Congratulations To Team Canada – And Thanks For Lifting The Spirits Of We Fellow Canadians

A Brief Comment by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

We Canadians have been shoveling our way through one of the most brutal winters on record – We have the likes of the Rob Ford clown show sullying the international image of our country’s economic driver of a city, and we have former Senate hacks like Mike Duffy, and the costly outfall of the Dalton McGuinty administration here in Ontario. 

Closer to home, we have a mostly dysfunctional, mean-spirited Niagara regional council.

It’s enough to drape the winter blues over the proudest of Canadians.

Then there was that glorious team of young Canadians that competed at these 2014 Winter Olympics Games, capping all the extraordinary medal winning performances with Canada’s men’s hockey team winning the Gold this past Sunday, February 23, just a few hours before the Olympic flame over Sochi was extinguished. Later that Sunday, I went out to pick up a few groceries and I could not help but notice how almost everyone around me walked with a prouder step, as did I. 

There were questions in the weeks leading up to these Olympics whether Canada should participate in them at all, given Russia strongman Putin’s horrific record on human rights and advancing the quality of life, including the aspirations for freer speech and more democracy,  of his own people. As little as it may have mattered, I was on the verge of writing a commentary saying let’s boycott these Olympics.

But that probably would have only served to inflame and make more monstrous the goon in the Kremlin, and would have hurt the majority of Russian people who, by most media accounts, opened up warm arms to our fellow Canadians and others who attended the games and who don’t have much use for Putin either.

Just as profoundly, a boycott of the games would also have robbed our young athletes of a chance of a lifetime they’d been training for all of their lives to have that global moment in a sport, many of which don’t get any of the coverage a few sports like hockey get outside the Olympics.

Canada’s young athletes did our country proud and I think we all should remember that they are just one part of younger generations of Canadians who have many of the same dreams older generation had in this country to achieve their goals and better their lives. Against a government in Ottawa that has defunded post-secondary education, leaving so many of them in their peers with debt loads that will compromise whatever investment they can make in their future and our economy for years – a government that has outsourced their jobs to low-wage countries and used a foreign workers program to displace their opportunities for jobs here, and has gutted rules and regulations for protecting the health of the environment for their future, all of us ought to embrace the glow of this Olympics to rally around and give more support to them as they work to build Canada.

(Niagara At Large invites you to share your views on this post. A reminder that we only post comments by individuals who share their first and last name with them.)