Over the decades we’ve spoken with many parents and players trying to parse this CHL/ NCAA equation. It was a heartbreaking scene when they gambled on a CHL career that gave them no life skills or permanent physical problems. Or the promised NCAA golden goose never appeared after playing in a lower league for prime development years. 

It’s safe to say that as Canada prepares to defenestrate Justin Trudeau in the next federal election, Wayne Gretzky will not be invited to Rideau Hall for beaver tails with the PM. It’s likely he’ll experience the Bobby Orr blackout, becoming a non-person in Canada for getting too close to Trump.

So is Nick Bosa acting like a college sophomore to express a voting preference compare to Kaepernick wanting a race-based social revolution in America? Mmm. These things are not like the other. It’s like accusing Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce of political interference for appearing with his girlfriend Taylor Swift, a vocal Kamala Harris supporter.

It’s eariy. But not so early that several NHL coaches are not feeling the heat already. We can expect that heads will soon roll if certain teams don’t find their mojo. It’s a sad but predictable result of a salary cap league where the most disposable item is a coach.

Fans and contemporary media still think they we are living in a time when every club, given a little luck and nan good draft, will reward its fans with a champions parade. That’s what the mania for parity and salary caps was about. But it doesn’t work that way any longer.

All of which begs the question: If so many of those affected by this supposed insult don’t see it as an insult… then who is the progressive culture industry doing it for?  I’ll take your answer off-air.

Like America’s ruling class before the 2024 election, Canada’s brahmins are blithely unaware they are being fitted for a rope in 2025. Confident they know best, they issue columns that declare that the public sometimes gets it wrong in elections. They faint in the face of Elon Musk making X into a dominant  political force. They assume the public is still listening.

Charles De Gaulle famously asked, “How can you govern a nation with 538 different cheeses?” America is about to find out that, in the new media era, covering an election may involve 538 different media sources producing disparate information. With Elon Musk as the ring leader.

It’s telling that, while at least 50 percent of Americans see through Kamala Harris and the DEMs coup narrative as complete bushwah, probably 90 percent of Canadians-- led by the corporate media-- lap up these condescending narratives. Their biggest fear remains that the populist revolt against authority in the U.S. might threaten Canada’s elite class.

From worshipful respect, Elon Musk is now met with scorn, derision and, in Europe, plans to censor him permanently. Brazil shut down X completely. British intelligence targeted his association with Trump. The radical Left in the U.S., accustomed to its version of truth, suddenly decided that Musk was in line with Nazis and the Far Right. It’s a bracing assault.

Barack Obama borrowed from MLK Jr. when he said, “The arc of of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”. Trudeau realizes that he’s been in charge for a long time, but dreams that, if hangs on long enough, justice will one day declare him the new man, unburdened by his record. Good luck with that. 

While French-language Radio Canada might still have a cultural argument in Quebec to make for its continued existence, no such imperative faces English CBC services anymore. The private production side and the digital world are perfectly capable of finding the next Schitt’s Creek or Pottery Challenge without air cover from the feds. So the Libs survival strategy now is attack, attack, attack.

Stephanie Cesca is a strong and capable storyteller. Her passion for detail and vivid imagination creates an authentic fictional world. Readers can see her characters in their mind’s eye. They can relate to their pain.

Throughout the book’s 384 pages, readers are kept guessing as to the killer’s motives. Could such rampaging violence be  a professional hit or a random act of madness? Or was the victim bludgeoned out of existence due to his shady business dealings and abusive, violent past?

Clewes is a sensory, effusive poet. Her lyrical words reflect a deep musical sense. In the third section, Calle Obispo, the poem of the same title, references Nobel Prize-winning poet and Polish-Lithuanian  author Czeslaw Milosz. The first stanza turns a plane trip into a spiritual experience.

Green’s complex, colloquial whimsy is grounded in a strong academic backbone and a broad knowledge base that references Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath. And how she loves wordplay and puns,

Winning a literary award hikes a book’s profile, as the books are put on course curriculums, book club reading lists, and are listed as library best staff picks. This creates more profits for publishers, which is a boon for authors because it increases a book’s promotions budget.

I think books in this genre require a bright label along the spine: Beware. A second reading may be required to fully comprehend this book.