad news will touch a community of SAC hacks who still revere him.) 

In 1983 he stood up as best man at my wedding in the backyard of my parents’ home in Burlington. He was the sound recorder, but 30 seconds in the technical demons switched everything off, committing the ceremony to the “oral tradition”. We thought it might convince him to tie the knot himself, but he somehow managed to avoid matrimony till Mary got him to do the deed last year. I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised as Mary also got him to ski in his 60s.

Eventually he rose the ladder of concert promoters in the country, taking tours across North America with the superstars. For a time he promoted the big summer shows at Molson Amphitheatre. In the winter, it was the O’Keefe Centre/ whatever-its-name-is-now. He’d bring you backstage to meet Robin Williams, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Mick Jagger, KD Lang, Stephen Page, Lucinda Williams. One Sunday night he called me up late to join him for dinner with a guest— who he couldn’t identify. I protested it was too late, and I was tired after doing two shows a day for CBC Toronto. I passed. Missing dinner with Bruce Springsteen.

After years of rubbing shoulders backstage with the stars Rob’s real joy seemed to come from the fine wines he brought backstage after the concert. Many a night as fans and hangers-on mobbed the act, Rob and I sipped a Mollydooker or a Lewis Cab in the corner of the dressing rooms. We were always comparing notes on our latest purchases. Me with U.S. futures, Rob with the latest LCBO treasures. In his spare time Rob began hosting dinner parties at home in Orangeville where he would lead tastings while his beloved partner Mary produced the food. 

We also shared a passion for golf. I joined Weston G&CC in Toronto while he became a ClubLink member at Grandview near his  second home, the cottage on Bigwin Island. Despite his short stature, Rob could smash his drives through the many rocky outcrops  at Grandview. He also became legendary among the members at the club for his explosive laugh that reverberated around the entire course. 

They nicknamed him The Pirate for his booming Robert Newton laugh and even created an annual tournament in honour of his signature braying. Players wore eye patches in tribute. We liked to call him the hedgehog after his adventures in the rough during our Florida trips.

After golf we’d retire to the cottage to sip wine and debate politics. Unlike so many people these days, political or cultural differences never interfered with Rob’s friendships. He was the most loyal friend to my family, which designated him the sixth Dowbiggin brother. At my father’s memorial service he brought a vintage Cheateau Beaucastel, because my father and mother had visited the winery. You could tell him anything knowing it would (almost) never be repeated. That’s why the acts respected him. What happened backstage stayed backstage.

In our earlier days it was the girls and women we dated, as he teased me about my first-date playlists of Hall & Oates or Boz Skaggs. After I met Meredith in Montreal, we’d compare golf handicaps. As our careers flourished we’d share our satisfaction over his celebrated sell-out concerts, my Gemini Awards and the compelling people we’d met.

As Meredith and I started our family in 1985 with the arrival of our son Evan, Rob became Uncle Rob to our three kids in a five-year window. Not the most paternal fellow himself, he was a great uncle to the kids. In his Raffi days he was godlike. For Evan, our eldest, the pinnace was a backstage meeting in Calgary with John Prime, who autographed Bruised Orange for him. 

We were so pleased how Mary’s children Robin and Will came to accept Rob in their lives. And he (belatedly) adopted a parental streak. He was as proud as anyone when Robin was married beside the Ottawa river in Hudson, Quebec. And he played the annoyed parent whenever Will acted like a teenager. It was precious. Lately he became a doting step-grandfather even as ALS took its hold on him. 

One of Rob’s signatures was to arrive just  in time for dinner. Since our moving west in 1999, getting together with Rob and Mary was less frequent. He often lamented that we couldn’t drop by each other’s homes on a whim or tee up a weekly golf game at Weston or a ClubLink course. But we made time for winter golf in Florida, where during one round Rob absent-mindedly twice stepped over what he thought were logs on a golf course looking to find some Titleist Pro Vs. The logs turned out to be alligators. He still couldn’t see what the fuss was about.

In spite of the great venues and great acts he staged Rob might have been most at home on Bigwin Island in the rocky cliffside cottage he’d purchased. Riding back and forth to the shore in his pontoon boat he felt himself the quintessential Ontario gentleman as he pointed out Shania Twain’s compound or the home of the GolfTown co-founder or the stately Bigwig resort. For an adopted kid who procrastinated about so much, the cottage was a definitive statement about how far he’d come since Norm and Glenna brought him to their home in Willowdale in 1952. 

It’s hard to put value on a friendship, but if I was asked to capture our own bond it would be how it helped us grow as men. I can remember us walking one perfect Florida night near my parents’ winter home and saying in astonishment, “Who ever thought we’d get this far when we met at the LCBO in 1974?”  As we all reflect on his impact, that is how I’ll remember Rob, a vital life force with his big laugh and a corkscrew in hand. And a man we can never replace. Good night, my friend. Take a bow in heaven with John Prine. 

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air:”

In Rob’s memory please donate generously to ALS Canada to find a cure for this cruel disease. https://als.ca/take-action/ways-to-give/

Breaking: New Democratic Party MP Lori Idlout is crossing the floor to join the Liberals, setting up Prime Minister Mark Carney to secure a majority government if upcoming byelections go his way.

Canada’s Days of Dissonance are continuing into a second decade. The defection of a tainted NDP MP virtually guarantees the Liberals the majority that Canadians did not give them in last spring’s election. They think they can snub Donald Trump and still have it all.

The coercion/ bribing of Idlout underscores the real story of the election. While the purchased unimedia pummelled Pierre Poilievre’s CPC for blowing a huge lead in the polls, it was the eradication of the NDP— with their votes going to the Elbows Up Liberals— that elevated Mark Carney to this moment where floor crossings will give him absolute power in Ottawa.

Certainly the fawning press will be full of hosannas for the political acumen of Carney as he flies around the globe promising money Canada doesn’t have. Offering to import more than four times the number of Indian immigrants compared to U.K./ U.S. with a fraction of their combined populations. The outgoing spigot for Canadian billions going to Ukraine, India and Gaza is reported as Canada leading “middle-ranked powers”.

If what you want is grand policy announcements, lavish promises of aid and photo ops in every corner of the globe then Carney is your man. He’s certainly the man for the Elbows Up crowd who continue to see him as equal parts Lester Pearson/ Pierre Trudeau/ Paul Martin. The antidote to Orange Man Bad down south. 

But it’s an opinion that few outside Canada share. “He is very good at self-promotion, at collecting trophy jobs and of course negotiating fabulously generous salaries and expenses for himself along the way,” wrote Matthew Lynn in the U.K. Daily Telegraph. “He is just not very good at delivering.” Canadians? What, me worry?

Yes, he’s buddies with the PMs of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Chairman Xi sees him as a continuation of the Justin Trudeau Follies, a third-rate poseur out of his depth. One recent example of his acumen was his pledge to back the American/ Israeli offensive in Iran. Only to furiously backtrack when his globalist pals confronted him.

That attracted the scorn of Donald Trump. “Mark Carney is a Globalist Loser who is selling out Canada to China, and now he’s badmouthing our Great Military from Australia? He should be thanking us for protecting his weak country… Canada is being destroyed by a man who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else.” While the international community scoffed, Carney’s approval ratings in daydreaming Canada went up.

On his latest sojourn away from Canada Carney charmed the Japanese by offering up  some phrases in their native tongue. But the message was unmistakable once the polite stuff ended. Japan made it clear that continued support for making their vehicles in Canada’s auto sector is contingent on a successful renegotiation USMCA. They want access to the American market if they’re to continue building their cars in Canada. Or else.

With the auto sector already hemorhaging jobs in anticipation of USMCA, news of Carney’s pledge to import 40,000 electric vehicles from China is a sign that Carney has lost touch with this file vital to central Canadians. While the major car makers write down their EV boondoggles, Carney forges blindly ahead. Even as the Governor of the Bank of Canada promises economic pain for decades. No worries. Polls indicate that Carney and the Liberals would score a large majority if an election were called.

Domestically Carney would rather talk about his latest fabulously expensive Net Zero pipe dream (in concert with his old pals at Brookfield Investments) than confront the growing disaster in BC over indigenous rights on Crown Lands and the title ownership of private homes. The recent Incremental Recognition Agreement provides that the Musqueam has Aboriginal rights and title in a vast area where 1.3 million British Columbians live and work, spanning Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, North Vancouver, West Vancouver and parts of Delta.

This comes after a B.C. Supreme Court decision involving the Cowichan Nation concluded that Aboriginal title can be a senior right to private property. Panicked B.C. voters are unsure if they still control the title on their own homes or if banks will extend them credit. (In Alberta indigenous tribes wanting the same are concerned how a republic of Alberta will affect their treaties with the Crown.) Again, Carney remains at stratospheric levels of approval in polls.

Speaking of home equity, the collapsing of the Canadian economy and the outflow of capital has revived the Liberal position paper on taxing the equity in private homes on an annual basis— a property tax on the increases value of homes. For many Canadians— even in the Elbows Up cult— the money accumulated on their homes the past decades is their security blanket. The promise of tax-free sales on primary residences is sacred to them. But the Liberals paper sees taxing that equity— even if the house is not being sold.

As an example, homes valued at $1M – $1.5M, would see a tax per year of $408– $1,021. Homes valued at $1.5M – $2M, the tax per year would be $2,118 – $3,618. On homes valued at $2M+, the tax per year would be $14,710 – $16,210. The government would rake in $4.5B – $5.8B per year. 

Carney’s polling in the wake of this trial balloon? Up, up and away with Canadians. 

While many consider taxing home equity political suicide, Carney has that covered with the burgeoning MAID program. His new majority will give him all the tools he needs to re-construct previous failed Green equity funds and climate investment schemes— those he ran after leaving the Bank of England. Using Canada’s public pension money he can prop up the nation’s economy even if it guts the housing market. After all, B.C. premier David Eby has said blowing off up to a trillion in real estate is a fair trade off for $50 billion in projects. 

Did we mention crime? The U.S. consulate in Toronto shot up. Synagogues targeted for gunfire. Huge fentanyl seizure suspects allowed to walk in Saskatchewan. A Vancouver area mayor pleading for outside help in there midst of gang wars. No, the Elbows Up slappies polled are koo-koo for his new majority.

The secret is no secret. Mention Donald Trump. There will come a time when Carney getting a bump in the polls from mentioning #TrumpTariffs will end. But it seems that Elbows Up is still infatuated with digging the hole deeper. So we will have to wait a while longer for the nervous collapse of Coyne of the realm.

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

Back in the day— when we were attempting a career in the performing arts— we worked for the Canadian Opera Company. It was 1979, and the COC was presenting Bizet’s opera Carmen at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in downtown Toronto. It was an exciting time to be young and surrounded by `the magnificent voices and stirring music of Bizet’s famous work.

But the most striking person in that spring of 1979 was the COC’s general director Lotfollah “Lotfi” Mansouri. A striking figure with a bold Yul Brunner gleaming pate, he’d been born in Tehran then came to North America to study. When we met him he’d been the general director of the COC since 1976. Seeing him soothe and cajole the singers while orchestrating the large cast was a lesson in arts generalship. 

He later recommended us for a spot in Canada's National Theatre School— a not inconsiderable action during production weeks to have time for a lowly production assistant. Carmen was a great success and cemented a love of opera that continued after the NTS when we later worked for Festival Ottawa in the summer of 1981.

But that spring of 1979 was different for Lotfi . Since we had visited Iran the year before a clerical revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini had kidnapped 66 Americans in the U.S. embassy in Tehran. It had expelled the Shah of Iran, forcing his expulsion from the country. (He died in Egypt.) Worse, it had imposed strict sharia law on the country. 

Everywhere supporters and functionaries in the Shah’s liberal regime were being rounded up, imprisoned and executed. It was a time of terror for anyone associated with America’s regime in Iran. Thousands disappeared or were publicly executed. It was a terror organization that was to continue till this day.

Lotifi knew many of the people who were disappearing or being killed. Some were family. Some were friends. Some were colleagues in the arts world. It was a time of terrible stress for him. Getting daily helpings of tragic news even as he advanced the production of Carmem to a successful opening night. 

And yet there was hardly any indication of his distress to those of us surrounding the production. He had told some people in the company what he was experiencing, but the rest of us were unaware how each morning must have brought a terrible burden for him. He hid his sadness very well.

Since those opera days we have followed all the abortive attempts to depose the clerics, from Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated desert rescue disaster to the Green Revolution stand-down during Obama’s presidency.

Lotfi died in 2013 having never seen his native country restored to some sense of sanity. We thought about him again this week as President Trump— in conjunction with Israel—  launched an attack on Iran’s regime. So often international events are a distant mirror of reality. But seen through the prism of Lotfi’s life and our own time in Iran in 1977-78 the news of the day is more tangible. 

Watching the explosions in Tehran, Tabriz, Mashad and Qom recalls a young tourist in those streets and squares, seeing the descent into a 14th century theocracy and the crushing of western liberal thought via the Shah. It is a chilling reminder.  In those days of the 1970s Iran was seen as a potential Persian version of Israel, a historic, educated society on the precipice of a modern tech and business success story. Its oil reserves guaranteed the financing to make their dreams come true.

Alas, that dream died when the hostages were seized and America put a target on the mullahs. Iran is now more known for blowing up its enemies than building a future. For most people their vision of modern Iran comes from the Academy-award winning film Argo which showed the efforts of Canada and American intelligence in freeing American diplomats trapped in Tehran in 1980. 

While it exaggerated some facts, the plain truth of spiriting Americans under Canadian passports in post-revolutionary Tehran was a crowd pleaser. When Canada learned that the American producer Ben Affleck had played down its role in the film, a new ending was stapled onto the film showing Canada celebrating its hero Ken Taylor.

For those who want a more nuanced view of life in modern pre-attack Iran we would recommend the acclaimed 2015 French TV series Le Bureau. Concentrating on the activities of France’s secret intelligence service, it won many awards and fans for its incisive take on middle eastern geopolitics. The second season involves a French woman spy sent to work undercover as a specialist in seismology, in order to gather intelligence about Iran's nuclear weapons programme. 

While the undercover drama is compelling the portrait of Iran’s two-tiered culture  is a revelation. It shows a modern privileged sector of society allowed to party and indulge so long as it doesn’t get involved in challenging the politics of the mullahs. This was the segment of Iran that Lotfi might have known. What comes next is anyone’s guess. Liberal democracy could re-emerge or a different strain of authoritarian rule might evolve.

But it will never recover the lost 47 years with Iran as an international pariah.

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

“U.S. Defeats Authoritarian Communists On The Ice, Again”— The Federalist

How excited are the Americans with the two gold medals in Olympic hockey? President Trump gave U.S. men's goalie Connor Hellybucyk the Congressional Medal of Honor at his State of the Union speech for stopping 46 shots against the favoured Canadians in the gold-medal final. 

Prompting a tantrum from Whoopi Goldberg on The View, calling it ”insanely rude" for President Donald Trump not to host other athletes who won gold medals as well. (The U.S. women’s team turned down a White House invitation from Trump.)

Other than that snark, Americans are over the moon about the men’s upset of Canada and the women’s predicted win over Canada. Old-fashioned patriotism in the form of toothless hockey grunts at the State of the Uniion has replaced The Squad as the dominant meme in America. Here’s satirist Matt Walsh puckishly suggesting that America should follow up on the hockey wins and do a Maduro on Mark Carney.

Leaving Canada where? There was much invested emotionally in the men’s team restoring pride in a Trump-obsessed nation with separatist movements rumbling in two provinces. Carney’s “Elbows Up” Canadian boomers and their paid media remain in shock over the loss. Here’s the Mop &n Pail’s headline for its Irish columnist: “The State of the Union was a zoo – and Team USA the monkeys”.

The patron saint of #TDS, Bruce Arthur, did his predictable rant to rationalize  the loss and the American celebration with Trump. “I don’t believe every player in the room is a MAGA chucklehead, but does it matter unless they apologize? Between this and Kash Patel, and accepting Trump’s invitation, this was just an utterly repellent display from a team that also honoured Johnny Gaudreau’s family.”

Apologize for what? Upsetting Canada’s pink press corps? Glen McGregor was all about polls. “After their White House visit, Team USA players Auston Matthews and Brady Tkachuk are losing fan support, according to this analysis of social media posts by "

See, only morally superior Canadians can decide what’s an appropriate celebration for the Americans In the aftermath of the Milan Meltdown. And so now lonely eyes on the Left turn to PM Carney and his plan to lead an association of Trump-hating nations in opposition to POTUS’ plans for a “DonRoe Doctrine” and a tariff-based economic model.

After promising to have a new deal with America on tariffs by last July it seems like Carney is now playing a waiting game in hopes that someone shoots Trump. Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh. But while the contrasts in the #DEI Canadian press have made much of Trump’s volatile business and personal background but very little of Carney’s past in the globalist bubble.

Which would be instructive in deciding the future of the country he runs. While Trump is seen as a transactional pirate the Canadian media have portrayed Carney as an internationally respected financial genius who advised Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland.

Or is he? The real resumé of the former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor is a Davos foot soldier. Here’s a deep dive from Calgary-based businessman Robin Hillier. In these two videos Hillier lays out the first time the Brookfield Asset Management vice-chair sought to “lead” a group of nations in the GFANZ (Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero). The secret sauce used by Carney was public pension monies like the Ontario Teachers Pension fund as LLPs to ‘de-risk” low-return green investments, making them sweeter for private investors.
 

Carney’s private-side version of GFANZ (with almost 600 global financial firms) then collapsed when the U.S. Department of Justice began investigating Carney’s baby for antitrust and unfair trading practices. {Update: "The state of Texas said Vanguard Group Inc. agreed to pay a total of $29.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a dozen states that accused the asset manager of colluding to manipulate the energy market and reduce coal output."]

Carney, who escaped repercussions for this fund, next scheme was to re-create that strategy, this time ginnng up to a trillion dollars in risk-free private investments in Canada by using rock-solid public pension funds as a backstop. Give the videos a close watch here. And here.

There is much detail about the fine art of globalist capital movement in these videos. But what we can clearly see is why, when the first investment scheme collapsed in a smoking ruin after just 18 months, Carney headed to the Canadian government as PM, conveniently replacing Trudeau. It was an easy transition as an unpaid Carney had been “advising” the financially illiterate Trudeau and his equally challenged finance minister Freeland on ways to allegedly circumvent the restrictions surrounding Canadian public pension money.

Hillier shows how the structure of the deals he’s concocting under the heading of “infrastructure” will benefit private-side investors (including Carney himself via his holdings in the U.S.) while putting the rlsk on the Canadian pension system. In a number of cases it might be a decade or longer to see how/ if the public benefited from the deals structured by Carney.

Given this revelation of Carney’s conflicts, Trump’s ballyhooed plans versus Carney’s use of the public pension system seem equally dodgy. Just not to the gullible Canadian public. The latest Angus Reid poll has the Liberals ahead by 13 points over the Conservatives, who at 32 percent, are at their lowest support level in over a year #cdnpoli Carney also leads Pierre Poilievre by even more in most trusted.

Leading to more TDS paranoia from the huddled masses of the north. @SpencerFernando “It is now beyond obvious that the Conservative approach of avoiding Trump has failed completely… the Conservatives have chosen a different route, a route based more on criticizing Canada for 'not getting a deal' rather than emphasizing Trump's hostility towards Canada. The polls indicate Canadians are rejecting that route.”

Yes, double down with blaming Donald when Carney’s Canada’s economic performance is in free fall. Sounds like a strategy. While no one would say Polievre’s reaction to Trump was seamless, Carney’s own avoidance scheme has been almost as bad as Cale Makar’s backchecking on the winning goal in OT. In both cases Canadians are going to have to wait four years to see if either redeems himself.

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

"Canada is like a loft apartment over a really great party!"  Robin Williams 

It’s been a big month or so for the Diversity Cult®. First, Bad Bunny made his pitch for Puerto Rican statehood with a Spanish-only halftime show at Super Bowl LX. Because it was in Spanish most viewers had no idea what he was saying about WAP and why couples were twerking in a pickup truck. It was a celebration of PR culture, goddammit, and anyone seeing anything remotely political is a Nazi.

Then came that celebration of frozen white culture known as the Winter Olympics. The unrelenting Viking paleness of most competitors was a challenge to the Diversity Cult®. How to reconcile patriotism in Canada and the U.S. with the lack of brown and black faces being demanded by DEI?

Simple, get the corporate world to bathe the commercial breaks in mixed-race couples, the Nurse family, tributes to the integrated Mounties, white men being scolded by women for their stupidity and a small army of TV hosts of colour. The same way Bad Bunny was a warning shot to traditional America, the Olympics coverage is  a heads-up that DEI culture is still in control of the conventional means of communication. 

The fashionable rejection of traditional culture may not be your life experience. But if Mark Carney has anything to say about iit soon will be in Elbows Up Land after a tsunami of immigration the past decade. Christopher R. Rufo explains the manufactured culture shift. “Our Anglo-American tradition is visible in numerous ways: our common language, our system of rights and liberties, the Protestant-capitalist economic system. Those things didn’t come from Somalia, Japan, or Brazil; they mostly came from the culture of England. But now, if you acknowledge these plain realities, you are treated as a de facto racialist and purveyor of hatred.”

Northrup Fry’s coined the phrase “garrison mentality” to describe the Canadian instinct to withdraw when the world feels threatening. Or as economist Niall Ferguson sadly observes , “Canada often opts for envy and self-pity instead of taking action to assert its global presence.” Carney understands the fear. It’s the reason the Laurentian Elite freaked out when CPC MP Jalil Jivani said after meetings with VP J.D. Vance: “We are shooting ourselves in the foot if we continue this anti-America hissy fit, and this is the reason I’m trying to talk into our government.”

Fat chance. Comedian Daniel Tosh sums up Canada’s good-neighbour delusion in the Diversity Cult®. “It’s really easy to be the cool, open-minded liberal hippie nation when there’s a Kevlar Snuggie of America wrapped around your fat frozen asses daring the world to talk shit. ‘We don’t use our military’. Yeah, we know, we’ve got you taken care of. Go back to sleep, we’ll wake you up when the NHL playoffs begin. You’re welcome, Canada. We take the hits so you don’t have to.”

At the moment Carney is flitting about with his globalist friends, posing for photo ops while avoiding Parliament and Trump. His fans love it. Lacking any movement on a new CUSMA trade deal with Trump he’s attempting to form new acronym-laden cooperative body of unicorns to keep his globalist/ climate/ DEI agenda going.

@TerryGlavin demurs. “On the ‘world stage’ Mark Carney leads a huge new anti-Trump trade bloc. In the real world, he isn't, and his "fast growing" alliance doesn't exist.” No matter. The Canadians of Tosh’s joke think Carney playing for time is a swell strategy for dealing with the world’s largest economy.

Those delusions of a “diverse” Canada leading the world may have run into a brick wall in Munich this past weekend. At the International Trade Meetings there U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio put Canada and the rest of the West on notice. Despite the embracxe of hopelessness and complacency seen everywhere else Trump’s America is going ahead with saving traditional Western culture

“We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline. We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history… What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency. An alliance -- the alliance that we want— is one that is not paralyzed into inaction by fear -- fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology. Instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future.”

In short, you can get on board or be left behind. Using those parameters the white guilt and self loathing infecting Canada have no tickets on the Trump train. In spite of Rubio’s warning, several of Trump’s biggest American critics tried to spin. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, hoping to raise her profile as a presidential candidate, blundered through a series of policy gaffes on Taiwan, alternating painful pauses with placing Venezuela south of the equator on a map.

“Whoever convinced AOC that she had successfully completed her tutoring and was now ready to give book reports about foreign policy in public really should look for another line of work. Unless the goal was to sabotage her. In which case: kudos for a job well done,” Glenn Greenwald wrote on X. In another embarrassment for the #TDS opposition, former Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, another presidential hopeful, dried when asked about Ukraine foreign policy, deferring to Trump’s EU Ambassador Matt Whittaker who was also on the panel. 

In short, if Canada is looking for kindred American spirits in Carney’s quest for the Diversity Cult® they might best be advised not to count on the Brat Pack of AOC . Judging by polls gullible Elbows Up fans will move ahead with Carney’s own new-fangled world order of building jets and encouraging trans dysphoria. It’s the perfect blend of Canadian self delusion mixed with victim mentality. 

Which means it’s got a good chance of succeeding in Diversity Cult®. “The federal government supports Sudbury Queers United Around Diversity to advance equality”.

.

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

“WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.” U.S. Declaration of Independence

It’s becoming clear that large parts of the Laurentian Elite have suddenly become nervous about the implications of Alberta’s unrest. After decades of turning a deaf ear to low rumblings of discontent, from somewhere beyond the Lakehead, the Andrew Coyne Brigade is in full force waving their law books, warning about why Alberta independence is against the natural law, God’s plan and more. @acoyne Smith has no mandate to hold a referendum… Among many, many other objections.

It shouldn’t have taken this long. Premier Danielle Smith made her position clear in a town hall in Fort McMurray.. “Alberta, year after year, has $20 to $25 billion that is siphoned out of our system to go to Ottawa so that it can be spent mostly in Quebec, but also in other places that vote Liberal.” Over the last 40 or 50 years, Alberta has had $600 billion taken out of the province. (Albertans voted in a referendum to remove equalization from the Constitution in 2021, but that Ottawa ignored the province.) There’s more on the reform list of requests. Lots more.

“The response from the Globe&Mail? “Danielle Smith’s grievance tour finds a predictable scapegoat: equalization”.

But just in case, concerned federalists have got some scary polls primed. Angus Reid: “The number cruncher finds two-thirds of Albertans would vote against Alberta independence. Of those two-thirds, the vast majority say they would leave Alberta if it became independent. That’s 2.5 million people hitting the road”.

Calmer heads point out that 29 percent of citizens telling pollsters they’d favour separation. is exactly the same amount as a poll earlier this month found for separation in Quebec). Tellingly, young people aged 18 to 34, are significantly more likely to say that they favour Alberta’s independence. They’re not willing to find out what happens in ten years.

To Ontario premier Doug Ford’s credit, he doesn’t say the Alberta government trips to the U.S. are treason. But he does characterize them as going behind Canada’s back. He says they are unacceptable. He says they are unethical. He is disappointed." Ontarians think this is supporting Alberta.

BC premier David Eby paused from awarding his province to the indigenous tribes to suggest the movement to re-examine Alberta’s future is “treason”. Strongly worded memo to follow. 

Here’s failed Liberal leader Stephan Dion with “choice words for Alberta separatists and Danielle Smith”. ”I have no patience for separatist blackmail," Dion said in an interview on Rosemary Barton Live airing Sunday morning. “Is she indifferent about the fact that Alberta is in Canada or not? Does she care? And if she cares, then she should say so.” 

(Which brought a satirical response online. @AndrewJWHaynes "Feb 9 I would like to invite Stephane Dion to do a speaking tour of Alberta in favour of Canada. I will pay. No one could do more to help the cause of Alberta Secession more than Mr Dion. He is Gold.”)

Refining Alberta’s role in Canada is not a popular sentiment for the NDP faction within the province. A separate petition, called the “Forever Canadian” petition, spearheaded last year by former Alberta Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk, calling for Alberta to remain part of Canada, collected over 400,000 signatures. Meanwhile, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation claims a separation referendum is illegal, because it fails to recognize the constitutionally protected rights of First Nations.

For the record Premier Danielle Smith favours a sovereign Alberta within a reimagined Canada. But she has said if the legal mechanism for a referendum— the one vexing the Toronto Star — is tripped then she will allow it to go to voters. Polling from one firm claims that jittery federalists are blaming MAGA for the hubbub. Not so says Stay Free Alberta official Mitch Sylvestre.“It’s very simple… We don’t want to become a 51st state. And that’s basically all there is to it.”

So how did we (finally) get here, that a referendum on Alberta’s place in/ outside Canada is likely to garner the requisite 177,000 votes? There is the long story (equalization payments). Then the middling story (under-representation in Ottawa). Then the story of the past decade of Alberta being used as a cash cow/ whipping post by the climate fanatics in Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government who wanted to keep Canadian oil in the ground while buying foreign oil from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. . 

The story of the past year is the 2025 federal election in which the anticipated large Conservative majority was foiled by Donald Trump’s musings about Canada’s sovereignty— and the panicked federal NDP running into the arms of Mark Carney’s Elbows Up stunt. It turned the certain CPC rout into as near-majority for Carney.

Where Alberta leavers had anticipated a sympathetic federal government they now were instead faced with a revived Liberal party extending its malign policies into the foreseeable future. Having seen the Liberals the past decade and doubting Carney’s honeyed promises to work with Alberta on energy projects, they’ve taken to the courts and American opinion. 

One thing is certain. They’re not taking advice from CBC’s At Issue. Lectures from Jean Chretien, the father of the Sponsorship Scandal, aren’t helpful either. Separation or a 51st state or remaining will be decided inside Alberta by Albertans.

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

"I don’t feel like I need to say anything but that no one is illegal on stolen land. Yeah, it’s really hard to know what to say and what to do right now.” Billie Eilish

No doubt Billie Eilish would disagree, but one of the abiding gifts of the British Empire was the establishment of property rights. The enshrined right of anyone to possession of their own home or property. To hundreds of millions around the planet the introduction of property rights is among the top benefits of Western civilization. 

It created the middle class, which led to democracy, which led to prosperity. It inspired Adam Smith to codify capitalism. (Billie might remind us about the horrors of the East Indian Company and Opium Wars. Whatever.) 

It was not for nothing that, in its earliest applications, the right to vote was restricted to those who held property. Influenced by John Locke’s ideas of property as a marker of societal contribution and independence, it was believed— and turned out largely to be true— that those with a dog in the fight were most likely to be the best stewards of the societies in which they lived.

Those possessing property decided what values their community would hold, what taxation could be applied, what laws would govern the group. They rejected absolute monarchy and divine right. Government legitimacy derived from popular consent and the protection of these rights, justifying resistance to tyranny.

It was noisy but effective. Over time suffrage was expanded to all citizens. (Everywhere but America that meant proving your identity.) Expanding the voting roles and liberalizing voting procedures didn’t work as well, but it was still judged effective enough by stakeholders.

Too effective for today’s autocrats and globalists who desire to run society themselves. It’s why people like Justin Trudeau talked openly of taxing the equity in property owners’ homes. People who wanted to order which vaccines you can take, how close you can stand to others, how many people could sit at your table in a restaurant. Who would put you in jail if you disagreed with wearing a mask. 

As the son of Pierre Trudeau, Justin came by high-handedness naturally. An authority figure in the ideal country. When it comes to governance, Canadians are big on go-along-to-get-along. Enforced behaviour is, after all, the cornerstone of Canada’s single-payer healthcare. There is no Column B on this menu. It gives the government the right to tell you how you can medicate yourself. How long you must wait it in line for treatment. When you can end your life. 

Everyone is meant to comply. The impertinence is why Trudeau was so shocked when the Truckers Convoy chose to defy him on vaccinations. It’s why he unlawfully invoked the Emergency Measures Act. It’s why most Canadians fell in line with Trudeau’s media buddies, condemning the truckers. 

It’s why so many who should know better are now all-in with Friend of China Mark Carney pivoting them to globalism and away from individuals rights. Trudeau’s successor knew that he couldn’t play Trudeau’s mandate with voters. So Carney flew around the world gathering wistful promises of a new world economic model led by China. 

His Elbows Up crowd, ecstatic at the idea of ditching Trump’s U.S., dreams that a freed-up Canadian economy will now roar. Sorry. The federal debt currently sits at $1.3 trillion, with over $60 billion a year in interest payments— roughly equivalent to every dollar of GST revenue. The federal sales tax is now effectively servicing the debt— not to build anything, fix anything, or improve anything. No wonder the economy is described as ‘on life support’ with Canada’s monetary establishment driving a “train wreck”.

Canadian money has been leaving the country at a far faster pace than foreign investment has been coming in — a gap approaching one trillion dollars. (Carney’s former firm Brookfield is among those who’ve skedaddled south from Canada.) Someone will have to make up the gap. 

Which brings up to those pesky people who own their own homes.  For good reason they’re less than convinced that Carney and his B.C. lieutenant David Eby are not going to make a move on the home equity they’ve gathered. 

Already Eby is cutting deals with Billie Eilish’s friends in the B.C. native community to give unelected chiefs controls over crown lands. Or partial ownership of homes thought to be owned by the middle class. Or the land upon which the Vancouver International Airport stands. They hope that by the time the public wakes up to this attack on property rights it will be too late. 

How worried is Carney about blowback? Not very. He’s watched the abject Billie Eilish surrender of the Canadian managerial class to land acknowledgements that harken to some half-remembered native nirvana. He’s seen his dimwit cabinet member Marc Miller suggest that black communities have contributed to Canada for “over 400 years”. 

He knows that given the right circumstances (Trump saying something about Canada’s failing economy) he will have the Boomers in his palm. As Dan Donovan writes, “Mark Carney speaks with the confidence of a man who has spent years being applauded in rooms where applause is cheap. Davos loves him. International panels love him. The global financial class loves him. 

And why wouldn’t they? Carney is fluent in the language of elite reassurance, the soothing cadence of “values‑based realism,” “strategic autonomy,” and “mobilizing a trillion dollars in investment.”

He’s so worried that he’s likely to call a snap election this spring. If he gets his majority control of your home will be one of his tasks. As for Eilish, she might not be in her mansion much longer. The Indian tribe that once owned the property now wants to take her up on her offer to make all land titles void. Mayber she can then write a song about karma.

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

“Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost.” — Thomas Merton

In the 1999 comedy Bowfinger, Steve Martin (playing a director) talks his  simple-minded production assistant (played by Eddie Murphy) into running across the busy interstate like he’s a movie action hero. Martin’s character says the speeding cars are driven by stunt drivers. Martin tells him that pretty Heather Graham is waiting for him on the other side. He says it will make the nerdy character, a dead ringer for star Kit Ramsey (also played by Eddie Murphy) into a film star.

It’s hilarious slapstick watching a clearly terrified Murphy dodge trucks and buses on the 405 highway (spoiler alert: he makes it.) It also puts us in mind of the real thing: how earnest, virtue-seeking liberal idiots like Renee Good and Alex Pretti are being convinced to put themselves in harm’s way to fight the hated Donald Trump and his ICE henchmen on behalf of Obama World. In spite of polling that shows Americans want the bums out of the country.

Here are the governor of Minnesota and the Justin Trudeau lookalike mayor of Minneapolis whipping up ther locals. Here are teary late-night TV meat puppets like Jummy Kimmel volunteering others to take risks they’d never take themselves. And here are former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, who both used to be all-in on deporting dangerous immigrants, subscribing to a plan to stage a 2020 coup against Trump

(Never heard on CNN or MSNews how over 100 former CIA leaders, leftwing politicians and Rob Reiner war gamed the project to create a coup against Donald Trump? Here is the Election Transition Integrity plan. )

If you are a nebbish Mark Ruffalo wannabe, hiving with over-medicated Karens, Marxist grad students in their Che/ Bill Walton T Shirts, this might move you to run across a highway for the revolution. Or take a handgun as you harass ICE agents as did serial protester Pretti, the former nurse turned vigilante.

But there’s no doubt that the most powerful Democrats in Washington and Hollywood (we see you, Edward Norton) are set to employ the shock troops, doubling down on their plans for the midterm elections. All it requires is a steady stream of death-wish devotees to flood the streets (Rachel Maddow of MSNow estimates 3.5 percent of the population should do it) and the media will do the rest to create a CIA-inspired colour revolution. 

In Canada the gullible target group playing in the traffic is Elbows Up, slappies who remain convinced that the best way to protect Canada is to entrust its future to the party that flushed the proud legacy of Canada down the Trudeau toilet for ten years. The buy-in is somewhat less dangerous work than dodging cars on the 401 or interrupting the Mounties as they make a drug bust. So it’s working.

Mark Carney’s persuasion technique is, as befits all Liberal schemes, a soft-sell potage of hockey themes and boycotting a Florida/ California winter vaycay. All you have to do is accept that you can take a little more China in your diet without any side effects, and that you can dump the U.S. economy, which represents $2.5 billion/ day in trade— without any loss in lifestyle.(And please, no questions about his Brookfield connections.)

Carney’s secret sauce is brash, bombastic Trump, whom the financially dependent Canadian media has made into Hitler’s successor. Whenever Carney is caught in a trap— say, reversing himself on China— he just applies a generous dollop of Trump and government-supported press do the rest. Seems to be working.

A year after his switcheroo with Trudeau before the election, Carney’s personal popularity remains far ahead of Pierre Poilievre, the punching bag of the Conservatives (Carney: 53% (+2) Poilievre: 25% (-) But that doesn’t translate to party. Despite all the hosannas bathing Carney, his Liberals are barely ahead of the Conservatives with the NDP vote heading back to the party under Avi Lewis (LPC: 39% (-5) CPC: 35% (-6) NDP: 12% (+6))

The noisy nature of American democracy is the thing about America that Canada’s toffs cite to puff themselves up is . The ability for people as diverse as Donald Trump and AOC to be allowed a voice offends many protected by Canada’s airless political environment. It’s why the impertinent Truckers Convoy shocked the Laurentian establishment and necessitated Trudeau’s overreaction, unlawfully invoking the Emergency Measures Act. 

The ability to stifle dissent in Canada may be at risk, however. As we have written since before the election the ruling Liberals have lost the U-50 cohort. A Jan. 18 poll by Abacus Data found that among respondents aged 18 to 29, 50 per cent indicated an intention to vote Conservative next time. They’re not buying their parents’ bull. The disparity extends into older demos until you hit the 60-plus Boomers, the Liberals’ sweet spot. 

In short, wiggle room is running out for Carney’s advantage. Death and MAID will start to tell. By which time it will be too late to turn out the Ottawa street brigades. Or wave bye-bye to Alberta, Saskatchewan or Quebec.

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

@DavidJPba Listening to Canadians defend a genocidal communist regime, as a “good ally”, because Americans said mean words about us, is peak Canada. A people whose only identity is feeling smugly superior to Americans, which is of course, a complete delusion.”

“Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way. They should be grateful but they're not. I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn't so grateful. But they should be grateful to us. Canada. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, next time you make your statements.” Donald Trump to WEF

If there’s anything Canada learned from its ten-year dance with Justin Trudeau is that, as bad as things were, he could always make them worse. His inept handling of the indigenous file destroyed relations with tribes and now has homeowners fearing for title on their properties. His authoritarian embrace of the climate hustle set competing parts of the country at each other’s throats.

But nothing compares to the utter depravity of his Covid orthodoxy imposed upon a frightened nation. Take your pick from the Trudeau/ Liberal abominations inflicted on the country. Total lockdowns. Mandatory masking. Quarantine hotels. Arresting people of faith for holding services while liquor stores and big box outlets stayed open. 

But nothing surrounding Covid demonstrated the caudillo arrogance of the trust-fund fool better than his imposition of mandatory vaccination for the entire population. Supported by a hysterical press pushing fake positives, Trudeau’s command was, Take the experimental juice or you’ll kill grandmothers. Or be denied health care. Or be refused re-entry into the country.

In the face of this arrogance came the noisy Truckers who invaded Ottawa with their rowdy-but-peaceful protest and their Bouncy Castles. We won’t re-hash the entire sequence of events that led to Trudeau’s government imposing the Emergency Measures Act— except to say he and his lapdog media friends painted the protesters as neo-Nazis or worse for hinking their horns too loudly.

The house organ CBC suggested that the Convoy might be a Putin project. (It wasn’t.) Mainstream media flacks asserted that funding from shadowy right-wing Americans was funding the noisy disruption to life in the capital (It wasn’t). They also accused truckers of setting fires, threatening women and trying to overthrow Parliament. (All untrue.)

In a shameless session of Parliament on February 14, 2022, 158 Liberals— joined by 25 NDP, 1 Green and 1 Independent— imposed the Emergency Act on Canada. This encouraged Trudeau to send mounted police after the protesters, his government to seize the bank accounts and funds of the truckers and to jail the leaders of the movement on “nuisance” charges. 

All this done by a PM who quavered behind his security, unwilling or unable to meet the Truckers to hear their grievances. Even as international voices decried his high-handed emulation of his father Pierre, the Dauphin stuck to his decision to arrest his opponents, steal their finances and jail their leaders. Why not? The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Richard Wagner, publicly called protestors anarchists and hostage takers.

Now with Trudeau dating Katy Perry and his successor Carney linking arms with China, Qatar and the globalist authoritarians at Davos, the Federal Court of Appeals has confirmed that the invocation of the Emergencies Act was unlawful, that statutory thresholds were not met, and that fundamental Charter rights including freedom of expression, protection against unreasonable search and seizure, were violated. 

It also held that the freezing of Canadians’ bank accounts was unlawful and occurred without the constitutional safeguards required in a free and democratic society. (The current Prime Minister, then a private citizen, concurred that Canadians’ bank accounts should be frozen.) This is now the second Canadian court to reach the same conclusion.

Hard to get slapped down harder than that. But will the architects of the Liberal/ NDP “unlawful” Act be made to account? Should the seven current cabinet ministers (Dominic LeBlanc, Mélanie Joly, François-Philippe Champagne, Anita Anand, Patty Hajdu, Marc Miller, Sean Fraser) who lied and bullied the vote be forced to resign? Does the Chief Justice— who has financially supported the current PM— withdraw or at least apologize for pre-judging? 

Please, this is Canada in 2026. Where the ruling elite is obsessed with Donald Trump insulting their vanity. Here’s the Toronto Star blaming the financial failure of re-named Dundas Square on POTUS 47. “Sankofa Square lost a lot of money last year due to protests and Donald Trump. Can the downtown Toronto landmark turn the corner this year?” (No proof of the Trump claim is provided.)

In the face of such triviality the aforementioned Little Banker continues his campaign to align Canada with China and the globalists of the EU. Announcing himself as the saviour of the West, a grinning PM hobnobbed with the Chinese as if they were the 4-H Club. Says former hostage and Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig: ”Diplomacy is necessary, grinning is optional and looking like a supplicant is undignified… That’s not a good look."

But the chattering class says it’s no big whoop. “@LMartinOtt We've always traded with China which is our second biggest trading partner. Now that Trump is cutting back on our U.S. market, we'll trade a little more with China. Hardly a shocking move.” And this CBC panel of blue-check hacks says America’s human rights abuses are somehow comparable to China’s. Ho-hum.

(For those inclined to buy Carney’s quick-change to China on trade: “@JoelleAdler USA is 80% of our trade and it is a NET SURPLUS FOR CANADA, helping our economy. (100B surplus 2025) CHINA is 7% of our trade and it runs a MASSIVE deficit It Will take 25 yrs to replace USA.”)

Having placed America’s sworn enemy at its northern border, Carney’s cabinet reneged on its pledge to NATO allies to spend two percent of GDP on military preparedness by December 31. @NationalDefence had no public comment and would not release its internal estimate of military spending under Access To Information.

Former CIA chief Mike Pompeo is blunt. “Mark Carney's decision to pivot toward China is a grave strategic and moral error. Beware any leader who would sell out his country for a mess of pottage.” Trump's Transport Secretary Sean Duffy condemns letting Chinese EVs into the country. "They will live to regret the day they let the Chinese Communist Party flood the market with their EVs,”

Security expert Dennis Molinaro is also unequivocal about doing deals with China. “@Dennismolin11 It was hostage diplomacy, and not a novel tactic. The mistake was believing trade could ever be separated from security consequences with China.”

The Hogue inquiry into Chinese interference confirmed Trudeau's office was warned about leaks of intelligence to China, but did nothing. Now CSIS and Five Eyes partners withhold details from Canadian officials due to fears of leaks. (Trudeau, meanwhile, is sashaying around Davos with his squeeze.)

As former Liberal Justice minister (fired by Justin) Jody Wilson Reynold observes, “It is something to turn on the news & watch my former Cabinet colleagues say & do the exact opposite of what they claimed to be committed to when I was there. Total lack of principles & backbone. No wonder there is so much cynicism & contempt for our political leaders.”

But Carney’s still grinning. He knows the Laurentian Elbows Up crew has an inexhaustible appetite for abuse and kow-towing to authority. Till that is drained expect more of the same— and a nasty turf war with Trump over China at his border wearing Canadian clothes.

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

Report: BEIJING — Mark Carney arrived in China Thursday seeking closer ties, but President Xi Jinping did not appear, send a greeting, or publicly acknowledge the visit. The muted reception underscored an uncomfortable reality: Beijing sees Canada as useful, not important.

Like fellow Canadian Hank Snow, prime minister Mark Carney is a travelling man. He’s been everywhere, man. He’s flying away from Canada so much that they’re offering the House of Parliament as an Air BnB.

This trip is a familiar one for a Liberal PM. No, he’s not headed to Tofino to surf. He’s headed to China on a mission to pretend Canada is pulling away from Donald Trump’s America. It’s one of a series of humiliating jaunts since he became PM that have also taken him to anywhere Brookfield Investments can turn a buck. IOW Everywhere. 

But China is very on the nose for Liberals. Since Jean Chretien hoofed it to China in his final acts as PM— with son-in-law Andre Desmarais in tow— to escape the AdScam stain he bought on himself, China is like a second home for the Grits. They dreamed big dreams of being the first Western nation to plunder China’s economy. 

What they discovered was, instead, a Faustian bargain in which the Chinese grabbed Canadian technology from the visitors while Canadians accepted Chinese spying in Canada. Stories of being swindled by the Communist party were everywhere. But this didn’t stop Chretien and his successors from competing with the Hunter Bidens and other corrupt foreign bag men from doing the pretzel dance with the CCP. 

As Sam Cooper and others have shown the quid-pro-quo for Canada from the longed-for embrace of China was using this country as a friendly place to launder money. Heaps of money, much of it in real estate and drugs. Here we documented the mysterious assembly of land in tiny PEI.  One of Trump’s complaints against Canada in 2025 was this incestuous tangle of foreign interests just north of his border. Somehow, Canadians were surprised. 

The most noxious example of the see-no-evil approach during the Justin Trudeau years was the amazing story emerging from Canada's National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg. At the height of Covid, two Chinese scientists smuggled deadly Ebola viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and were allowed to escape Canada (they are now living in China under aliases and have been given special new positions.) Their partner in the research? Michel Chretien, Jean’s brother. 

The story touched upon the highest level of the Trudeau government, and yet the incident was buried in the interests of China/ Canada relationship. Suggestions of the Wuhan connection were stifled as bad-think during Covid when Trudeau shut down the country to protect the official line that no one was sure where the virus came from. Also to deflect from his government getting fleeced by China is a deals for PPE and respirators.

But this confluence of corruption is just a small slice of the story. A former CSIS Officer stated that the agency can prove that every federal government from Mr. Mulroney to Mr. Trudeau has been compromised by agents of the CCP. An allegation that has simply been ignored by the globalist cult running Ottawa.

The Chretien legacy has also resulted in a stealth inversion of Canadian politics and society— all performed with casual cynicism by the Liberals. The most recent example was Carney pinching a Conservative MP of Chinese origin to cross the floor to help him get to a majority in the House. Newly minted Liberal MP Michael Ma in now joining PM Carney on a friendship visit to Beijing.

For those who like details here is a chart assembled to help people follow the money in the China/ Canada relationship.   The current trip is a furtherance of these many connections and a jab in the eye (and elbow?) to Trump for taking a hard line on China.

The eye candy in the visit is Carney trading EV tariffs for China dropping tariffs on Canada’s canola, which the Trudeau government blundered into. Security expert Dennis Molinaro warns, “If Canada trades EV tariff relief for market access, it undercuts an allied security framework and reinforces the U.S. position that its tariffs are national-security driven. A weak fentanyl case becomes a strong China and supply-chain case because of Canada’s own actions.”

In case anyone was hoping for a bold step forward in Carney’s “new” relationship with China that was dashed by visiting Liberal MPs slinking out of a Taiwan visit so as not to draw attention from Carney’s epic moves. Former Canadian ambassador to China David Mulroney is unimpressed. “It tells Beijing everything it needs to know about how spineless and amateurish Canada's ruling party is. Our opening position couldn't be weaker. The visit has become a damage limitation exercise.”

But blissful Boomers remain besotted by the little banker traveling the world and shaking important hands as if it were Lester Pearson solving the Suez crisis. As Trump has repeatedly stated— to the horror of Canadian Elbows Up— their country is now an ineffectual duchy living on dreams of past glory. 

As just one example, the Fraser institute reports that In 2025, an estimated 105,529 Canadians, tired of lineups and delays that can last years, travelled abroad for medical care. More patients (10,320) travelled abroad last year for general surgeries than any other treatment. 

Trump aside, if Carney doesn’t have Canadians on health care he’s a dead Liberal walking. 

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

“The Canadians are ridiculous. We don't need to use military force against Canada. The Salvation Army could defeat Canada.” @WallStreetMav

Canada is not a nation to rush into anything. As an example, its government has been ragging the puck since February when Trump told them he was fed up with them bringing six beers to the party but drinking nine. 

For some time it seemed possible for Mark Carney to placate the Liberal blue hairs with the EU card and his jingoistic Elbows Up charade. But the past two weeks have seen Ferris Bueller’s words take on special meaning. “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it,”

And so events are forcing sated, satisfied Canadians to finally look around. Trump plucked Venezuelan presidente Maduro from his palace in Venezuela, the Iranian mullahs are on the brink of a coup. Documents tying Barack Obama to a coup attempt in 2017 have been released. The Democratic VP candidate last November has pulled out of the Minnesota governor’s race because he’s been found at the top of a massive bribery scheme. 

A committed Marxist preaching the warmth of communalism has become mayor of New York City. And Trump, God bless him. is reviving visions of Seward’s Folly by annexing Greenland and controlling the trade lanes in the North Atlantic. 

In Canada Trudeau’s deputy PM Chrystia Freeland has decamped to Ukraine to advise them on how to collapse their economy as she did Canada’s, leaving Elbows Up three seats short of the majority Liberals crave. Carney is flying off again to pretend to negotiate with new trade partners. That’s a full docket for two weeks.

But it’s America’s Venezuela dash for cash that has broken the glass on Canadians’ trance. The seizure of the means of Venezuela’s oil production has freaked out the Liberals’ blue-hair base who’ve been assuming Alberta’s petroleum was leverage in the non-existent negotiations with Trump. Many see Venezuela flooding the market again as catastrophic for a country that uses energy to backstop its sputtering economy. 

The realization that Trump might actually launch (gasp) an Ottawa military event to protect the Hemisphere now has gained a foothold among the Canadian ben pensants. This incursion would not feature Bouncy Castles. Needless to say the fainting goats of the Laurentian elite have tried surpassing each other in scenarios where Carney is hauled away by his heels as crack Canadian DEI dragoons get locked in the Commons bathroom. 

The Americans will march down Wellington Street! Panic! “@JeanCharest_Jan 5. The military operation in Venezuela confirms the new U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), particularly towards the Americas and, therefore, Canada.” Bob Rae, the last Pearsonian left in Canadian Foreign Affairs insists that Canada is on the menu Chez Trump. 

In The Line Jen Gerson takes the temperature of a Canada caught unawares. “Maduro’s extraordinary rendition seems to have hit a real nerve here in Canada among those who have correctly realized that an America that doesn’t need our oil is an America that has the luxury of setting its own trade terms. To be honest, some of this analysis has bordered on the unrealistic, and even hysterical.” 

(While Trump has everyone’s eyes on oil it’s incumbent to note that the Maduro extraction is a checkmate for the Chinese who are buying large tracts of the Americas. It’s also a gotcha to the Russians and their pals in Cuba that their clubhouse on the Caribbean is down for repairs.)

A recent editorial in the Globe&Mail shows peak panic on Parliament Hill. . “We need to prepare for the possibility that the U.S, use military coercion against Canada.” Cry harder. In a broadside of hot leads and overheated logic, the G&M authors see America using duplicitous Alberta as the pathway into an invasion. Not to be outdone, the yellow stain Toronto Star posed, “ After Trump’s capture of Venezuela’s Maduro, does Doug Ford need to watch his back?”

The concept of a military invasion Is hysteria squared. As anyone who knows a quant from a quart can attest, Canada’s debt status means that the U.S. need only recall its auto industry or withdraw its defence capabilities to bring Canada on bended knee. No tanks needed. Sign the paper.. Over by dinnertime.

To forestall Carney being captured by Trump, Team Elbows Up announced its sudden focus on foreign money laundering and political interference by the Chinese and others. Yet Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree proposes to weaken foreign registry mandated by Parliament 19 months ago with penalties as modest as $50 fines, and that cash payments to foreign agents remain hidden: “Regulations would allow certain information not to be published,” he told reporters.

At the same time a former New York-based employee of TD Bank N.A, Wilfredo Aquino, pleaded guilty to facilitating a money-laundering network moving hundreds of millions of dollars through TD Bank accounts. This coming on the heels of TD Bank being fined $3B US for facilitating money laundering.

But what’s a few billion between neighbours? Once again it’d be champagne dreams and caviar wishes for the gourmets running Canada. If only they click their heels three times and say, “Send him home” Trump will be impeached or assassinated or sent to Mars by Elon Musk— allowing Carney to bring Greta Thunberg into his cabinet for business as usual. 

But in their secret hearts they must know time’s up. This new geopolitics has no time for a nation that mailed it in for a decade under Trudeau the Younger (and Stupider). The bill has come due ,and Trump means to collect.

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 cavas 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. T”he 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 grap 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. descfribed. 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

“The unifying theme that enables the Liberal party to maintain its hold over Canada is persistent anti-Americanism…I hope Canadians finally mature, acknowledge that we are neither superior nor inferior to the United States, and abandon our collective national inferiority complex.” Conrad Black quotes a friend. 

Canadian media have almost always been reflexively anti-American. Fair enough. Abandoned by Britain they needed to push back. But the real fear of being consumed by the rebel colonies to the south has morphed into a fear of Donald Trump reminding Canada that it has been riding first class while paying economy. 

Bashing noisy, bumptious America has always been good business if you owned a Canadian newspaper or television/radio network. The performative worship of Canadian leaders who cocked a snook at the Yankees led, in recent times, to the open-mouthed support for the fatuous Trudeaupian line of monarchs. As Ray Davies sang, “each one a dedicated follower of fashion.”

Since Pierre “The Bold” Trudeau succeeded Lester Pearson and ascended to the throne of the Family Compact in 1968, Canadian policy from Viet Nam to Trump has become “What are the Americans doing? Then let’s do the opposite”. Sample of spite: CBS TV pulled a controversial 60 Minutes news story —but it aired in Canada after being leaked by pissed-off CBS employees.

Yes, there was the brief Harper interregnum when Canada actually fought a military campaign alongside the U.S. in Afghanistan. But mostly it was Jean “Golf Balls” Chretien sitting out the Iraq War. 

Alas, all good things must end. Or at least pause. People were starting to notice that Justy was a Chinese trusty, his Montreal riding campaign funded by hundreds of Chinese “businessman” from far away. The tragi-comic Trudeuapian succession hit a speed bump with Mark Carney being brought in to domesticate Canada in manner satisfactory to Brookfield and the EU. 

But no one is betting the Libs won’t turn to a third generation of Quebec fashionistas— in the form of another Trudeau progeny— when all else fails. 

As usual caustic Conrad Black sums up Canada best. With Quebec and Alberta talking separation he quotes a friend con the state of the nation. “What exists instead is a Liberal Party that manages — often quite poorly — the finances of a collection of provinces and territories, while relying on its media apparatus to shape and safeguard its narrative. It resembles a hedge fund supported by an image consulting firm.” (Insert your convict felon/ anglo wannabe reference here.)

There is no doubt that, as 2025 skulks out, the “image-consulting firm” painting rosy pictures of the Laurentian Elite is in for a a challenge. Justin thought using Trump as his pretext could achieve peace by buying up the lads and lasses of the fourth estate. It worked with Covid and the Truckers Convoy as the column writers/ panel hosts dutifully wrote it like he called it (even as the internstional press chided Trudeau.). 

But even those good times didn’t last, forcing the Libs to do a presto-chango before Justin could lead them to a catastrophic defeat in the spring election. Once more, faced with Trump’s aggressive posture toward trade with Canada, the press closed ranks over Elbows Up, portraying CPC leader Pierre Poilievre as Dick Dastardly.  

But new polling shows that the burst of enthusiasm for more Liberal pantomime is wearing thin. The new “new” trade deal promised with Trump has dissipated. The threat to private home ownership in B.C. by government’s indigenous land concessions has sent a chill through the middle class. The NDP fainting goats who bought Elbows Up are headed back to Crazytown, likely under Avi Lewis.

Now, at last, the reckoning promised by the Conservatives’ 20-point lead in polling this time last year may be at hand. While the diehards will go their graves mumbling land acknowledgements and 32 pronouns, there is hope that the under 60s— who emphatically support the Tories— will force change.

What change? Tristan Hopper in the National Post suggests that one place to start reforming the jalopy of Canadian government is in the oceans of money lavished on cause-related political leeches. Seeing the Bondi Beach slaughter by ISIS radicals many now question how long before Toronto or Montreal experiences a similar tragedy at the hands of jihadis who are lavishly supported by tax money. 

Yes, not all Muslims in the West are terrorists. But almost all terrorists in the West are Muslim. Hate-spewing Hamas groupies from college faculty are regularly allowed major intersections with police protection as they promise to wipe out infidels. Till now it’s been poor form to even mention, let alone criticize, this pantomime. 

Withdrawing financial aid to these groups and their academic fellow travellers would immediately rob these brigands of their impact. The cries of despair from cutting the cord would also expose those in the Commons who have coddled these vipers with grants and ministries.

Similar hacking at the slush money aimed at every other form of leftist posing— from trans to indigenous to illegal immigrants— would also mark the end of free money. Of course there will be caterwauling from the Elizabeth May Free Lunch crew. But with the threat of Canada coming apart with Quebec and Alberta/ Saskatchewan headed for the door those usual dissenting voices will be muted.

Only one thing stands in the way of this culling. That is PM Mark Carney coercing one more MP to cross the floor to his party, cementing its majority status for up to four more years. While the At Issue panels slap their flippers in glee at Poilievre’s demise, the rest of the nation will be less enthralled with the new realities of censorship, trade and housing. 

As Stephen Punwasi states. “People in Canada can’t afford homes & prices can’t fall because debt was securitized with widespread fraud—so taxpayers will subsidize foreign speculation. It’s like they hired the mayor of Vancouver to run housing. Oh—they did, eh? Kids, run.”

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

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. Foregt 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 @AlJazeeraWorldviewers 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 int 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

Breaking: President Donald Trump signals that America could exit the USMCA entirely. This is extinction level to Canada. Talking about 400,000 jobs and an instant severe recession!““

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.” George Bernard Shaw

In the days immediately following Donald Trump’s rude intervention into the 2025 Canadian federal election— suggesting Canada might best choose American statehood— two schools of thought emerged.

The first and most impactful school in the short term was the fainting-goat response of Canadian’s elites. Sensing an opening in which to erode Pierre Poilievre’s massive lead in the 2024 polls over Justin Trudeau, the Laurentian elite concocted Elbows Up, a self-pity response long on hurt feelings and short on addressing the issues Trump had cited in his trashing of the Canadian nation state. 

In short order they fired Trudeau into oblivion, imported career banker Mark Carney as their new leader in a sham convention and convinced Canada’s Boomers that Trump had the tanks ready to go into Saskatchewan at a moment’s notice. The Elbows Up meme— citing Gordie Howe— clinched the group pout.

(In fact, Trump has said that America is the world’s greatest market, and if those who’ve used it for free in the past [Canada] want to keep special access they need to pay tariffs to the U.S. or drop protectionist charges on dairy and more against the U.S.)

The ruse worked out better than they could have ever imagined with Trump even saying he preferred to negotiate with Carney over Poilievre. In short order the Tories were shoved aside, the NDP kneecapped and the pet media anointed Carney the genius skewing Canada away from its largest trade partner to the Eurosphere. We remain in that bubble, although the fulsome promises of Carney’s first days are now coming due. 

Which brings us to the second reaction. That was Alberta premier Danielle Smith bolting to Mar A Lago in the days following Trump’s comments. Her goal was to put pride aside and accept that a new world order was in play for Canada. She met with U.S. officials and, briefly, with Trump to remind them that Canada’s energy industry was integral to American prosperity and Canadian stability.

Needless to say, the fainting goats pitched a fit that not everyone was clutching pearls and rending garments in the wake of Trump’s dismissive assessment of his northern neighbours. Their solution to Trump was to join China in retaliatory tariffs— the only two nations to do so— and to boycott American products and travel. Like the ascetic monks they cut themselves off from real life. Trump has yet to get back to Carney the Magnificent

And Smith? She was a “traitor” or a “subversive” who should be keel hauled in the North Saskatchewan. For much of the intervening months she has been attacked at home in Alberta by the N-Deeps and in Ottawa by just about everyone on CBC, CTV, Global and the Globe & Mail. “How could she meet with the Cheeto?”

Nonetheless conservatives in the province moved toward a more independence within Canada. Smith articulated her demands for Alberta to prevent a referendum on whether to remain within Confederation. At the top of her list were pipelines and access to tidewater. Ergo, a no-go for BC’s squish premier David Eby who is the process of handing over his province to First Nations. 

It became obvious that for all of Carney’s alleged diplomacy in Europe and Asia (is the man ever home?) he had a brewing disaster in the West with Alberta and Saskatchewan growing restless. In a striking move against the status quo, Nutrien announced it would ship its potash to tidewater via the U.S., thereby bypassing Vancouver’s strike-prone, outdated port and denying them billions. 

Suddenly, Smith’s business approach began making eminent good sense if the goal is to keep Canada as one. So we saw last week’s “memorandum of understanding” between Alberta and Ottawa trading off carbon capture and carbon taxes for potential pipelines to tidewater on the B.C. coast. A little bit of something for everyone and a surrender on other things. 

The most amazing feature of the Mark Carney/Danielle Smith MOU is that both politicians probably need the deal to fail. Carney can tell fossil-fuel enemy Quebec that he tried to reason with Smith, and Smith can say she tried to meet the federalists halfway. Failure suits their larger purposes. Which is for Carney to fold Canada into Euro climate insanity and Smith into a strong leverage against the pro-Canada petitioners in her province,

Soon enough, at the AFN Special Chiefs Assembly, FN Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak told Carney that  "Turtle Island" (the FN term for North America popularized by white hippy poet Gary Snyder) belongs to the FN people "from coast to coast to coast.” The pusillanimous Eby quickly piped up about tanker bans and the sanctity of B.C. waters etc.

Others pointed out the massive flaw in a plan to attract private interests to build a vital bitumen pipeline if the tankers it fills are not allowed to  sail through the Dixon Entrance to get to Asia. 

But then Eby got Nutrien’s message that his power-sharing with the indigenous might cause other provinces to bypass B.C. (imagine California telling Texas it can’t ship through its ports over moral objections to a product). He’s now saying he’s open to pipelines but not to lift the tanker ban along the coast. Whatever.

Meanwhile the kookaburras of isolation back east continue with virtue signalling on American booze— N.S. to sell off its remains stocks — while dreaming that Trump’s departure will lead to the good-old days of reliance on Americas’s generosity. 

But Smith looks to be wining the race. B.C.’s population shrank 0.04 percent in the second quarter of 2025, the only jurisdiction in Canada to do so. Meanwhile, Alberta is heading toward five million people, with interprovincial migrants making up 21 percent of its growth.

But what did you expect from the Carney/ Eby Tantrum Tandem? They keep selling fear in place of GDP. As GBS observed, “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.”

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: Ottawa and Alberta have reached a memorandum of understanding that paves the way for, among other things,. a new oil pipeline in return for higher carbon taxes.. How’s it doing? B.C. and Quebec both reject the idea. The Liberals former Climate minister resigned his cabinet post.

The most amazing feature of the Mark Carney/Danielle Smith MOU is that both politicians feverishly hope that the deal fails. Carney can tell Quebec that he tried to reason with Smith, and Smith can say she tried to meet the federalists halfway. Failure suits their larger purposes. Carney to fold Canada into Euro climate insanity and Smith into a strong motive for separation.

We’ll have more in. our next column. In trhe meantime, another Alberta initiative on healthcare has stirred up the hornets of single payer.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “Canada’s health system is the worst in the world. Except for all the other systems.” If there is anything left that Canadians agree upon it’s that their provincial healthcare plan is a disaster that needs a boatload of new money and the same old class rhetoric about two-tier healthcare.  

Both prescriptions have been tried multiple times since Tommy Douglas made single-payer healthcare a reality. As a result today’s delivery systems are constantly strained to breaking and the money poured in to support it evaporates in red tape and vested interests. 

But suggest that Canada adopt the method of somewhere else and you get back stares. Who does it better? How can we copy that? Crickets. Then ask governments to cut back and create efficiencies. No one wants totell the unions thay are the first to move. As a result, operating rooms sit empty for lack of trained nurses and rationed doctors. The system is all dressed with nowhere to go. And never is heard a discouraging word.

Southpontiac Breaking news! MD frequently mentioned by CBC and Toronto Star adamant that Canadian healthcare system is functioning perfectly and any and all criticism is unwarranted. Canadians are just experiencing healthcare differently.

There are many earnest people trying their best to fit the square peg in the round hole. But so far it has produced a Frankenstein quilt of private clinics in other provinces handling overflows and American hospitals taking tens of thousands of overflows or critical cases. Ontarians travelling to Quebec for knee surgery. Albertans heading to eastern B.C. for hips and shoulders. Nova Scotians going to Boston for back surgery.

To say nothing of the legions of Canadians on waiting lists for terminal cancer or heart problems who, in despair of dying before seeing a socialist in 18-24 months, voyage to Lithuania, India or Mexico to save their lives. Everyone knows a story of a family member or friend surgery shopping. Every Canadian health authority sympathizes. But little solves the problem.

Which has led to predictable grumbling. @Tablesalt13 if the Liberals hadn’t surged immigration over the last 4-5 years and if all of the money spent on refugees and foreign aid was redirected to health care how much shorter would Canada's medical waitlists be?

And if any small progress is made the radical armies opposed to two-tiered healthcare raise a stink in the media, stopping that progress in its tracks. Suggesting public/ private healthcare systems is a quick trip to a Toronto Star editorial and losing your next election. 

Into the impasse Alberta has introduced Bill 11 to create a parallel private–public surgery system that allows surgeons to perform non-urgent procedures privately under set conditions, moving ahead with the premier’s announcement last week.The government says the approach will shorten wait times and help recruit doctors, while critics argue it risks two-tier care. 

The legislation marks a major shift in healthcare reform in Alberta and faces (shock) strong opposition from the NDP which is pairing these reforms with the province’s use of the notwithstanding clause in banning radical trans surgery and medication for minors in the province. 

There are examples of two-tiered healthcare elsewhere in the West. France , Ireland, Denmark, Switzerland and Germany, among others, use a dual-tracked system mixing public and private coverages. Reports FHI, “In the most successful European healthcare systems, e.g., Germany and Switzerland, the federal government handles the PEC risk, via national pools and government subsidies, sparing the burden on individual insurers.” While not perfect it hasn’t produced class warfare. 

The Americans, meanwhile learned to their chagrin with ObamaCare (the Affordable Care Act, that government healthcare is not the answer. The U.S. heath system replaces government accounting with health insurance rationers as the immoveable force. Many Americans were outside this traditional system, paying out-of-pocket. Under the Obama plan everyone would be forced into a plan, like it or not. 

The AFI continues, “ACA has a flawed design. Its architects meant to appeal to the public, promising what the old system could not fully deliver – guaranteed access to affordable health cover and coverage for pre-existing conditions (PECs). But they were wrong about being able to keep your doctor or your old policy if you wanted.

Previously individual policies had to exclude PEC coverage to be financially viable. Yet employer group policies often covered it after a waiting period, but the extra costs were spread over their fellow workers – a real burden on medium and small-sized companies. Under Obamacare, the very high PEC costs are still spread too narrowly – on each of the very few insurers who have agreed to stay as exchange insurers.”

In other words getting a universal system that helps the needy while not degrading treatment is illusory. Alberta is willing to admit that fact. Like agreement on pipelines it will face nothing but headwinds from the diehards (pun intended) who still believe Michael Moore’s fairy tales about a free system in Canada. And will do nothing to bind Canada’s warring factions.

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.