Svengali on Ice

The CBC is said to be perpetually in search of definitive Canadian stories. Perhaps it might consider the sorry tale of former NHL player Mike Danton as a topic for a movie of the week and tell Being Erica to go rest for a spell. If it needs a primer, it can consult Steve Simmons’s book The Lost Dream: The Story of Mike Danton, David Frost and a Broken Canadian Family, a tome brimming with the entire portfolio of human misery.

We meet Danton (born Mike Jefferson), a Toronto kid with borderline NHL talent who went to jail for attempting to murder his … um, here’s the tricky part. Danton says he wanted his natural father killed, but the hitman he engaged was shown a picture of Danton’s agent, the Svengali-like David Frost, as the victim instead. Danton had rejected his natural family for a life pursuing the NHL dream as defined by Frost, a character as...