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Newsstand: December 2, 2010
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
Thursday’s not the worst day: Rob Ford has arrived in his gravy-decorated office, councillors say Transit City should be in their hands, police officer receives a manslaughter charge at a testy time, and an analysis of anti-American CBC programming was WikiLeaked.
Day one of the reign of Ford kicked off yesterday (not that anyone‘s counting), and the new mayor arrived at City Hall to find packets of gravy left in the office vacated by David Miller. Early wind of this sparked a serious debate at Torontoist over whether gravy is, in fact, packet-able (or whether “Chalet sauce” from the popular chicken joint might have been substituted). Turns out it was powdered gravy. Goes to show what we know. The new mayor began by picking a fight with transit advocates, declaring an end to “the war on the car,” sounding the death knell on streetcars, vowing to ban TTC strikes by declaring transit an essential service (a wee bit contradictory, no?), and, finally and dramatically, declaring the $8.15 billion dollar Transit City light-rail dead in the water.
As far as future of Transit City goes, the majority of city councillors think that the decision should be made by council and not left to the nine members of the Toronto Transit Commission, according to a Globe and Mail poll. Only six of the twenty-nine councillors surveyed said that they support Ford making the decision among the smaller group made up largely of his followers. Ford, for his part, insists that he takes his cues from the citizens of Toronto, who voted for him on a pro-subway, pro-car, anti–everything else platform. But Ford also thinks that being a good politician is about “customer service,” and to that we say: dude, a consumer doth not a citizen make.
For the first time in thirteen years, a Toronto police officer has been charged with manslaughter for fatally shooting someone on the job. Constable David Cavanagh shot and killed twenty-six-year-old Eric Osawe on September 29 as police entered Osawe’s home to execute a search warrant. The manslaughter charge handed down from the Special Investigations Unit comes at a testy time, when the watchdog and the police force have been in a spat over the investigation into police brutality at the G20 summit. Bill Blair recently accused the SIU of relying on a video that had been “doctored” in conducting its investigation into the excessive force used in the beating of Adam Nobody by police during the summit. The SIU re-opened its investigation into Nobody’s case on Tuesday.
Diplomats wear many hats, and those who join up with the American foreign service may find themselves serving their country parked in front of the tube. Nestled among the spate of documents unleashed by WikiLeaks was this little gem from the US Embassy in Ottawa: an analysis of Canadian TV shows such as The Border and Little Mosque on the Prairie and their nefarious influence on the public’s view of their friendly Uncle Sam. The unnamed diplomat who penned the 2008 cable names the CBC as a stronghold of anti-Americanism and claims that Canadians are consuming dangerous American stereotypes in our popular culture. Canada is the focus of several more cables leaked to the National Post in advance of the WikiLeaks info dump, including an assessment of the mood in the lead-up to the 2008 election, a memo to Barack Obama warning that Cold Fish Harper (epithetic flourish ours) will try to yoke up to the popular president, and several other apt if unflattering analyses of the Canadian “habitual inferiority complex vis-a-vis the U.S.” Touché.