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Newsstand: January 6, 2015
Congratulations to Canada’s junior men’s hockey team, who beat Russia to win gold at the World Junior Hockey Championship last night. In all likelihood, Vladmir Putin is thoroughly unimpressed. In the news: A Toronto illustrator brings attention to the stories of missing and murdered aboriginal women, Stephen Harper and Kathleen Wynne finally have a meeting, and two CBC executives are put on indefinite leave related to the Jian Ghomeshi sex scandal.
Toronto illustrator Evan Munday is creating one new portrait of a missing or murdered aboriginal woman each day in an effort to get people, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to pay attention to their plight. Selecting his subjects randomly from an online database, Munday completes each drawing with pencil and ink before uploading it to Twitter. He says the time-consuming process forces him to think about the story of each woman, which he hopes everyone will do when they look at his finished illustrated portrait. The grim reality is that Munday is not about to run out of subjects anytime soon. The RCMP revealed in 2014 that nearly 1,200 aboriginal women and girls have been murdered or gone missing over the past three decades, so it will take Munday upwards of three years to complete every sketch. Munday has vowed to send each portrait to the attention of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s official Twitter account to try and rouse his attention, after taking exception to his recent dismissive stance on the issue during a year-end interview with CBC News. “The federal government seems more concerned that retail prices for books or toys are slightly higher in Canada than the fact that thousands of indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered. That’s higher on their radar,” said Munday.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was busy on Monday tweeting congratulations to Team Canada’s junior men for their World Junior win. He made the trip to Toronto to watch the gold medal game, and also managed to work a visit with Premier Kathleen Wynne into his schedule—their first in over a year. A spokesperson for Prime Minister Harper said that the two discussed issues related to the economy and job creation within the province, as well as infrastructure investment. Despite having publicly sparred over the past 12 months about the provincial deficit and pension plans, the two appear to have made some progress in their communication skills. While they have not pledged to be BFFs, they jointly say that they plan to keep in contact on all the issues they discussed during the meeting.
The CBC announced on Monday that two senior managers have been placed on involuntary leave over issues related to the Jian Ghomeshi sex scandal. Radio executive Chris Boyce and human resource executive Todd Spencer have both been placed on an indefinite leave, according to CBC spokesperson Chuck Thompson. While Thompson would offer no specifics about why both executives were put on leave, you don’t have do dig to deep to find some circumstantial justification. When The Fifth Estate looked into the scandal last year, it was alleged that Boyce and Spencer had been made aware of Ghomeshi’s inappropriate comments and groping of women within the CBC workplace. Boyce told the show that he and Spencer spoke with employees at Ghomeshi’s former show Q to determine whether or not he had harassed anyone; however, the employees in question maintain that they were never approached.