Sunday, July 6, 2008

Hockey night in Canada

The big news story (other than the biker chick scandal) when I was in Canada in June was the theme song from "Hockey Night in Canada", which is the hockey analogue of Monday Night Football. Canada's public television network, the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) decided it no longer wanted to pay up every week to use the famous theme song - Canada's "Second National Anthem" according to the website maintained by the song's owner - and announced a contest for a new theme. There was public outrage everywhere! In all seriousness, this was the top news story one day when I was in Vancouver for the CEA meetings. In the end, private enterprise came to the rescue, as one of the CBC's private competitors called CTV bought up the rights to the song and will use it in its own hockey broadcasts.

One of the best magazine covers I saw during my years at UWO was on the door of a non-pc colleague of mine in political science (who, you will not be surprised to learn, departed for the US not long after I got to UWO). It had two identical pictures of a beautiful landscape from the Canadian Rockies. One side bore the caption "Canada with the CBC", the other "Canada without the CBC".