Elbows Up Part Deux: Liberal Canada Now Riding The Blue Jays

And you thought Elbows Up was just a hockey thing? Ha! The folks who marketed the Mike Myers hockey election campaign to use Donald Trump to distract Canadians have decided that baseball fans must too be swept up in patriotic fury to support the governing Liberal minority. All over a baseball team with zero Canadians on its roster.

This from the nation that half an hour ago was telling the world Canada was a genocidal settler tyranny burying murdered babies in the moonlight. Go figure.

Rogers Media is running commercials during the Blue Jays AL Divisional Series boasting in Liberal red and white “Proud owners of Canada’s national team”. (What team owner has ever put itself above the title on a sports team?) If you haven’t caught that ad there are others Rogers’ ads extolling its magnificence in giving Canada the highest telephone bills this side of Botswana. Oh wait… They say, Go Jays Go, Canada’s national team. Sorry about that.

The team’s announcers are also being made to read verbatim prefab trite slugs about the story of the Blue Jays not being written yet. (We counted three doing the hype before Gm. 1.) Watching the proud-as-punch onslaught from the team’s owner one would think this has to be more than Vlad Guerrero uber alles. And, of course, there is. Rudyard Griffiths, publisher of The Hub, calls it part of the “soft, silent takeover of the nation’s press”. Having used public money to bribe… er, support even the richest media in the country Liberals can count on their support for tongue bathing of Mark Carney’s faculty lounge.

The intro for Game One of the ALDS lathered the “Canada’s team” lard. You’re supposed to think its the 1992-93 World Series all over again. Don’t pay attention to those MAGA cranks in the corner. Rogers is not alone. Much of the advertising during the Jays/ Yankees equates Canada’s team and Canada proud. The advertisers on the games are punctuating ads with a “made in Canada by Canadians” angle (even as jobs flee the country).

But never has the Laurentian Elite of Canada needed a distraction from the mess of Canada’s Liberal hegemony. It can’t be seen that Trump was correct stating it was a better deal being part of the U.S. Samples of Elbows Down:

Canada has no mail system.

"Hollywood North" just got torpedoed by Trump.

Government financial watchdog said the economy is "unsustainable"

Country is in cost-of-living, unemployment and housing crises. 

Imperial just let go 1,000 employees and sold its Calgary HQ.

There’s plenty more. Like the virtuous refusing to visit the U.S., the Jays’ insertion into the mindset of Boomer Canada is providential to advertisers who make a living pitching the Liberal brand. Almost as precious as “Our” team is the concept of the Blue Jays as a national team. It seems like only yesterday they were deposing the previous national team, the Montreal Expos. The ‘Spos had aided Toronto in getting a franchise in 1977. When Toronto sputtered in the early days the Expos gave them oxygen. But as we wrote in July of 2023, the newcomer turned on their National League cousins.

“As the Jays went from weak sister to equal partner to dominant team on the field winning the 1992-93 World Series, their tone about letting Expo games generate income in their territory grew less than cordial. Labatt Breweries  owned the biggest, most lucrative market in Canada. And only they should profit from it.

This exposed the fundamental weakness of the Montreal franchise. The Olympic Stadium was proving to be a cold, fan-unfriendly disaster. Hundreds of thousands of English speakers had left the province when the Parti Québecois took power. At the same time as initial owner Charles Bronfman was tiring of coming up short on the field and repeated labour stoppages, the Expos were threatened with a severe hit to their broadcast revenues. 

Their friendly sharing of MLB in Canada with the Jays now appeared naïve.  MLB said the Expos could control Quebec and the Maritimes, but it would have to stay out of southern Ontario. McHale could see the writing on the wall. Owner Bronfman appealed to then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn for relief, saying this ruling would “ghettoize” the team within Canada. His intent on buying the club in 1969 had been to “bring Quebec into the nation”. Instead, the team he’d encouraged to join MLB was freezing the Expos out of the large English speaking markets. 

After hearing from the Jays, MLB commoner Bowie Kuhn allowed the Expos to show 15 TV games a season in Ontario. McHale and Bronfman knew this was inadequate. As the Jays started getting into the postseason in 1985 and the Expos sank in the NL the die was cast. Making it worse, the Canadian dollar began its plunge that ended with a 62-cent dollar versus the U.S. 

The 1994 season, in which Montreal had the best record in MLB, was cancelled. Bronfman sold the club to a consortium of owners without Bronfman’s means. By 2000, attendance nosedived as the Expos dumped their great core of Walker, Pedro Martinez, Moises Alou and John Wetteland. By the early 2000s, new American owner Jeffrey Loria was actively trying to sell the team to investors who’d move it  to the U.S. 

By 2005, the Expos were sold to new owners in Washington who renamed the club the Washington Nationals. Loria, meanwhile, was allowed to buy the Florida Marlins franchise, which he ran into the ground as he’d done to the Expos. 

The Blue Jays, meanwhile swept in to capture the entire Canadian sports TV audience. They are today valued by Forbes magazine at a cool $2.1 billion. There was talk of transferring the Tampa Bay Rays to Montreal but that evaporated when local Florida politicians promised lawsuits. MLB is now talking about possibly returning to Montreal as an expansion club should they build a proper ball park. 

Although who in Quebec has a billion to throw at a baseball stadium is unclear. And how they’d get past the Blue Jays monopoly on broadcast rights in English Canada is also a huge question. Just remember, however, that you needn’t look far to see who had a large hand in killing the Expos.

It was the Toronto Blue Jays.” 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.