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Weekend Newsstand: August 29, 2015
Weekend news coming at you! A couple of end-of-summer street festivals, a strong opiate was stolen and may be reaching the streets soon, former PC leadership candidate Christine Elliott stepped down, and demands to end carding continue.
Head out to some street festivals while the weather’s still warm! BuskerFest began Thursday and runs until Sunday, keeping Yonge Street blocked off to vehicles from Richmond to College. The first Tamil Festival is happening in Scarborough this weekend, so if you’re in Scarborough or able to make it out there, that will be one to see as well.
Fentanyl, a synthetic opiate that can produce highs up to 40 times stronger than those of heroin, has been in the news lately as the cause of deaths across Canada and the source of a burgeoning problem in Western Canada. A pharmacy in downtown Toronto was recently robbed, with up to 100 fentanyl patches stolen: police said there were between 14 and 20 boxes of patches stolen, and each box contains five patches. On the street, fentanyl is either sold on its own or added to other street drugs, meaning people who use drugs like heroin and Oxycontin (and even cocaine, which, while a stimulant, has reportedly been cut with fentanyl in the recent past) are at risk of unknowingly buying drugs cut with fentanyl.
Christine Elliott, Progressive Conservative MPP for Whitby-Oshawa and current PC leader Patrick Brown’s rival in the party’s recent leadership race, has announced her immediate resignation from the Ontario legislature. “While I put my name forward to lead our party, party members made a different choice,” she said, adding that she “fully respect[s]” that choice. Elliott did not announce what she plans to do after leaving the legislature.
The province is doing a consultation into the specifics of police carding, formally known as street checks, but what it’s hearing from many corners is not that the practice needs fine-tuning, but that it needs to be banned altogether. Critics have long said the practice disproportionately targets black and brown men, and a Toronto Star investigation bolstered those claims. Many lawyers have also argued that the practice constitutes a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While people are not legally required to give any information to police when they’re not being arrested or detained, which is the case with carding (which is done to people not suspected of committing any crime), many citizens either don’t know this or feel uncomfortable refusing a police officer’s request.