The Lougheed Legacy: Christy Clark, and a Divided and Uncompetitive Nation

The Lougheed Legacy: Christy Clark, and a Divided and Uncompetitive Nation

 You will note that I did not make this post at the time of Peter Lougheed’s death and the celebrations of his life.  People who knew him seemed to feel he was a good man.  I’m hardly here to dispute that—never met the man.  However, he was in a responsible public position for a long time, so it’s fair to take a clear-eyed view of elements of his record, rather than resorting to the self-congratulatory hagiography of most commentators.

 The process of decentralizing Canada, the acceleration of “executive federalism” in Canada after WWII, is well known.  As we know, while America began with a constitution designed to limit federal powers, Canada began with a constitution designed to ensure a strong national government.  As history has played out, America has seen more power gravitate to Washington, and Canada has seen power diffuse into the provinces. 

In terms of the diffusion, or rather, dissolution of federal powers in Canada, Lougheed played a key role.  We don’t really have to revisit the controversies of the National Energy Program (NEP—or do we, I would read what anyone has to say), but it’s fair to say that Pierre Trudeau, as a national leader, wanted to have national programs.  That meant that if Canada had resource wealth, Canada should benefit from it first.  Lougheed, with an eye on his own electorate, wanted to ensure that he was seen as a defender of Alberta against Ottawa, even if it meant selling out to Houston first.  Thus the “blue-eyed sheikh.”

Today, Christy Clark has been arguing that, if Alberta wants to build a pipeline, then British Columbia better get a huge share of any economic benefits that flow from the oil flowing from an Alberta pipeline.  Alberta premier Alison Redford more or less scoffed at such a notion, saying that that was not how Canada worked, that the constitution of the country would have to be rewritten before Clark’s demands could be entertained.  Who have we to thank for this?  Peter Lougheed.  For the balkanized confederation we now inhabit, Peter Lougheed bears striking responsibility.  Grandstanding against the feds became a key, if not the sole, way that premiers could justify themselves to their own electorates.  So we had Clyde Wells sinking Meech Lake, which might have brought Quebec into the confederation in a definitive way, Danny Williams, a hard-right hockey lover like Stephen Harper, lowering the Canadian flag at public buildings.  And Christy Clark essentially saying ‘no pipeline unless we get a huge chunk of the revenues.’  Peter Lougheed’s chickens have come home to roost.  Stephen Harper, who advocated a “firewall around Alberta” in a past life, won’t even meet with the premiers anymore.  Clark wants to cut a deal that, she generously allows, would involve British Columbia, Alberta, and the federal government in negotiations.  No mention of several territories and eight other provinces and what they might think about affairs of the “nation.”

And besides, has anyone who might read this ever actually been to a place such as Edmonton (no, no, not the Lougheed mansion in downtown Calgary--and also, anywhere else in the world—that, I’m sure you have)?  For all the wealth that has streamed out of Alberta (and Canada—many did say Peter Lougheed was a “great Canadian,” but I couldn’t gauge the level of irony), to the United States and China and Japan and innumerable countries, has anyone ever actually seen Edmonton?  The streets of Edmonton should be paved with gold.  Not just in theory, but in practice, Edmonton should be home to the grandest opera houses, the most immaculate churches, the most stunning public edifices, the most tended parks—basically that the world knows.    

Not very long ago at all, the West Texas Intermediate wallowed around $15/barrel; now it’s $90+.  And oil companies, and Alberta, still can’t find a way to profit enough?  I think there is an answer to that: the oil companies have.  But they don’t live in Alberta, and they sure don’t live in Canada.

 We keep hearing the boasts about how much oil Alberta has relative to other countries, but at least Arabs can build a skyscraper, and impoverished countries with 1/1000^th of Alberta’s budget can be magnets for people from all around the world because they have found a way to develop and maintain their legacies and emblems thereof.  Edmonton?  Oh dear, oh dear.  Coming back to the theory/practice theme, I won’t even go there.  (Unless I want to find a pawn shop or payday loan franchise or liquor store within 20 sq. ft. on virtually any point of the compass that I should choose to stand and look out from.)

Pipelines happen.  They exist.  They’ll keep existing.  Interestingly, a few voices, even Conservative ones, have recently suggested that building a pipeline to eastern Canada might not be such a bad idea.  You know, jobs, access to eastern seaports, oil refining in central Canada, etc.  Hm.  Turns out Trudeau wasn’t such a wild-eyed communist after all.  For those really, really way out there, there have actually been businesspeople who’ve suggested doing oil refining right on the west coast, and keeping jobs and upgrading revenues right here in Canada (!!).  Predictably, such notions were quickly shot down by Conservative politicians, who argued that other nations had so much refining capacity, and that refining capacity costs so much to get going in the first place, and returns on it are so small, that we should never ever consider such a scheme in the first place.  Rather, just get that dirty crude on tankers and off our shores as fast possible, like cattle through an XL plant.  So much for secondary industry.  So much for Canadian companies.  So much for “knowledge jobs”—jobs that would attract people from around the world and Canada’s own university graduates to stay here and make Canada an energy world leader.  For short-term gain and long-term pain, best just to sell out to China.  Who knows what the next 10, 20, 30 years will bring—but who cares—let’s rip and run with the tar sands while we’ve got them, and when the Americans and Chinese and Norwegians and Japanese and French and British and who knows who else intriguing in the tar pits have gone, we can look up at them with teary dirty faces and ask if they can’t give us a crust.  This, this is the Lougheed legacy.  If Canadians can’t refine oil in Canada—which was ultimately what Lougheed was saying by pre-paraphrasing Ralph Klein saying let the “eastern bums and creeps” freeze in the dark—then how come other countries could and can?  Mini-minds like John Ibbitson have recently swooned before Tory handlers who told him that Canada has to stand back and pause and figure out how to deal with “state capitalism” such as that of Indonesia.  Er, Virginia, anyone?  Does anyone really think that, when deciding who to source rivets and panels for a U.S. Navy ship from, the U.S. actually thinks, ‘well, gee, we better get the Chinese to do that’?  No, Americans have a country, and they do it themselves.

In most advanced countries, it’s a knock-down dead-straight self-evident no-brainer that you take care of your own country first.  You build up and from within.  Yes, Norway again—can you imagine Norwegians, whose version of the Heritage Fund dwarfs that of Alberta by multiples even theoretical mathematicians can barely glimpse (again, the Lougheed legacy) saying “oh, well, we can’t possibly refine or develop anything—we just have to sell it off as fast as possible to everyone else so that we can maintain an illusion of fiscal solvency while we stupidly cut taxes like the GST”? Even the Conservatives, when they want to buy 35-billion-dollar jets, at least insist that a sop has to go to Canadian companies to build, what, fabric seats for the jets?  Why do we not think this way when it comes to our “natural resources”?

So.  The Lougheed legacy.  A country so divided that its national leader won’t even speak with its provincial leaders (the U.S. looks like Woodstock, by comparison), premiers increasingly and really quite astonishingly trying to set up their own countries-within-a- country in order to stay elected, and a primitive, uncompetitive nation incapable of engaging in a world economy.  That’s the Lougheed legacy.

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An All-Sports Radio Station in Canada! The time has come. Or gone. Or was here but went. Or is never going to happen. Pity.

Still, it would be a nice idea, sometime.

 

Precis/Abstract: Sports radio in Canada had a unique, unfulfilled opportunity to cover the spectrum of sports.  With media concentration, the unfulfilled opportunity hardened into shill shows for owned properties.  The concentration and hardening of sports radio talk has emphasized a disinterest in amateur sport and sport in general, leading to a less sportive, less healthy, and less internationally competitive country, one that can only take an interest in American sports from a couch perspective.

 

Well, what with the NHL lockout upon us for some time now, it becomes increasingly evident that there is nothing to talk about on “sports radio.”

 I remember those days in the mid-90s when the FAN (what is now) 590 first came on the air in Toronto.  I was excited!  I mean, I like sports!

 Yeah, well, only took me a couple of weeks before I was disabused of any notion that the FAN590 would actually ever cover anything relating to most sports.  Less than two months in, I knew that, with a couple of buddies and a couple of phone lines, a lot less education and bombastically hidden knowledge, I, too, could be the FAN590.

 Remarkable to think that the same still obtains today, and if anything, the situation has gotten worse, with no-sports alleged “sports” stations fanning out across the country to shill for Rogers properties or team owners.  Back in the day, stations did actually promote the idea that they were “all sports” radio stations.  But, coming clean a bit, they have mostly dropped pretense to that, opting for generic and interchangeable names such as “The Team” or the aforesaid “FAN”, etc.  They know they don’t cover sports—just the properties their owners own, and that’s it.

It’s important that we realize that how the media covers sports in our country affects our success as a sporting nation, and, in a remotely tangential but still definite sense, our national health.

I guess I’ll set aside print media for now, but, full disclosure, it is still the one I follow the most. 

Oh for those days when a youth could pore over stats forever. 

No more. 

 As for TV, the highlight shows have become mockeries of themselves, because, in the splintered sports universe now, they only cover what they own.  Thus, don’t look for CFL coverage on Rogers.  Don’t look for curling coverage on Rogers.  Don’t look for baseball coverage on TSN.  And so on.  A sports fan would have to watch 50 hi-lite shows in a row to figure out what really happened during that day’s sports.  So TSN, Rogers, etc., have descended simply to showing fly balls (aka home runs—not actual interesting sporting plays) and endless fluff, as in their “top 10” lists—top ten sports moves done with a spoon, etc.  And I’d watch those, maybe, but of course the kid with the remote at TSN or Rogers has the memory of an amoeba and can’t even unearth the most obvious top 10 most obvious top 10 moments, 99 times out of a 100.  In a way, my sense is that the good ol’ local news-weather-sports broadcast is making an interesting comeback, because at least it’s there that sports fans can actually get a quick rundown of the day’s events, even if the only video shown is from the station owners.  And in any case one can never look to TV for any kind of context or depth or anything anyway, so it is foolish to mention it on this post.  The bottom line is, though, that concentration hurts sports fans, because sports fans can’t find out about sports quickly; they have to filter sports properties.  Is it any wonder they must go to the computer.  TV shoots itself in the foot.

So we come back to the alleged “sports radio.”  Yes, when the FAN590 (or 1430) came on, I really thought there’d be talk about sports.  At the time, that station didn’t have the Argos or the Leafs, but I think it did have the Blue Jays.  So there was lots of Blue Jays.  But other sports?  Nothing.  Zero.  Zip. Nada.  Gerbil-mouthed American Bob McCown interviewed Bert Sugar from time to time about the corrupt sport of boxing, a couple of good ol’ boys had a ½ hr slot somewhere about cars you and me will never drive turning left at high speeds for a couple hours.  But that’s all.  No actual sports.  There could have been interviews or talk about, oh, I don’t know, golf, tennis, horse-racing, amateur or Olympic sports, university sports, jai alai—I don’t know.  I’m a sports fan.  I would have been interested in any of it.  Around the time the FAN first came on, Canada’s Jonathon Power was perennially ranked as the No. 1 or 2 squash player in the world.  How many Canadians have ever done that?  I’m not a squash player, but I know it’s an incredibly popular sport—I would have listened to him, or something about him, with great interest.  But no, we only get to hear about the sports properties owned by the host network.

An infinitely worse situation obtains in outports such as Calgary, where there is a four-man (1?  ¼?) outfit called the FAN960, a former country station.  14 hours out of every 24—get that, 14 hours—(that is, for those of you doing the math, about 60%) it is piped-in utterly irrelevant American crap about Alabama Hoosiers against San Quentin Triple-threats, or whatever.  (And if anyone wants to say, “oh, you’re just being anti-American, well, I will just ask how many Oklahoma Sounding Dogs routinely tune in to Calgary Wildheads broadcasts, or how many Calgarians really, really care about the fate of the New Mexico Hogbenders.)  (Another hour goes to aforesaid McCown with that appealing squinchy gerbil face he makes as he tries to get his shades up over his nose and beneath his sprayed-on 70s Journey rhythm-guitarist hairdo way above his 2-buttons-undone cool-and-mellow-like-Manilow, baby, shirt.  How his make-up artists get that haze of unshaven finely drifting snow onto his not-ready-for-TV receding chin each day preoccupies me more than the show itself.)  So there’s 8 hours of local broadcasting to talk about. . .the Flames just signed Blake Comeau to a one-year contract!!!!!  Take it and ride, boys, take it and ride.  The FAN960’s intrepid team doesn’t know anything about any sports, and they’ve got to talk about Flames, so that’s the end of it.  Empty talk, and American talk, 24 hours out of 24.  When we *could* be talking about sports in our own communities, provinces, country.  And I can’t believe that Canadians wouldn’t be interested in it.  Why wouldn’t I want to hear from Christine Sinclair, or one of the greatest athletes this country has ever, ever known, like Clara Hughes?  Why not?  I am a sports fan.  Why wouldn’t I want to hear about Milos Raonic, who looks like being Canada’s greatest male tennis player sometime soon?  How come I even had to go hunting all over the web just to find out what happened to Rebecca Marino, who looked fit to join Milos as the most exciting male-female pair of tennis players this country has ever known?  Why wouldn’t I want to know about what it was like for Canadian rugby players down in NZ recently, or our cricket players, or ethnic sports I don’t even know about (they buy cars and eat wings, too, I assure you).  Anyone who likes sports, as I do, could fill in infinite blanks here.

But, on sports radio, sports radio such as the FAN960, we will never, ever get to hear it.  Now, this does raise the issue of exclusivity contracts.  When the FAN960 starts getting owned by Rogers, well, then, obviously, its staff of 2-year tech. college grads has to talk about what dead Ted has told them to talk about.  So they can’t actually address sports, and in this way, they contribute to the lack of sporting success in this country, and also help to ensure that Canada becomes a nation of couch-potato spectators who go to wing nights for Monday Night Football, like them.  The FAN960 helps to ensure that sports, and sporting success, is less and less a goal on Canada’s radar.  And again, exclusivity; no-one at the FAN960 can ever criticize the Flames, or he (there are no on-air she’s) loses his job instantly.  Who knows what Rogers’ contract, and the Flames’ contract, is with the FAN960, but, since they’re certainly not going to fess up with any documents, it’s fair to say that unfavourable discussion of any Rogers or Flames properties a vast majority of the time is going to have them pulled right off the air, according to the contract terms.  So we can’t have sports.  We can’t promote them, we can’t talk about them, we can’t celebrate great athletes, we can’t introduce young people, or old people, to other sports and great sporting individuals—it’s the total sports shutdown, as if we all have to be Pat Steinbergs in his parents’ basement playing UFC with a game controller.  Sad.

 [Now, let me argue against myself.  We know, based on past history, that we can count on an NHL lockout/labour stoppage on average every five years.  This is a fact.  In the past, the FAN960 would go with the Blake Comeaus, the Flames 3^rd-rounder playing for the Brussels Squirrels, etc., for the whole afternoon.  This time, it’s different.  Despite the fact that *Rogers does not even own* Calgary Stampeders rights, the FAN960 has, actually, given a bit more coverage to the CFL.  Now that the FAN960 is owned by Rogers, it *has* to cover some baseball, and this is, from a listener’s standpoint, really funny.  Just about anywhere across the country, you can/could follow baseball, but never in Calgary.  The FAN960’s 2-man crew was always smirky and smarmy and dismissive and jocular about a sport that they never knew anything about but then, uh, uh, oh, new boss, new owner, looks like we gotta know about baseball.  Hilarious to hear the FAN960 suddenly not hate baseball and stop joking about it; sadder still to think that Rogers is such a bloated and moribund top-heavy organization that it couldn’t even find anyone who knew anything about or liked baseball enough to staff the stations it suddenly took over.  Call in Nikita Kruschev as a manager.  But I forget--no problem; there’s always that piped-in Corndogs drama.  Draws me in every time.  I done hear tell they’re 14^th in the pork-10 conference.  This isn’t just alien to me.  It is alien to pretty much everyone in the civilized world.  If you want to think that affiliation with the North-central donegone Doogies marks you out as a sophisticated person, get, as Elliotte Friedman would eloquently say, a f**************************ing plane ticket to anywhere in the world.  Sorry Elliotte I ran out of ***s.]

Am I sounding too Elliotte Friedman about his contractors here?  Surely not.  Elliotte dropped 11 f-bombs, and on this entire blog, you will not encounter even the mildest of obscenities that you can hear on the FAN every day.  And despite what I say/do re-admit below, the government has advanced more funding for amateur sport, and I support this.  Politics is priorities, and, despite how difficult it is to allot tax dollars, I support greater funding for amateur sport.  If the government gave to billionaire Daryl Katz what it gave to impoverished athletes, we’d beat China by a 100 medals.  Actually, someone should start that chart-o-meter—what we give billionaire Daryl Katz, vs. what we give our amateur athletes….]

 The point is, we *could* use this lockout to highlight other sports, and get people interested in sports and following them and making us a more healthy nation.  But no, we’d rather talk about the lockout.  In the Glib ‘n Stale a couple weeks ago, Lawrence Martin suggested that we *could* take more of an interest in amateur sports (http://m.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/amateur-yes-but-well-worth-watching/article4490594/?service=mobile).  I suppose the mere phrase “amateur sports” sounds like cancer, but it sure isn’t, if you’re an actual sports fan and are interested in sports.    

No, I’m not Pollyanna about this; I realize any athlete needs sponsorship and cash—look no further than Lance Armstrong for that, the purest example of the purest athlete who was the purest crook in the history of his sport.  I’d listen to any great athlete, but I don’t need to know that Dirk Lancestrong signed with the BB affiliate of the Hometown Weasels of the WCWLHL.  What about talking to great athletes from around the world, to find out what makes them great?  Beats the hell out of Mikael Backlund signs a one-year contract any day.  (But then, I forgot, I am a sports fan.  And I actually engage in sports.  Silly me.)

 Also, I anticipate those people who say, well, look, we’re a hockey country, so that’s what we do.  No.  No.  That isn’t the legacy of Bobbie Rosenfeld or Tom Longboat or Fergie Jenkins.  Not at all.  Canada WAS a great sporting country.  We ARE not just hockey.  Maybe Stephen Harper wants you to believe that, and you buy in because you are weak, but Canada is a strong sporting country that never had to rely on hockey as the only thing that made it relevant in sporting terms. Sure, in other countries they have their key sports.  In Australia, they love Aussie rules.  But they’re also great at rugby and swimming and tennis and so on.  Look at how the Netherlands perform in just about anything.  Take Slovenia, and how they compete in water events and ski events _and_ World Cup soccer, for crying out loud.  The entire population of Slovenia is almost half of the greater Toronto area, but they made the World Cup and did well.  Comparatively, this would be like me and ten of my buddies going to play against Germany.  Think about it.  Other countries can do great things, so why can’t we, and where is our media, and, through their support of media cartels, our government? 

Lastly, let’s remember where any coverage of any Canadian sport ever came from—it came from a public broadcaster that would cover things like track and field.  The government is doing everything it can to ensure that there are only one or two media cartels in the entire country—meaning that those cartels will only cover the sports properties they own the rights to.  In other words, your government is, despite waving the flag with your tax dollars on tv commercials on said networks, doing everything it can to shut down exposure for great amateur athletes, and to prevent exposure to great athletes from around the world that could inspire Canada to be a greater, healthier, more sporting nation; the government works hand-in-glove with private networks to ensure greater and greater concentrations of media power that lead to. . . more and more Pat Steinbergs, and fewer and fewer and fewer Clara Hughes’.  Say I’m Pat Steinberg sitting on a couch, and I’ve got a daughter, but I’ve got my gameboy and my cheesies and I know I’ve got to go to work on Monday, and my daughter looks up at me and says “daddy, how come you don’t like kayaking”?  Pat’s got one answer.  “Because nobody, little one, wants to hear about kayaking.  It’s bedtime now, honey.”  He told his daughter, and an unflattering number of people he has never even imagined, a lie.  But it made the cheesies go down good.  And Pat wouldn’t work again, so he thinks, if he tried to talk about Adam van Koeverden.  Flames told him he couldn’t.  It satisfies Pat to think that, well, in his way, he has helped to ensure that his daughter, too, would be a big cheesie-eater, just like him, never knowing anything about sports or participating in it, but rather just enjoying the cut and thrust of really important things like “contract talks” and “lockouts.”

We should take greater interest in sports, and our media are letting us down incredibly, and our government will only exacerbate the situation by supporting media concentration.  The government *has* provided more funding for amateur sports than in the past.  Now our media has to get on board by showing us fewer corndogs and more treesappers.  Do we not want to know anything about our athletes, or those we have to compete against across the world?  I’m Canadian; I’m a citizen of the world; I’m game.

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