Welcome to the club

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:58 AM - 30 Comments

The Conservatives formally initiate Brian Topp with a leaked memo of partisan attacks.

“Topp is a union boss and has deep union ties,” they say in a memo to MPs and party faithful. “How could Brian Topp speak on behalf of all Canadians, when he is so tied to big union special interests…

“Topp is not just the candidate of union bosses but also NDP insiders,” the Tories say, noting that he worked for former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow, former left-wing Toronto mayor David Miller and former NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin.

And if that does make Tories shake in their boots, the party back-roomers add that “Brian Topp is most notable for being NDP Leader’s hand-picked negotiator in the coalition talks with the separatist Bloc Québécois … Brian Topp will do anything – including forming a wreckless [sic] coalition with separatists – in order to gain power.”

Via Twitter, Brian Topp pronounces himself honoured.

NDP fantasy league update

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 4:21 PM - 2 Comments

I am told that former Toronto mayor David Miller, who had been the subject of some theorizing, has no interest in seeking the leadership of the NDP.

The NDP’s federal council will meet tomorrow to set the rules and timetable for a leadership campaign. Nathan Cullen is still thinking about a run. Robert Chisholm, depending on which quote you prefer, is either in or still thinking about it as well.

The long goodbye to Jack Layton

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, September 5, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 10 Comments

Jenna Marie Wakani/Maclean's

When, a decade or so ago, his activism in support of same-sex marriage triggered death threats, Rev. Brent Hawkes would call his friend Jack Layton, the Toronto city councillor who, along with his wife and colleague Olivia Chow, had done so much to champion gay rights, and gave him the specifics. The bullies said they’d turn up at this or that event, and promised violence. Layton was always determined to show up. When Hawkes, wearing a bulletproof vest, officiated at the 2001 double wedding ceremony that eventually led to the legalization of gay marriage, Layton was there.

Now here they were again, Layton and Hawkes, on stage at Roy Thomson Hall. Layton was dead—“cruelly gone, at the pinnacle of his career,” as eulogist Stephen Lewis put it—his body within a flag-draped casket that over the last days, amid much pomp, had travelled to Parliament Hill, to Quebec, and to Toronto’s City Hall, where thousands came, waited to gaze upon him, many with tears in their eyes.

Before Hawkes was an audience composed of some of the most powerful people in Canada, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who, while in opposition, had been a leading antagonist in the fight for gay marriage. This was a state funeral—an extraordinary gesture normally reserved for past and present governors general, prime ministers and cabinet ministers, but one that Harper had offered Layton’s family. Hawkes did not exploit the moment—not to partisan ends, anyway. Rather, he dwelt on the way Layton’s life, at its best—despite his mistakes, his “normal imperfections,” to quote Lewis again—could be used as a model to live better. “If the Olympics can make us prouder Canadians, maybe Jack’s life can make us better Canadians,” Hawkes said, noting that Layton was always careful to ask after his husband, John. “It’s about remembering, about remembering to say, ‘Hi, Brent. How’s John doing?’ Hawkes paused, looking into the hall. “Hi, Prime Minister. How’s Laureen doing?”

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Looking back

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 1:22 PM - 8 Comments

The Agenda convenes a panel to remember Jack Layton.

The Agenda team also put together a compilation of some of Mr. Layton’s moments on TVO. Continue…

Why Jack Layton needed a human shield

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, July 11, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Elizabeth May

Politicians with bad hips

At Toronto’s 31st annual Pride Parade it was all about party leaders in rickshaws. Green Leader Elizabeth May rode in one as she has in every parade since having a hip replaced in 2007. This time, NDP Leader Jack Layton, who still walks with a cane after hip surgery, was pulled in one covered in rainbow flags. His team was prepared for all the people who insist on spraying politicians with huge water guns—a nightmare for anyone with a BlackBerry. At one point Layton’s wife, MP Olivia Chow, took a water cannon shot in the back to protect him. Chow then opened a rainbow umbrella to deflect further H20 assaults from Layton’s left flank; a volunteer opened a huge orange umbrella to protect him on the right. May is waiting to have surgery on her other hip and says after that she will be able to walk in the Pride Parade. The Liberal MP presence was diminished this year. Interim leader Bob Rae and Carolyn Bennett were the only two elected Grit MPs. Rob Oliphant, who was defeated in the last election, was also in attendance. Rae’s wife, Arlene Perly Rae, demonstrated powerful arm strength as she tossed bead necklaces into the crowd. One shot accidentally hit a photographer and she quickly went over and apologized.

‘Screw the cottage’

There was much anger and campy commentary over Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s snub of all Pride festivities. (Ford said he always goes to his cottage for Canada Day weekend and would not be attending Pride.) Former Toronto mayors were well represented. David Miller and Barbara Hall marched and Mel Lastman sent a letter that was read at the Metropolitan Community Church service before the parade began. Ford mockers were out in force. One man dressed as Ford held a sign saying “Screw the cottage.” Many wore Ford masks. “More people wore them on their ass than their face, which sums it up,” noted Fab magazine associate editor Drew Rowsome.

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Pride and Politicians

By Mitchel Raphael - Sunday, July 10, 2011 at 10:08 PM - 19 Comments

MPs hit the Toronto Pride Parade. Below, Green leader Elizabeth May (right) with Green volunteer Michael Wall.

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NDP leader Jack Layton and his MP wife Olivia Chow.

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(Left to right) Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett,  Liberal leader Bob Rae and former Liberal MP Rob Oliphant.

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How Rob Ford won Toronto

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, October 29, 2010 at 5:20 PM - 0 Comments

Nick Kouvalis, Rob Ford, George Smitherman| Donald Weber/VII Network/ Cole Garside

In the weeks after Richard Ciano and Nick Kouvalis joined the Ford For Mayor campaign last spring, the two market researchers and conservative political activists launched into a series of interviews with their new, colourful candidate for the Toronto mayoralty race, plumbing the depths of Rob Ford’s past. “Is there anything we need to know?” Ciano, who is 36, and Kouvalis, 35, asked Ford—repeatedly—once they’d dealt with the obvious: the homophobic slurs, drunken outbursts, the talk of “Orientals” working “like dogs.” Nope, said Ford. And that was the end of it.

Until August, that is, when Ford, Kouvalis and a 14-year-old campaign volunteer were zipping through the streets of downtown Toronto—and Ford got a call on his cellphone. Kouvalis had instructed Ford many, many times to stop answering his own phone. One day, he told him, he would be sorry. “He didn’t listen,” Kouvalis says. “That’s his brand. He answers the phone.” This time it was Jonathan Jenkins, of the Toronto Sun, asking Ford about a Florida marijuana charge dating back to 1999. Ford looked over at the 14-year-old and, on the question of whether Miami police had ever plucked a joint from his back pocket, apparently chose to prevaricate. “No, to answer your question,” he told Jenkins. “When I say no, I mean never. No question. Now I’m getting offended. No means no.”

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Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 at 10:03 AM - 0 Comments

As someone who is employed for the expressed purposes of describing—”sketching,” as they say— the words, actions, behaviours and appearances of public figures, I am a keen student of community standards as they relate to physical description. And so, of course, I have been watching with great interest the discussion that has resulted from the printing and retracting of Stephen Marche’s description of Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford as “fat.”

This description—”great deflated tires of defeat,” Mr. Marche wrote quite illustratively—has provoked a great deal of consternation and, indeed, condemnation. To the greater community, the use of the term “fat” is apparently offensive. And on those grounds, Mr. Marche has been soundly and publicly rebuked. We have, as a society, identified a line over which it is unacceptable to tread.

So be it. But we should not let this pass with that as the only result. Here, indeed, is a teachable moment—a chance to ask ourselves pseudo-intellectually serious questions about how we describe the shapes, sizes and features that constitute the human mosaic. If, indeed, we are to describe them at all. Continue…

Toronto Gay Pride—politics, drag and dancing

By Mitchel Raphael - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 11:28 AM - 0 Comments

Politicos and celebrities marched with drag queens in this year’s Pride parade in Toronto. Some were armed with water guns. Below, Rick Mercer and Belinda Stronach.

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Proud Liberals carry the Liberal banner, while Bob Rae carries the Canadian flag.

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48 hours of hindsight

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 86 Comments

With more than 1,000 people arrested, the G20 is seemingly the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. The Toronto police are happy to showcase the seized weapons and condiments, but now concede the “secret” “new” “law” never really existed. The mayor is displeased. The Star gets a look at the infamous detention facility. Two Post photographers talk about their time there. A Globe reporter writes about her experience at Queen & Spadina. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association says police action was, at times, “disproportionate, arbitrary and excessive.” Amnesty International wants an independent review. Mark Holland demands answers. The NDP has questions too.

Roland Paris weighs the cost. Tim Powers justifies the trouble. Brian Topp condemns the riot. James Morton defends the police. The Economist considers. Jon Stewart mocks. Steve Paikin laments.

Miller responds

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, June 26, 2010 at 6:20 PM - 0 Comments

A serious-looking David Miller—hands firmly gripping the sides of the lectern, arms straight, the studio lights unhelpfully casting shadows across his face—has addressed reporters here at the international media centre, expressing what he said was a mix of anger, outrage and sadness. The individuals responsible for violence in Toronto this afternoon came here, he said, with the intention of inciting violence and did just that. He referred to the perpetrators as “criminals”—”I will not dignify their activities by calling them protesters.” He noted that peaceful protests take place here everyday, and at one point he referred to the events today as “unToronto.”

He commended the police forces and dismissed those who suggested police should have done more to stem the violence. He had previously stated his opposition to the summit site in downtown Toronto—the mayor would have rather it been staged on the exhibition grounds—but dismissed a request to reflect on that stance given today’s events. He assured residents that, while the core should be avoided for the moment, the city is safe and police are pursuing the wrongdoers. He maintained that none of today’s troubles will detract from the successful story his city has to tell.

Sorry Toronto

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 25, 2009 at 3:29 PM - 32 Comments

Jack Layton is staying in Ottawa. Possibly forever.

Jack Layton, the NDP leader and a former Toronto city councillor, praised David Miller’s record as mayor today and said clearly he will not be among the candidates running to replace him… “I’m rather busy right now,” said Mr. Layton in a phone interview. “There’s so much more to do in our effort to have Canadian values reflected in the governance of the country that I am fully, and 100 per cent engaged. But I have no doubt there will be good people that come forward. I will not be one of them.”

Toronto stinks

By Charlie Gillis and Kate Lunau - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 8:30 AM - 32 Comments

The apocalypse, as advertised on morning radio, hadn’t come to pass. Traffic moved well along Toronto’s Lakeshore Boulevard last weekend as pickets allowed people to drop off their garbage at three giant parking lots fenced off for the purpose. Union leaders had warned that striking municipal workers would be delaying residents up to an hour at these specially designated dump sites before letting them off-load—a gambit that would have transformed the area into a knot of snarled traffic and snarling drivers. But instead of chaos, motorists were greeted on Saturday by two men wearing strike placards and morose expressions. One held back drivers for all of two minutes, before letting them roll ahead to the drop zone. Most drivers passed through without hearing a gripe.

Maybe the workers figured Toronto’s municipal employees strike was nearing its bitter end. But if they thought they were getting the upper hand they were wrong. For more than three weeks, mounds of plastic bags had been stretching toward the far reaches of the lakeshore lots, as 24,000 inside and outside workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees walked the picket lines, and residents grimly took up the task of transporting their own trash for disposal. The resulting spectacle is at once impressive and revolting: in a few short days, the piles at the lakeshore—one of 21 such sites through the city—rose and spread to cover several acres behind translucent snow fences, attracting squadrons of seagulls and emitting an odour whose foul complexity was hard to describe (rotting food and soiled diapers were just the beginning). On Sunday, city managers had obtained their second court injunction allowing pest control workers to spray the burgeoning piles, while the zones themselves were nearing capacity. Yet somehow Torontonians were struggling through. Continue…

What's Toronto Mayor David Miller doing with his garbage?

By Tom Henheffer - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 5:57 PM - 70 Comments

David Miller’s garage stinks. It should—it’s full of trash.

The Toronto city workers’ strike has already dragged on for a month. As a result, municipal services like pools, daycares, kids camps, and garbage collection have been shut down. (Grab a copy of this week’s Maclean’s for more on the strike.) If residents want to get rid of their refuse they have to take it to one of the city’s management-run temporary dump sites, 19 of which are still accepting garbage. But the Miller family has held on to their trash, and plan to continue adding to the garbage heap until the strike ends. Hauling it to a temporary dump site isn’t an option. “That’s sort of like giving in to the strikers,” says Miller.

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Toronto Pride: So this is what the Conservatives helped fund!

By Mitchel Raphael - Wednesday, July 8, 2009 at 1:50 PM - 25 Comments

There’s been much  drama over this year’s announcement of the Conservative government funding Toronto Pride. But just who was at this mega gay parade? Men in leather jockstraps, drag queens and  porn stars, naturally. But also pro-Israel groups, anti-Israel groups, gay Anglicans—and the Canadian Armed Forces doing recruitment. Several on-duty police forces wore festive gear. While politicians from the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, the Liberals and the NDP were out in full force. And Rick Mercer.

Iggy at Toronto Pride.

Toronto Liberal MP Bob Rae shows off his huge umbrella.

NDP leader Jack Layton, with his MP wife Olivia Chow, shows off his huge rainbow umbrella.

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'They should f*** off' (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 1:34 PM - 45 Comments

John Baird says sorry.

'They should f*** off'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 9:51 AM - 54 Comments

This should actually only make John Baird more popular in Ottawa, right?

Silly question

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 6:18 PM - 46 Comments

If Stephane Dion had, while Liberal leader, pulled approximately the same move that Mr. Ignatieff pulled today, wouldn’t he have been mocked, or further mocked, as a ninny?

On a not-unrelated note, Toronto Mayor David Miller’s “Looks Like A Mayor, Talks Like A Mayor” campaign in 2003 continues to prove wildly instructive.

Megapundit Extra: But think of the symbolic value…

By selley - Tuesday, August 5, 2008 at 5:38 PM - 0 Comments

The Toronto Star encourages us today to sign Mayor David Miller’s petition to ban private handgun ownership in Canada:

The case for the ban is succinctly stated on the petition itself: “Handguns are intended for one purpose and that is to kill people. Their presence in Canada has resulted in the deaths of far too many people.” Immediate action is requested.

Handguns are the preferred weapon of violent criminals, so it is only logical to restrict ownership to police, the military and a few top competitive shooters, such as Olympic competitor Avianna Chao of Toronto. But there is scant justification for allowing others to possess this class of weapon.

Private holdings of handguns provide a ready arsenal for criminals who are willing to steal from legal owners. Indeed, about one-third of the illegal guns seized by Toronto police come from such sources. This pool of weapons – successfully tapped by the underworld – could be largely eliminated by ending the private ownership of pistols.

A few semi-circular quibbles and queries, to which we invite readers to add:

• It seems highly unlikely that Toronto’s police officers would agree that “handguns are intended for one purpose and that is to kill people,” given that many will have drawn their weapons at some point in their careers but very few will have killed someone.
• However, if the Star agrees that “handguns are intended for one purpose and that is to kill people,” then how can its editorialists consider sport shooting an acceptable pastime?
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Megapundit: Climate change—like Y2K, only warmer

By selley - Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 1:33 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Dan Gardner on Y2K+8; Colby Cosh on gun control.

On Americans, Canadians, and guns
Why we don’t have a well-armed militia, and why maybe we should.

“We are fond of interpreting [Canada's and the United States'] different gun cultures as the product of their origins,” Colby Cosh writes in the National Post, but as recently as 100 years ago, the differences were few and far between: “a housebreaker or robber in Canada could then still expect to be greeted by the nose of a revolver,” and concerned homeowners could purchase their weapon of choice by mail order. The fact that US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s amazing defence of the handgun (e.g., as opposed to a rifle, “it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police”) now “seem[s] to float to us from some alternate universe very far away” is proof, says Cosh, of how “small social differences … can be exaggerated by means of policy within just a few generations.”

The Toronto Sun‘s Peter Worthington, meanwhile, trots out all the usual statistics to show that gun control doesn’t work, including the fact that the murder rate in Washington, D.C. went up after the city instituted the handgun ban that was overturned by the Supreme Court last week. We wholeheartedly support Worthington’s campaign against Toronto mayor David Miller’s hopelessly facile anti-gun campaign, but as usual with these arguments, it’s really just a big mess of chicken and eggs. For example: is Arlington, Va.’s miniscule murder rate in comparison to Washington’s a byproduct of its relatively high rate of private gun ownership, or its relatively rich and well-educated populace? (Answer: it depends whether the gun control opponent is trying to argue that gun ownership reduces crime, or that criminals, not law-abiding gun owners, are the real and only problem.)

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Between the Pundits: That's our Mayor!

By selley - Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at 3:28 PM - 0 Comments

David Miller, mayor of Toronto, explains why target shooters are no longer welcome at the CNRA Handgun Club (located upstairs from the city’s decrepit train station), or anywhere else on city property:

In a day when you can’t bring a large tube of toothpaste on a plane how can you allow guns to wander through Union Station, the biggest transit hub in Canada?

It’s more apt a comparison than it seems at first. Airline security measures are probably the most arbitrary and theatrical restrictions on normal human behaviour Canadians currently face—roughly as arbitrary and theatrical, one might say, as Miller’s handgun ban. The remarkable thing is that sooner than reconsider his position, which has zero support outside City Hall, Miller would resort to justifying it by citing precedent policies that are universally despised.

Megapundit: The Big Three's 'great reckoning' is upon us

By selley - Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 1:27 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: David Olive and Don Martin on the auto industry; Dan Gardner on oil addiction; John Ivison on losing confidence in the Tories; Chantal Hébert on Jean Charest and Dalton McGuinty; Christie Blatchford on the Toronto 18.

The death of the truck
Things aren’t as bad as they look for the internal combustion industry… yet.

Auto industry consultant Dennis DesRosiers has last month as “the second best in the history of Canadian auto manufacturing,” Don Martin notes in the Calgary Herald, and even as GM slashes jobs in Oshawa, Ford is adding 500 in Oakville to make the “new Flex crossover vehicle, complete with what sounds like a beer cooler in the console.” This is what happens when gasoline crests $1.30, he argues, and Buzz Hargrove “is clearly off his meds if he truly believes this truck sales skid is preventable or reversible.” Far more sensible than propping up production of gas-guzzlers, as McGuinty seems determined to continue to do, would be to invest in “advanced efficiency or environmental technologies for the auto industry.”

“This is the great reckoning,” David Olive writes in the Toronto Star. This is what Detroit gets for betting the farm on “gas-guzzling but high-margin SUVs and heavy trucks” when $1.30 gasoline was “foreseeable,” while mulishly refusing to invest in their own hybrid vehicles. And this is what Dalton McGuinty gets for not tying “auto-sector subsidies to a Detroit commitment to small, fuel-efficient vehicles.” “The new Motown bosses reject the … tradition of satisfaction with intermittent profits,” Olive concludes, “and will be dispensing still more bitter medicine” in hopes of stable profits and stable employment for its workers. There isn’t a thing Hargrove can do about it but “fulminate.” And away he goes…

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Megapundit: Being Sharon Stone

By selley - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 1:24 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: John Robson, Don Martin and Susan Riley on the leave-behind affair; Rosie DiManno on journalist casualties in Afghanistan.

The Bernier-Couillard Affair, Day 104
Or maybe it just feels that way…

“The only fruitful line of inquiry” for a Commons committee investigation, the Ottawa Citizen‘s Susan Riley opines, “would involve Couillard’s role, if any, in helping her former biker pals apply for a security contract at Montreal airport in 2005, presumably to facilitate their drug trafficking.” As for the whole leave-behind affair itself, she can’t imagine what Couillard could have done with the information to threaten national security. “Sell it to the Taliban? Pass it to her geo-politically astute former biker pals?” And besides, Riley quite trenchantly notes, we’ll never know what those documents contained anyway—either because the information really was that sensitive or, more likely, “because it would give rise to awkward questions about why they were declared confidential in the first place” and imperil the “‘national security’ dodge” that keeps so much in Ottawa needlessly under wraps.

John Robson, writing in the Citizen, “shed[s] no tears for Mr. Bernier,” and if Couillard is “a babe in the woods,” he says “the bears better look out.” His goal today is simply to expose the hypocrisy of Canadian politicians to “maximum ridicule.” By saying the matter has nothing to do with “the minister’s private life,” he argues, Stephen Harper is suggesting the same fracas would have erupted had he “been married to her for 15 years”—which is laughable. The claim that Bernier only found out about the bikers when the press got wind of it is “as useless as it is implausible because it tacitly admits he would have worried if he had known.” And Michael Ignatieff, meanwhile, says it’s all about the possible “link between organized crime and airport security in Montreal” and that he doesn’t care about Couillard’s past. “But the possible link with organized crime is her ‘past,’ ” Robson counters.

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