…to move baseball’s Montreal Expos to Washington DC? Might not happen after all.

The CBC, as one of several attempts to overcome the ratings disaster that is the NHL lockout, came up with a viewer contest to name The Greatest Canadian.

All summer, the network and its website asked viewers to nominate the most significant Canadian citizen, past or present. This fall, the network aired documentaries about each of the top ten figures (all male, and including two of the network’s own air personalities).

On a Monday-night live special, the winner was announced. It’s T.C. Douglas, founder of what’s now known as the New Democratic Party and originator of the nation’s universal health care system.

Douglas, a prairie populist of the old Depression-era variety, remains a big reason why Canada’s now a more progressive, more Euro-oriented land than our sorry place.

(Incidentally, among the non-finalists in the contest: Margaret Atwood, Marshall McLuhan, basketball inventor Dr. James Naismith, Emily Carr, Shania Twain, Sarah McLachlan, and William Shatner.)

…on a list of “Signs You Might Be Too Canadian”: “You dismiss all beers under 6% as ‘for children and the elderly.'”

The Montreal Expos have left with a whimper, not a bang. A three-point-five-decade tradition of bilingual baseball finally sputtered out with the last home game Wednesday night, following four years of threats by Major League Baseball to move or fold the team.

The Expos’ home-game attendance has been abysmal for some time. Their field performance has been abysmal ever since the 1994 labor lockout. One fan, in a letter to the Anglophone Montreal Gazette, blames baseball’s post-1994 business structure, hostile to “small market” teams, for the team’s demise. Yeah, except Montreal’s not a small market but a big city whose media reach extends to six to eight million people.

No. The handwriting was on the wall (or the domed-stadium roof) for the Expos by their ninth season in 1977. It’s a long story, and it involves Seattle.

The Expos were one of four teams added to Major League Baseball in 1969. Among the other three were the Seattle Pilots. After one pathetic season in the long-since-demolished Sick’s Stadium, owner Dewey Soriano sold out to now-MLB Commissioner Bud Selig. He moved the team to Milwaukee. The City of Seattle sued the American League. Following years of litigation, the league agreed to award Seattle another expansion franchise, which became the popular and fiscally successful Mariners.

But adding just one new team would’ve screwed up league scheduling. To maintain an even number of teams, the league awarded a second expansion franchise for 1977—the even more successful Toronto Blue Jays.

For their first eight seasons, the Expos had been Canada’s first and only MLB team. They enjoyed coast-to-coast TV coverage and print-media attention.

But once the Blue Jays showed up, the Anglophone Canadian media, and the Anglophone Canadian public, reclassified the Expos into a team of merely local significance within the province of Quebec. The Blue Jays became the “home team” for all the entire rest of Canada, from Labrador to Vancouver Island. The Expos’ newspaper coverage, merchandise sales, and broadcasting contracts all diminished. At one point the team didn’t even have an English-language radio contract.

The Expos never recovered in the marketplace. With reduced sponsorships, they couldn’t get the backing to replace Olympic Stadium, one of those dull domes of fluorescent lights and artificial turf so popular in the ’60s and ’70s among everyone except fans and players. Attendance diminished, as did political support for a new publicly-funded stadium.

The rest was a long, slow denoument, ending with this week’s announcement that the team will move to Washington DC (no team name or owners have been announced).

…I’m not independently wealthy. Like many of you, I’m increasingly desperate to find a way out of a personal-fiscal pit. So I give a hoot about the economy. So do those nutty Canadians at Adbusters magazine. They’ve just started a movement to dump current economic models (especially the gross national product) and instead develop something called “True Cost Economics.” (The name derives, at least in part, from their desire to see the environmental and human costs of business/ventures added into their balance sheets.)

…opening ceremony live on CBC (one more reason Canada’s a cooler place). The thing’s a big, gaudy, lovely performance-art spectacle (think Cirque du Soleil) with gods, lovers, classical art, philosophy, history, and huge nude male sculptures.

The celebration of Greek history within the show, like most accounts of that proud nation, lingered on the ancient/classical days and rushed through everything since. As the ceremony’s parade of live tableaux depicted it, the fall of Greek creativity didn’t stem from the Romans’ conquest but from the rise of that late-Roman religion, Christianity.

PS: Yeah, the original Olympic athletes were all male and naked. But there were even more differences between then and now; some of which involved the eternal contradiction between democratic ideals and slavery.

Globe and Mail TV writer John Doyle wrote about the Faux News Channel’s attempts to get onto Canadian cable systems. Doyle said his countrypeople should get the chance to see the channel so they could laugh at it.

Bill O’Reilly, on said channel, urged his viewers to send insulting emails to Doyle, as if Doyle would be impressed and won over by people calling him dumb names.

Doyle’s follow-up article sez: “The people who support Fox News must be the most uncivil and foul-mouthed creatures on the planet. This is an informed opinion. They’d give English soccer hooligans a run for their money.”

Amazing who you’ll find hangin’ out on Granville Street in Vancouver these days. Like Goldie Hawn and the Dalai Lama.

…in the coolness department: the new Vancouver affiliate of Toronto broadcast trailblazer City TV. Imagine: A commercial VHF station in a region no more populous that ours that’s got local cooking shows, local ethnic-cultural shows, local filmmakers’-showcase shows, serious arts documentaries, old silent movies, sex documentaries, uncut soft-R movies after midnight, and a Speakers’ Corner where citizens can videotape themselves ranting about anything they want.

The Canadian and Ontario governments paid Conan O’Brien to tape four shows in Toronto; then went all up in arms over O’Brien’s anti-Canadian and anti-Quebecois insult jokes.

…here’s a CBC news report about that wacky new fad, “A network called ‘Internet.'”

During his week-long series of farewells at the Canadian Liberal Party convention, Prime Minister Jean Chretien told the National Liberal Women’s Commission that he was proud of all the women he’d appointed to public office, but that “it’s important to find slots where you have a chance of winning.” Some attendees apparently misunderstood him in his thick Quebecois accent, and thought he’d said a word other than “slots.”

THURSDAY I SAW Jean Chretien’s farewell speech as Canada’s prime minister. It made me want to move there even more.

Here was a guy fluent in two languages (that’s two more than our federal leader), pointing with pride to everything that’s happenned in his country during his leadership–balanced budgets, decent health care, staying the heck out of Iraq, same-sex marriages, even the careers of Shania Twain and Alanis Morrisette.

Then came the clincher: Chretien’s barbs at the opposition coalition, whatever it’s called this week:

“Canadians should beware of those on the right who put profit ahead of community . . . beware of those on the right who put the narrow bottom line ahead of everything else.”Canadians should beware of those on the right who would reduce taxes at the expense of necessary public services . . . beware of those on the right who do not care about reducing social and environmental deficits. Canadians should beware of those on the right who would weaken the national government because they do not believe in the role of government.”

You think we could ever get a guy that on-the-bean?

FROM A NATION that still has at least a semi-free press, comes a huge CBC investigation into all those 9/11 conspiracy theories. What the Canadian TV team was able to confirm as facts is a tiny piece of the theory pie, but even that’s full of scary stuff about the Bushes, the bin Ladens, the small-town cameraderie of the global oil-political elite, and geopolitical strategems that totally backfire.

…the eternal skeptics concerning bigtime sports megaprojects, such as the now-forthcoming 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. His response: “At least Vancouver probably stands a better chance of getting its federal government to chip in than we would with ours. So, good on you, Vancouver, and better you than us.”