When tossing a reporter from the rink becomes a story

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PJ’s Ponderings: When you throw someone out because of what they wrote, you are inevitably going to draw attention to the act. Is that really what the Canucks want?

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Published Mar 28, 2026 • 3 minute read

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rogers arena When you throw someone out because of what they wrote, you are inevitably going to draw attention to the act. Is that really what the Canucks want? Photo by Rich Lam /Getty ImagesArticle content

One of the lead items in the fine print is that Canucks press credentials can be revoked at any time at the team’s discretion.

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It’s standard, really. Every sports reporter knows it. In general, there’s an understanding that if you are fair in your work, the team won’t stand in your way.

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But there’s also that slight worry that they might be capricious, or heavy handed, and pull the rug away anyway.

There’s a professional line we must walk, one that in all fairness teams should and will point to from time to time. That’s traditionally meant a phone call from the PR team expressing concern about a narrative that’s been presented. Sometimes they want to push back against framing.

Every once in a while a nasty phone call is placed to the editor. Rarer still is the angry letter that threatens legal action.

Being pulled from the building is a big as it gets. And it’s now drawn attention to a story that wasn’t drawing much attention before.

This is what’s known as the Streisand effect. Daily Hive’s Trevor Beggs was removed from the rink on Thursday. He believes it’s because of how he framed a story. Rather than asking him to retract or rework the story and suggesting that a failure to do so would lead to him being barred from the building, the Canucks jumped to the conclusion.

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That is their right. We all understand it.

But now people are talking about it. For the first time in modern memory, the Canucks have put a reporter on the pavement while a game was being played. There are recent examples of the team keeping reporters out of the building in the first place, for a variety of reasons, but as much as any of the veteran reporters I know can remember, no one has even been told to leave after the puck was dropped.

Canada home games

Canada Soccer and its players have their reasons why they prefer to assemble for home matches in Toronto rather than Vancouver, but seeing the BMO Field stands filled with more empty seats than fans made me chuckle.

Imagine if the turf at B.C. Place had been replaced before the MLS season with the natural surface that will be installed in just over a month’s time for the FIFA Men’s World Cup? Might that have made these friendlies this week an appealing test run for the Dome?

Surely more Vancouver fans would have turned out for the games than have in Toronto. A nice, domed stadium with a nice, fresh surface?

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As for the performance by the Canadian men on Saturday, given all the injuries, it was a capable effort. Jesse Marsch threw some new faces in the fire and obviously learned plenty about them.

How many of the names on the pitch Saturday will be in the XI when Canada kicks off in June? Most of the starters, some of the bench?

IOC rules on women’s sports

It’s interesting how muted the reaction in Canada the last few days has been to the IOC declaring that female athletes will have to take a one-time genetic test to prove their gender if they’re going to compete in the Olympics.

My reaction, generally, has been that the trans athlete issue has been made into a mountain out of a molehill: the number of trans women looking to play in competitive female sport is very low and there are no examples of these women being insanely dominant because of physical advantage. The whole controversy, such as it is, has been a scare tactic by bad-faith actors who somehow see people wanting to live as they feel as a threat to them and then drawing grand conclusions that somehow female sport was under threat.

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Beyond this, I’m concerned about how cases like Caster Semenya’s will be handled going forward.

She was a brilliant Olympian, but one who was singled out for her nature. Her advantages were wired by her genes. Truly she was born this way. This was not a choice. She wanted to run. She is a woman. What was she supposed to do? Run backward?

And the status of other women like her are now under threat.

“This does not make sense. It does not save women’s sport,” she told Sky News in the U.K. on Saturday. It’s terrible that she’s having to speak out again, but good on her for doing so.

I’m going to be listening to what she has to say and following her lead.

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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