CKNW Editorial
for July 16, 2001

I hear that one of my colleagues calls into question my patriotism for giving the Bronx Cheer to Toronto for losing the Olympics Bid. Well, dear colleague, here’s some more news for you. I was utterly delighted that they not only lost but got their noses rubbed in it. I am, you see, no hypocrite … I want Vancouver/Whistler to get the next but one Winter Olympics and there was no way that would have happened if Hogtown got the Summer Games. I am, unashamedly a British Columbian and Vancouverite. I didn’t spend many of my formative years sucking off the public tit that passes for the government radio and broadcasting corporation with a mandate to keep Toronto types employed. Moreover, just to give you more ammunition for your next patriotic outbreak, I hate the Toronto Maple Leafs and would indeed have trouble pulling for them if they were playing a team from Beijing for the world’s championship … I remember so well how, in days of yore, the CBC refused to broadcast the Montreal Canadiens games on the spurious grounds that decent English speaking Canadians only wanted to hear the Toronto Maple Leafs … I remember the raw racist Foster Hewitt who was Toronto’s gift to English speaking Canada and I was embarrassed at efforts of the CBC to pretend to the world that Wayne and Schuster were funny.

Nothing against the city of Toronto itself which, for a rather drab group of buildings with a surrounding mass of ticky tacky houses on a polluted lake, with lousy weather, is OK. I have a son, daughter-in-law and three grandkids there. I enjoy visiting the place.

But, you see, I remember the lack of enthusiasm Toronto showed way back when my colleague was in diapers, if he was anywhere, for Vancouver having a football team ... indeed I well remember back in 1967 when the only way Vancouver would get an NHL franchise was if they gave Stafford Smythe, son of Mr Maple Leaf himself, Conn Smythe, a square block of downtown Vancouver and let him own and run the arena. And how Torontonians to a person were surprised that we didn’t leap at this chance to let Toronto, as always, lead the way. I remember the muted enthusiasm from the Ontario dominated Federal Government for Expo 86 and how Premier Bill Bennett had to shame them into getting involved. I need hardly remind anyone that Toronto got, as a campaign pledge last year, well over a billion dollars from the feds to update their harbour while the largest port city in Canada, indeed the Americas, goes begging for a new convention center. Never mind that Glen Clark was naughty to them, Ottawa is supposed to be our capital too.

Then I looked with increasing nausea at the Toronto centric CBC and their performance for the Toronto Olympics. Gadfrey Daniel, last Thursday night CBC radio news the first 11 minutes were devoted to this world shaking event. There was no news from the Middle East, of the Balkans … nothing out of the world capitals … just Taranna and its valiant bid for the Olympics! I came to work Friday and there was Peter Mansbridge and every senior on air person from the CBC including the adenoidal Brian Williams pantingly awaiting the result, a result that everyone else in the world knew was going to Beijing if only because the retiring Olympics president wanted it as a retirement gift. I wonder how much of our taxes the Mother Corporation wasted on this nonsense? They could have handled it with one reporter in Moscow and a panel of their favourite Order of Canada Torontonians back in Hogtown saving, one would assume, hundreds of thousands, perhaps more considering that the whole lot of them no doubt flew and stayed first class.

It’s going to be interesting to see if the Liberal government ponies up half a billion up front for the Vancouver/Whistler bid and whether the CBC will give wall to wall coverage of our bid. Which leads me to my last but one comment. I was delighted at Toronto losing if only because I will not have to watch, for most of the next decade, every CBC program that remotely has a connection with sports, jamming the Toronto Olympics at us.

But my last point is my first point. I suppose there is an old English Public School tradition where one publicly hopes one's adversary wins … that he punches your lights out … and when he doesn’t and you win, you spend a suitable time consoling him with there, there old chap … marvelous show old boy … you did a marvelous job and I really did hope you’d win.

But I don’t belong to that school. I’m a fighter – and I want Vancouver/Whistler not Toronto to have the next Olympics. And if that means I show unrestrained joy that the Toronto threat has been removed, so be it.

The day, cher colleague, that I see the Toronto run government of this country give a tinkers dam about my part of the country is the day I might show a little good will towards them.

Until then – call me xenophobic, for in this context I bear the name with pride – until then I say Up BC and awwww to Toronto’s loss.