Character builders

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Photo by Jenna Marie Wakani

Mascots often define a brand. Just think of Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger or Kraft’s Kool-Aid man. And if you see one in person, there’s a good chance the costume was made in Toronto, where a thriving industry has emerged selling to clients around the globe. “Toronto is the mascot mecca of the world,” says Christina Simmons, president of Loonie Times Inc., one of the half-dozen mascot companies in the city.

Why Toronto? “I think we just put more TLC into them,” says Simmons. Unlike mass-produced mascots made overseas, Toronto’s mascots are conceived by bona-fide artisans. Take Sugar’s Costumes Studio, founded in 1980 by Peter deVinta, an Italian immigrant who comes from a long line of tailors. (His father, Joseph, now 91, was a master tailor in Italy who worked for top military generals.) A medium-sized firm, Sugar’s makes upwards of 400 mascots a year. Some are famous, like the Blue Jays’ Ace, and others obscure, like the Calvary Chapel’s California Nuts for Jesus: PJ, Al, Wally and Hazel. DeVita just shipped Nahkool, a date palm tree and mascot of a town in Bahrain.

The companies hire from nearby schools, like OCAD University and Seneca College, who pump out sculptors, designers and sewers. “When you’re making a custom character like the Honey Nut Bee, you need a fashion design graduate so they can do the pattern drafting and do the math to look like the design,” says Mike Chudleigh, president of 1-800-Mascots, another local firm.

Continue…

MLSE goes to courts over Maple Leaf Gardens

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 12:18 PM - 1 Comment

Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment is seeking an injunction against Ryerson University and Loblaw Properties over Maple Leaf Gardens, the former home of Toronto’s NHL team. Court documents reveal MLSE is trying to ensure Ryerson can’t use the name Maple Leaf Gardens for the building. The company claims the name could lead people to mistakenly believe Ryerson is affiliated with the Leafs. The venue is part of the university’s plan to add more space to its downtown campus and build its name, and has been supported in part by a levy students have paid in addition to their tuition fees. The injunction indicates MLSE is worried the 2,500-seat arena will steal away concerts and other events that would otherwise be held at the Leafs’ current home at the Air Canada Centre.

Globe and Mail

Landslides, floods kill dozens in South Korea

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 12:15 PM - 0 Comments

At least 77 people are dead or missing after the heaviest rainfall in a century hit the Seoul region in South Korea. Landslides and floods have destroyed homes, a Buddhist monastery and military sites, officials say. About 10 landmines buried near an artillery unit in southern Seoul weren’t recovered after a mudslide, the country’s defence ministry says, leading officials to caution residents about stray explosives. The storms have also affected North Korea, but state media didn’t make any immediate reports of damage. More than half a metre of rain has fallen in the Seoul region since late Tuesday, according to the country’s weather bureau.

Reuters

Peacekeepers seize three locations in Mogadishu

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 12:11 PM - 0 Comments

The African Union Mission has taken over three “strategic” locations in Somalia’s capital, freeing 41 civilian hostages who were held by al-Shabaab militants. The peacekeepers seized Florenza, Sinai and Monopolio Junctions in northeast Mogadishu after a “highly targeted” offensive, the organization said in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg. The African Union targeted the areas to protect aid workers providing assistance in the country. A drought has caused famine in two regions of Somalia, causing as many as 100,000 people to arrive in Mogadishu in search of food, water and shelter, according to the United Nations. Medical officials say 50 people were wounded in the operation.

Business Week

Hundreds cram Toronto city hall for budget hearing

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 12:05 PM - 0 Comments

Hundreds were expected to gather Thursday to speak out against proposed municipal budget cuts in Toronto. More than 280 people had registered to address city council about the controversial measures, which may include cutting police staff, closing libraries and slashing transit services. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford invited the public to air their thoughts about the proposals earlier this week. Toronto’s budget debate has already taken a few odd turns. The mayor’s brother publicly called out novelist Margaret Atwood, a library supporter, at a press conference this week. The Mayor himself was earlier accused of extending his middle digit at a fellow motorist. Thursday’s debate was expected to stretch into the night and possibly beyond.

CTV

B.C. referendum stumbles over missing ballot claims

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 11:58 AM - 0 Comments

British Columbia’s fractious debate over harmonized sales tax threatened to boil over into farce this week as opponents of the tax called on the government to intervene in its own referendum. Fight HST leaders say thousands of British Columbians have not received the mail-in ballots needed to vote in the poll. All ballots must be received by Elections B.C. by Aug 5. The HST fight has dominated B.C. politics for more than a year, with a devil’s brew of right-wing activists and New Democrats ganging up to punish the governing Liberals for bringing in the levy.

Vancouver Sun

Winehouse laid to rest

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 11:55 AM - 0 Comments

British soul singer Amy Winehouse was laid to rest in North London Thursday. Friends, including reality television star Kelly Osborne and DJ Mark Ronson, were on hand for the private ceremony. Winehouse, 27, was found dead in her home Saturday. A cause of death has yet to be determined.

The Telegraph

Smoke forces Air Canada flight to land in Sydney

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 11:17 AM - 0 Comments

An Air Canada plane landed safely in Sydney, Australia after smoke was detected coming from an oven in the galley. The captain of Air Canada flight number AC34 decided to circle back to the airport after taking off in Sydney. Although the captain did not declare an emergency, the plane dumped fuel above the suburbs of the Australian city so that the plane would be light enough to make a landing. The plane was scheduled to fly from Sydney to Vancouver before heading to Toronto. There were 264 passengers on board, including four infants, according to Air Canada. The plane landed safely just after noon local time, before taking off again at 1:50 p.m.

Herald Sun

Fault line beneath West Coast deeper than previously thought: study

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 11:09 AM - 5 Comments

The fault line where tectonic plates meet under the Olympic Peninsula in the Pacific Northwest is deeper than previously thought, according to a new study. That suggests the region will be hit hard the next time there is a megathrust earthquake. Andrew Calvert, a professor of Earth Sciences at Simon Fraser University, led the study, which was carried out by a team of scientists from Canada and the U.S. Calvert told the Globe and Mail that the fault line is seven kilometres deeper than previously thought, although it’s unclear what that means. He did, however, predict that a massive earthquake—magnitude 9, probably—in the area is imminent. Calvert says a megathrust earthquake happens in the Pacific Northwest every 500 to 600 years. The last one was in 1700.

Globe and Mail

Boehner pushing through Republican plan to prevent U.S. default

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 10:53 AM - 0 Comments

As politicians in Washington continue to debate how to prevent an unprecedented debt default on Aug. 2., House Republicans plan to push through a bill Thursday that aims to raise the U.S. debt ceiling while cutting $900 billion in spending over the next decade. The legislation, however, faces the threat of a presidential veto. U.S. President Barack Obama supports an alternative plan put forward by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. That plan offers comparable cuts, but would raise the debt ceiling by a record-breaking $2.7 trillion, thus avoiding a replay of the borrowing-limit debate until after the 2012 elections. Reid’s plan is also unlikely to pass without compromise, since Democrats don’t have enough votes to overcome Republican opposition. Analysts predict that failure to raise the nation’s debt ceiling by next Tuesday could be catastrophic for the still-recovering U.S. economy. It could also further de-stabilize the global economic climate.

CBC News

‘We deserve to know a lot more than we’ve been told to date’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 10:28 AM - 30 Comments

Andre Picard says Jack Layton has a responsibility and an opportunity to explain his medical situation fully.

Mr. Layton should tell his political family – the electorate – what he tells his immediate family: what kind of cancer he has, the treatment he will undergo and the prognosis. That is part of being a modern-day political leader … during his sick leave he still has an opportunity to make a powerful statement about transparency and openness, and to serve as an inspiration for cancer patients at the same time.

I’m not sure there’s a sturdy connection to be made between demanding the release of Afghan detainee documents—”the culture of secrecy that has enveloped federal politics under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives”—and disclosing the details of one’s personal battle with cancer. I also don’t know if the leader of the opposition should have to discuss his personal health because of a public proclivity for gossip and cynicism. But there is that question of what we would accept from a prime minister and, if we would demand more, whether that should apply to the opposition leader.

A day like no other

By Richard Warnica - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 4 Comments

MAHMUD HAMS/AFP/Getty Images

On Sept. 11, 2011, 10 years to the day after terrorists crashed two passenger jets into the towers at the World Trade Centre in New York, 15 Americans will run out for a pool match against Ireland at the Rugby World Cup in New Plymouth, New Zealand. The date of the game is a coincidence, organizers say. There is no special reason the Americans are playing then. But the particular timing is not lost—either on the players or the security officials charged with keeping the tournament safe. The New Zealand Police have established a special unit to oversee the World Cup. A spokesman said they have “no indication” of any threat tied to the game. But they are “aware” of the occasion. As for the players, team captain Todd Clever was one of the first to see the schedule when it was released. The date of the Ireland match stood out right away. “It was yelling at me,” he said: “9/11/11.”

New Zealand sits just west of the international date line, so the men of the U.S. rugby team will be among the first Americans to live through the 10th anniversary. But as the sun moves east and the morning breaks elsewhere that day, millions more will mark an occasion that, a decade after the attacks, remains heavy with apprehension, sorrow and the niggling fear that it might just happen again.

This year’s milestone could be particularly poignant. It marks not only 10 years since nearly 3,000 people died in the worst-ever terrorist assault on American soil, but also comes just months after the man who oversaw the attacks was himself killed. U.S. Special Forces shot Osama bin Laden dead at a compound in Pakistan in May. Documents found in the raid suggest the 9/11 mastermind hoped to pull off another plot a decade after his greatest triumph. According to initial reports, bin Laden wanted to bomb a train to mark the occasion. (Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists killed hundreds in train bombings in Spain and Britain in 2004 and 2005.) Media reports have since indicated he was looking to shoot down Air Force One, assassinate U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, or fly a small plane into a sporting event. According to the Wall Street Journal, those plans never went past the earliest stages. Bin Laden kept vetoing targets, others have reported. And there are questions about how much influence the Saudi still had with al-Qaeda when he died.

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REVIEW: Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 1 Comment

Last year, in one of the most scandalous “gotcha” stories ever produced by the now-defunct News of the World, the tabloid’s reporters pulled off an audacious sting aimed at Sarah Ferguson. Fergie agreed to “open doors” for a “fake sheik” by selling access to her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, duke of York, who is also Britain’s trade envoy. The price was $800,000. Sarah’s life, already in a debt-laden spiral, crashed after the tabloid released a video recording of the sordid encounter. “‘Look after me,” she said, “and he [Andrew] will look after you.”

Though Sarah was advised to lay low for a year, she didn’t. Instead, she cut a deal with Oprah Winfrey to go on a journey of self-discovery, with a camera crew capturing her every moment. The result is a miniseries and this book, which lays bare some of her most painful memories and feelings, especially her realization of how much she’d hurt her fiercely loyal daughters Beatrice and Eugenie. “How could they possibly love Fergie for behaving in such a way,” she wrote. “I feel I have let so many down. My self-hatred and self-punishment is rampant. I cannot forgive myself. I need healing.”

While chunks of the book are filled with the usual celebrity self-help encounters with spiritual advisers (even the obligatory shaman), as well as stays in personal transformation retreats, it’s the sections chronicling her turbulent life—her mother abandoned her young daughters for an Argentine polo player—that reveal why Sarah, now 51, changes directions like an overeager puppy and lurches from crisis to crisis. Though she often tries to justify her actions, it’s left to Dr. Phil to deliver the hard truth: “You need to realize: ‘It’s not anyone else’s fault that I am the way I am. I have the power to choose who I am going to be and how I am going to live my life.’ ” The next move is up to Sarah.

REVIEW: This is Not the End of the Book

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

The future of the book in the digital age has lately been much on the minds of philosophers, writers and ordinary readers. Eco and Carrière are all three of those things, the former an Italian semiotician most famous in the English-speaking world for his novel The Name of the Rose (1983), the latter a French screenwriter (The Return of Martin Guerre) best known for his lengthy collaboration with director Luis Buñuel. Nor do they merely make a living by the written word: these two men, both 79, love books the way Queen Elizabeth loves corgis.

Here they speak in turn—the book is arranged as a conversation between them—and manage, on occasion, to stick to the title topic. They do discuss how rapid technological development in some ways makes the traditional book valuable for its staying power: Eco can no longer easily get at the early drafts of his novels, locked away as they are in floppy disks his current computer cannot read. (If he had typed them, he notes, they’d be in his file cabinet.) Always a dab hand at aphorisms, Eco grandly concludes, “The book is like the spoon: once invented, it cannot be bettered.”

But luckily for readers, they don’t usually stay on topic. The old men talk, pointlessly and gloriously, for over 300 pages on anything and everything written and captured in books. They chew over Carrière’s adamant belief that not a single real poem can be found among the tens of thousands of French verses penned in the 18th century; they spend pages on 17th-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, summing him up as an early embodiment of the Internet. Kircher knew everything there was to be known about all branches of learning in his time, and half of what he wrote was true and valuable, while half of it was nonsense. The two old men sound like visitors from an already dead civilization, and it is a pleasure, both pointless and delightful, to listen to them.

The rising price of DVDs

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Has Netflix declared war on physical media? The movie rental behemoth announced last week that instead of giving its U.S. customers both DVD rentals and unlimited online streaming for $10 a month, it will be offering streaming and DVDs for $7.99 each—a 60 per cent price increase for customers who want to keep both services.

This price hike could help wean customers off DVDs and get them to embrace a streaming-only service, which is already the only option the company provides in Canada. Dan Primack of Fortune explained that Netflix last year “spent between $500 million and $600 million on DVD postage,” and the company’s future business strategy mostly depends on avoiding the mail.

So the people who still want to rent physical media will have to pay a lot of extra money for it, or else switch to the new digital era. There’s just one problem, though: even in America, where Netflix streams considerably more content than it does in Canada, most movies and TV shows are not available outside of the DVD format. Unless studios start licensing more of their content to Netflix, we could be looking at a future where customers have to choose between a big snail-mail selection and a tiny online one.

An udderly new camel business

By Cigdem Iltan - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Mosab Omar/Reuters

Camels are best known in the West as spitting, mean-tempered beasts, and not milk producers. But could camel milk and milk products soon appear on supermarket shelves in Europe and North America? A camel farm and processing plant near Dubai has increased production to 4,500 litres of milk a day, becoming the first of its kind in the world to produce on this scale. In order to properly pit camels against cows in the milk market battle, the Emirates Industry for Camel Milk and Products farm’s veterinarians adopted a selective breeding procedure using embryo transfers to improve milk production.

The UAE has tried for years to export camel milk drinks to the EU, so far with no success. But that could change soon: last year, EU officials said they would inspect quality standards and veterinary practices at camel farms this summer. Camel milk is higher in vitamin C and has lower fat content than cow’s milk, and has been used by researchers to treat chronic hepatitis. It’s also widely believed to be an aphrodisiac among Gulf Arabs.

Not party to the $20-million lotto prize

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

The young clerk at the Hi Ho Esso station in Okotoks, Alta., says that the famous legal battle over a lotto ticket sold at his counter has been unobtrusive. “The people involved were told by their lawyers not to talk,” he says, “and we know better than to ask.” In a Calgary suburb in 2011, there’s already enough money around for $20 million not to make much visible impact.

But it is enough cash to destroy friendships. Michael and Catherine Clancy were part of a group of regulars in a lottery pool at the Okotoks Elks Club. The participants generally covered for one another, making sure nobody missed a drawing. But the Clancys’ names, for the first time, somehow didn’t make it onto the list for the Nov. 23, 2007, Super 7 drawing; 21 other Elks habitués, however, won a piece of a $20-million prize.

One of the winners testified that the group assembled to discuss the Clancys’ bad luck about a week after the big win. The plaintiffs “were pretty close friends,” Drew DeVries said, and he “would have liked to see them in the money, but everyone voted it down right away.” The Clancys, astonished that nobody had covered for them, sued for two twenty-thirds of the total prize.

Continue…

Speaking of Showrunning

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 5:22 PM - 0 Comments

There’s not a lot I can add to this: Ken Levine has written a list of tips for first-time TV showrunners. They largely centre on the things showrunners can do to keep morale up – their own, and the writing staff’s. An example of something that’s not good for staff morale: the practice I’ve heard referred to as “credit-hopping.”

A good way to completely destroy any morale is to automatically put your name on every script and share credit with every writer. You may win in arbitration but you lose your troops. The trade off is not worth it. You’re getting paid more money than anybody already. Let your writers receive full credit and residuals.

I don’t think he’s referring to one particular show; Matt Weiner on Mad Men is currently known for putting his name on most scripts, but he’s hardly the only one. Another example would be Robert and Michelle King, who took a “teleplay by” credit on most Good Wife episodes last season (with the writer of, I presume, the first draft getting a “story by” credit). These systems seem to work for those particular shows. But they can backfire on other shows because it leads to a lot of staff turnover. Hands-on showrunners who let the original writer keep his or her full credit, even after a complete rewrite, may find it easier to keep good writers on staff for a long time.

In the air tonight

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 4:56 PM - 33 Comments

This afternoon, Elizabeth May took to Twitter to fret about the harmfulness of wifi. Some degree of mockery ensued. As to the central issue, Kate Heartfield posts a Citizen editorial from a year ago.

The World Health Organization says there is no convincing scientific evidence that wireless networks cause any damage to human health. Yes, wireless devices emit electromagnetic radiation, as do other electronic devices we use in our homes and offices: computers, televisions, even baby monitors. The exposure to radiation from a mobile phone, which is generally much closer to the person using it than a wireless access point, is much higher than that from a wireless network.

It’s certainly true that exposure to wifi networks has increased over the past few years, and that it might take time for any ill effects to show up in the research. So it makes sense for health agencies to keep monitoring the research and be prepared to change their minds, as is true for all science. The evidence from the research to date, though, is clear and reassuring. There is certainly no reason to start getting rid of wifi in schools and other places where children spend a lot of time.

The WHO fact sheet on wireless networks is here. More recently, Health Canada posted the following video. Continue…

Mother bear endures 9-day swim

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 4:14 PM - 0 Comments

Shrinking polar ice fields are being blamed after a mother polar bear was found to have swam nine consecutive days in search of rest. The bear lost a cub and 22 per cent of its body weight during the ordeal, according to a new study on the movements of female polar bears. Ice fields in the Beauford Sea, where the swim took place, have been shrinking in recent years. As a result, bears there are being forced to endure longer and longer treks in search of food and shore.

Toronto Star

The leader of the opposition

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 3:30 PM - 5 Comments

The NDP caucus has officially backed Nycole Turmel as their interim leader.

“I’m overwhelmed by the support of the caucus today. I’m also ready to take on the job as long as the federal council accepts the recommendation of the caucus,” Turmel said following the caucus meeting Wednesday morning. “We have a strong caucus, we have a strong leader as Jack Layton. We want to give him the time to rest to come back in September,” said Turmel.

A vote of the party’s federal council should confirm the move tomorrow. I’m not entirely sure of the historical criteria in this case, but if this does move Ms. Turmel officially to the position of Leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition, she would seem to become the 43rd individual and the second woman to occupy that post.

Got news to leak? Get lost.

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 2:47 PM - 22 Comments

Whatever happened to the Wikileaks revolution?

Mere months ago, Julian Assange’s anonymous whistleblowing site was touted as a journalism “game-changer” that would do to news distribution what Napster did for music distribution: disrupt and democratize it.

What would this new era of transparency look like? Every online news story would include a “disclose” button to allow readers to safely dump additional info. Leaks would go local—in addition to big targets like the U.S. government or multinational banks, public school principals and gum factory foremen would also be vulnerable to being exposed. Media organizations would outsource news gathering to the public, and turn their internal efforts towards verifying, analyzing, editing and packaging compelling stories. And we wouldn’t be stuck with a douchey ideologue like Assange, either: new sites like OpenLeaks, LocalLeaks, EuroLeaks, IsraeliLeaks and HackerLeaks were popping up to poke holes in secrecy and conspiracy wherever they are found.

But let’s say that right now you had some dynamite data to dump. Who would you leak it to?

Wikileaks will accept your donation to Julian Assange’s legal defense fund, but it won’t accept your info leak. The site is currently not taking new submissions “due to re-engineering improvements“. OpenLeaks, a spinoff project by former members of Wikileaks, isn’t functional, and there’s no word on when it will be. Same with LocalLeaks, a project from the friendly folks of Anonymous. The rest have yet to gain much traction, and as for legacy media finally smartening up and offering their own secure data drops, the one major newspaper to try was practically laughed off the Internet.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Safehouse site was immediately ripped apart by security experts and transparency advocates alike. At launch, it was insecure both by technical bug (your I.P. address might be sniffed as you uploaded) and by deliberate design (the site’s terms and conditions warns leakers that the WSJ reserves the right to snitch them out to the cops whenever they feel like it).  In other words, you’d have to be nuts to trust Safehouse to keep you safe, and unsurprisingly, nobody with anything good has. There has yet to be a notable revelation to come from the effort.

Perhaps I’m speaking too soon—it has been only nine months or so since Wikileaks’ notorious diplomatic cable-dumps. Or perhaps I’m simply ignorant of some truly consequential leak sites out there (it would help if I read Russian). If so, I’d love to know about them.

But if I’m right, and it’s true that in the wake of Wikileaks, nobody else has stepped up to take their place—well why on Earth not?

Mind the infrastructure gap

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 2:26 PM - 10 Comments

Daryl Copeland argues the federal government’s priorities have left little room to deal with national infrastructure needs.

At a time of robust economic growth, Canada’s federal government cut personal and corporate taxes, and reduced the GST by a few percentage points. These actions eliminated several tens of billions of dollars per year in revenue, and, with that, the government’s capacity to raise and retain funds that could later be deployed in support of the public interest. At the same time, the government dramatically increased spending on the armed forces, accumulated the large ancillary expenses associated with going to war in Afghanistan, and presided over the unprecedented militarization of Canadian society.

Meanwhile, Postmedia finds that the $3.1 billion spent to upgrade water treatment plants in recent years may not bring such infrastructure up to new federal standards—standards that may require another $20 billion in upgrades. Municipalities put the total infrastructure deficit at $123 billion.

Opposing prayer in Toronto public schools, with dignity

By Emma Teitel - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 2:14 PM - 42 Comments

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

A Toronto public school has caused enormous controversy in the press this month for its makeshift Muslim congregation. For the past three years, every Friday afternoon during the darker months, nearly 400 Muslim students at Valley Park Middle School, have—under the auspices of the Toronto District School Board’s Religious Accommodation policy—prostrated themselves on the cafeteria floor facing Mecca, and made their afternoon prayers as the sun set over the school (those lamenting the separation of church and state can thank Canadian winters for their reunion). The school’s faculty implemented the imam-led sessions when they noticed large numbers of students were signing themselves out of class after lunch on Friday to attend Mosque, and several weren’t coming back. It seemed an easy fix: eliminate a liability with a seemingly workable accommodation. Unfortunately it didn’t work: The girls prayed behind the boys to maintain “modesty” and menstruating girls sat lazily up-right at the back—excused from prayer until their “cleanliness” returned to them.

People are angry and I understand why: Organized prayer doesn’t belong in school, religious accommodation shouldn’t accommodate sexism, and tolerance should never tolerate intolerance. The Toronto District School Board does all of its students—Muslim and non-Muslim—a great disservice by compromising one policy (gender equity) in favour of another (religious accommodation). But lately something has complicated my indignation: An old bearded man—of any religious stripe—relegating 13-year-old menstruating girls to the back of the room is highly unsavoury, but so is Ezra Levant donning a burka on national television to show solidarity with oppressed Muslim women. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that some of the most strident opponents of the cafeteria congregation are as morally deficient as the congregation system itself.

But most Canadian publications haven’t noticed. Take the Canadian Hindu Advocacy, an interest group that’s been Valley Park Middle School’s most passionate opponent. Nearly every newspaper article on the topic, from those in the Toronto Star to the Toronto Sun, has called The Canadian Hindu Advocacy a mere “critic of Islam”. Closer investigation, though, (or any at all) makes clear that the CHA is no critic, but one, a vehemently anti-Islamic organization; and two, despite its name, an embarrassment to Canadian pluralism. Go on the group’s website and you’ll see, under “Our Activities”, items that provide a quick snapshot of the CHA’s truly charming take on minority rights: “CHA speaks at Jewish discussion of Geert Wilders” (Wilders, of course, is the inflammatory Dutch politician famous for comparing the Koran to Mein Kampf); “CHA exposes The Sham of Tarek Fatah” (Fatah, a fiercely secular Muslim writer and broadcaster in Toronto, is in favour of gay rights, a strict division between church and state, and a progressive form of Islam); and “CHA published op-ed, ‘Slam the doors on Immigration’” (acceptable advice, apparently, now that the CHA has slipped through the doors). The group’s leader, Ron Banerjee, has been quoted to the effect that: “In its entire history, Islam, the Islamic civilization, has invented and contributed less to human advancement than a pack of donkeys.” Just this past month Banerjee debated Toronto imam Steve Rockwell on the John Oakley radio show, where he spent more time belittling Muslims than he did championing secularism. “The PEW (Research Center) did a study” he told Rockwell, “and in each and every case the situation is the same. The Hindu community and the Jewish community have higher than average education and incomes, and the Muslim community rank at the very bottom…Numbers don’t lie”. Unfortunately Banerjee’s numbers haven’t yet managed to remove organized prayer from public schools; his alleged mission.

Ordinarily Banerjee wouldn’t bother me that much. He is small samosas, and he’s done a fine job so far marginalizing himself. But by joining the campaign against organized prayer in school, he and his organization have clouded what should be a crystal-clear, trans-ethnic argument about a fundamental ingredient in democracies. The CHA is now promising to protest in front of Valley Park Middle School if prayer congregations continue in the fall. And frankly, we shouldn’t let them. If we’re going to hold the school board accountable for allowing prayer in school, then we should hold the CHA equally accountable for disrupting school—and making Muslim kids feel bad about themselves. Banerjee says his biggest qualm about the “Mosqueteria”—as many right-wing bloggers have dubbed it—is that prayer interferes with the students’ education. Last time I checked, however, politically fuelled protests and mega phones do too.

Ron Banerjee should take a page out of Raheel Raza’s book—a moderate Muslim activist and author, who argues that whatever is done should be done with “respect and dignity, because this is not about bashing another faith, and children are not responsible for what their elders have put them into”. Raza doesn’t believe prayer belongs in school, but she has an interesting idea about why it’s there. “I call this the Liberal white guilt complex,” she says, “where they [the TDSB] think they are being accommodating when all they are doing is adding to the problem”. According to Raza, the gender segregation and Imam present in the Valley Park service is not a universal representation of true Islam. Yet what Tarek Fatah calls “the racism of lower expectations” prevails, and school board officials blithely assume the worst about a religion they’re too afraid to question. “They are making a mockery of my faith,” Raza argues. “The Koran says there is no compulsion in prayer.”

But there is compulsion at Valley Park Middle School. “What about the students who don’t want to pray?” Raheel Raza asks. “Can you imagine the pressure on them?” Considering the prayers are monitored by members of the community—parents included—such pressure is almost guaranteed. So while the TDSB has given kids the right to pray, it’s inadvertently stripped them of the right to pass. And that is infinitely more important. It’s also precisely the kind of principle that the Ron Banerjees of this world are indifferent to. The end may justify the means sometimes; but in this case, doing the right thing for the wrong reason would be a bitter kind of victory.

Read Ron Banerjee’s response to this article