I was wondering if and when someone would complain about so many Canadians brandishing foreign flags during the World Cup. It’s very topical, really — easily linked, if one so chose, to the whole “multiculturalism’s death rattle” theme that’s going around these days.

Enter the Post’s Peter Kuitenbrouwer, who came across some foulmouthed pre-teens on the Corso Italia yesterday:

“Canada sucks.”

So spoke Michael Latartara, 9, who waved an Italian flag while walking down St. Clair Avenue West at Dufferin Street yesterday, following Italy’s defeat of Australia, 1-0, in World Cup action.

“Why does Canada suck?” I asked.

“Because they’re no good at soccer.”

“They?”

Out of the mouths of babes… newspaper columns!

…there’s nothing wrong with celebrating your roots. But this reclaiming of Italian identity, by kids who can’t speak Italian, seems strange.

“Since Canada is not in the World Cup, why not cheer for the other part of your family?” reasoned Katherine, 13, whom I met, wrapped in an Italian flag, farther down the street.

True, but where were the parades of Canadian flags when Canada had its most successful Winter Olympics ever in Turin in February?

They were in the basements of people who care mostly about hockey, is where. Let me take you back to February 24, 2002…

in Ottawa:

in Toronto:

in Vancouver:

Go England!

Someone else (the Star) has finally picked up on the story of the GST cut that will ostensibly pass Toronto by:

For example, the city charges $49, including $3.21 GST, for skating lessons. The GST cut lowers that by just 46 cents per person. The move would save consumers a total of $148,000. But the cost of reprinting the parks and recreation brochure to reflect new pricing would be $300,000.

This brochure, you mean, which they print twice a year anyway? The PDF version of which they could fix in a half hour? Right then. They can go ahead and change the price accordingly when the Fall-Winter “Fun Guide” comes out. Or better yet, they can change the price immediately and risk the ire of making people pay 46 cents less than advertised for their skating lessons. How much could the extra security cost?

Why the Leafs felt they needed a goalie is frankly beyond me. This is what they had:

29-year-old J-S- Aubin: 179 GP; 72-72-11; 2.87 GAA; .903 SV%
26-year-old Mikael Tellqvist: 39 GP; 16-15-2; 3.04 GAA; .895 SV%

And here’s what they got:
26-year-old Andrew Raycroft: 108 GP; 43-46-10; 2.62 GAA; .908 SV%

Here in my land of low expectations, though, I’m relatively pleased. Hearing names like Nabokov and Giguere rattling around was downright terrifying. If you’re going to acquire a goalie who recently got fired for cause, better it be the slightly younger, vastly cheaper one.

Tellqvist was the Leafs’ best goalie all year, the odd time Pat Quinn let him play, until Aubin stole his job and ran with it. Aubin has been a number-one goalie for exactly as many full seasons as has Raycroft, and I would have been happy to have him duke it out with Tellqvist for the number-one job or a platoon situation. But the trade boils down to a first round pick for a guy who won the last Calder trophy — I can’t complain too much.

In other news, we have Oily bloggers saying they’ll burn down Rexall Place if Kevin Lowe trades Chris Pronger to the Leafs for Alex Steen and Tomas Kaberle. Suffice to say the feeling is mutual. Between the Olympics (until it became clear he wasn’t really interested) and the Oilers playoff run, I’ve taken more time off despising Chris Pronger this season than I ever intended to in my entire life. Chris Dillhole Pronger is a loser, and he’ll always be a huge, enormously talented, pussy-whipped loser.

“Kaberle is obviously no Chris Pronger, and we have plenty of guys who score less than 20 goals.” Riiight. No one is Chris Pronger, but the fourth-leading defenseman scorer in the NHL — a minutes-hog with 14 more assists and 8 more shots than C-Prong — plus a real gamer of a rookie for a total of somewhere around a million-and-a-quarter less than the guy who’d rather live in St freaking Louis than your precious City of Champions is not worthy of such derision, Oilers fans.

Here’s hoping you get Eric Brewer back for him, straight up.

Chris Zelkovich “balances” his deserved praise for British soccer commentators with this dud:

When England’s David Beckham finally scored, he [John Helm] mentioned Mrs. Beckham and then handed them the victory: “It promises a place in the quarter-finals.” That was with 32 minutes to play.

promise • v. 2 tr. afford expectations of (the discussions promise future problems; promises to be a good cook)

An Innovative Research poll for the Ottawa Citizen found that 37% of Canadians feel we have “found the right balance between protecting national security and protecting civil liberties.” Of those who see an imbalance, 23% feel civil liberties have suffered in favour of national security; 18% feel national security has suffered in favour of civil liberties.

Another poll question: “If we lower our protection of civil rights when we deal with potential terrorists, we are letting the terrorists win.” 52% agreed (18% strongly; 34% somewhat); 39% disagreed (13% strongly; 26% somewhat).

And another: “Without national security, all of the other individual rights become theoretical.” 62% agreed (19% strongly; 43% somewhat); 29% disagreed (8% strongly; 21% somewhat).

On that third, highly abstract question of what happens to individual rights in a country “without national security” — i.e., a country totally unlike Canada — a strong majority answered (correctly, in my view) that those rights become more theoretical. On the two more practical questions, however, the Canadians polled were more concerned (if they were concerned at all) with civil liberties than they were with national security.

The Ottawa Citizen’s headline: “Sacrifice civil liberties for security, Canadians say.”

Wow.

(Cross-posted to the Shotgun.)

I’d have a hard time believing that anyone except Calgarians and the 18,978 actual Hurricanes fans in the world could have been actively cheering against the Oilers, but there was nothing wrong with a good Canadian boy like Adam Radwanski cheering for the Hurricanes. We all pick our teams according to our own criteria.

I’d certainly like to see a Canadian team win the Cup — they’re called the Toronto Maple Leafs — but I cheered for the Flames last season and the Oilers this season because I liked the teams and the hockey they were playing. The 2004 Flames perfectly demonstrated the best way to play the game — quickly, brutally, with a terrifying forecheck and active penalty kill. The Hurricanes were closer to that model than the Oilers in these playoffs, if you ask me, but the Oil had enough heart to run a mastodon, and heart trumps skill any day when I’m picking a team. Good thing, too, because you’re going to need a lot of intangibles for me to cheer for a team with Chris “15,000 unpenalized crosschecks and counting” Pronger, Mike “every hit I deliver is a charge” Peca, and a crazy terrible power play.

There were reasons to cheer for the Hurricanes, too. I am grateful to them for having destroyed one of the sportswriter’s most prized shibboleths: that you need both a stud number-one defenseman and a stud number-one goalie to win the Stanley Cup. (And no, Cam Ward’s sham Conn Smythe trophy doesn’t change anything in that regard. Real MVPs don’t lose their jobs half-way through the campaign. Carolina is a very good team that didn’t need an insane goaltending performance to win the Cup, and they have a hell of a captain who led the team in scoring.) But the comebacks, the local boy made good, Ryan Smyth… it was the whole package. It was irresistible.

It’s certainly not just because they’re a Canadian team. I dislike three of the five Canadian teams I don’t support rather intensely, actually. Vancouver? Meh. Get a room, Markus and Todd. You can probably sublet from Shayne Corson and Travis Green. I actually liked the Habs when I lived in Montreal, but I have no time for its current collection of gutless dipsy-doodlers and sundry B-list hangers on. They should be ashamed to skate on the same ice as Saku Koivu. And Ottawa? For me to cheer for the Senators they’d have to somehow go back in time and take on Hitler. And this post would suddenly reappear in German as soon as they did.

Now that it’s over, I have no particular affinity for the Edmonton Oilers. But that was a bitchin’ playoff run, and any Canadian team that plays like that can expect in the future to get the same fanatical support from Torontonians like myself. So long as they aren’t playing the Leafs, of course, and so long as they aren’t the Habs, Senators or Canucks.

Ouch:

So with remarkable rapidity, from being a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people, liberalism has become a doctrine designed to put it back again.

So says Peregrine Worsthorne in a blistering attack on what’s happened to western democracy.

On the media:

The liberal argument for the importance of a free press was that it gave voters the necessary information on which they could vote intelligently. Of all the British newspapers today, only the Guardian even tries to do that. The rest concentrate on misinformation or even disinformation — sophisticated and clever disinformation in the case of the broadsheets, and untreated sewage in the case of the tabloids. So, far from helping to guide the reader into the real world — the world for which he or she is meant to take responsibility — they offer him or her a way out of that real world into one of fantasy, muddying rather than clarifying the democratic waters.

On meritocracy:

Of course it made sense in John Stuart Mill’s day to replace hereditary aristocracy, of which there was too much, with a system of careers open to talent, of which there was too little. But… the new problem, which is getting worse all the time, is the deeply unattractive and unimpressive nature of an exclusively self-made meritocratic ruling class: a ruling class made up of men and women exceptionally gifted only in the horrible rat-race arts of elbowing their way to the top. Aristocracy may have its faults but ratocracy, which is what in practice a meritocratic system produces, is proving even worse — which is possibly why the public seems so eager to welcome the return of the English gentleman in the shape of David Cameron.

On liberal triumphalism:

…the Iraq war is only the first move in a liberal jihad aimed at spreading to all mankind a secular and materialist religion, the central tenet of which — free thought — can be relied upon to dissolve people’s faith in any transcendental religion far more certainly than could communist repression.

We’re trying to export an idea of society that, while demonstrably superior to the incumbents, hasn’t exactly gotten us where its spiritual fathers had in mind. Our national broadcaster is going to preempt the news for a show about manufacturing a singer, for instance. I can understand if Iraqis are a tad skeptical.

(Cross-posted to the Shotgun.)

Due to the unfreezing process, Paul Jackson has no inner monologue:

Carolyn Bennett reminds me of the type of wife who one day haughtily proclaims to her husband: “Sex isn’t all there is to a marriage, you know.”

Having been through that little charade myself, I know most husbands on hearing those words immediately go looking for greener pastures.

Politically, it would be the same. Carolyn’s the type of politician who slams the door in her own face.

The normally quite reasonable Philip Johnston was miles off the mark in yesterday’s Telegraph:

The fact remains, this ghastly episode took place on the morning of July 7, just as London was celebrating winning the 2012 Olympic Games. Not even a year has passed, yet you begin to wonder whether the country, or some sections of it, has been stricken with amnesia or has access to privileged information that guarantees it is never going to happen again.

How else can you explain the systematic and insidious attempt to undermine the efforts of the police, MI5 and other counter-terrorist agencies as they seek to thwart another attack?
…
They have also made some dreadful and tragic errors, such as the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes and the raid on a house in Forest Gate, east London, which they had thought contained chemical weapons.

But that is what they were. Mistakes. And understandable ones at that, given the background. Have we also forgotten that on the day Mr de Menezes was killed, the police had good reason to fear that London was the target for a sustained series of suicide attacks?

In the Forest Gate raid a suspect was shot in the chest, apparently accidentally. He’ll live, and the Police have apologized. On July 22, 2005 Mr de Menezes, a totally innocent man, was shot seven times in the head. The Police mounted a disinformation campaign of a distinctly totalitarian pedigree, and by some accounts are still undermining the inquiry.

Shooting a supposedly legitimate suspect, even by accident or as a result of incompetence, is “understandable” to a degree that de Menezes’ murder is not. Stepping off a bus at Brixton Tube station, seeing it closed and hopping back on, as de Menezes did, is not a suspicious action. I imagine he wasn’t the only one on that bus to execute the manoeuvre. But since the adrenaline-charged officers were already sure they had their man — he had “mongolian eyes,” after all — it served as further validation. Their commanders trusted the eyes and ears they had in the field and authorized the takedown. This needs to be prevented from ever happening again.

Johnston condescends to all civil libertarians when he suggests their “undermining” the security forces stems from collective amnesia. The fight against terrorism isn’t just a numbers game. The extinguishment of Mr de Menezes’ life is quite frankly more important to the future of Britain than that of anyone on the Tube or the #30 Bus. The latter was facilitated by the trust that British free society puts in its citizens; the former represents the temporary abandonment of that free society’s principles. That’s easy for me to say, never having been on an exploding subway car — but nor has Philip Johnston ever been on an exploding subway car, and nor will 99.9-odd percent of Britons ever be.

That giant lucky majority has a responsibility to soberly contemplate the balance between security and freedom. Tony Blair, for instance, decided on behalf of the entire Iraqi people that they would be better off with more of a certain kind of freedom and less of all kinds of security. Back on the homefront, he’s asking the opposite of his own constituents. It isn’t delusional to question that state of affairs. It’s incurious not to.

(Speaking of free societies, the abandonment of principles and incuriousness, an autospy has determined that Rigoberto Alpizar was shot 11 times by air marshals on a Miami jetway. There will be no inquiry, mostly because nobody wants one.)

Not being an avid reader of Terrence Corcoran, I missed his somewhat embarrassing attempt at an economic analysis of world sport until now. It’s 11 days old, but just too good to pass up.

Basically his premise is that the North American model of sports is more in line with his own brand of buck naked capitalism than world soccer’s. Anyone who knows anything about European football knows how incorrect that is. It’s about as capitalistic as it gets in sports: you can pay as much as you like to any team you like to buy any player you like. And if your team stinks, it gets demoted to a different league.

Corcoran:

Soccer, where soccer is big, is a one-sport wonder. With some exceptions, competition is non-existent. Britain and a few other countries have cricket, France and some other countries have cycling, Russia and Sweden have hockey, Japan has baseball. Otherwise, nothing outside of soccer ranks as a major league sport in Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia.

In most of the world, sports fans have no choice. So where soccer is big, it is really big. North America, by comparison, has at least two major sports competing for fans and dollars at all times.

“Britain” doesn’t have cricket — England does, and even there it’s neck-and-neck with rugby union as the second sport. Soccer is by some accounts Australia’s fifth most popular sport, and far worse off than that in the United States. Of the countries in this World Cup, Korea, Mexico and Japan love their baseball. The Serbs and Croats are mad about basketball — literally. The Czechs and Swiss are among the foremost hockey nations.

More to the point, why does Corcoran presume that the billions of people around the world who follow soccer and exclusively soccer do so for lack of capitalist choice? If Angolans and Togans (?) and Ghanaians choose soccer for any reason other than their love of the game, it’s because they can’t afford sporting equipment above and beyond a ball per village, so to speak. Simplicity is one of the things that make it such a beautiful game — that, and massive transfer fees.

I suspect Corcoran can’t abide the idea of any European economic model being more laissez-faire than its North American counterpart, but he’s going to have to. And as multiple letter-writers suggested in today’s Financial Post, he might do well to stay away from sports in future.