15 Comments October 31, 2014 at 4:50 pm

Extra, Extra: Historical Halloween Pranks, Racist Cartoons, and What It’s Like to Face Ford Nation

Every weekday’s end, we collect just about everything you ought to care about or ought not miss.

It turns out Toronto has an impressive history of Halloween hooliganism—much of it involving livestock of various kinds. On one memorable occasion, recounted in a 1913 edition of the Toronto Daily Star, it seems several cows were shooed from the market to City Hall, “where they were left to their own devices.” Swine got in on the fun, too: when a boy was unable to go out with his prankster friends one Halloween, they distracted him from his inevitable FOMO by setting a pig loose in his bedroom.

Toronto Sun cartoonist Andy Donato is under fire for his incredibly racist depiction of Olivia Chow published just before Monday’s municipal election. The cartoon features Chow in a Mao suit, standing on a skateboard and literally riding her late husband Jack Layton’s coattails (worth noting: Andy Donato does not know how skateboards work). In a piece published on the Star‘s website John Honderich, chair of the Torstar board, called the cartoon “racist and sexist,” and asked why it has gone largely unchallenged: “Should we now accept that a cartoon that makes fun of a candidate’s ethnic background and mocks her gender passes the test of ‘good taste’?” NDP leader Tom Mulcair also took issue with the cartoon. In what could double as a perfectly apt description of the Sun more generally, he said “It’s sort of like an amalgam of everything offensive that you could possibly think of.”
Andray Domise lost his Ward 2 council bid on Monday, finishing in third place, while current mayor Rob Ford wound up with 58 per cent of the vote despite—well, everything. In a TVO interview yesterday, Domise spoke about income inequality, North Etobicoke’s needs, and what it’s like to face Ford’s unflagging Nation.