Thanks Justin: While NFL Thrives The CFL Remains On Life Support
The NFL has made it to its final four teams this weekend playing in the Conference Finals. While the season was pockmarked with Covid-19 related absences no player became seriously ill with the virus. Some coaches and support staff suffered greater illness but, again, no one died.
It was an unsatisfying season at times, but it looks as though the NFL is going to be able to crown a champion at the Super Bowl in early February. Who knows, Tom Brady might win a seventh Super Bowl title, his first with Tampa Bay. Or Southern Ontario’s surrogate team, the Buffalo Bills could win its first title in five SB tries.
The CFL wishes. The league that has been awarding the Grey Cup to its champion for 101 years never got out of the blocks last summer. Covid-19 security and financial woes derailed the playing of even a modified schedule in a bubble. The league’s traditional Labour Day and Thanksgiving Day clashes went unplayed. Ditto the playoffs and the Grey Cup game.
A last-ditch appeal to the federal government for a loan went unfunded. Adding to the disappointment of fans the denial corresponded with the Liberals’ WE scandal in which the prime minister, his cabinet members and others were (not for the first time) implicated in shady financial behaviour.
As of this writing the CFL is planning on playing the 2021 season, but nothing is certain in several markets. Plans to expand have been shelved again. The exact details for dealing with Covid-19 are still being finalized. But nothing will remove the pain of missing 2020.
It seemed to us at the time that there was money for the infamous Kielburger brothers but none for a league that unites the nation. Here’s what we wrote last August.
“Depending on whom you ask, the Canadian Football League is either your grandfather’s sports league or a vibrant part of the national community.
In Saskatchewan it’s blood and bone. On social media it’s an irrelevance. At Grey Cup time it’s a national party. When the Buffalo Bills play it’s a weak second option for NFL-besotted fans in the GTA.
When you ask the government of Justin Trudeau about the importance of the CFL he’s apparently going to tell you that the Kielburgers don’t like it, so go fish.
Okay, perhaps that’s a little cranky. But developments Monday that led to the Covid cancellation of the 2020 CFL season would certainly seem to indicate that M. Trudeau has gobs of money for dubious national projects like packing gyms with students to hear empowerment rhetoric or squandering fortunes on climate hucksters.
(The latest episode of Liberal profligacy is the prime minister’s effort to send more billions toward the green economy sink hole of renewable energy and global climate agreements.)
What Trudeau the unifier doesn’t have money for is the 101-year tradition of the Grey Cup that has a significant TV footprint across the country and millions of fans in both official languages. (Or a contract with controversial Chinese communications giant, Huawei.)
With its diminished status in the Centre of the Universe (Toronto to the uninformed) the CFL is an easy target for the Liberals’ risible idea of cost cutting. The league wanted a $30 million interest-free loan to hold a truncated 2020 season in the bubble city of Winnipeg. It had a dedicated broadcaster in TSN. It had a feel-good message of Canadians becoming stars of the league.
But it didn’t have the prime minister. Which is ironic because, in a previous attempt to pal around with the Canadian government, the CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie had adopted Trudeau’s gobbledygook notion of “diversity”, splashing the meaningless tripe all over its helmets, uniforms and coaches on the sidelines.
As Shakespeare said in Hamlet, “For this relief, much thanks.” But Monday, it meant no cash from the PM. (But a comfy sinecure for his ethically malign finance minister Bill Morneau.) The CFL commissioner now knows what price loyalty when dealing with a party that prefers the CCP and environmental flim-flam above an enduring institutions of real culture.
This snub will have few reverberations on the Aga Khan’s island or Bill Morneau’s French villa or wherever the Liberal toffs congregate these days. But in the heartland of Saskatchewan or Hamilton or Edmonton or Winnipeg there will be a terrible void this Labour Day weekend or the final Sunday of November.
It’s hard for those who prefer film festivals and freeloading to fathom what a possible death of the CFL would mean to many in this country. (My next door neighbour has a “RiderLand” sign above his garage.) Everyone knows that a fragile project like the CFL taking a year out of the marketplace is more likely to spell “goodbye" than “see you again next year”. Frankly the odds are lousy. But that’s what you get when you deal with Justin Trudeau.
In honour of the CFL’s Lost Season, a Top Ten List of things that the CFL shutdown will effect (courtesy David Schneider).
10. Beef jerky sales will be down 50 percent in Canada in 2020.
9. TSN will replace CFL games with “Bowling in a Bubble’.
8. Matt Dunigan will lose Platinum status at the Holiday Inn and Popeyes.
7. The league will finally cough up the 500 bucks and be a gold member of the Liberal Party.
6. Justin will kick the ball at the next Grey Cup and be allowed to take his shirt off.
5. Last year’s all stars will get first dibs for any contact tracer positions in their hometown.
4. The Kielburger brothers will join them in the development office after WE closes down.
3. Many football players will end up happier being paid more under CERB and getting fewer injuries.
2. Mosaic Field’s nickname goes from the Green-and-White Elephant to just the White Elephant
1) And the top story that will come out of the cancelled CFL Season: With this announcement many Canadians in the GTA might actually learn there is a CFL just in time for it to die.
And that’s just sad.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx