Category: New

The sidewalk artist writes ‘It’s all my own work,’

And it’s why I claim copyright, so don’t be a jerk.

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PM Stephen Harper pissed off the Arab Emirates,

Lacking diplomatic skills, friendship he obliterates.

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Next week’s hearing at the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) in Gatineau is not really about ownership of Canada’s largest English-language television network.  It is about the millions of Canadians with their Blackberries, iPods, iPhones and next generation cell phones who will want to pay a few dollars each month to receive sports highlights and updates on their hand-held, hi-definition connection.  And sports fans are just one of the markets being fought over.

It is CTV who’s ownership is being argued next week. This is the network that paid an outrageous price to buy the 2010 and 2012 Olympic Games to squeeze out the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  And then they lured away the CBC’s best people to help them make it happen.  (These are the same kindly people who then demanded that cable and satellite companies pay to carry their local off-air TV signals.  Mind you, the cable and satellite companies did them one better.  As the dust settles, the cable and satellite companies own everything.)

So who wants to buy CTV?  It is not like there was a bidding war or any other crass financial argument over who would win the prize.  After all there are not many Canadian companies that could casually come up with $3 billion from the petty cash drawer.  Bell Canada Enterprises is back in play, again.  Even BCE had to leave about half the money in subordinated debt.

Behind the war of words next week, the war over sports fans is just warming up.  The CBC has teamed with Shaw Cable (which owns Global) to challenge the Rogers-CTV consortium for the 2014 and 2016 Olympics.  This will be the more interesting challenge as many will root for the CBC-Shaw underdogs.

We are about a year away from the more interesting battle over Hockey Night in Canada.  This is forecast as a three-way battle between the incumbent CBC, the Bell-owned CTV/TSN and Rogers’ Sportsnet.  At the same time, TSN and Sportsnet are expected to go toe-to-toe for the National Hockey League’s cable package.  The CBC-Shaw consortium’s last gasp might be the fight over the Canadian Football League.  If the CBC loses there, the once great network might as well close its doors as a viable network.

With CTV’s TSN starting its own radio network shortly, all the bases are being covered.  BCE will have a totally integrated communications empire that can do pretty well anything it wants.  And sports fans, you will pay for it.  You will pay and pay….

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

A solemn gathering of Liberal society,

Said a fond farewell to a Liberal deity.

Keith Davey became a Canadian icon,

One Pearson and Trudeau did rely on.

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At Queen’s Park the word was spreading,

Our Ms. Carroll was leaving the building.

She has now confirmed to the Babel mob,

She no longer cares for the provincial job.

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Premier McGinty will not be deterred

In a quest to be the voters’ preferred,

Rejects all histrionics or super bionics,

He just ambles along singing his song:

I’ve Timmy on my right, Andrea is left

And neither one has any political heft.

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A feature of life in Babel each year is the annual migration out onto the ice of Kempenfelt Bay.  The movement is gradual.  First one hardly soul tries the ice cautiously and if he does not go through and need the help of the Babel fire department’s airboat to be rescued, another foolhardy fisherman joins him.  Soon the ice is crowded and small shelters are dragged out onto the ice to accommodate the less invincible of the ice fishermen.  Within the first weeks of the lake freezing over, the daily population on the ice of the bay starts to rival that of a small town.

And people keep devising new ways to increase the crowds.  In the past two years there has been a fishing derby that attracts thousands of people who want to stick a line through a hole in the ice to see what they can catch.  Most just catch a cold but some get sufficient fish for their efforts to bring them back.  From our angle the long lines of holes in the ice for the derby should have the words along them: ‘fold here.’   You would think that all those holes would weaken the ice.

Another worrisome trend we see is the increasing size of the ice huts.  We saw four men wrestling with a very large structure on the shore the other day and the next thing it was out on the ice.  It is the first two-storey ice hut.  We checked and we found it had a playroom for the kids in the attic.  That was sweet.  They said the family that fishes together, freezes together.

Mind you, there is more than fishing going on out there.  The parachutes pulling skiers and snowboarders along at breakneck speed are quite fascinating.  The fast moving snowmobiles are less attractive, noisy and more of a menace.  Others routinely defy death and go for a Sunday walk on the ice.  They dare the ice-boaters, snow-mobilers and other sports enthusiasts to run into them at their peril.  The fishermen just hunker over their hole in the ice and await a few more fish.

We keep waiting for the construction trailers next door in the water pollution centre to be pulled out onto the ice to be used as group homes for the fishermen.  With flush toilets, and electric heat, some of those doublewides could accommodate up to 30 fishermen at a time.  Mind you, we only make this suggestion in the hope that there is an early break up of the ice this year and the trailers disappear into the murky depths of Kempenfelt Bay.

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We read today in the Toronto Star

They’ve 10,000 complaints so far.

About all those Bell telemarketers

Now tell us how the CRTC deters?

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An era has ended.  It was the time of Lester Pearson.  It was the time of Pierre Trudeau.  The political strength of those men was that of Keith Davey.

Keith was a mentor, a friend and a fellow conspirator.  He was a playmate that I missed as a child.  We reveled in the sandbox of politics, theorizing, scheming, arguing and working together to build our sand castles of the political left.  We earned our enemies, our detractors, our supporters and followers.  Our trust was such that one could make the bombs and the other would throw them.

You never knew when Keith would call.  He played the telephone as a virtuoso.  His voluminous lists of contacts across the country kept him in constant touch with the opinions of the party and the nation.  He recorded it all each day in small crabbed handwriting on a single sheet of paper.

Keith hated hypocrisy.  This led to one of our greatest failures.  After writing about the politics of city hall for years, I was convinced that city politics needed to be openly based on party politics and accountability instead of the covert system then in place.  To my surprise, Keith told me he agreed and he wanted to help.  Keith took more of the blame for the fiasco when the party took the plunge than he deserved.

Lost to us in the veil of Alzheimer for his last years, Keith’s understudy, Hon. David Smith took the political reins for Jean Chrétien’s years as Prime Minister.  Keith was unaware of the sorry state of his party under Paul Martin and the ensuing regime of Stephen Harper.

Canada is a better place for Keith having been with us.  He is missed.

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The chattering classes, the talking heads, the bloggers of note and the political pundits have all decided that Canada is going to have an election.  Who can argue?  The truth is that MP Dan McTeague told me the date of the election over a beer, more than a month ago.  And as sure as the price of gas at the pump will rise tonight, Dan has proved himself a reliable forecaster.

And that is the good news.  Canada needs this election.  Prime Minister Harper certainly wants it.  His only concern is to not look too eager and to manoeuvre the opposition into pulling the plug.  Opposition leader Michael Ignatieff is ready to do his part in ranting and roaring and demanding the election.  It is an opportunity for Jack Layton.  It is if he could just understand the opportunity.  His caucus is the problem as they just see lost seats no matter what way Layton turns.  Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc can only lose in this election as both Conservatives and Liberals target specific seats in Quebec.

The bad news is that it is Stephen Harper’s last chance to win a majority.  He will leave no rock unthrown in his determination to remake Canada as the extreme right wing country he believes it should be.  His Canada is a cold and bitter place of Old Testament judgement and survival of the fittest.

And this election is Michael Ignatieff’s only chance.  He needs the ‘Hail Mary’ play in this one because he has just the one chance to prove that he can lead the Liberals and the country.  He used the first eight of his lives as leader in two years of marking time, unable to retaliate against those attacking him from the rear.  In this election, he goes for broke!  Not winning a majority, under the circumstances, can be forgiven.  Not winning the government cannot be countenanced.

It should be Jack Layton’s last election as leader of the New Democrats.  It is not that he has been ineffective as leader of the NDP.  He just never proved there should be an NDP.  His party needs to join the socially conscious left wing of the Liberal Party.  With the Liberals, he can help form the concerted centre-left force needed to block the right wing viciousness of Stephen Harper.

And that leaves Gilles Duceppe, a leader with no future.  Separatism in Quebec is a failed ideology.  It is just not a winning proposition.  Quebec can ill afford to continue to let the world pass it by while it drowns itself in the jingoism and tribalism of a language ghetto.  It will soon celebrate fifty years of separatist foolishness when it so desperately needs leadership to build partnerships and a strong future in a united and equal Canada.

This will be a watershed election.  Canada will not be the same afterward.  Hopefully, Stephen Harper will be gone from the Conservative Party and the extremism of its right muted.  The NDP will see the renewed strength of its future as part of a more socially conscious Liberal Party.  The Liberals, with their new allies, will have settled the leadership question for the near future.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]