Ice breakers, a short documentary about Black hockey players then and now

By Alex Kronstein – November 17, 2019

Photo NFB

KJIPUKTUK (Halifax) – At this summer’s 2019 FIN Atlantic International Film Festival, three new shorts were screened that were part of the National Film Board of Canada’s Re-Imagining Nova Scotia series.

Filmmaker Alex Kronstein went to see all three of them, and here is his review of Ice breakers, directed by Sandi Rankaduwa, about a rising teen hockey star from Cole Harbour who is Black and dreams of playing in the NHL.

TV monopolies and Canadian football

By TONY SEED

On Saturday November 25, the Canadian university football championship was held in Hamilton between the University of Western Ontario Mustangs and Laval Rouge et Or, with the former prevailing 39-17 . The Vanier Cup, attended by 10, 754 fans, was not broadcast on either CBC which featured an Alpine skiing race, an elite sport, or CTV, which featured the Hollywood doomsday movie Armageddon. Instead, it was relegated to TSN 3. (TSN is owned by Bell Media, with EPSN holding a 30 per cent share; Bell owns CTV.)

Sport in Canada has been commercialized, privatized, Americanized and colonized by private empires, reinforced by the sports media monopolies. To watch a Canadian championship, one has to be a cable TV subscriber. But even that is no guarantee. About ten years ago, CIS sports had to quietly pay the then Score TV cable channel $50,000 to come to Halifax to broadcast the semi-final and the final of the college basketball finals. (Score was later bought out by Rogers Sportsnet.)

Is it little wonder that the Vanier Cup is plagued by low attendance?

None of the big Toronto newspapers and across Canada  most if not all daily newspapers regularly report on university sport, let alone amateur sport. The report on the match in the Sunday Toronto Star was reprinted from the Hamilton Spectator. Once again the question of relevance was raised. Reporter Scott Radley writes, “One way or another, the game deserves to be seen. The past seven Vanier Cups have all been terrific. A couple have been even better than that. This one wasn’t as tense yet it was a clinic to appreciate.” His solution? To package it with the Grey Cup and hold it on the same weekend wherever in Canada it is being played.

In contrast, on Saturday three US networks – Fox, CBS and ABC – were broadcasting college games one after the other from noon to late evening. The Auburn University stadium alone was packed with 87,000 people. TV contracts rule American sports, including university sport. The NFL is in the middle of a $26 billion deal for TV rights.

Then there is the Grey Cup, the championship of the Canadian Football League (CFL) which was held in Ottawa as part of the colonial Confederation 150 “celebrations.” Opening the festivities on Tuesday, Prime Minister Trudeau proclaimed that the Grey Cup “brings the nation together.” The CFL cannot be said to be an instrument of nation building. After 105-years, this private sports empire still does not have a franchise east of Montreal (the Alouettes are the former Baltimore Stallions, owned by an American capitalist) in Atlantic Canada, yet it vainly tried to expand into the United States between 1993 and 1996. Doom was brought upon all the American CFL markets except Baltimore due to the CFL’s capitulation to U.S. franchise owners’ demands affecting the originality of the Canadian game.

Despite notable differences with the American game such as the size of the field and the football, placement of the goalposts, the number of downs, the rouge and offensive motion, CFL rules nevertheless refer to Canadian players in negative terms as “non imports.” According to the CFL website, the number of imports and the definition of a non-import in the CFL has undergone 32 significant changes since 1936. This in fact refers to residency and where a player has received his training, not just Canadian citizens; a quota system stipulates that teams are made up of 42 players, including three quarterbacks and 39 other players, of which 19 may be imports. A mere seven of the 24 starting players must be “non-imports,” with skill positions such as quarterback reserved for imports. American cadre overwhelmingly dominate management and coaching positions.

Once again, Canadians had to have a cable TV subscription to watch the match held in Ottawa on Sunday November 26 between the Calgary Stampeders and the Toronto Argonauts and/or the festivities in Ottawa, which was confined to TSN and Shaw, a corporate sponsor of the CFL.

“We are ambassadors of the NFL”

The TV monopolies are a main instrument for spearheading the marginalization of Canadian football.

It is worth remembering that Rogers Communications, owners of Sportsnet, the Toronto Blue Jays (“Canada’s team”)‚ and a majority co-owner with Bell Media of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE – owners of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Toronto Raptors [“We the North”], TFC, Toronto Marlies, Air Canada Centre, operators of BMO Field, etc.) and the Buffalo Bills of the NFL signed a five-year deal in 2008 to bring one “home” game a year to the Rogers Centre in Toronto, along with three pre-season games (later reduced to two). The Rogers’ group included Larry Tanenbaum, minority owner and chairman of MLSE. Despite the manufactured hype, price-gouging and lacklustre attendance, the deal was renewed in January 2013 for another five years.

“Rogers Media is committed to producing and delivering premium sports content and experiences for fans,” said Keith Pelley, President, Rogers Media, at the time.  “We are ambassadors of the NFL and are continually assessing the market to bring that true NFL experience to Canadians.  We created a benchmark for our game last season with a first-rate pre-game festival and half-time show, and look forward to building on that over the next five years.”

The deal was suddenly terminated in March 2014. “Upon hearing the news of its death,” reported the Toronto Star, “fans rejoiced on social media.” When Bills’ owner Ralph Wilson died, Tannenbaum headed a new group that vainly attempted to buy the franchise with a reported offer of $1 billion and eventually move it to Toronto.

MLSE now owns the Argonauts who have been moved from the Rogers Centre to BMO Field, assisted by a $10 million government grant for stadium renovations.

Meanwhile on Sunday the CBC was broadcasting alpine skiing and . . . a bobsleigh competition.

CTV, which had already broadcast two NFL games in the afternoon, was showing “Football Night in America” – the Sunday night NFL game between two U.S. cities, Pittsburgh and Green Bay.

The Halifax stadium lie

Tim Bousquet

Some $2.4 million in public money went to design this 25,000-seat stadium at Shannon Park, and a half a million dollars more to study building a 10-14,000 seat stadium at Shannon Park, and then another million dollars to study building a 20,000-seat stadium at Shannon Park. Now the city is being asked to look at another stadium proposal for Shannon Park.

Those Superfast Nike shoes are creating a problem

The people who oversee track and field have to give serious thought to how much running-shoe technology is too much | Amby Burfoot*

Wearing a controversial Nike shoe, Eliud Kipchoge, the marathon world-record holder, broke the event’s two-hour barrier last weekend | Leonhard Foeger/Reuters

(October 18) – Last weekend’s extraordinary marathon performances — 1 hour 59 minutes 40 seconds by Eliud Kipchoge in Vienna and 2:14:04 by Brigid Kosgei in Chicago — have focused attention on an already simmering question: Does the International Association of Athletics Federations need a more stringent rule to define legal running shoes?

Canada finally beat the US in soccer

Alphonso Davies | Cole Burston/Canadian Press

Last night in Toronto, the Canadian men’s soccer team defeated the United States 2-0 in a CONCACAF Nations League match. This is the first time in 34 years that Canada beat the U.S. in men’s soccer. No one on the current team was even born the last time this happened.

Eliud Kipchoge makes history by running sub two-hour marathon

• Kenyan runs unofficial time of 1hr 59min 40sec in Vienna
• World record holder was assisted by 41 pacemakers and lasers

Ewan Murray in Vienna

(October 12) – It was the marathon that turned into a sprint. Even the strongest cynics – and they are not hard to come by – had to smile at the 500-metre final stretch that defined the making of history: the marathon distance has been completed in under two hours.

Toronto Wolfpack: Yet another sports franchise militarizes game, stadium

By TONY SEED

On August 31 the Toronto Wolfpack rugby franchise staged an inaugural “Forces and Families Day” at Lamport Stadium in parallel with the Canadian International Air Show being held over the Canadian National Exhibition (see below) to promote war and militarism in Canada. The event included a fly over featuring a CF-18 Hornet fighter jet, CH146 SAT Griffon helicopter and Sikorsky CH-148 Cyclone helicopter – all aircraft which have been used by Canada to wage war on other nations; displays of Canadian Forces military equipment in the pre-game FanZone (a beer garden) as “family entertainment”; a half time contest with active military members; and free admission for hundreds of well-paid members of the Toronto Scottish Regiment and their families.