Do you live in the greatest music city in the world?

By David Newland - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 6:07 PM - 0 Comments

Christian Holmér/Flickr

A recent article in Toronto weekly The Grid posed the question, “Is Toronto the greatest music city in the world?”

Only a Toronto publication would even ask. The term “greatest music city in the world” sounds like the dubious “free-standing structure” designation that gave the CN Tower its twenty-five year triumph of ludicrous loftiness.

To his credit, the author, Andre Mayer, admits “The question is deliberately grandiose, and, of course, impossible to answer.”

We agree: the question is grandiose. And if you’re from Montreal, Halifax or Saint John’s, let alone New York or New Orleans, you probably think so, too. But while Mayer’s article, a compelling catalogue of the exploits of various Toronto artists from Drake to Feist, won’t likely be enough to convince you otherwise, we cheerfully disagree about the question being impossible to answer. Continue…

The baby killer at Toronto’s Sick Kids was rubber

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

QMI Agency

In April 2010 a story concluded in a Dutch courtroom, much like a similar one burned into the memories of Canadians of a certain age. Nurse Lucia de Berk was cleared of seven murder convictions that had put her in prison, supposedly for life, in 2004. After the unexpected death of a baby cardiac patient—determined by autopsy to be a case of deliberate poisoning with the heart drug digoxin—de Berk was arrested. Deaths previously ruled natural were relabelled because de Berk was present. Prosecutors took as proof of guilt indications that fell far short of evidence—in her diary de Berk confessed to a “very great secret,” which she later said was her unscientific interest in tarot cards—and ignored the fact she wasn’t present for some of the “murders.”

In short, it’s a close replay of Toronto nurse Susan Nelles, the deaths of dozens of babies at the city’s Hospital for Sick Children during 1980 and 1981, and the resulting Grange inquiry after the bogus case against Nelles collapsed. But the real parallel remains unknown to most Canadians even now: it’s not that the wrong person was fingered for murder, but that no murders were committed at all.

That’s the conclusion meticulously and persuasively argued by retired physician Gavin Hamilton in The Nurses Are Innocent. Between June 1980 and March 1981, baby deaths spiked 625 per cent at Sick Kids’ cardiac unit—43 cases in all. Autopsies belatedly performed as death inexorably followed upon death seemed to show poisonous levels of digoxin. Investigators focused on Nelles, because she was (apparently) on duty for 24 of the deaths, and because she had the temerity to ask for a lawyer. Later, the Grange inquiry managed to cast a lifelong cloud of suspicion over another nurse, Phyllis Trayner (now dead), while ruling eight of the deaths as murders.

Continue…

Rogers and Bell team up for the biggest play in hockey

By Charlie Gillis, Chris Sorensen, and Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters

Before the tentative phone calls, the fevered courtship and the awkward consummation of a blockbuster deal, there were breakfasts between Ted and Larry. They lived across the street from each other in ritzy Forest Hill, home to Toronto’s ultra-well-monied. They talked about sports franchises in the way car buffs talk about their favourite set of wheels.

Ted Rogers had bought baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays in 2000 with the idea of boosting his company’s profile in southern Ontario. Larry Tanenbaum was chair of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd., the company that owned the coveted Toronto Maple Leafs and basketball’s Toronto Raptors. So once or twice a year, they noshed beside the Rogers family pool, talking pucks, bats and player salaries over scrambled eggs and orange juice. “Ted couldn’t tell you the latest scores,” recalls Tanenbaum. “He was more interested in the concept of sport as something that brought people together. But for as long as I knew him, he and I talked about the idea of one day hooking up and becoming partners in the Toronto Maple Leafs.”

Chances to buy into the crown jewel of Canadian sports and broadcasting don’t come around very often. For 16 years, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan had watched the value of its interest in MLSE skyrocket, and was in no mood to sell. Moreover, any Rogers bid would surely meet a competing offer by Bell Canada Inc. (BCE), Rogers’ great rival in the cable, phone and wireless business (Rogers also owns Maclean’s). So when Teachers put its 79 per cent stake up for sale last year, the inheritors of Rogers’ corporate mantle quickly signalled their interest. Reports of a pending deal soon surfaced, and the coronation of Rogers Communications Inc. as winner of the MLSE sweepstakes seemed a matter of time.

Continue…

Rebel young man, rebel

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 12:16 PM - 0 Comments

David Staples looks at the young Stephen Harper who left home in search of something.

Harper got on with Imperial Oil with the help of his father, Joseph, who was a top financial officer in Toronto, Frank said. “Stephen had broken with his family because they had wanted him to be a chartered accountant at the University of Toronto, where his brothers were. He decided he was going to be a pioneer, he was going out West. He was going to find his own way. I was virtually told to hire him, but I did. And he was a very troubled boy when he came. I think what upset him the most was rebelling against what the family wanted him to do.”

… Mary also could see Harper was dealing with family issues. “He was very self-absorbed,” she said. “I would say he’s absorbed by two things. One is himself and the other is: Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the thing that I should be doing?”

Among the ink-stained wretches at the Air Canada Centre

By Dave Bidini - Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 4:54 PM - 0 Comments

A light, twinkling snow fell against the towered streets as I made my way to the rink last night, my first visit in two years. That this blog had such pull with the Leafs’ press office made me remember the means by which I’d crashed other media rows in past years: fudging credibility to sit in old Memorial Auditorium to watch the Sabres; an anthem-singing guest appearance at the Gardens on the eve of my wedding; and a plea to a novice university pop writer from Expos’ brass in the late 80s to cover a team that no one outside of Quebec wanted to cover. On this visit, however, it appeared as if I’d found legitimacy, passing easily through the glass doors of the rink to the tableclothed media desk in the guts of the Platinum Club, securing my card—my name on it and everything—from a nice woman in whom I confessed procedural unfamiliarity. “That’s okay,” she said, adding, “The elevator is just around the corner,” guiding me with the voice of a nursemaid and a flight attendant’s wave.

I found my ride, walked past P.J. Stock and secured my station—number 81—sitting on high across from the Sittler banner at the north end. Then two anthems, a Coke, a Leafite whispering team scratches into our ear from the press row speaker, and a stick save by James Reimer off an early Devils power play. Excited is too small a word to describe how I felt. So is old, for legitimacy rarely finds the young.

In the first period, the Devils scored two quick power play goals. Continue…

It’s a bad time to be a loser

By Dave Bidini - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 1:13 PM - 0 Comments

It’s a bad time to be a loser. Everything seems just a little wrong (which is to say, a little right) and everybody seems not to be themselves (embodying the posture and attitude of a winner).

Take, for instance, last Sunday’s game vs Ottawa. It turned into an L for the Leafs, but the disappointment slid down the shoulders of fans like beading October rain. The previous night, Toronto had risen to best the Crosby-less Pens, a substantial win in the face of an injured starting goalie and a second line that has yet to find its zone. Were Reimer at full-strength, it would have meant games split between the suddenly able netminding duo, and a better chance in back-to-back contests. Besides, losing to Ottawa felt more like an early-season mulligan, and even if this amounts to misplaced confidence, that any kind of misplaced confidence exists among blueblooders is a not insignificant achievement. Continue…

The Paul Dewar show

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 2:31 PM - 0 Comments

Another video from the Dewar campaign.

Rob Ford can’t fight city hall

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 67 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

The Saturday after the worst week in Rob Ford’s political life, the mayor of Toronto and his councillor brother Doug attended the inaugural game of Toronto’s new women’s lingerie football team, the Toronto Triumph, in which players wear bras, hot pants, garters and shoulder pads, and for which Doug’s daughter Krista is captain. “How these puppies are going to stay in place beats me,” Krista, in her early 20s, wrote before the game on Twitter, an apparent reference to her breasts. “All I care about is: not missing a single tackle & leaving it all.”

The Triumph lost badly, 48-14, to the Tampa Bay Breeze. For the Fords, the losses did not end there. Bad news has dogged them for weeks, a situation so intriguing to many Torontonians that it often pushes Ontario’s provincial elections off the city’s front pages. Much of that fascination has to do with the intense culture war under way between the Fords and Toronto’s downtown elite. If Krista’s LFL—the Lingerie Football League—is the most powerful symbol of the conflict, it is by no means the only one. No politician in recent Canadian history has had as polarizing an effect as Mayor Ford and his brother Doug, generating an industry of Tweedledum and Tweedledee caricatures and promoting a level of civic engagement at city hall not seen in years.

Ford, who secured an improbable election win by promising to deliver a stripped-down Toronto—one free of graffiti, a Toronto of roads, perhaps some police, lower taxes and little else—has been stopped in his tracks by the city’s old order. His story is a morality tale that plays more like farce. It would be funny if it were not such a powerful lesson in the staying power of civic vested interests and the Sisyphean challenge of changing a city.

Continue…

A cheese so good people ‘attack’ it

By Pamela Cuthbert - Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Photography by Andrew Tolson

I was at a bustling food fair in Italy when a cheese stopped me in my tracks. All other enticements—white truffles, rare molluscs, champagne—blurred into the background. Gouda would never be the same again.

That’s right, the stuff we know as “goo-duh”—mild, adaptable and as inexpensive as it is unremarkable—is having its potential pushed to extremes through aging processes: the rewards can turn out an ultimate taste experience that packs a punch of caramel, coffee and salt—or, if taken too far or mishandled, a wax-like inedible waste.

Afrim Pristine of Cheese Boutique in Toronto started importing, and then aging, a farmstead Gouda (meaning the milk is sourced from the family farm) from the family-owned Lindenhoff label after trying it with his dad at an international show. “We had a taste,” he says. “And then we freaked out!” He set out to see if he could buy up all of their supply. His cellar today is stocked with hundreds of the 11-kilo wheels. “In my opinion, this is one of the top five cheeses on the planet.”

Continue…

Snapshots from the red carpet

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 3:14 PM - 0 Comments

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Snapshots from the red carpet

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September 10, 2011: Robert De Niro poses for photographers at the premiere Killer Elite at Roy Thompson Hall during the Toronto International Film Festival. (Kara Dillon/Maclean's)

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The race is on

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 4:34 PM - 0 Comments

The NDP federal council has set the convention to elect a new party leader for March 24 in Toronto. The entry fee is $15,000 and the spending limit is $500,000. No votes will be set aside for unions.

Olivia Chow is promising to stay neutral. It is “unlikely” Pierre Ducasse will enter the race.

Jack Layton and Olivia Chow: A force field of two

By Anne Kingston - Monday, September 5, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 7 Comments

Andrew Vaughan/CP

In 1987, Jack Layton and Olivia Chow attended a fundraiser for Toronto’s St. Stephen’s Community Centre at a Chinatown restaurant. By then they were already “Jack and Olivia”—NDP star couple, he a rabble-rousing city councillor, she an activist Toronto School Board trustee. After dinner, Layton took the stage as energetic auctioneer, a role he played for social causes. Afterwards, I watched the couple hit the dance floor, a force field of two you couldn’t look away from.

Lorraine Segato, a long-time friend of Chow’s and Layton’s who performed at the politician’s state funeral, carries a similar mental snapshot of them from her 2009 wedding to Ilana Landsberg-Lewis. “I scanned the room of 350 happy people dancing to great music, and Jack and Olivia were in the middle,” she says. “Later I saw Jack holding [his granddaughter] Beatrice up. It was an unbelievable moment of pure joy in the family unit.”

It wasn’t surprising that Karl Bélanger, Layton’s long-time press secretary, cited the couple’s 26-year union at Layton’s funeral as emblematic of the NDP leader’s “collective ambition” and “team effort”; the “partnership of romance and politics with Olivia the greatest proof,” he said.

Continue…

The woman who launched a symbol

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 30, 2011 at 1:13 PM - 5 Comments

The woman who seems to have been the first to write a chalk message at Nathan Philipps Square writes about what she did.

I wanted to take … I don’t know, something. Flowers didn’t seem right. So I bought a couple of boxes of chalk. When I was done I left the chalk on the ground by the ramp, and … things got sort of splendidly out-of-hand.

Who cares about libraries?

By John Geddes - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 13 Comments

Andrew Tolson

To hear the uproar in Toronto, an avid book borrower might be forgiven for imagining that Canadian libraries are coming under financial siege. The administration of the city’s right-leaning, populist mayor, Rob Ford, is taking a hard look at closing branches of the Toronto Public Library to cut costs. That prospect has drawn fire from novelist Margaret Atwood and director Norman Jewison, and sparked petitions and angry public meetings. The debate will continue as the city’s budget deliberations stretch into the fall. News from abroad gives Toronto library enthusiasts ample reason to be worried—state and local spending squeezes have led to closures or curtailed hours in the U.S., and British libraries are also struggling.

Yet top Canadian librarians do not see the Toronto scrap as a sign that the international malaise has arrived here. They point to upbeat developments in other Canadian cities. Just when Atwood was launching her Twitter war with Ford in late July, Calgary’s city council voted to earmark $135 million for a new central library, along with $40 million it had already set aside for the ambitious project. The oil field capital will have to build a spectacular temple to books to outshine Surrey, B.C., which is slated to open its curvaceous, Bing Thom-designed, $36-million City Centre Library later this month, or Halifax, which is spending $55 million on a European-inspired, architecturally adventurous downtown library, slated to open in early 2014.

These and other gleaming new libraries are only the most obvious indicators of seemingly solid political support for free reading. “The economic situation in the U.S. has seen some serious library casualties,” says Karen Adams, president of the Canadian Library Association and the University of Manitoba’s director of libraries. “But Canada has been spared most of those kinds of stresses.” One reason is the comparative health of public finances in Canada, where government deficits are generally less crushing than in other rich countries. As well, aversion among Canadian politicians to taxation to fund services is far less fervid than in the U.S.

Continue…

Photo gallery: Jack Layton’s state funeral in Toronto

By macleans.ca - Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 10:15 PM - 0 Comments

In memoriam

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 2:00 PM - 5 Comments

The official program for this afternoon’s service can be downloaded here.

‘He said he believed in them’

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

A Torontonian remembers her time with Jack Layton.

Not only did Layton accept, but he spent two hours that summer afternoon on a walking tour of the neighbourhood, listening to them talk about problems with community housing, schools, a lack of recreational facilities and, ultimately, a lack of jobs.

“No one was doing anything for them,” Davis said, “but he did. He told them they had to get involved in order to change their lives and that they were as good and intelligent as anybody else. He said he believed in them and that they could improve their lives if they would believe in themselves.”

Swimming, biking, recycling and Pride

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 8 Comments

Tom Johnson remembers Jack Layton the swimmer.

“He was tough,” said Tom Johnson. “He was a guy who when he got the bit between his teeth and he wanted to do something, he could be pretty determined. I think that whole characteristic and personality trait that showed up in his political career was developed in his swimming career to a certain extent.

“The playing fields of Eton kind of thing. You learn those behaviours and you learn to persevere and you learn the tenacity and relentlessness you need to succeed. When you do a sport like swimming, you’re looking at a freakin’ black line most of the time but you’re workin’ inside your own head to try to work things out to make yourself better.”

Edward Keenan lists five ways Jack Layton changed Toronto.

Short, but meaningful

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 3:48 PM - 1 Comment

Conservative MP Mark Strahl recalls a fleeting moment with Jack Layton.

I only had the opportunity to speak with Jack once during the spring session of Parliament, before his revelation that he would need to step aside to deal with cancer once again. I happened to be leaving the House of Commons at the same time as he was after some late night votes. He was at the members’ entrance-with his signature cane and signature moustache- and I took the opportunity to introduce myself. Even at that time it was clear that he wasn’t feeling too well, but he flashed his signature smile, gave me a strong handshake and welcomed me as a new MP. He shared with me his fondness for my dad, wished me the best and asked me to pass along his regards to Chuck. I said that I would, wished him well and we parted ways. It was a short, but meaningful personal encounter and I think that’s what made Jack successful as a politician. He no doubt had many meaningful, personal encounters with hundreds of thousands of Canadians from coast to coast, and like me, they probably were left with a positive impression.

Further thoughts from Stephen Lewis, Rev. Brent Hawkes, Perrin Beatty, Martin Deschamps and Gerald Hannon. The Star asks readers to suggest how Toronto might honour Mr. Layton’s memory.

The Commons: Mourning Jack

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 6:55 PM - 106 Comments

Here lay Jack Layton. Here where he basked in the warm glow of the television lights and held forth each afternoon. Here before the grand door to our grandest room. Here where you can turn your gaze just slightly upward and see the Prime Minister’s office. Here a few flights of stairs below the ornate office that Mr. Layton was to occupy for the next four years. Here between the portraits of Borden and King, surrounded by carved sandstone, underneath a ceiling of decorated glass. Here wrapped in our beautiful flag.

Down the hall and around the rotunda and down another flight of stairs and then outside and along the path that leads to the magnificent Centre Block, a thousand people made their way to his casket. In Toronto, a thousand words written in chalk in a public square. On the lawn of Parliament Hill, probably several thousand millilitres of orange soda mixed in among the flowers and notes and balloons.

This is how we mourn and remember and mark and honour. Continue…

Hey look: Harper’s new Ford

By Paul Wells - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 12:35 PM - 0 Comments

From the print edition, my new column ponders the meaning of that big picnic in Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s mom’s back yard, at which the surprise guest was Stephen Harper.

A point I, uh, forgot to mention in the column is that Harper has begun referring in speeches to “that Conservative fortress of Toronto.”  I suspect that’s still a bit tongue in cheek. But if the 2011 results solidified or if the Conservatives were able to extend their gains in the GTA, Toronto would start to play a big part in Conservative election hopes. And as I say in the column, this comes after everyone’s already seen so much of Harper that he might reasonably have been expected to be waving goodbye to parts of his voter base, not adding to it.

Are public libraries an essential service?

By Emma Teitel - Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 49 Comments

At 9:30 am on Thursday, July 27th, Toronto’s city council, and roughly two-hundred regular people, packed into a board room at city hall to “discuss” Toronto’s latest greatest angst-ridden cause célèbre: the proposal by Rob Ford to trim the city’s $774 million budget shortfall, via the “rationalization of Toronto’s public library footprint.” Which is to say, closing libraries.

Over the next 24 hours more than a hundred civilian deputations would be made, directed mainly at the mayor, who swiveled in his chair, downed the occasional Red Bull, and made not-so-comfortable eye contact with angry disputants. “Save the libraries” and “Shame” were among the more popular epithets slung at Ford, whose fiscal mission—to distinguish Toronto’s “need to haves” from its “nice to haves”— has clearly put neighbourhood libraries in the latter category. His Worship’s older brother Doug—also a city counselor—helpfully poured gasoline on the library fire, making an unlikely opponent of Canadian author and T.O. resident Margaret Atwood by asserting that a) there are more libraries than Tim Hortons outlets in his neighbourhood (there aren’t), and b) he doesn’t care what Atwood has to say about his erroneous assertions because he doesn’t really know who she is.

Continue…

Cleaning up the mess

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 at 6:23 PM - 22 Comments

Stephen Harper salutes Rob Ford for cleaning up the “NDP mess” in Toronto and salutes himself for cleaning up the “left-wing mess” in Ottawa.

http://youtu.be/s8wgfKHHT9I (The video seems to have been removed.)

At the same event, Jim Flaherty was apparently presented with a championship belt.

Ford chairs longest city council meeting in Toronto history

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 29, 2011 at 11:27 AM - 9 Comments

Thursday and Friday marked the longest continuous city council meeting in Toronto history, The Toronto Star reports. Approximately 168 people accepted Mayor Rob Ford’s invitation to tell the city council what core services should and should not cut. Ford promised committee members and constituents that the meeting would go until the next morning if need be, and it did—officially ending at 6:30 a.m. after 22 hours and 25 minutes of civilian deputations and budget talks. Only 2 of 168 presenters (300 people were signed up originally) proposed any kind of budget cuts endorsed by KPMG, the agency responsible for drafting the controversial budget proposal, with the rest urging the mayor to keep core services like public libraries and the school crossing guard program intact. No official decision will be made until the next council meeting on September 19.

Toronto Star