Western Discontent: The Days Of Our Lives
“When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.” — Bill Murray as Phil Conners in Groundhog Day.
Twenty-three years ago this week I arrived in Calgary to take a job as sports columnist for the Calgary Herald. It was like an ice palace, covered with snow drifts and frozen dirt. (I’d golfed in Toronto two days earlier.) As I shuffled to my rental car I seriously wondered why I had risked everything to move West, a place my mother hated after three dismal years living in the 1950s in Edmonton.
I certainly didn’t need the job. I was comfortable at CBC Radio in Toronto doing sports nationally in the morning. My executive thought I’d lost my mind. “Why are you going there? You’re a big city guy from Montreal and Toronto.” (My first inkling what CBC executives thought of the West)
But I was looking for a challenge and relief from getting up at 4 A.M. When the Herald’s editor told me, “At your age (45) you won’t get this offer again” I thought, “Why not?” To understand Canada you have to live in all of Canada. Describing the country from Toronto is like a worm describing the garden.
So hello Calgary, goodbye Toronto. Little did I know I was about to enter the plot from Bill Murray’s brilliant existential comedy Ground Hog Day. In the film Murray plays Phill Conners, an acerbic weatherman for a Pittsburgh TV station. He hates his assignment covering Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog who sees his shadow on Ground Hog Day.
He is snotty with what he sees as bucolic rubes. “This is pitiful. A thousand people freezing their butts off waiting to worship a rat. What hype. Groundhog Day used to mean something in this town. They used to pull the hog out, and they used to eat it. You’re hypocrites, all of you!”
Through a strange quirk he suddenly becomes destined to live the same day, February 2, in an endless loop till he gets it right spiritually and romantically. He is baffled, enraged, frustrated, depressed, suicidal as the same people and situations repeat themselves. Each day begins with the radio in his room playing “I Got You, Babe” by Sonny & Cher.
Phil wonders about the Buddhist nightmare he’s living. “Well maybe the real God uses tricks, you know? Maybe he’s not omnipotent. He’s just been around so long he knows everything.”
Like Phil Conners I was a TV snob who maybe thought he was slumming in Stampede land. With my Toronto and CBC biases intact, I sought to change Calgary rather than the obverse. It showed. After I wrote critically about a fatal chuckwagon accident, one local columnist hissed that I didn’t know “a Charolais from a Chardonnay”. Good line, BTW.
Like Phil Conners, I was destined to live the same day over and over till I got right with the people I met in Calgary. Replacing Toronto/ CBC data in my brain with an appreciation of the people I now met took time. Not everything in Calgary was perfect. Not everything from Toronto was worth abandoning.
But I found myself liking the authenticity of the West, the determination of the people to pursue a goal, the long line of purple mountains to the west as my plane would bring me back after assignments. (Nothing can make me like the weather.)
I began rooting for them in their eternal struggle against the snobs— like my exec who thought Calgary was Baffin Island with an energy industry. As this column from 2018 illustrates, I had become a vendu, a sell-out to the petro billionaires. I was a traitor to my class.
Like Murray’s character I began to see the honest beauty in so many and the value of their dreams. And got right with the freedom to speak, the freedom to pursue goals now being suffocated by the blue-check elite. Canada had enough liberal enclaves. It needs checks and balances.
Which is why I sympathize with how they’re being made non-people by the current prime minister and the Media Party. The recent naming of a Greenpeace agitprop extremist as cabinet minister for the energy industry is a clear provocation against his Western political enemies. The preening press conference in Glasgow where he grandiosely proclaimed a cap on an industry that made the entire nation prosperous was an excommunication (thanks Rex Murphy) of the West.
Worse the provincial Conservatives, who planned a challenge to the equalization system, have become mired in the Covid crisis, distracted by the diktats of the health “experts” whose remedies changed every five minutes. It got so bad that Calgary elected a new mayor who thinks the city is in the midst of a climate disaster.
For what? A Boy Scout badge for global citizenship while the rest of the world snickers at Canada’s gullibility?
There is pushback. Alberta approved the referendum to renegotiate the equalization scheme. In Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe says the province needs a new deal within Confederation. That led Globe & Mail editors to sniff, “Moe wants Saskatchewan to have nationhood status. Yes, it’s as bizarre as it sounds "
That snark prompted Toronto author and psychoanalyst Jordan Peterson to take up the West’s cause. “This is not bizarre, you elitist centralist snobs. This is exactly what is going to happen given Trudeau's antipathy toward the economic engines of the west. It's absolutely inevitable. Wake up, Toronto.”
But Peterson is unique. Led by Toronto media/ culture voices the West is a whipping post. My heart is with my neighbours as they try to keep their bearings in these stormy seas. I’m not sure how long I’ll remain here (my kids and grandkids have moved elsewhere to pursue their lives), but like Phil Conners my loyalty will be with the proud, rambunctious Albertans who’ve taught me the meaning of a fulfilled life.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand has been nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan is called InExact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx