COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON, CANADA. TUESDAY, JUNE 4, 2024. This is the day India’s election results are due — the grand conclusion of the world’s largest democracy’s majestic but still somewhat troubling 2024 quest to give Nardendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP government a third consecutive term in office.

As we write the BJP has still yet to win a parliamentary majority! We’ll certainly be offering a few further gratuitous thoughts on all this somewhat further down the road. But our brief main objective here today is quite different.

Yesterday we saw someone from Alberta on CBC TV, asking with the usual friendly hostility whether anyone in Toronto seriously cared about the Edmonton Oilers as Canada’s team in their 2024 Stanley Cup finals with the Florida Panthers? Starting this coming Saturday night!

As long-term Greater Toronto Area residents we just want to make clear that, from now until the end of the 2024 Stanley Cup final, absolutely everyone in the GTA loves the Edmonton Oilers deeply. (As does for that matter, eg, everyone in Southern Ontario, Central Canada, and indeed all of Canada east of the Lake of the Woods to the Atlantic sea-bound coast — in French, English, and Cree, to say nothing of Mandarin and Punjabi.)

We are all hoping fervently (and some among us even praying every night) that Captain Connor McDavid ‘s team will at long last return Lord Stanley’s hardware to its home and native land, for the first time since the Montreal Canadiens (“officially le Club de hockey Canadien and colloquially known as the Habs”) beat the Los Angeles Kings in 1993. (At this point the great Wayne Gretzky was with the Kings, having moved there from the Oilers late in 1988. Gretzky started with the Oilers in 1979. So far the Oilers have won the Stanley cup five times — 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, and 1990. Gretzky was with Edmonton for the first four of these five Stanley Cups, and would never play on a Cup-winning team again.)

We counterweights editors also just want to underline that in the GTA itself our current love and affection for Edmonton has nothing to do with the hard facts that Oilers captain and shining star Connor McDavid was born and raised in Richmond Hill just north of today’s City of Toronto proper, and once played for the fabled Marlboroughs in the Greater Toronto Hockey League.

Certainly we are on board in our part of the GTA because right now the Edmonton Oilers really are Canada’s team, and of course we want a Canadian team to finally win the Stanley Cup for the first time in more than 30 years.

(We editors lost in the GTA also think that, hockey aside, Edmonton is a great Canadian city — with an excellent jazz bar called the Yardbird Suite, in Old Strathcona : “Edmonton’s home for jazz since 1957 … operated by the Edmonton Jazz Society … with an international reputation for offering the best in sophisticated live music ” GO OILERS GO!)