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I don’t know what the right amount for a government to spend on childcare is, and I don’t know how much of that spending should go to the middle class rather than to lower-income families. What I do know is that the argument being used to support the Canadian government’s new childcare-oriented budget, namely that by following the lead of Quebec’s 1997 childcare plan we can all benefit from a significant rise in labour force participation as mothers return to work, may be missing the point. When it comes to the labour force, we’re a long way from 1997:

(Or, to put it another way):

The biggest age cohort in Quebec in 1997 was 30-40 year olds, whereas in Canada today it is 60 year olds, roughly speaking. This means that where the labour force is concerned, the main issue is no longer working mothers. It’s senior citizens. In particular, it may be working-class seniors and elderly women who will determine Canada’s labour force size; the former being the most likely to work in jobs that are physically strenuous, the latter being (for example) twice as likely as men to reach 85 years old. (Indeed, the labour force participation rate among working-class men may have already fallen below that of professional-class women before Covid if you ignore the segment of the population aged 15-25, within which professional-class labour force participation is relatively low because of university attendance). Obviously, only by helping to keep seniors employed will Canada’s labour force remain active. The official labour force participation rate, meanwhile, is becoming antiquated: it only counts people between the ages of 15-64 as being in the labour force.

Chart 1: Labour force participation rates of men and women aged 25 to 54, 1953 to 2014

Figure 2 – Participation rate of older individuals (55-64 and 65-69), by gender and age group

Notice also, for Quebec in 1997 and, to a lesser extent, for Canada today, that there is a drop-off in population below the age of about 30-35. This means that the childcare programs were introduced just in time to assist mothers in their 30s, whereas many younger, working-class mothers already had kids too old for childcare.

(According to journalist Andrew Coyne, economists tend to say that government should simply send lower-income parents money earmarked for childcare, rather than adopt the Quebec plan in which childcare spots tend to be taken disproportionately by affluent parents, and least of all by lower-income parents who work jobs that don’t sync up with the 9-to-5 hours the childcare system provides). 

_{[As a mostly irrelevant aside, the oldest of this Baby Boom generation came of age during the 1970 October Crisis and Pierre Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act in Quebec, the youngest of this generation came of age just in time to vote in the secession referendum in 1980, and the generation as a whole reached its prime – 30-50 years old, say – around the time of the far closer (50.58% to 49.42%!), confusingly-worded, high-voter-turnout Quebec secession referendum in 1995. The narrow loss in this referendum led to Lucien Bouchard – who in 1995 had said “We’re one of the white races that has the fewest children” – to become Premier in 1996 and implement universal childcare in 1997. In the 1997 Canadian election, meanwhile, 3 of 4 most voted-for party leaders were Qubecois – Chretien for the Liberals, Duceppe for the Bloc Quebecois, and Charest for the Progressive Conservatives]}

As it happens, Canada already had among the highest labour force participation in the world before Covid. According to the World Bank, only New Zealand, Switzerland, and Singapore had higher labour participation among developed economies in 2019. This doesn’t mean there isn’t room for further growth of course, but it should raise the possibility that Canada may have some more pressing concerns to address than labour force participation.

Where caring for children is concerned, I can think of at least one more pressing concern: road traffic, which is the leading cause of death for children out of infancy and a leading cause of wasted time and stress for working parents (especially for parents who have to find parking spots twice a day outside of their toddlers’ childcare centre, in winter). Road traffic is also a major barrier against senior citizen labour force participation, and senior citizen quality of life in general. Yet rather than try to reduce the size or number of vehicles on the road during rush hour (three-quarters of Canada’s new car sales are SUVs!), the budget instead contains vast amounts of money to build and buy new, oversized e-sedans. …As usual, all roads lead back to cars.

Baseball is the most North American, and North Pacific, sport. It’s little played in Europe, mainland Asia, or south of the equator, but is loved by Americans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Venezuelans, Central Americans, Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, and Canadians alike.

Well, not quite alike. Just as Canada has fiddled around with American football – dropping a down here, adding a rouge there, widening the field – so too baseball is played a little bit differently on the Canadian side of the border.

The Blue Jays notwithstanding (and the Expos, sadly, no longer standing), Canadian baseball is played in almost exactly the same way as Yankee baseball. It has only a few tweaks that better suit it to the colder Canadian climate. As it happens, one of those tweaks also makes the game much more interesting, by significantly increasing the number of highlight-reel plays that occur each game.

So, it’s long past time that we introduced to the world these little-known rules of Canadian baseball, our glorious ice-free pastime:

• The outfield walls are further back than in the MLB, but instead of having Designated Hitters there is a fourth outfielder, so the overall fielder-to-field space ratio is about the same  

Outfields were originally expanded in order to give spectators and players less shade and more sunlight, but it was quickly realized that, with a larger field and an extra fielder (unofficially called a Mountie), there are more diving catches, throw outs, doubles, triples, and even inside-the-park-home-runs. There are also, of course, fewer home runs in general, but the ones that do get hit are deeper and more exciting.

• Spring and Fall Lunch Games

In the summertime, Canadian baseball games are played MLB-style; that is, on weekday evenings or during the daytime on weekends. In spring and fall, however, games are instead split into 3 periods of 3 innings each and played across 3 days during lunchtime, in order to avoid colder, darker evenings. Each 3-inning lunch period usually takes about an hour or so to play. If it is raining at lunch time, the period is instead played that evening or, if the evening weather is too cold, 6 innings are played the following day (and so on.. ) This includes the later rounds of the playoffs, which are played in the fall, but not the earlier rounds, as the playoffs begin in late summer. ..Canadian ballparks also tend to have sections of stationary workout bikes and ellipticals in the spring and fall, for fans to stay warm and get a midday workout in. Winter Training is played in Cuba.

• The Mercy Rule

If the weather drops below zero degrees Celsius before the start of the game – this usually happens a handful of times a year (more, in some cities) – outfielders will be forced to stand in the same spot at the beginning of every play during that day, and these fixed spots are kept heated from below.  

That’s about it. Eight teams make the playoffs every year and vie to win the Roy Halladay Cup, with the finals traditionally being played over several days around Yom Kippur. For now, Canadian baseball only has a National League. One wonders, though, if it will ever be joined by an American League (or even, one day, a Russian League). States like Minnesota, after all, can be really, really cold too. And let’s face it, without Canadian baseball rules, MLB regular seasons can feel as long as a northern winter.

Stadium-Shaped Hockey:

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine a hockey rink that is roughly the same size as an NHL rink, except that it is stadium-shaped: the boards behind the goal lines are uniformly curved, rather than only curved in the ‘corners’ as in a conventional rink.

Here’s my very rough, amateurish rendering:

How would this rink shape impact the game?

I don’t know the answer to this question of course, but I suspect that it might make hockey faster or safer, or both. Some of the implications of a stadium-shaped rink might include the following:

• because there is more space behind the net, players who skate quickly and aggressively towards the net have more room to slow down before crashing into the boards, and less fear of being tripped up from behind on a breakaway (or tripped by a goalie: check out this play from just yesterday, the opening night of the NHL playoffs)
  

• goalies might need to become more skilled at playing the puck behind the boards. (The trapezoid era could, thankfully, be over; or at least, this would put a lot more space within the trapezoid)
  
• it would probably reduce the danger coming from what is perhaps the most dangerous species of hit today, which is when a player is circling around the net and is then hit directly – and sometimes blindsidedly – by an opponent coming around the net from the opposite direction. With more space behind the goalie this type of hit might become less common, and when it does occur it would less often lead to a player being hit head-first into the boards, and less often lead to a player being hit without even having a chance to brace himself or herself
  
• because the end boards are curved, head-on crashes into the boards would probably become less common in general
  
• Skaters would be able to pick up more speed circling around the net, creating more opportunities for scoring attempts or nifty centring passes
  
• not only would more room to operate behind the goal line be likely to create more offensive opportunities for players who excel at this area of the game – Sidney Crosby comes to mind – it might also lead to more missed centring passes, which would in turn lead to breakaway opportunities for the opposite team
  
• bouncing a pass off the end boards from one side of the goal line to the other would become much harder with the end boards being curved, but new possibilities for passing the puck off the end boards such that it bounces back in front of the goal line would also be created. Firing the puck around the end boards would also change somewhat: the boards would be longer so the puck would have further to travel, but the boards would also be curved, so the puck might travel more smoothly around them
  
• In 3 on 3 Overtime hockey in particular, when breakaway opportunities are common, the space behind the goal could make the game faster, safer, and higher-scoring, making OT even more exciting and even less likely to end scoreless and so result in a shootout
  

Now, obviously the NHL isn’t about to change its rink shape. But it would be interesting to see what would happen if certain youth leagues or international competitions were to experiment with stadium-shaped hockey.

Stadium-Sized Hockey:

Ice hockey played on a rink the size of a football field already exists. It’s called bandy, and is played in northern Europe and Russia:

It looks very fun, but it is also more like field hockey or football on ice than it is like ice hockey. It has, for example, 10 skaters per side on the ice at a time, it uses a ball rather than a puck, its goalie-nets are field-hockey-sized, and its side-boards and end-boards are only about ankle-high.

So, while it would be cool if bandy were to start being played more in Canada and America, it may also be interesting to think about what a new stadium-sized hockey sport might look like.

Why now? First, because televisions have gotten so good in recent years – and jumbotrons have gotten so big – that the problem of seeing the puck would no longer necessarily be an issue for fans, even considering the difference in size between a hockey puck and a massive rink. (Bandy, by the way, uses a pink ball to increase visibility.) Second, because stadium ice-maintenance has improved significantly in the past decade or so as the NHL has honed its Winter Classic technology.

What then should the rules of stadium-sized hockey be? How many skaters per side? (7? 8?). How big should the goalie-nets be? (I’m going to say bigger than hockey, but smaller than bandy). Should there be offside blue lines? Icing? How often should games be played? (Let’s say once a week, NFL-style). I don’t know…what I do know is that if you put this on TV I will watch. And, better yet, if the ticket prices are stadium-priced, as opposed to arena-priced, I will be there, singing football chants in the cheap seats.

Stadium-Sized and -Shaped Hockey: Speed Skating Hockey

Stadium-shaped speed-skating venues could also play host to stadium-sized hockey rinks. The largest of these venues, in the Netherlands and in China, can seat over 12,000 fans. The largest in North America can seat about 6,000 fans.

In the previous post we discussed the rules of Canadian baseball, which are still not well known beyond Canada’s borders. But, while most people may not have heard of Canadian baseball, they have at least heard of baseball. In contrast, when it comes to that other great sport played in Canadian summers, gunslinger, I’m always a little bit surprised, when I speak to people outside of Canada, that they have almost never even heard of the sport before.

I guess this does make some sense, since it’s not played all that much these days..especially not since we started having indoors skating rinks everywhere that allow hockey to be played year-round. Back in the old days though, gunslinger was the number one way that Canadian athletes kept their skating skills sharp during the warm half of the year. It was, in some ways at least, the quintessentially Canadian sport, mixing hockey and tennis (which the British-era colonials were obsessed with)with the gunslinger ethos of the old (North) American West.

The rules of gunslinger are simple enough:

• Players can use a tennis racket or a hockey stick, and can switch back and forth between the two at will, either by going to their bench to swap utensils or by going to their bench to sub players.
• Each team is allowed one Lone Gunslinger in the game at any given time. The Gunslinger, uniquely, carries both a hockey stick and a tennis racket. The racket the Gunslinger keeps sheathed in a holster slung over his (or increasingly, her) shoulder, to draw and re-holster at will
• on a football-field-sized, tennis-court-surfaced rink, on roller skates, players score a goal by hitting a tennis ball through an upright goal. (In most gunslinger facilities, the uprights are the same as those used in American football for field goals).
• When the ball goes out of bounds, a player on the opposite team gets to tennis-serve it back into play from the sidelines
• Like hockey, games are usually played 5 on 5, with three 20 minute periods, 2 minute penalties, and sudden death overtime

That’s about it, for the core rules of the game. Much of the fun of the sport comes from its strategic stick/racket/gunslinger mixing – the great Canadian dialectic – with sticklers at an advantage whenever the ball is close to the ground, racketeers at an advantage playing the ball in the air and scoring, and the Lone Gunslingers cooly ready for any situation, as any gunslinger worth the name must be.

At the height of the sport a century ago, games usually resembled something between an orderly war-game and (especially given the quality of 19th century roller skates) a violent mess. In the modern game, knowing what we now know about head injuries, a few adjustments have made, some for the sake of safety and others for the sake of fun:

• the ‘Wimbledon border’: rather than have the big gunslinger rink be directly surrounded by hockey-style boards, instead there is now about 10 feet of grass between the rink and the boards. The ball is still in-bounds when on the grass; the grass mainly serves to slow down skaters so that they cannot hit opponents into the boards at high speeds. (Players do hit opponents into the grass at high speeds sometimes, but those who try for a big hit of this kind and miss will often fall into the grass themselves, so high-speed dangerous hits are relatively rare, and players’ heads do not crash into boards or hard surfaces even when big hits do occur).
  
  
• the ‘Flip on the fly’: because teams’ benches are situated behind the rink’s 10-ft-wide grassy border (though there is a narrow path through the grass to reach the bench), any player who wants to rapidly swap his stick for a racket or vice versa has the option of doing so ‘on the fly’: by tossing his or her stick/racket across the grassy border to a teammate on the bench, and then another teammate further along on the bench throwing a new stick/racket across the grass back to him or her. This is not mandatory, but when executed properly it is fast and extremely cool.
  
  
• the trampoline goalie. This is probably my favourite modern gunslinger innovation. It seems to have been inspired by slamball in the 1990s….or perhaps by quididitch in the 1990s. In gunslinger facilities equipped to handle trampoline goalies, the goalie creases are large, circular trampolines on which only goalies are allowed to stand. The trampoline goalie-only creases are then surrounded by a circle of grass (usually about 6 feet deep) in order to protect the goalie from other players from falling into the crease. The goalies wear shoes, not skates, and can carry a racket if they choose to (but do not have to). If they catch the ball in the air, they can only bounce once on the trampoline before throwing or racketing the ball back into play; failure to do so results in the opposing team getting to serve the ball inbounds from the corner sidelines. In some trampoline goalie gunslinger rinks, the upright goals have been replaced by quidditch-style upright hoops, sometimes quite high off the ground and with large diameters. Of course, the higher off the ground the upright goal is, the more gymnastic and well-timed the goalie must be, and the harder it is to score a goal with a stick rather than a racket. (Just don’t tell that to Pavel Birkenov, who is currently leading the Kelowna Dancing Bears in scoring despite having more stick goals than racket goals!)
  
• 3-2-1 scoring system: Gunslinger typically uses a scoring system in which you get 2 points for scoring the ball through the raised goal (whether that goal is a quiddich-style hoop or football-style uprights), 3 points for scoring from behind a 3-point line (trickier to do not only because it’s harder to aim from further back, particularly for sticklers, but also because the trampoline goalie has more time to time his jump right), and 1 point for hitting any part of the post (for example, if you fake a shot to get the trampoline goalie in the air, you can then snipe a 1-point goal at the post below him).

Just like bandy in Scandinavia and Russia, gunslinger is a skating sport that has mostly been forgotten about in the world at large – despite having everything a sports fan could want: speed, skill, strategy, simplicity, sharpshooting, soccer-sized stadiums, and lots of opportunities for fans to snag balls hit into the stands during the game. This is a real shame; superstar Condor Macphearsom, the starting lone gunslinger for the Edmonton Tar Heels and the league’s top scorer, is well worth the price of admission on his own. (Forgive me for saying this, but Macphearsom may be the fastest draw the ole’ Western conference has ever seen). With fans finally starting to fill stadiums again, it’s time we finally, finally bring the sport back out of the Canadian wilderness. It’s time for gunslinger to go global.

All-Star Game, 2022:

1st Quarter: Lightweight

West: Curry, Lillard, McCollum, Morant, Mitchell, Chris Paul, Jamal Murray, Shai GA

East: Kyrie Irving , Bradley Beal, Jrue Holiday, Trae Young, Van Vleet, Lowry, Sexton, Brogdon

2nd Quarter: Middleweight

West: Doncic, Kawhi, Paul George, Klay, Booker, Derozan, Draymond, Lonzo

East: Harden, Butler, Brown, Tatum, Middleton, Lavine, Hayward, Lamelo

3rd Quarter: Heavyweight:

West: Lebron, Davis, Jokic, Zion, Gobert, Towns, Ayton, Ingram

East: Simmons, Durant, Giannis, Sabonis, Embiid, Adebayo, Vucevic, Randle

4th Quarter: Crunch Time

West: Curry, Doncic, Lebron, Davis, Jokic, Lillard, Kawhi, Zion
East: Harden, Giannis, Durant, Embiid, Butler, Kyrie, Tatum, Simmons