I knew that little headline would get your attention!

And it’s true.  Being the guy (currently) most likely to become Premier if (theoretically) there is an election, Hudak could have chosen the easy course.  He could have chosen discretion over valour.  He could have jumped on the popular and populist bandwagon, like Kathleen Wynne and countless others.

But he didn’t.

Tim Hudak (along with me, Gerald Butts, Alex Panetta and, er, that’s it) is not cheering for the Toronto Maple Leafs.  He has always cheered for the Bruins, and continues to do so.  Good for him.  That takes balls.

Now, when I was a kid attending Our Lady of Lourdes in Kingston, I adored the Bruins, too.  Lots of us did in Kingston.  Cashman, Orr, Sanderson: those were our hockey heroes.  Not the Maple Leafs.

Relocated to Calgary, I loved the Flames and the Habs (which were, at one level, the same organization).  Once in Toronto, I did not waver.  Why? The Leafs fans made it easy for me.

Not, I note, the Leafs themselves.  They, like all hockey teams, are comprised of young men getting paid too much to play a kids’ game.  It’s not their fault, per se.  No, I did not hate them.  I hated the Leafs fans.

Leafs fans are the most uncritical fans in the sports universe.  You could dump a metric tonne of manure at centre ice, throw a Leafs jersey on it, and the assembled fans would cheer for it.  In their multi-thousand-dollar corporate boxes, drinking shitty $20 beers.  And then they’d go buy overpriced manure merch, and wear it on weekends to trips to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Leafs fans, who haven’t had a team that has won a cup since 1967, endlessly complain about how bad their team is.  They kvetch and moan about it.  BUT THEY STILL KEEP PAYING THOUSANDS TO SEE THE LEAFS PLAY.

And that is why the Leafs suck: even when they suck, Leafs fans keep buying tickets.  You don’t see that sort of mass delusional psychosis happening in Montreal or Calgary or Vancouver.  They’d stop coming.  And at that point, team owners would be obliged to – surprise, surprise – put together teams who can win.

And that’s why I detest the Leafs – their fans.  Their fans are the problem.

Oh, and Tim Hudak?  Your resolve won’t hurt you with Toronto Leafs fans.

Deep down in their tiny black hearts, they suspect you are right.

Comments (27)

R.I.P.

He was no fan of yours truly – case in point – but what a career he had! He’d been there to see it all, first-hand.

Journalism really doesn’t produce men (or women) like him anymore.  It’s a cliche, but it’s true: with Worthington’s passing, it’s the end of an era in Canadian journalism.

Sincere condolences to his family and many friends.

Comments (2)

God is dead.

Or, at least, he’s irrelevant. So say a growing number of Canadians who, according to Statistics Canada’s just-released National Household Survey, are becoming less and less religious.

The numbers are drawn from the agency’s 2011 demographic study and they paint a picture that anticipates an increasingly secular Canada. Back in 1981, around 90% of Canadians were Christian and just over 7% had no religious affiliation at all.

Thirty years later, those self-identifying as Christians have plummeted to 67% — and the non-believers have surged to nearly one-quarter of the population.

Statistic Canada’s numbers show constant growth in the non-religious category, by about 5% every decade.

If that trend holds steady, a third of Canadians will be effectively godless by the end of this decade.

For students of politics — and conservative politics, in particular — there are other trends worth noting.

The survey also found that Jews are far less numerous than they once were, and are now in danger of slipping below 1% of the population.

Meanwhile, the number of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs are rising all the time. In 1981, for instance, less than one-half of 1% of Canadians was Muslim.

Now, they constitute more than 3% and are the second-largest religious group in Canada.

Any politician seeking to one day lead to the Conservative Party of Canada — or anyone hoping to win a Conservative nomination somewhere, and a seat in a federal or provincial legislative body — should scrutinize the Statistics Canada trend lines very, very carefully.

They strongly suggest the Conservatives have pursued a strategy that, ultimately, will see them marginalized in the way Republicans currently are in the U.S.

Going back a decade, Stephen Harper’s Conservative coalition had been partly made up of evangelicals, right-leaning Christians and Jews who were upset about Liberal party foreign policy.

At the same time, Harper’s party gave the cold shoulder to other faiths — going after the charitable status of left-leaning Christian causes, attacking the religious garb of Muslims and suggesting (as Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney famously did) that Sikhs were “overheated” and use “the race card.”

In the short term, it was nasty, but it was a strategy that worked. With a massive war chest — and with state-of-the-art electioneering techniques like psychographics and geo-demographic segmentation — the Conservatives cobbled together enough votes to win a majority in 2011.

But, if Statistics Canada is right, the Conservatives have also chosen a path that long-term will ultimately end in defeat. By championing Christian-right causes and demonizing Muslims, the Harper Cons are demographically putting themselves out of business.

(Personally, as a church-going Irish Catholic guy, the StatsCan data makes me sort of sad. I’m no missionary — I consider religion to be an entirely personal affair and detest those who are always lecturing and hectoring others about it — but I know I draw considerable comfort from my faith. It gives a measure of hope to me and, I believe, others. So how do the growing numbers of non-religious folks get by without hope? I’d find that pretty hard to do, but that’s just me.)

As citizens of the best country in the world, these statistics should make most of us pretty happy, however.

We are a peaceful, diverse society, and that’s helping to attract people from all over. We are the envy of the world, as Jean Chretien used to say, and that can only be a good thing.

But these statistics should fill future Conservatives with dread. They strongly suggest that Harper’s party — as conservatives so often do — is fighting the last war, and not preparing for the one that lies ahead.

God might have something to say about that, but at press time he could not be reached for comment.

Comments (40)

RIP, Doug.

Last communicated with him in an email exchange – about rock’n’roll, not politics.

That tells me he had his priorities straight. My condolences to his family and many friends.

Comments (5)

I don’t have any skin the BC ‘2013 game. I’ve got friends in both war rooms, and I think they’ve all run impressive campaigns.

Adrian Dix was assisted by the fact that he’s no Glen Clark-style Dipper: he’s a centrist New Democrat, more like Roy Romanow than his former boss. On the other hand, he was hurt by his less-than-stellar debate performance, and his naive promise to stay “positive” when his opponent had been going neg, big time.

Christy Clark? Well, she’s a perfomer. I’ve known her since she was a Liberal staffer in Ottawa – but, then again, I didn’t. With Christy, I never really knew who or what she was: a Martinite? A Chretinite? Right? Left?

When she started chumming around with Stephen Harper and Preston Manning, I had had enough. It wasn’t that she was a conservative, per se. My problem was that she was, in her core, without a core. She was fake. She was phony.

Clark, at the campaign’s end, deserves to lose because you just don’t know what she believes in – or if, in fact, she believes in anything at all. She’s an actor, but not a leader.

Anyway. The mechanics of the thing are all against her: the NDP vote is much more efficient in BC than Easterners realize. And it’s concentrated in the Lower Mainland, too. Dix, therefore, is going to win.

Read my almost-boss Gary Mason on it, here. He gets it.

The desire for change, when it starts, is hard to stop. Change is coming to BC, and that is good thing.

Comments (23)

I got the new BlackBerry Z10. It’s alright, I guess.

Problem: unlike on the reliable old 9900, I can’t figure out how to share Web links on the Z10 directly to WordPress.

Any charter members of Team Propellerhead care to help out? This puppy’s got me stumped.

Comments (2)

…but, apparently, it has become a criminal offence in Toronto.

Assaulting a kid with developmental issues, and breaking his collarbone, meanwhile – that should be illegal.

Comments (16)

I’m no fan of celebrities, but I thought this story was uniquely Canadian (and Toronto): black, white, Jewish, American, Canadian, and millionaire rapper.

Sounds like us.

Comments (0)

Tried to post it on that Vine thing. Didn’t work. So imagine this on a perpetual loop.

Comments (2)

Yes, you read that right.

I am never, ever shocked.  Honestly, nothing shocks me.  But this shocked me.

Back story: a few days ago, my pal Nadwuar got in touch with me via Twitter.  Wanted my email.  Sent it to him.  Didn’t hear anything else.

Then Simon at Ugly Pop sends me this, this aft, about the Palma Violets – one my fave new combos, to whom I was introduced by Jian Gomeshi.

 

Holy crap. I literally watched that vid with my mouth hanging open. And it was true, too – they cover the Nasties, here, and it has been written about in places like the Washington Post, here.

And so, you might ask, how did I not know this, given that the Palma Violets were in town a few days ago? ‘Cause we were pooped, and we decided not to go. So I missed it.  I MISSED IT.

Not again. Next time they are near Canada, we’re goin’.

Wait’ll I tell SFH about this tonight. Maybe now Rolf will agree to cover Nasties’ tunes.

Comments (6)