La Marche to Corporate Socialism

by Joey Grihalva

he codeine-laced acetaminophen starts to ease my hangover as I exit the Mtro station downtown. A crisp Montral autumn wind slaps me in the face. I throw on my tuque, zip up my jacket, pop my collar and blow on my hands. There is no gray 1991 Honda two-door on Rue St-Denis. Two red-eyed, tattooed young white guys hustle across the street and put a finger in my face. Hey my man, you know where we can get some E? asks the tall, pimple-faced one as he polishes off an energy drink. Help us out brother, we just came in from Toronto last night on a bus, says the chubby, mustached one. Cant do it man, I reply. But good luck. My rideshare pulls up and the chubby one stumbles into the car. The driver glares at him. I ask if she is Natalie and she shoots back a confused look. Shes expecting to take three girls with her to Qubec City. I tell her that my trip was planned at the last minute and I used a friends account. I can refuse you, you are aware of dis, Natalie says matter-of-factly in a thick Qubcoise accent. Dats da policy on dare website. I understand and Im really sorry, I explain. Im a journalism student. Im going to Qubec to cover La Marche Bleue. Id really appreciate the lift. She rubs her pregnant belly and looks across Rue St-Catherine. My husband is a writer for La Presse, I understand, she says, referring to Montrals widest-read French daily newspaper. While we wait for the other girls I dip into a convenience store. Im compelled to buy a copy of La Presse even though Ill need to translate every other word. The girls dont show so we hop onto Autoroute Jean Lesage heading northeast to the capital of La Belle Province. The early October landscape bursts with reds, yellows, oranges and in-betweens. In the oldest major settlement in North America, on the Plains of Abraham where the British defeated the French in 1759 and gained sovereignty over Nouvelle Francethousands of people will gather to celebrate their lost National Hockey League (N.H.L.) franchise, les Nordiques du Qubec, who were sold in 1995, moved to Colorado, became the Avalanche and won the Stanley Cup in their first season after relocation. (Ouch.) The 60,000 folks at La Marche Bleue, along with a handful of corporate benefactors, are trying to send a message to Prime Minister Stephen Harper: 1

Please send us federal funds for a new arena! N.H.L. Commissioner Gary Bettman considers a new venue a prerequisite for any franchise rebirth. As I chat with Natalie, who is originally from Qubec City, I can tell shes not the sports type. She doubts a new N.H.L. team would be a financial success. Do you think people in Rimouski and de Eastern Townships will do two or tree hours of car a night to see a hockey game every week? Maybe once a year but its not enough to make sure da new arena will be full every match. I ask for her opinion on federal tax dollars funding the new arena. If our health system would be wonderful we would say Great, lets put a few millions in that project, but its not the reality. -----------------------------------Its a challenge to stay awake. I shouldnt have let my girlfriend drag me out last night on her first-year undergrad pub-crawl. There was free beer at every bar, which is a dangerous offer to make to an eternally thirsty guy from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Im dozing off as Natalie munches on a granola bar and cheese curds. I have a flashback to the 47-yard field goal with 2:14 left in the 4th quarter of that weeks Monday Night Football game. The kick helped the dreaded Chicago Bears defeat my beloved Green Bay Packers of the National Football League (N.F.L.). I watched the game at a pub where I befriended a native Montraler and die-hard Packers fan. The guys been to Lambeau Field (home of the Packers) a bunch of times and is going to the San Francisco 49ers game on my birthday. Lucky bastard. The silver Honda swerves and Im jolted awake from a dream where the Packers beat the Bears in the NFC Championship game and make it to the Super Bowl. Were on the outskirts of Qubec City. Natalie drops me off at a gas station and I board an accordion city bus. Im not sure where Im going but I figure if I follow the blue-clad mob of hockey fans Ill be okay. Young and old fill the bus as we snake into the historic city center. There is a festival atmosphere in the air. There are already ten thousand people at the Plains of Abraham. It is a gorgeous day and everyone is sporting a smile. Dogs and babies and musicians and club promoters and corporate sponsors and street salesmen and ex-players and Olympians and politicians and the proletariat and celebrities and the media are all out and about.

How did this thing come together? Is it a genuine popular movement like whats happening in Egypt? Or is it something else? This being North America, where the public tends to be on the apathetical side of the political spectrum, I can confidently say it is something else. -----------------------------------My inspiration for the trip to Qubec City came from a talk with sports writer Dave Zirin, a man who combines politics and sports like non-other. He is a passionate, prolific, progressive voice and his words made me realize the importance of my ownership of the Green Bay Packers. I now grasp the significance of that piece of paper my father had framed when I was 11 and hung in our Packers memorabilia/computer room. The Green Bay Packers are the only non-profit, publicly owned, major professional sports team in the United States. In this age where sports and capitalism are consummate bedfellows, the Packers are a throwback and a threat. Zirin breaks down the history and irony, considering next seasons potential lockout, in an excellent article for The New Yorker called Those Non-Profit Packers. There is no billionaire in control of my team. My father bought a share each for my brother and I after the Packers won the Super Bowl in 1997. There is a shareholder meeting each year where a seven-member executive committee is elected to attend owners meetings on our behalf. At Lambeau Field volunteers work concession stands and 60% of the proceeds go to local charities. When it snows before a game you can be sure more than enough volunteers will line up to shovel. The team supports the community and vice-versa. It is a beautiful thing. Any kid growing up in Wisconsin is going to feel like they are a co-owner of the Green Bay Packers, whether they actually own stock or not. The dedication to the Green & Gold displayed by the residents of my home state is upper echelon in the sports world. I wrote poems about the team in elementary school. I will never forget running through the snow on January 26, 1997, the day we won the Super Bowl, when the streets of Milwaukee looked exactly like Madrid during the 2010 World Cup final. Back in Montral, Dave Zirin is suggesting to a crowd at Concordia University that we need to reframe the debate about bringing back the Nordiques. As fans we have to say, On what terms is this actually going to happen? If they cant pay for their own stadium, if theyre going to ask for public dollars then we should say Okay, if theres going to be public expenditures to get the Nordiques back, then there also should be public ownership. No more socializing the debt of these projects and privatizing the profits.

Zirins indignation stems from the fact that over the last 30 years $30 billion in public money has been spent on building sports venues in the United States, the closest thing to a national urban development project. All of the research shows that these venues do not deliver a return on their investment. They offer minimum-wage non-union jobs, jack up ticket and concession prices, displace residents and suck resources out of these neighborhoods. Taxpayer dollars are paying for these venues but private owners are profiting off them. Zirin aptly refers to these projects as neo-liberal Trojan horses. You get the sense that he would rather not see a return of the Nordiques if it means less federal money going to social welfare and more going into the pockets of rich owners. In the case of the Nordiques that owner would be media mogul Pierre Karl Paladeau, described as a Montgomery Burns-like figure by an attendee of Zirins talk. Paladeau is younger and possibly more malicious; he will soon be launching Sun News Network, which has been dubbed Fox News North. Paladeau tried to buy the Montral Canadiens hockey team a couple of years ago but was outbid by the Molson family. Sources believe hes planning a French sports TV channel for his cable network that would compete directly with RDS, which is owned by Bell, one of only four media conglomerates in Canada. Quebecor is the parent company of Paladeaus empire. RDS currently holds the broadcasting rights for Canadiens games, so the only way for Quebecor to viably compete is with the exclusive rights to Nordiques games. Also, Quebecors communications wing Videotron recently launched a mobile phone network and it is likely that Paladeau is looking to make even more money with live game broadcasting on mobile devices. In July of 2010 Quebecor lobbied Qubec Conservative politicians, including Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs Jose Verner and Minister of Natural Resources Christian Paradis. Then in August a seemingly grassroots blog, website and Facebook group cropped up called La Nordiques Nation. On the Facebook group a humble insurance salesman named Mario Roy created an event page for La Marche Bleue, set to take place the first Saturday in October, a few hours before the Montral Canadiens play their annual Qubec City exhibition game. At this point Qubec City Mayor Rgis Labeaume has pledged $50 million of the city budget towards the arena project. Premier Jean Charest says the province will chip in $180 million, leaving the rest of the proposed $400 million to the federal government. To get Prime Minister Stephen Harpers attention a group of Conservative politicians hold a photo-op weeks before La Marche Bleue sporting customized Nordiques jerseys.

The Conservative federal government initially says it is open to funding an arena on the grounds that it will be used for community and international events like the Winter Olympics. It also must fit within the framework of their Economic Action Plan. Harper backtracks after a shit storm of criticism in the press and from a member of his own cabinet. The hype escalates heading into La Marche Bleue. The biggest commercial radio station in Qubec City intensely promotes the event, holding fundraisers and connecting organizers with their friends at Budweiser and local food chains who handle concessions at La Marche. Enterprising street vendors sling Nordiques apparel and memorabilia. A barber even has a chair set up and is shaving Nordiques logos in fans heads. No surprise, TVA Nouvelles (Quebecors TV news arm) and Le Journal de Qubec (Quebecors print arm) are reporting almost exclusively on La Marche. Le Journal actually commits the first ten or so pages in the following days paper to coverage of La Marche. On the Nordiques Nations blog there is a tagline that roughly translates, For the return of the fleur-de-lys in the N.H.L. The fleur-de-lys is the symbol of France, and is the centerpiece of Qubecs flag, the ultimate symbol of French-Canadian pride. It features prominently on the Nordiques jersey. There is no doubt that a sense of provincial pride inspires the 60,000 in attendance that October afternoon. Well-known Qubecois musicians play singalong folk songs and the crowd loves every minute of it. But what it feels like to meand I could be wrong because I dont speak or read French very wellis that those genuine feelings of pride and the innocent desire for the return of their team is being co-opted and exploited by a handful of influential business people. La Marche is a giant spectacle complete with local celebrities, ex-players, Olympic athletes fresh from Vancouver and many, many pleas for those sweet federal funds. Every person I talk to is eating up what the people on stage are selling. Ottawa, please send us money for the new arena. We dont care if Paladeau owns the team. We just want our Nordiques back! Representatives from an initiative called Jai Ma Place are also in attendance at the rally. Their goal is to raise $50 million in private contributions through the sale of seats in the future arena. A businessman named Mario Bnard manages the group. Like the rest of the corporate leaders and the proletariat, Bnard is happy to take taxpayer dollars and welcomes Paladeau as the teams would-be owner. ------------------------------------

Among the sea of blue I find one man in opposition to Paladeaus potential ownership and accepting tax dollars. He is compelled by a radical notion. Armed with a cream-colored placard and printed out info sheets Craig Boomhauer is prepared to pitch his wild idea to anyone taking an interest in his sign. Boomhauer is an unassuming man from the Eastern Townships who speaks pitch-perfect English and French. He wears a plaid shirt under an L.L. Bean jacket and a pair of khaki pants. He is not pessimistic that they will fill seats in a new arena. But Boomhauer has a different idea for how to go about funding it. What Im proposing here is that we finance the stadium ourselves, Quebeckers, were going to create 3.65 million shares at $165 per share, which will create sixhundred million dollars in revenue and with that well build the arena, certified green, and able to afford 49% of a new N.H.L. franchise. Boomhauer is advocating for public ownership of a new N.H.L. team in Qubec City. He knows about the Green Bay Packers and has studied the Canadian Football Leagues Saskatchewan Roughriders, who operate on a similar model. Being the amateur journalist that I am, I neglect to get Boomhauers contact information. A Google search comes up empty. This is not surprising since the idea of public ownership of sports franchises is not something the corporate media has an interest in reporting on. The concept only seems plausible in a bygone era, when N.F.L. teams could be won in a card game, as Zirin says. Technically, public ownership could not happen today in the N.F.L. Article V, Section 4 of their constitution states that, charitable organizations and/or corporations not organized for profit and not now a member of the league may not hold membership in the National Football League. But this law can and should be challenged. Public ownership is happening elsewhere in the sports world. And the fact that the Packers are Super Bowl champs once again shows that a return can be made on the investment, be it pride or an economical healthy community. Franz Diego, an artist and friend from Minneapolis, Tweeted the following during the 2011 N.F.L. playoffs: Sports are a testament to the human spirit making something out of nothing. Too bad that something still feels like nothing. It is easy to feel this way. Modern professional sports smack of commercialism and civic complacency. But it is precisely for this reason that we should not disengage with sports. Professional sports are big business. They can either extract money from communities or they can support them. Here is Dave Zirin again from his talk at Concordia University: Ralph Nader has this line that he likes to say, You better turn on to politics or politics will turn on you. Well, we have to turn on to sports and how sports operates or its going to turn on us.

On February 10, 2011 Mayor Rgis Labeaume holds a press conference in the 65year old Pepsi Colise, the arena that was once home to the Nordiques and was the venue where the Canadiens exhibition game was played on the day of La Marche Bleue. The new arena is a done deal. The city and province will split the bill but remain open to federal and private funding. By this time Paladeau, a reluctant investor at La Marche, has come around and pledges tens of millions. The day before the announcement it is discovered that Prime Minister Harper is thinking about amending federal regulations so a municipality can spend all or part of its annual gas-tax funds on entertainment facilities such as a new arena. On the night of La Marche I desperately want to attend the Canadiens game, but I dont have enough cash for the game and the cab ride to the Colise. The arena seats 15,000 and it is the only time of year it sees any N.H.L. action, so it isnt a cheap ticket. I get a room at a hostel in the old town, a magical cobblestone neighborhood still surrounded by the original city walls. I eat dinner with a group of international students from France, Denmark and the Netherlands who have come from Montral for a jazz festival. For the first period of the game I drink at an Irish pub full of tourists and mall shoppers. Its not my kind of scene so at the first intermission I walk into an establishment adjacent to my hostel. There are two people inside, an old man who runs the place and an Argentinean-Qubecois in his late twenties. A pitcher of coffee, a pint and an expensive-looking hockey stick sit on the table between them. They are engrossed in conversation and I wait for a pause to introduce myself. The old man pours me a triple of whiskey and charges for a single. I learn that back in his day he too studied journalism at Concordia in Montral. He moved to Qubec City for a girl, opened the bar in the 1970s and hasnt looked back. He doesnt care much for sports but he loves his town so he understands the excitement over the potential return of the Nordiques. The young man was at La Marche. I saw my best friend cry today, right in front of me! He had his face painted in blue with the team tag tattooed on his face and everything. Then all of a sudden he had tears. It was wild. During the post-game show a raucous crowd of Nordiques fans chant and shout, drowning out the commentators, whose producers are forced to end the segment and play highlights from the game. The young man is ecstatic. We drink deep into the night, celebrating the day.

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Now that the new arena will be built I hope for the sake of the 60,000 at La Marche, the rowdy fans at the Colise that night and the thousand who journeyed to a New York Islanders game in December (hoping the N.H.L. will set that franchise free), that N.H.L. Commissioner Gary Bettman allows a resurrection of the Nordiques. But I worry it will mean my new friend from the pub will pay no less than $50 to get into a game and another $10 for a beer. I worry the project is ultimately a political move to secure votes for Conservative politicians and give Pierre Karl Paladeau a license to print money, as Dave Zirin says. Qubec is a Canadian province strapped for cash and known for corruption. In December the government announces it will hike tuition for post-secondary education. Student protests ensue. On the day officials announce the new Qubec City arena will be built with provincial funds dozens of student protesters with smoke bombs storm Quebecor headquarters in downtown Montral. Socialism for the corporations. Austerity for the people. This is our reality. And it is worth fighting against.