Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains: the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have had an influence on the city over the past 12 months. From December 10 to 19, we’ll unveil the nominees, grouped by category. Vote for your favourites from each batch, every single day! On December 19 and 20 the winners from each category go head-to-head in the final round of voting, and on December 21, we will reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

Daniel Dale is used to getting bylines as an urban affairs reporter at the Toronto Star. This year he made headlines after a bizarre altercation with Mayor Rob Ford.

Dale alleged that the mayor ran at him with a “cocked fist,” before essentially robbing him of his telephone and voice recorder. The confrontation took place near Ford’s Etobicoke home, where Dale was gathering information about a piece of parkland the mayor was trying to purchase from the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority.

The incident crystallized a number of prominent themes of Mayor Ford’s term in office, including his ongoing feud with the Star and his tendency to perceive media presence as a threat. Shortly after the incident, Ford’s political allies, including his brother, Councillor Doug Ford (Ward 1, Etobicoke North), took to the air to accuse Dale of harassment and trespassing. The mayor even threatened to boycott any media scrum that included Dale.

Dale maintained his innocence throughout the ordeal, and police didn’t charge him after completing an investigation. But beyond questions about his behaviour before the confrontation, Dale also had to deal with criticism of his apparently less-than-macho decision to run away when the mayor came rushing toward him. NOW magazine writer Josuha Errett described Dale’s account of the events as “self-righteous,” and contended that the award-winning journalist may not be fit for work in the industry, where “hostile subjects” are a fact of life.

That Sunday, on the mayor’s weekly radio show, Toronto Sun contributor David Menzies went further. He accused the Star of sending “their most effeminate reporter” to bait Ford into a confrontation that would evoke sympathy for Dale. Still others suggested, half jokingly, that Dale should have taken whatever abuse the mayor may have been prepared to dish out, in the hopes that Ford would be charged with assault and removed from his post.

Through it all, Dale remained professional and seemingly unfazed by the criticism. He continued to do his job, even when it involved covering Ford. Among his many contributions to local news this year, Dale and his colleagues relentlessly pursued allegations that mayor Ford had been using City resources to help coach his high school football teams.

Dale later said of the encounter, “I’m not at all ashamed to say it…I was scared.” While he disputed the mayor’s recollection of the incident, he said he hoped that his future interactions with Ford might be as “courteous and mutually respectful” as they’d been before that fateful evening. As we noted in the aftermath of the confrontation, those who questioned Dale’s masculinity suggested he should have stayed and fought. If he had, the public would likely have been a lot less informed about city issues in 2012.

Toronto Ombudsman Fiona Crean Grace under fire.

The Globe and Mail‘s Paywall Reminding us that journalism costs money to make.

Alice Moran   Speaking up when she didn’t need to.

Captain John   Keeping the waterfront interesting, and keeping his dream alive.

The tweet that launched a thousand tweets.

Last night, during the broadcast of the third and final US presidential debate, Toronto Sun city columnist Sue-Ann Levy was on Twitter. As usual, her tweets were combative. Levy always espouses what most would consider to be a conservative point of view, and she’s not afraid of challenging those who hold different opinions. Most of the time, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Except on this particular occasion, Levy did what she periodically does: she wrote something misleading and ethically questionable, and then, when challenged, responded with ad-hominem attacks and attempts to change the subject.

The tweet that started it all is screencapped above. Note the hashtag, where Levy appears to imply that Barack Obama is a Muslim. This is a classic bit of far-right cant that emerged during Obama’s initial rise to prominence as a presidential candidate. It seems meant to characterize him as someone who doesn’t have America’s best interests at heart. (Because anyone who would believe it would also believe that all Muslims despise the US.)

In fact, it’s bullshit: Obama is a Christian.

When confronted with this information, Levy was her usual charming self. Within hours, she became the centre of a Twitter brawl involving several users, many of whom were Levy’s fellow City Hall reporters and newspaper columnists. She never admitted to being in the wrong, but did attempt to contain the damage in her own way. A Storify of some of the exchange is below.

We asked James Wallace, editor-in-chief of the Sun, if the paper will reprimand Levy for her tweets. He has said he’ll get back to us, and we’ll update when he does.

UPDATE: October 23, 2012, 5:00 PM And here’s a written statement from James Wallace:

Sue-Ann was on holiday watching the presidential debate and expressed her views in a tweet.

The tweet also included an inappropriate hashtag that could be subject to misinterpretation.

She did not intend the hashtag to appear racist.

Her views do not reflect the views of the Toronto Sun or Sun Media.

James Wallace
Editor-in-chief
Toronto Sun

A great many things have and will continue to be written in the wake of a confrontation between the mayor and Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale—about the mayor and his temper, the Star and its coverage of him, and the perpetually tense relationship between the two. But armchair psychologizing and media theory aside, there is also this: a lot of people, in comment sections and message boards and Twitter and coffee shops, are calling Daniel Dale some pretty nasty things.

Apparently, Dale defies some notion of masculinity that involves meeting physical intimidation with more of the same. Apparently, that’s a bad thing.

Dale, if you’ve never met him, is a mild-mannered, quiet, gentle guy. He is an award-winning journalist. And he has handled the media attention this situation has garnered with a great deal of composure.

None of that matters for the purpose of this point. The point would hold even if Dale was a talentless loudmouth who bungled at every turn.

What matters is that Dale had a 300-pound angry man with a football player’s build coming at him. He got the hell out of there. And for this he has been widely mocked.

We can continue to discuss those other questions about media relations at City Hall, but there should be no debate about whether running from a guy who is twice your size and has his fist raised, when nobody else is in danger and nothing but your phone is at stake, makes you less of a man.

It makes you a sensible human being with survival instincts. It means you are capable of keeping your head under pressure. It is, most of all, a sign that you have a sense of proportion—that you prize safety over some ego-driven display of bravado that can make a precarious situation worse. And if you did run when there was something more vital at stake—someone else’s safety, for instance—that wouldn’t make you less of a man, either, though it might make you less of a person.

If it were a woman who’d been sent to cover the story, it’s unlikely anyone would have faulted her for running away—it would have just been a sensible precaution. Calling Dale a wuss because he fails to conform to some kind of retrograde conflation of masculinity with brute force says everything about the name-callers, and nothing about Dale.

It also, perhaps, says something about the appeal Rob Ford continues to hold for a great many Torontonians. If Dale is somehow deficient for running then Ford is correspondingly manly in successfully intimidating him: it reinforces a conception of the mayor as strong, powerful, someone who won’t take crap—from journalists he doesn’t like, from staffers who give him disagreeable advice, from unions in the midst of negotiations. (There’s a lot more to say about the way that particular norm plays out in our political sphere—and especially about how it affects and is affected by the lack of diversity in elected officials—but we’ll save that for a future piece.)

Strength is a virtue. But it isn’t primarily one that manifests in physical action, and it takes many forms. (Self-control is one.) And it’s certainly not the domain of any particular gender.

Maybe the Star does have a vendetta against the mayor. Or maybe this is just the kind of scrunity they bring to every mayor: they sent a photographer to David Miller’s house to see if he kept his lights on during Earth Hour back when he was in office, after all. But whether he should have been working on this story or not, at that hour or not, nobody should fault a male reporter—one working on a real estate story in Toronto rather than, say, a street battle in Syria—for running from a raised fist.

If yesterday’s media hooplah turned you off hearing the phrases “Rob Ford,” “parcel of land,” and “fists cocked” together in one sentence—my apologies. But in case your interest in the Ford vs. Toronto Star Urban Affairs reporter Daniel Dale debacle is still piqued: the Toronto Star has obtained phone records showing a phone call was made from Dale’s blackberry about 45 minutes after he’d abandoned it behind chez Ford. Apparently, a call was made to Robert Andreacchi, executive assistant to Councillor Maria Augimeri (Ward 9, York Centre).

In one account of the event, Dale juxtaposes the fear of being “cornered” by Mayor Rob Ford in the way of a “mano-a-mano physical confrontation” with his previous bold forays into hurricane territory in the slums of Jamaica and refugee camps in the West Bank. The latter, apparently, did not scare him. Basically, despite being referred to as “soft-spoken” and “mild-mannered” by “sources,” he wants you (that’s right, you!) to know he is not a “wuss.” Noted.

Also not a wuss, apparently (oh, boys), is the mayor himself, who supposedly asked his family if they wanted him to step down after the aforementioned scandal. His seven-year-old and his wife both agreed that he should not step down.

Toronto ombudsman Fiona Crean released a report calling for significant changes to the way the city provides services in the midst—or wake—of a crisis. Having investigated how city services dealt with a fire two years ago at 200 Wellesley Street East, a community housing complex, which forced 1,700 residents to flee the building, Crean says there was unnecessary confusion surrounding evacuation processes. Furthermore, post-fire, there was apparently a misunderstanding between the Emergency Planning Unit and Toronto Community Housing over who was calling the shots.

In elephant-related news, Toronto’s three, well, elephant matriarchs will have to wait a few more months before traveling to their new home/retirement residence at a California sanctuary. After a meeting in the mayor’s office yesterday, it has been decided that councillors Michelle Berardinetti (Ward 35, Scarborough Southwest) and Giorgio Mammoliti (Ward 7, York West) will be heading to California with senior zoo staff to talk out the differences between our zoo and the California facility. Honestly, who isn’t deferring their retirement these days?

—Toronto Star urban affairs reporter Daniel Dale, who was met with a very angry Rob Ford while researching a story on a piece of land the mayor wants to buy, adjacent to the mayor’s current home. Ford contends that Dale trespassed on his property and was trying to shoot photos of him; the police have confirmed that Ford called to report the incident. A fairly terrified-sounding Dale—who has covered City Hall since 2010 and would be well-known to Ford—writes that he didn’t come within 10 metres of Ford’s yard, was not staking out the Ford home, and that the mayor was so aggressive he feared for his safety.