Sunday Roundup
Baseball
Clearly, it is too early for me to form coherent feelings towards the Toronto Blue Jays after which produced as gut wenthing a loss in game seven last night as the ’93 Toronto Maple Leaf loss to Wayne Gretzky. Unlike that evening’s performance which is revered as the Great One’s greatest game, last night’s loss featured no such individual heroics on the part of the winning team. Just a drip, drip, drip of good plays across the game which were not countered by the Jays.
Opportunity aplenty to become the historic rewriter of Toronto sports history, and yet, like so many years before, the Jays are relegated to also rans that crushed the spirit of a city and nation. Such is the existence of Toronto sports fan. 58 years of the Leafs not being able to get it done in Game 7’s. A two year flash in ’92 and ’93 with the Jays after a couple of crushing defeats, the worst of which was to the KC Royals when Dave Steib and the best outfield in baseball couldn’t get it done.
The Raptors had a brief shot at redeeming the Toronto sports persona but unable to resign their rent-a-star the slunk back into NBA obscurity. The Argos and whatever the sort of pro soccer team is may have a following but not on the larger stage of important sports. Real football is played either in the NFL or in European cities. And for the GTA NFL fans the likely team of choice is the Bills. Another perennial heartbreaker with that of wide right being the closest its gotten to winning the Super Bowl.
Am I jaded regarding Toronto sports teams? I have mostly stopped watching hockey as the leafs once again try to remedy their 58 year drought. I had not watched a baseball game for likely 10 or 15 years and the same prior to that. My wife and I have cultivated a shared love of Sunday afternoons watch football and cheering for the Bills, which might go off the rails this week after a six year build up. And basketball has never been something I watch. So at least there is no emotion attached to the Raptors.
Canadian Politics
I am certain Mark Carney was pulling for a Jays victory to smooth out what is now the big Canadian news focus this upcoming week. Finally we are going to have a budget introduced after a significant period without one. Unfortunately for Carney theJays did not provide a National Pride resurgence nor or at least a national euphoria with their victory which likely would have included a parade on Tuesday that would be top of the news cycle instead of the overwhelming deficit that will be presented in the budget.
Just like the Jays, Carney came into this with great promise, the wonderkind who can take on and beat Orange Man Bad. Sadly he is head of the gang who couldn’t shoot straight that at every opportunity remove toes with bullets in trying to best the US in trade talks. The latest being the lack of shade being thrown by Carney on Doug Ford for his running of an ad during the start of the World Series that raised the ire of the Administration. At an Asian meeting Carney through Ford under the bus, apologizing to Trump for the ad and telling him he was against it. Of course that’s not the Ford story which is that he and Carney discussed the ad in person and Carney was good with it.
So talks regarding a trade agreement are once again on hold. This should be an interesting week with with the trade debacles and what is likely to be the deficit debacle. It will be interesting to see what the CBC and CTV networks do to spin all this in favour of Carney. Seems harder and harder for them to prop him up with a straight face but old white women sure still seem to buy into the creativity.
Canadian Judiciary
I suppose this could have fallen under the Politics category as it seems the Supreme Court of Canada has again weighed in to politics with the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences in cases of child pornography. Once again the Court has relied on the precedent set in R v Smith which used an argument of a hypothetical case to strike down as unconstitutional a minimum sentence that Parliament decided in a vote was necessary when someone traffics a boatload of narcotics into our country. The court used a process called the reasonable hypothetical when striking the mandatory minimum as cruel and unusual for a man caught with $168,000 worth of cocaine on his way into Canada, The hypothetical they used was that of a teen sneaking a single joint into the country after being on vacation. Definitely analogous.
The Supreme’s and appellate courts have now used this precedent to strike mandatory minimum sentences 39 times in the past fifteen years. Understanding that these sentences were the will of the people as voted on by their representatives by Acts debated and passed in Parliament and have been overturned by the unelected unaccountable judiciary is something that the political left love and the politcal right and middle abhor. Allowing the judiciary to make law instead of applying law is as undemocratic as it gets. And yet the same folks that applaud such decisions are the ones slamming the political right as undemocratic fascists.
So what does our government do to rein this in? well nothing actually, in fact they are lodging a case for the Supreme Court to decide whether the notwithstanding clause is actually constitutional even though it is specifically a part of the constitution for such eventualities. As the result of this incredible misuse of precedent, two men are not required to spend the year in jail the people believe is just for what are very heinous crimes against the children of our land. Such is the state of our country where the courts place better safe guards on twisted sick perverts than they do on the children of our nation.