Hockey

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Saturday February 22, 2014Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday February 22, 2014

Lots of Cheering in Canada this Weekend

Four years after winning gold on home ice in Vancouver, the Canadians will get a chance to make it two in a row Sunday against Sweden after beating the United States 1-0 in the Olympic semifinals Friday at Bolshoy Ice Dome.

This time, though, it was made possible by a few players who weren’t around in 2010, namely Jamie Benn and Carey Price. Benn scored for Canada on a pretty pass from fellow newcomer Jay Bouwmeester, and Price — chosen by coach Mike Babcock to start over Vancouver golden goalie Roberto Luongo — had 31 saves to make it stand up.

Canada’s victory came a day after the women’s team staged an improbable late comeback to beat the United States for its fourth straight gold medal. Babcock and his players said that victory taught them that “you don’t give in.”

Of course the way Team Canada got to the gold-medal game was very different. It hasn’t trailed for even one second at these Olympics. (Source: CTV News)

Meanwhile, Liberals gathered in Montreal for a policy convention this weekend, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s opening speech Thursday evening took shots at the Harper government, saying Canadians are tired of the tactics of fear and division practised by the Conservatives.

Trudeau also aimed broadsides at the Quebec government of Pauline Marois and the NDP.

The previous leader’s aloofness

In a speech that was earlier broadcast by mistake on closed-circuit television to the media room as it was being rehearsed, Trudeau said Canadians should have trust in the diversity of Quebec despite the Quebec charter of values bill proposed by Marois’s government that would ban the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in provincially funded jobs.

Trudeau praised the diversity he says he knows exists in Quebec, despite “the divisions that are being stoked in this province these days.”

He said he has no wish to join “Mr. Harper and Mr. Mulcair in a contest to see who can make Canadians angrier.” (Source: CBC News)

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SOCIAL MEDIA

Événement du siècle : week-end libéral à Montréal. Shared on L’Expérience lol78

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Wednesday, November 27, 2013By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday, November 27, 2013

What the new Rogers-NHL deal means for the CBC

National broadcaster to earn no revenue from hockey

The CBC is in trouble. It is losing all of its hockey revenue – but keeping about 320 hours a year of hockey, including Hockey Night in Canada – under the NHL’s new Canadian broadcast rights deal.

Rogers is making big moves to control ever more Canadian media and the announcement on Tuesday that they’re essentially taking over hockey rights across Canada is an enormous move.

Losing hockey is a big deal for the CBC. They’ll keep Hockey Night in Canada for four years on a sub-contract from Rogers, but they don’t own the content anymore. They will not even get the advertising revenue from the broadcasts. They also will not pay for the rights to the games. All that falls to Rogers.

CBC President and CEO Hubert Lacroix acknowledged that the next season of Hockey Night in Canada will be very different.

“Starting next year, Rogers will assume all editorial control (all editorial decisions with respect to the content, on-air talent and the creative direction of HNIC – we have the right to be consulted and there is a commitment to excellence) under the new agreement,” he wrote to CBC staff in an internal memo.

“While this deal will result in job losses, the staffing impact would have been much greater had we lost hockey entirely, as CBC is still producing hockey. Preserving HNIC also allows CBC to maintain a capacity to execute a sports strategy and fulfil lits existing contractual obligations (i.e. Olympics, Pan-Am, FIFA),” he continued.

Lacroix was unclear on which jobs, and how many, would be cut as a result of this deal.

Later, in a press conference with Rogers, Lacroix tried to remain positive but had little to add.

“Rogers takes on all of the revenues from all of the properties. We have no costs that come with that. We don’t pay any broadcasting rights,” he said. “Our friends at Rogers pick up all of the revenue.”

Asked what CBC gains from the deal, he said the CBC has maintained the right “to promote some of our programs through the iconic Hockey Night in Canada.”

That was it. Rogers refused to comment on any specifics of Don Cherry’s future. (Source: Canada.com)

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Thursday, November 7, 2013By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday, November 7, 2013

A Great Game: Stephen Harper’s hockey history captures the pulse of a young Canada

Can a book this long awaited also be unexpected? Stephen Harper’s first book is. A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs & The Rise of Professional Hockey is billed as a look at the early history of the sport. It’s being marketed as a tale for hockey obsessives. But what it is, really, is something better and more interesting and, from the perspective of book sellers, probably less saleable: a history of Canada in the early years of the last century, before the old world was washed away by The Great War.

The entry into that world comes through the tale of Toronto’s earliest professional hockey teams. Between 1908 and 1914, they challenged for the Stanley Cup. They did so while fighting a far more vicious battle off the ice: against Toronto’s conservative hockey establishment, which sought to destroy any club or player committing the original sin – playing the game for money.

Mr. Harper’s book reads a bit like a PhD thesis, which is to say that it is well researched, and sometimes heavy going. He seems to be aiming to write the definitive take on these events, so minor details aren’t left out. The pacing of the narrative sometimes suffers. But the Prime Minister does a good job of taking you back to the country, and the time, that gave birth to the national game.

The Canada of 100 years ago is in some ways easily recognizable to us: immigrants arrived in record numbers, the cities boomed and hockey was already incredibly popular, with the Stanley Cup already the ultimate prize. Players wanting to make their fortune headed south: After he and his teammates in Berlin (now Kitchener, Ont.) were suspended for accepting a gift of $10 gold coins from the city’s mayor, John “Doc” Gibson moved to northern Michigan and created what appears to have been North America’s first openly professional hockey team, in 1903.

There were debates over hockey violence, and counterclaims that new rules were robbing the game of its manly nature. In 1904, the Belleville Intelligencer accused the authorities of turning hockey into a wimpy “cross between croquet and ping-pong.” It sounds like a quote from Coach’s Corner.

But in other ways the Canada that is the setting for A Great Game is now a foreign country. Toronto before the First World War was run by people who saw themselves as defenders of the British heart of a British Canada. Mr. Harper describes them as so conservative that they remained stuck in the Victorian era long after it had ended, and he contrasts them with the “palpably more flexible” elites of Montreal. (Continued: Globe & Mail)

FEEDBACK

Letter to the Editor, Hamilton Spectator, November 8, 2013

Kudos to Graeme MacKay for the Great Game cartoon, showing the three Senators being tossed out. Due process was surely a fourth victim.

The long awaited book on hockey by our prime minister reportedly shows great admiration for goalies. They consistently keep over 90 per cent of all shots from scoring. It is an average that Stephen Harper can only dream about, judging from recent Question Periods in Parliament.

Richard Ring, Grimsby

Friday, May 10, 2013

Friday, May 10, 2013By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday, May 10, 2013

A weak Senate response to its expense scandal

Any Canadian hoping to see serious reforms or criminal charges in the wake of the Senate’s housing and expense scandal is sure to be disappointed by the Red Chamber’s tepid response.
The Senate’s standing committee on internal economy Thursday recommended no further penalty, beyond returning the money they took, for three senators who had made inappropriate housing allowance claims. The committee also recommended dispensing with the traditional honour system in handling accounts.

All told, this is the absolute minimum the Senate could do to salvage some shred of integrity. If Senators think this bit of contrition is enough they still haven’t got the message. This will only fuel demands for a fuller, more transparent public accounting of what they do with our money.

“The credibility of the Senate has been attacked and has been diminished,” said Liberal Senate Leader James Cowan, following the committee’s report. “None of this is good news.”

The committee reviewed detailed reports from the consultant Deloitte showing senators Patrick Brazeau, Mike Duffy and Mac Harb had each claimed thousands of dollars in public money to support secondary homes in Ottawa because their primary residence was supposedly more than 100 kilometres from Parliament Hill.

In fact, Harb and Duffy lived in Ottawa while Brazeau resided in nearby Gatineau. With exquisite precision, citing evidence such as cellphone records, the consultant found Brazeau spent only a fraction of his time at his supposed residence, in far away Maniwaki, Que. Likewise for Duffy’s stay at the Prince Edward Island home he claimed as his primary residence and Harb’s supposed home in Westmeath, more than 100 km northwest of Ottawa. (Source: Toronto Star)

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Tuesday, January 8, 2013By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Idle no More meets Idle no More

It almost looks like a toy. The agreement between the NHL and its players’ union that ended a painful and unnecessarily long lockout has been met with far more skepticism and bitterness than any rejoicing. Many fans, and even sportswriters, are calling for boycotts of games and of NHL merchandise, the belief being that the league cares only about money and hitting it in the pocketbook will be the retaliatory gesture that hurts it the most. But is it really such a shock that a professional sports league, along with its owners and players, would focus on the bottom line? The most sensible things to do is be thankful the entire season wasn’t lost and just get back to enjoying the game.

Not that there aren’t things to be miffed about. The intermittent and half-hearted negotiations came across as a grudge match between two factions that put pride before everything else. The final deal amounts to little more than the moving around of a few numbers and does nothing to solve the long-term problems facing the league. The most obvious of these problems is the continued existence of bankrupt teams in southern United States cities, such as Phoenix, Arizona. Why Canadian fans will be forced to continue to subsidize this failed experiment through revenue-sharing remains a mystery.

As the aboriginal movement, Idle No More protests continue to grow, comparisons are being made to the grassroots Occupy Wall Street movements that sprang up across the globe in 2011 and helped fuel public discourse on the issue of economic inequality.

But while that issue, if not the Occupy movement itself, found a receptive audience among many, including many Canadians, it is not clear that a protest dedicated solely to aboriginal issues will have a similar impact or spur any kind of change. (Source: CBC News)