When you logged into any social networking platform in the past week, you would have never known that these next few weeks constitute one of the greatest sporting rituals practised by Canadian jocks, gamblers, and patriots: the start of the NBA play-offs. Our team from the Centre of the Universe – the Raptors—might not go deep, but I like their 3 – 0 record against Cleveland, whom they will match up in the first round starting this weekend. Oh, sure, there’s another sporting marathon also starting up this weekend, something called the Stanley Cup play-offs featuring mostly American teams staffed by mostly Canadian players, but with only three teams involved that can be labeled as “truly Canadian”, at least in PM Mark Carney’s mind: Montreal, Edmonton and some place called “Ottawa”, which in certain portions of our nation’s western hinterlands is a curse word, even though there’s not a single politician lacing up skates for the team.
While I write almost exclusively about politics and the “players” in the sport, what intrigues me most about Canadian professional sports teams over the last five years and makes me proud to consider myself as being of this nation is that both the Raptors AND the Blue Jays, stocked with mostly American-born talent, are avidly followed by Canadian sports fans, AND the respective players on both of these teams truly respect that devotion and play harder because of it. What’s even more interesting, though, is that when it comes to preferring which one of the three teams Canadians (or Canadiens) would like to see win the Stanley Cup this year, an Angus Reid poll released on Thursday shows that almost 60% of those being polled claim that we as a nation could care less – just so long as one of them finally bring the Cup back to the nation to which it truly belongs – and what’s more, easterners will get behind Edmonton if Montreal or Ottawa wash out, and westerners will switch allegiance to the eastern team still in the hunt if Conner McDavid’s Superman act hits some kryptonite along the way.
So, when you finally go online yourself, wouldn’t you expect this same pride being displayed as it relates to our political process, where no one cares what language is on the cereal box and only taste governs who devours it?
Are you naïve…
Most of my political friends didn’t even bother to stay awake Monday night to find out who’d won the three federal by-elections, two in Toronto and one in Montreal. Even my friends pretending to be reincarnations of Kenny Rogers bypassed their urge to bet on the outcome, knowing the pay-out when they won wouldn’t buy them a coffee in the morning, and definitely not one were they a Starbucks aficionado. But on the political right, the outcome produced an outpouring of rage.
To our increasingly whacked-out but fortunately shrinking members of the right’s political extremities, the result was as though Justin Trudeau was still our Prime Minister, and now he was going to have a “majority” in Parliament, even though it was actually Mark Carney assuming the role of PM. Imagine, then, their dismay in knowing that starting in September of 2022 and carrying on even up to the end of January 2025 the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre’s leadership had led the Liberals in polling results by as many as 30 points. However, not only did our more reasonable public grow weary of Poilievre’s harshness and support for causes such as the Carbon Convoy leadership team, but in 2025 literally kicked the Conservatives to the curb after Carney took over the leadership role of the Liberal Party.
To these frenzied clowns, Carney is no different than “Justin”: he lies, he cheats, he steals, he bribes the weak in the Opposition wings, he doesn’t understand economics, and “he hasn’t done a damned thing for Canadians” – unless, of course, it was something that the Conservatives were going to do IF they formed government, such as changing the rules regarding the setting of bail for repeat offenders. What bothers these inflamed entities the most, though, is the reality that Parliament is now under the control of a majority rule Liberal Party.
The manner by which they obtained that majority, however, is unique to the annals of Canada’s parliamentary history. Following the 2025 election the Liberals held 169 seats, leaving them a mere 3 seats short of majority rule. However, since then five MP’s, four of whom were elected as Conservatives have chosen to cross the floor to join the Liberal ranks, and following Monday’s three by-election victories, all won by Liberal candidates, contributed to that majority status.
To those who have studied our nation’s history, there have always been floor crossers in Parliament, particularly during troubling time such as the nation is now encountering by the disparaging manner in which U.S. President Trump holds our sovereignty. During World War 1, as an example there were multiple crossings of Liberals joining Prime Minister’s “Unionists” to form a “consensus government”, which one would think would be the type of political situation that Canada’s having to find a relatively uniform and cooperative manner by which it can repulse Trump’s stupidities.
This time, however, no doubt fuelled by the awareness of their popularity from early 2025 to the present has deteriorated some 35 points and is still in decline, CPC politicians are suddenly of the opinion that should a Parliamentarian having won a seat under the banner of one party and its priorities, then later simply deciding to compromise on certain fundamental issues in order to provide the necessary consensus the government needs to prepare its defense of its democracy, that person should, indeed MUST first subject that choice of sides to the voters within the riding they represent.
That a democracy under attack can’t afford the luxury of a three month or longer sojourn down a by-election pathway should be obvious, but for the Neanderthals, their only goal is to turn the pain of the Covid-19 pandemic into an opportunity to define what exactly is a human right into a deification of their own personal id. Their sickly venture to relight the old fires of political sectarianism, be it Carbon Convoy’s Pat King now stalking Mark Carney wherever he moves within Ottawa circles or “Air Fare” Tamara Lich boringly repeating “Freedom” to a meme background of Volvo cab-overs decked in Canada’s flag are only yielding more sickly results to society. They serve no purpose in attempting to heal the ills that political hatred has foisted upon our nation though the rantings of our Conservative brethren, especially those once spoken by Pierre Poilievre.
Perhaps Carney, instead of just calling the three by-elections, should have simply called that general election and sent the puppets who speak for this faction preaching destruction home to lick their wounds and hope they have enough time spent in Ottawa to collect their pensions. The small-“c” conservatives know full well that their numbers would have been decimated to post-Mulroney levels had that occurred, and it’s now up to them to assure Canadians that these clowns do not speak for us.
I just want to sit down and watch the play-offs – both in basketball and hockey – just like everyone else does, and no longer have to worry about our nation again losing its now ascending cordiality.
I doubt that I’m alone in expressing that feeling…
Ken MacDougall is a retired teacher and former election candidate for the federal NDP.
