Archive for the ‘Lockout Thoughts’ Category

If I told you the NHL lockout reminds me of maple forests, would you think I was insane? Because I think I might be.

Despite learning about it every year of my elementary school life, I don’t think much about ecology.  Or I didn’t, anyway, until the lockout. It’s one of those things that urbanites- even waste-recycling, local-eating, carbon-footprint-reducing environmentalist urbanites- tend to understand in dualistic, romantic terms: the pristine harmony of untouched wilderness vs. the corrupted, polluted haunts of man. A few years in the city and it’s easy to fall into the platitudes. Balance of nature, circle of life, etc etc. I forget the details of how ecosystems actually work.

In the fall, when the lockout was just beginning and the world was still green and there was still hope the hearts of hockey fans, I took a trip north, to spend some time among plants. The northern forests are the ‘nature’ of my childhood, the familiar wilderness. The Canadian version is a little rockier, a little lakier, but it has a homey kind of beauty. Spare, thin trees reaching to great irrational heights, spindly leafy ground plants, chipmunks and deer, everything a pale green light splotched with shadows. I’d never been to that forest before, yet it felt like I’d been there a thousand times, like I’d been going there every year since I was four years old. I am that much of a city girl, that it seems to me as though they are always the same trees.

They’re not. What looks to me like pure, beautiful, balanced nature, preserved in a pristine harmony by the zealous care of the Parks Service is no such thing. It’s full of havoc and death. What we think of as the balance of nature is no happy equilibrium. It’s a constant succession of traumas, of disease, murder, starvation, suffering. The state of nature is a perpetual imbalance. Although it always pulls back in the direction of the happy medium, that point of perfect harmony is seldom reached and never holds for long. Something is always overgrowing. Something is always dying out. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not a lawyer, but I know of a couple of hockey bloggers who are lawyers. One of them is mc79hockey, who wrote a post up early this morning about aspects of the NHL’s suit against the NHLPA. His takeaway point is that, if this suit goes further, eventually the Canadian courts ought to get involved, which is a win for the 100 or so players working for Canadian teams, because “the various American acts referenced in the NHL’s claim don’t apply in Canada.”

Again, I’m not a lawyer, but I’ll presume the province of British Columbia has more labour-friendly laws than the state of New York. The NHL chose New York, as mc79 says, “parties who have some choice of jurisdiction…would prefer to have their case heard in a jurisdiction that is more friendly to their position.”

You may have noticed that some players named by the NHL, including Cristobal Nieves and Shane Prince, are not NHL players. Prince was a second round pick of the Ottawa Senators in 2011 who played in the OHL, signed an entry-level contract under the previous collective agreement and now plays for the Senators’ AHL-affiliate, based in Binghamton. the NHL suit says that Prince “resides in Spencerport, New York” and Cristoval Nieves, an unsigned college player drafted by the New York Rangers, “resides in Baldwinsville, New York”.

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