you've always been so tough

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.

According to an Instagram post from his girlfriend, agents forced their way into his home, and during this arrest his state ID was lost and his phone was damaged to the point of being unusable. He has since been transferred to a detention facility hours away from his home. He has only been able to contact people through brief phone calls where he says he is "okay."

I have been lucky enough to play alongside Johan during special events, and he is an incredibly nice and hardworking person who should not be in this situation in the first place.

As of now, there's not much anybody can really do because we aren't sure what's going to happen. If you have Instagram I'd recommend reposting his girlfriend Adriana's post about the situation which I linked earlier in the post. Even if you don't have Instagram, spreading the post around would be great for raising awareness.

Please keep him and his girlfriend in your thoughts. fuck ICE

Screenshots of his girlfriend's post underneath the cut in case you dont wanna click the Instagram link