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Newsstand: July 31, 2015
Has the heat broken? Can it be? in the news today: the sale of Hydro One is wildly unpopular, more details about Jermaine Carby, and a man with Tourettes was kicked out of a local club.
Polling done by the provincial Liberal Party has revealed that a majority of Ontarians don’t want to see Hydro One partially privatized. Just shy of three quarters of those polled said the province-owned utility should either “definitely” or “probably” stay in government hands. The sale of a 60 per cent stake in the company is intended to provide cash, some of which will go toward the province’s debt, while a large chunk will go to funding transit in the GTA. Former TD bank executive Ed Clark, now known as Premier Kathleen Wynne’s “privatization guru,” has also suggested privatizing the utility will lower prices for consumers. The Liberals’ plan is to maintain control of 40 per cent of the utility and not to allow any single private owner to have more than a 10 per cent stake in the company, theoretically leaving the government with the controlling share.
More details have emerged regarding the police slaying of Jermaine Carby in September of 2014. Carby’s family met with Special Investigations Unit officials about their investigation into the conduct of the police who shot and killed Carby, and provided a recording of that conversation to the Toronto Star. The investigation found that Carby had been taken by police into hospital under the Ontario Mental Health Act a month before his shooting death, after attempting to disarm a police officer. A more full picture of Carby’s actions and mental health state raises further questions about officers’ attempts to de-escalate the situation, as they would have seen in their squad-car computer that Carby had been apprehended and was facing mental health issues. However, the public is still largely in the dark about the officers who shot and killed Carby and who were on the scene.
Graham Kent, a Toronto man with Tourettes Syndrome, says he was kicked out of a club after his tic — rubbing his nose with thumb and forefinger — led bouncers to suspect he was on drugs. Kent says he tried to explain the situation to the staff after he was ejected, but to no avail: the bouncer told him the club had a zero-tolerance policy for drug use. Kent has written to the club’s ownership and would like an apology and to educate people about the realities of Tourettes.