you know, a couple years ago when i was just starting to learn to research and thought my interests might lay in sport media analysis, i went looking for an episode of the patcast, which used to air on TSN 1040 before bell unceremoniously shuttered the station in 2021. the particular episode doesn't matter much to this story, but the patcast itself is (or was, we'll get there) one of the numerous contributions to the vancouver sports media scene that survives jason botchford after his tragic passing in 2019. it's difficult to describe botch's impact in vancouver to anybody who wasn't around for him, but it might do to say that if you read any canucks-related news articles in any publication, anywhere, chances are the author of that article owes at least some of their career to him. for my part, i owe my entire academic career to his writing, without which i would have never fallen so deeply in love with the sport of hockey.
anyways, imagine my shock when i opened the 1040 patcast page on apple podcasts and the audio wouldn't load. fine, whatever. tsn isn't keeping up their old 1040 feeds, they have no reason to, but there's other audio hosting sites and i could find it on those. but, the thing is, i couldn't. on every single website i visited, i could find the episode and click play, but the audio file was fucking gone. bell had gone ahead and wiped every trace of the show from the face of the earth following the closure of the station, along with countless others. thousands of hours of discourse on the canucks, lions, whitecaps, and others, completely disappeared, to say nothing of the human impact, the jobs immediately lost upon the closing of what had been the most popular radio station in the province.
it's really hard for me to express the cultural loss that vancouver and british columbia has just suffered with rogers' sudden closing of SN 650, the sportsnet counterpart to 1040, this morning. the rise of podcasting has done wonders for the preservation of radio history, but the rights to these broadcasts are still held by sportsnet, who have no monetary interest in keeping them available. no doubt the void that was filled by 650 in 1040's absence will now become even wider than it was before. dedicated radio coverage of vancouver's sports teams now does not exist, and just like what happened with 1040, many people are now suddenly out of a job. on top of that, 650 was one of just two remaining canadian sports talk radio stations dedicated to a market outside of ontario or quebec. with its demise, SN 690, dedicated to calgary, is the sole survivor of western canadian sports talk radio (although we don't actually know their fate at this moment either, their morning radio show went live today but the closure of 650 is expected to impact them as well, and even if they survive the day they may not be around much longer).
obviously the 'wexit' and alberta secession discourses that have been kicking around since the 2021 election are patently ridiculous (and probably the result of destabilization efforts by foreign powers), but i'm sorry, i just can't find it in me to see this as anything other than massive media conglomerates based out of ontario yet again deciding to sacrifice western canadian culture on the altar of shareholder profit. both the public and private sectors in this country tend towards viewing provinces and territories outside of ontario and quebec as generally irritating expense items rather than equal stakeholders in this country with our own lives and our own practices, and as long as there's no profit incentive for doing so, nobody ever bothers to look out for our interests.
i could say so much more about it (one more thing i will say, to be clear: any struggles western canada experiences are felt twice over in the maritimes and ten times over in the territories. western canada actually has it pretty good in comparison), but i don't want to make this post much longer than it is. i love ontario, i love the people here and i love the life i've built, but it fills me with such a deep, unrelenting sadness to see how little folks here value the places and people i used to call my home.
