AS I SEE IT COLUMN: Why the Southeast Event Centre must remove the U.S. flag

Steinbachers and people from around southeastern Manitoba are still rightly basking in the high praise the Southeast Event Centre (SEC) received after recently hosting a super successful Grand Slam of Curling event.

That all the medal winners in Olympic curling were playing at the SEC just a few weeks earlier, is beyond cool.

SEC looked fantastic on the national and international stage, with one eye-popping, egregious exception: The U.S. flag hanging below the Canadian flag. Having flags from all the nations at the Player’s Championship would have made perfect sense. But just the U.S. flag? Promoting a nation whose president enjoys causing us economic pain and suffering, who has launched an unprovoked war of aggression that has already harmed the global economy and could lead to WWIII, makes no sense.

There are many more, but here are four baseline reasons why the SEC must immediately take down the U.S. flag.

TRUMP IS A WAR CRIMINAL

Led by Zionist forces in Israel who, after 40 years finally found a U.S. president gullible and stupid enough to start a war in Iran, Trump launched an unnecessary war of choice that has killed many innocent people, including 168 young school girls. Bombing schools and hospitals and apartment blocks constitutes war crimes. The SEC should not be promoting a country committing crimes against humanity.

THE WAY CANADIANS ARE BEING TREATED

The American president, a convicted felon who belongs in jail and not the White House, has been insulting and threatening Canada for over a year. And now, with his National Security Strategy that he released in December 2025, the cosmically ignorant Trump has formalized his desire to control our water, lumber, minerals and our land as part of official American doctrine. It’s no longer just an idle threat.

Simply put, the United States poses an existential threat to our sovereignty and to our future. Why is the SEC endorsing a country that wants to make us their 51st state and control all of our natural resources?

HOW AMERICANS ARE BEING TREATED

We all have American sports teams we cheer for, American athletes we like and many of us have friends and relatives that live in the U.S. So to see cowardly, masked, ICE agents kill two American civilians in broad daylight in Minneapolis, is not something the SEC should abide.

As the closest American city with teams in all the major professional leagues, Manitoban sports fans of hockey, baseball, football, basketball and soccer (used to) love travelling to Minneapolis. It was horrifying to see that beautiful city look like a war zone.

Displaying the U.S. flag at Pistons and Selects home games is a tacit approval of the terrorism that Trump inflicts on America.

HOW THE WORLD IS BEING TREATED

The unhinged U.S. president – who terrifyingly calls the death and destruction of his unjust war “exciting,” as if it was a video game – has attacked Venezuela, threatened to invade Greenland, annex Canada and has said Cuba is next on the list of countries to invade after he’s done incinerating innocent people in Iran.

The Trump regime represents a threat to Canada and to the future of life on this planet. That a corrupt, psychologically unstable narcissist has the launch codes to the world’s deadliest nuclear arsenal should horrify every sentient North American, no matter what their political affiliation is.

Whether it’s Pistons or Selects games, curling bonspiels or any event at the SEC, it should not be promoting a country that is being openly hostile to Canada, its own people and the rest of the world.

This is no disrespect to the Americans on the Pistons. (It’s to his enormous credit that Paul Dyck can recruit players from all over North America.) It has nothing to do with them. It has everything to do with their profoundly deranged president. The SEC shouldn’t display the flag of a rogue nation that is violating international law and threatening to take over our home and native land.

The SEC needs to immediately remove the American flag. Such a beautiful, majestic building should not implicitly condone the actions of a country led by a demented, barbaric madman.