Don Newman's Take on Gary Bettman's failings.

By Don Newman, special to CBC News

See Don's Complete editoral here.

Discredited strategy

Harper's dilemma is a bit like that of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman's: caught out by past maneouvrings.

Lured away from the NBA where he was a deputy commissioner, Bettman's game plan was to get the NHL onto a major American television network.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman at the 2010 draft in Los Angeles. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

The initial strategy was to shift teams from smaller Canadian cities to American ones where there were already established TV markets for professional teams in other sports.

Clustering pro teams in this manner was meant to help the NHL gain U.S. exposure. But it hasn't worked.

Now, apparently, Bettman looks prepared to again try the discredited strategy the NHL attempted in its first American expansion phase in the 1970s — violence.

Put the morality aside for a moment, is this even smart business?

You would think that cheap shots to the head would be outlawed after the one that put Sydney Crosby, the league's marquee attraction, out of action for over two months.

How good for business is that? How good for hockey?

And how good for public life is the kind of partisanship that has led to charges in the courts and the prospect of a sitting government, for the first time ever, being found in contempt of Parliament.

Of these two great Canadian institutions under attack, the NHL seems to be sleepwalking into a perilous future.

The one less followed, our parliamentary democracy, at least holds out the possibility of correction.