"Hockey News 1/2-00: Canada, Manley, NAFTA, Star, Cox"

NEWS
__________________________________________________________

above & beyond .. death of hockey .. reviews .. new compendium .. the authors
fan forum .. crosswords .. trophy case .. bookshelf .. hockey links .. buy the books

click here for NetScape version of this page __________________________________________________________

January-February 2000
NAFTA All is Said and Done... Star Bulletin... Archive

__________________________________________________________

NAFTA All is Said and Done

All right, class, settle down. Canada, sit down over here. You're all upset and emotional.
It's very unlike you! America, sit down over there. You haven't been paying attention. We'll
explain it to you while Canada composes itself. Then we'll sort it out for both of you. Gary
Bettman? You go stand in the corner with the owners. As usual, you're the real culprits here.
Shame on you.
Okay, America, here's the basics. Take notes. Canada's all worked up for a reason.
Their teams operate at a real disadvantage compared to American teams. NHL teams in
the States -- like NFL, NBA, and major league baseball teams in the States -- essentially pay
no rent and no taxes. Instead, they get sweetheart deals from state and municipal governments,
who tax state residents to raise the funds to erect new arenas for billionaire NHL club owners.
You're aware of that much, right? There used to be a lot of fuss about it when this sort of thing
first started years ago, but now it's just business-as-usual in the US. Once in a while, when
an owner makes insane demands and threatens to move the team to another city unless he's
appeased, some level-headed citizens group stages a protest, and occasionally they get
some results, but mostly the billionaire owner gets his new arena, and more tax breaks, and
whatever he wants. It's called "corporate welfare." On the other hand, Canada over there
hates that sort of thing. They think it's disgusting. They're right, of course. NHL teams in
Canada pay arena rent and lots of taxes, like they should. On top of that, Canadian owners
have to pay their players in American funds (the American dollar is currently worth about
$1.40 in Canadian money). So while all those complaints you hear from American teams
about how much money they're supposedly losing are mainly BS -- the definition of a business
"loss" seems conveniently ambiguous, and profits and expenses are shuffled around between
interlocking companies and subsidiaries and hidden so well it takes an army of auditors and
CPAs months to sort them out -- the same complaints have some legitimacy when you hear
them coming from Canadian owners, because their profits really are being eaten up by rent
and taxes and the harsh currency exchange. "The $11 million a year [the Montreal Canadiens]
pay in property tax... is three times the combined total the 22 American clubs pay to their
municipalities," Jack Todd pointed out in The Montreal Gazette. Got that now?
Canada, stop crying and cursing over there. We'll get back to you in a second.
Okay, America, back to you. Listen up. Canada had quite an incident in late January.
Over the past couple years, every NHL team up there -- except Toronto, which is big and rich
-- has complained loudly about their money problems and threatened to move to the US unless
something's done to let them compete fairly with American teams. Rod Bryden, the Ottawa
Senators owner, has been the most vocal; somehow, while making the same old extortive threats
that every other money-grubbing owner before him has made, he's become the tell-it-like-it-is
darling of the fans. The owners, the government, the media, the taxpayers, the fans --
everybody's had a say. On January 18, the federal government made front-page news from
St. John's to Nanaimo by announcing it would provide a four-year aid package of several
million dollars to prop up Canadian NHL teams and keep them from moving south of the border.
It was the biggest news since Confederation, or at least since the Halifax Disaster -- and
the corporate welfare plan was so repulsive to most Canadians that mobs of taxpayers began
advancing on Parliament with torches and scythes. Two days later the government sheepishly
apologized for having mentioned it at all and withdrew the offer. So the teams are still
in jeopardy and the fans, especially in Ottawa, are still upset. Are we all up to speed now?
Gary, owners, front and center. Now we're going to discuss this like adults.
The government assistance plan put forth by Industry
Minister John Manley appeared so hastily and clumsily
assembled, so foredoomed to intense opposition and failure,
you have to question whether any of it was ever meant to
succeed or whether it was just put forth as something Ottawa
-- both the federal entity and the team -- could point to
later on and say, "See? We tried," as the Senators packed
their bags for Houston. It ignored the innate Canadian
resentment of industry bail-outs; it ignored public concern
over the economic woes of the Canadian hospital system
and the farm industry and over growing urban problems
like homelessness; it ignored the anger of fans in Winnipeg and Quebec, whose teams
received no such offers of assistance before being shanghaied to the States; it ignored what
a hot-button issue hockey is throughout Canada; it ignored much smarter recommendations
from every quarter, including the government's own 1999 Mills Commission Report. It left
itself open to insinuations of collusion and favouritism: Bryden has been a major player in
Canada's Liberal Party (the party in power and of which Manley is also a member), and the
conditions of the bail-out plan, requiring the financial participation of local and provincial
governments -- participation that had already been clearly ruled out in the case of all five
other Canadian teams -- would have benefitted only Ottawa, Manley's own political riding.
There were plenty in Canada who were enthusiastic about the government offer, observing
it was a small price to pay to keep NHL teams, and the big tax revenue they generate, in the
country -- Canadian teams being the exception to the economic rule, which, in America, is
that major league teams, despite their own claims, actually contribute almost nothing to their
region's fiscal health. Howie Meeker -- in his time a Calder Trophy winner, coach of the Leafs,
Conservative Member of Parliament, Hall of Fame broadcaster, and author -- spoke for many
more Canadians, however, in an impassioned editorial in The Globe & Mail, saying he was
"outraged" by subsidizing millionaires who can't run their businesses properly, and urging the
money instead be put into developmental youth hockey programs.
Maybe the government thought that a federal economic study released that week, projecting
boom times in the year ahead for Ottawa, Edmonton, and Toronto, would have Canadians soft
and happy enough to accept the proposed hand-out to their NHL teams. On the other hand,
The Montreal Gazette's Jennifer Robinson reported that "A new study published by an Ottawa
think-tank, the Vanier Institute for the Family, shows that as Ottawa racks up surpluses,
Canadian families have less and less disposable income... The problem is that despite good
economic news in most of the past decade, average salaries have not kept pace with the cost
of living. But what hurts most is that governments are taking a bigger than ever chunk of every
dollar earned." Good to keep in mind when the average price of a ticket to an NHL game
in Canada is $64.00. The Gazette also reported that week that the federal government had
lost track of $1 billion in grant money. Thanks to typical bureaucratic inefficiency, "Canadian
taxpayers will never know whether $1 billion in federal grants and contributions was properly
spent, because of sloppy record-keeping in the giant Human Resources Development Department.
A scathing internal audit of the department found that the paperwork on grants and contributions
it handled over the past two years was so sloppy that some files didn't even have a record of
anyone applying for the money."
From a PR standpoint, the whole NHL episode was a disaster:
the proposal appeared without warning, unclothed in explanation or
rationale; even Manley himself seemed embarrassed about the whole
thing -- "I feel that hockey is really part of Canada," Manley said
at the press conference. "But at the same time our heads are saying,
'What is this all about?'" While Canadians may hate the idea of their
tax dollars going to support business, it goes on regardless, assisting
everything from Big Oil to the arts -- but none of those industries
carry the emotional weight or provoke the ubiquitous interest that
hockey does. As Todd put it, had Manley announced "a $20-million
annual subsidy to study advanced metallurgy techniques in the nickel
industry, it would have rated eight paragraphs on an inside page of
The Globe & Mail. On a slow day."
And from a substantive standpoint, the aid package was barely
a drop in the bucket for Canadian teams. "Manley's bailout is simply
a Bandaid to carry them through to the real coming crunch: the next
collective bargaining agreement, which comes up exactly when
Manley's promises run out," Roy MacGregor noted in The Ottawa
Citizen. Todd again: "In federal government terms, the amount of
dollars tossed the way of the NHL yesterday is roughly equal to the
spillage from the tables in the House of Commons cafeteria in a good month. Chump change
is a generous way to describe it. In NHL terms, this will keep a few clubs in Tiger Balm
and ankle wraps. Big deal. Divvy up something between $12 million and $20 million in
federal money among six supposedly teetering Canadian franchises and you have enough
money to buy each Canadian team a Scott Thornton. OK, and a Patrick Poulin, maybe."
But what really hurts most here? What's the most dangerous fall-out from this fiasco?
Of course, it's that Bettman's NHL will perceive this as -- or at least claim this demonstrates --
a fundamental lack of interest in hockey among Canadians. This is, remember, the same Gary
Bettman who listed revenue-sharing as one of his priorities when he was named Commissioner
and has never again mentioned it since, the same Gary Bettman who didn't lift a finger to keep
the Jets in Winnipeg or the Nordiques in Quebec. The same Gary Bettman whose diplomatic
visit last year to that strange foreign country of Canada gave him the opportunity to display his
ignorance and slap Canadians in the face by telling them they'd better get with the program
and support their teams the American way, with tax breaks and corporate welfare. When that
support doesn't come through -- and that's officially now -- Bettman has all the excuse he needs
to sit back, fold his hands, and smile like the cat who swallowed the canary, as at least four
more teams abandon the game's heartland and national cradle for American arena deals,
American tax breaks, and American dollars. Despicable.
Bettman and the chimpanzees who own American NHL teams can't find the incentive to
do what's right, to do what's good for the game, by instituting any meaningful revenue-sharing.
Bryden's response was to promptly raise ticket prices 17%, "giving our fans," he said, "the
final say on if we stay or if we go." Yep, it'll be the "fans'" fault. So what's left to do? Well,
here's one idea. In The Death of Hockey, we discuss the possibility of a NAFTA challenge
-- legal action under the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which forbids
a business from deriving an unfair advantage through government assistance, such as American
NHL teams receive, when conducting that business internationally. Seems to us Canada has
a case. Maybe it doesn't; we're not international trade lawyers. It's certainly been mentioned
often enough; it was one of the Mills Commission recommendations. But it's always argued
in a vacuum. Nobody's looked further into it, and nobody's taken any action. Why? Who
knows. Well, we got sick of the inertia, and made some calls, and it turns out anybody can
raise a NAFTA complaint. So here's our pledge to every hockey fan, and our warning to
the owners who'll be chortling over their martinis at poolside during the NHL All-Star break.
If nobody picks up on this by the end of February, we'll look into contacting the Office of
NAFTA ourselves to get the ball rolling. The game's salvation, or the NHL Apocalypse?
Or maybe not even an applicable issue. We'll find out. Let the chimps fall where they may.
-- KER / JZK

picture credits: Bryden photo by Tom Hanson, The Canadian Press; old art from Pictures NOW!

__________________________________________________________

Toronto Star Bulletin

      Once the news here is posted, we stand by it, bravely ignoring the malleability and revisionist 
possibilities of the InterNet as a documentary medium.  But here's an addendum worth looking at 
and too good to wait for.  The day after this news page went up, we were alerted to this fine piece 
by the Toronto Star's Damien Cox, published the same day.  What can we tell ya?  Great minds 
think alike.  Check it out: "Canadians tell NHL: Stop clowning around."                -- KER / JZK

__________________________________________________________

Archive

Current news    The latest edition 
December '99   Youth Hockey Injuries / Saving Maple Leaf Gardens / On the Air / 
                           Holiday Thoughts 
November '99   4 on 4:  Save us, Stevie / '99 Stanley Cup:  Game 7 / Modano:  redeemed? /  
                           AOL poll / Holiday shopping ideas / Site news 
October '99       NHLFA Membership Push / NoGoal.com / Buffalo Snooze / 
                           Phoenix Freebie / Death of Hockey Audio 
September '99   NHL Thugs Gang Up on Hockey Fan Page 
December '98   The Village Voice:  "The Death of Hockey" 
February '98     The New York Times:  "Hockey's Proposed Cures Could Kill the Patient"

___________________________________________________________

by JEFF Z. KLEIN and KARL-ERIC REIF
published by Macmillan Canada

available at Chapters, Indigo, and other fine booksellers throughout Canada
and on-line from Chapters/Indigo and the Hockey Bookshelf

chapters....................................................	indigo......................................................
buy it here!	buy it there!

Hockey Bookshelf [members.aol.com/SportInfRe/IXbkshlf.htm ]

or buy it direct from the authors!
- All prices in Canadian funds -
Before you go, be sure to bookmark this site now -- there's no return link at the bookstore
___________________________________________________________

Above & Beyond Hockey


Current News


The Death of Hockey      The Hockey Compendium


Read the Reviews      Meet the Authors


Contact the Authors/Join the Debate
Fan Forum


Professor Krypto's CrossChecks


The Trophy Case


The Hockey Bookshelf


Hockey Links


Help Storm the Barricades
National Hockey League Fans Association


Viewing the Explorer/AOL version by mistake?
NetScape 4.7 version

The Death of Hockey
published by
Macmillan Canada
(C) Jeff Z. Klein
&
Karl-Eric Reif
1998
all rights
reserved Above & Beyond Hockey
website
(C) Jeff Z. Klein
& Karl-Eric Reif
and
Sports Information
& Research
1999-2002, 2003
all rights
reserved

Website constructed by Sports Information & Research Problems viewing, or linking to or from, this site? Click here to let us know