the watcher

I swear most of this talk, the   XFL and 4 downs comes from the fact that the media in Toronto , and Toronto in general feel like they are to big for the CFL. It's a " we are a world class city and the CFLis a secondary minor league  " thing. The leauge had one down year ( in the middle of the pandemic ) so let's blow up a 100 + year league  ??? It's just a convient excuse. Maybe those people in power in Toronto would be far better to spend their time figuring out  how to properly promote the game. Anyone seriously suggesting that someone in Toronto will suddenly say " Oh! The CFL switched to 4 downs  ! Let's go support a team we never have before ! "  is off their rocker.  What a joke. 
Edit : The NFL was happy because scoring was up to 22.8 points per game post pandemic.
The CFL  is down to 43.1 points per game last year.. Yes let's panic and change the basics of the game.

Absolutely, bang on... and lets try the concept of talking No Change for a few years. 
The real problem is Toronto, perhaps changing things there would help, starting with the thinking. The entire group needs to be brought down to earth in that area.
I get it and why the feelings: shortly, the NHL playoffs will start, the Leafs will make a quick exit and all will be back to normal (Leaf nation will be jumping of the CN Tower). Then, TSN will have full blown 24/7 coverage of the Leaf failures until puck drop for next season, baseball will be on until the Jays last pitch, plus we get a sprinkling of Raptors. Same old, same old...talk about needing change.. Other then the poor attendance last year, the CFL Toronto based team wasn't that bad.
Give me 3 down football as it is today. Dare I say it, even watching a Rider game, has its good points!!!

I swear most of this talk, the   XFL and 4 downs comes from the fact that the media in Toronto , and Toronto in general feel like they are to big for the CFL. It's a " we are a world class city and the CFLis a secondary minor league  " thing. The leauge had one down year ( in the middle of the pandemic ) so let's blow up a 100 + year league  ??? It's just a convient excuse. Maybe those people in power in Toronto would be far better to spend their time figuring out  how to properly promote the game. Anyone seriously suggesting that someone in Toronto will suddenly say " Oh! The CFL switched to 4 downs  ! Let's go support a team we never have before ! "  is off their rocker.  What a joke. 
Edit : The NFL was happy because scoring was up to 22.8 points per game post pandemic.
The CFL  is down to 43.1 points per game last year.. Yes let's panic and change the basics of the game.

I swear most of this talk, the   XFL and 4 downs comes from the fact that the media in Toronto , and Toronto in general feel like they are to big for the CFL. It's a " we are a world class city and the CFLis a secondary minor league  " thing. The leauge had one down year ( in the middle of the pandemic ) so let's blow up a 100 + year league  ??? It's just a convient excuse. Maybe those people in power in Toronto would be far better to spend their time figuring out  how to properly promote the game. Anyone seriously suggesting that someone in Toronto will suddenly say " Oh! The CFL switched to 4 downs  ! Let's go support a team we never have before ! "  is off their rocker.  What a joke. 
Edit : The NFL was happy because scoring was up to 22.8 points per game post pandemic.
The CFL  is down to 43.1 points per game last year.. Yes let's panic and change the basics of the game.

Meanwhile Rider fans are going to be super disappointed when they tune into the combine and don't see any wheat harvesting going on. 

If the American players had better options, they would be elsewhere. This is, in fact, the Canadian Football League.

Oh yea he just lifted the rock up and gave it more oxygen and exposure.

The greatest damage done by Trump and Trumpism in my opinion has been the 1st degree murder of Truth. The truth is now whatever you want to make up. The Truth is whatever you want it to be regardless of facts. I say 1st  degree because it wasn't accidental. Truth and it's supporting facts have always been under assault but it has sadly met it's demise 
 

The greatest damage done by Trump and Trumpism in my opinion has been the 1st degree murder of Truth. The truth is now whatever you want to make up. The Truth is whatever you want it to be regardless of facts. I say 1st  degree because it wasn't accidental. Truth and it's supporting facts have always been under assault but it has sadly met it's demise 
 

The right wing has swallowed the Trump brand of politics hook, line and sinker. The nature of democracy is that the majority of voters will determine government policies. The alternative? Look at Russia or the type of America Trump fantasizes over where a small, militant percentage of people, not necessarily even voted for, do whatever the hell they want., and get drunk on power.

I agree, the next election might be a foregone conclusion but (as the NDP found out after Doer left) the effects from poor leadership can be felt well after one election cycle.  The PC's are very much headed down this path at the moment - no easy answers for them as to who could turn things around though.

I'm not sure they have enough time to turn things around, nor a leader that can take over an election campaign.

People truly believe that "I'm allowed to have my opinion" means they get to pretend facts don't matter.  
Used to be that dumbest ideas were shunned by communities so it was kept quiet. Now the internet has allowed them to find like minded fools and pretend they are actually informed.

We can thank social media for giving the platform for people to easily distribute their ‘research’ and have access to a large population of easily impressionable people who then take this ‘research’ as gospel, preaching it across social media with little to no consequence of it being bunk. They yell as loud as they can you can’t censor me, freedom of speech, muh rights, you’re all sheep while e-transferring their money to grifters who could care less about them but think they are great at owning the libs.
 
 

Fort Whyte bye-election today.  I am reasonably pessimistic that a centre/left split will see Khan getting elected.  I would really like to see the Liberals getting official party status.  Lamont is solid in the Legislature and I'd like to hear more from him.

I think Dr. Horton was also referring to national and global leadership when she was talking about failure of leadership at all levels of government. From what I've read, the CDC set a really low bar when Covid first came out. My memory on this is a bit fuzzy, so feel free to correct me, but when they first brought Americans back from the Covid cruise ship in Japan, they refused actively refused testing and mitigation measures in hopes that it would just go away. From what I have read, many health agencies and governments followed their lead and this led to it getting out of hand really quickly. The information I got is from experts interviewed in Michael Lewis' book on the pandemic response. The outright suppression of knowledge of Covid in China would also be an example of horrible leadership that may have saved us from a worldwide pandemic.
In respect to Manitoba, we consistently had a buffer in Covid waves. For some reason we were behind other areas of the country while local doctors and experts warned it would come to Manitoba and we needed to be proactive with restrictions. We never were. Coming to mind is Pallister's cancelling Christmas speech that was lauded in other places in the world, but was criticized in Manitoba because we were asking for proactive restrictions that may have prevented "Cancelling Christmas."
I understand your point that in many respects we weren't all that different from the rest of the world. Compared to some of the Republican-run states, we had extreme restrictions. Unfortunately I think we've seen a bit of a race to the bottom, especially lately, in terms of who will open up the economy first. Manitoba also has a population that has been a lot more in favour of restrictions than our prairie neighbours to the west or places in the US. One of the reasons Stefanson and Pallister have/had such low approval ratings is because the people of Manitoba have wanted more restrictive measures or at least more proactive measures to prevent harsher restrictions when it is too late. (There are definitely other reasons for low approval ratings as well - see defending residential schools and the response to the death of Krystal Mousseau for example)
We've seen how our leaders optimism/indifference played out for other Covid waves we have had - we'll see if the optimism of our leaders will finally work out in our favour in the next months.

What I don't understand about Dr. Horton's response is - where in the world are they doing anything differently? Canadian provinces have had some of the toughest covid restrictions, in the entire world. 

Yeah, I’m not too upset about the two 2nds… Maybe a 1st and a 5th.  Barron doesn’t seem like much… he’s a big kid, I guess.  We’ll see how it plays out.  Copp needed to be moved.

Barron 9 goals 6 assists in 25 games for ahl Harford.  Big guy. Nice scouting report plus basically 2 2nds and a 5th? 
What more can you expect?
Stastny? I know a couple people in the biz and I texted the one guy and they said there was no Market for him so much so that he wasn't even in the top 30 on tsn or sportsnet today.  You aren't getting superstars for rentals but that's a huge haul for essentially our 3rd line winger who wasn't signing here 

Barron can still develop into a good player.  One of the 2nd s could easily become a 1st.  The other 2nd  we can choose to take it in another year. Plus we exchanged picks , gaining a round. That's a pretty good return. I loved watching Copp play but he is a 3 line center ( a good one) , that can move up in a pinch. A good solid player but not at all flashy. If you were expecting much  more you were deluding yourself.

For a UFA rental? That's a haul 

If it's not worth it to trade him then so be it. It's also possible he didn't want to go anywhere 

Sharks get Bitetto (remember him?)

It's amazing how many crazy people there are in this world and I don't mean just the crazy grifters, people that are truly insane and they walk amongst every day.

Seems legit.
We’re screwed.