Mock Turtle

At first glance this makes a good deal of sense:

Bill would protect kids from drug endangerment

The bill would make it a separate offence to “drug endanger” a child. It would establish drug-endangered children as a category in need of protection. It would also add drug endangerment as a form of child abuse under the Child and Family Services Act, Dunlop said Wednesday.

Endangerment would include exposing a child to the manufacturing or production of an illegal drug, as well as any substance that is used to make illegal drugs, he said.

Obviously, having little kids living in houses that are meth labs or grow ops is a poor idea.

It’s the “any substance that is used to make illegal drugs” clause that worries me here. Lots of perfectly normal household substances go into drug manufacture — alcohol, acetone, paint thinner, camp-stove fuel, gasoline, some kinds of cold/allergy pills, and so on. It seems to me that many a fishing expedition could be carried out under such a law: “Your Honour, we found no less than SIX such substances in the house! Think of the chiiiiiiildren!”

Surely social services and the law already have sufficient other tools to cope with the Crack-House Kid problem?

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Apparently OSAP allows $7.50 a day, or roughly $225 a month, for a student food allowance. The Star is reporting on the extreme hardship this produces, and four intrepid students, risking starvation and perhaps even the odd foray into their own kitchens, are blogging their attempt to comply with this limit for three agonizing weeks.

One of these students felt the need to supplement this:

To cut costs, Crane will seek one of the $25 emergency grocery vouchers Brock’s student union offers cash-strapped students; this year it has upped the number of vouchers to 105 from 75 last year because of the recession.

so she now (lucky thing) has the slightly lesser horror of feeding herself on $250 a month instead of $225.

Right about now every single person living on welfare is rolling their eyes so hard they may be able to see out the backs of their heads.

I think back to fourth year, when K. and I each allocated $75 a month to groceries — $105.27 in current dollars — and we ate very well. Lots of seasonal fruit and veggies, yogurt, a little meat, lots of home-made muffins… and yes, pasta and rice but certainly not the “cheap carbo-loading” mentioned in the article as necessary. We often, as I recall, had money left over at the end of the month (with which we bought wine).

I might also look at our current grocery spending. On average I spend about $100 a week on groceries for the three of us, so that’s $400 for the month. Every two weeks a $55 box of organic milk, eggs and veggies is delivered; another $110. And we probably spend about another $100 on wine — Well, to be generous let’s call it $150 to cover off the odd bottle of fizzy and/or a decent LBV. $400 + $110 + $150 = $660 a month.

OSAP would allow $7.50 x 30 x 3 = $675.

To be clear, I’m not denying the challenges inherent in trying to live on the utterly inadequate amount OSAP provides if it’s your only source of income, and I won’t for a second defend a student loan system that saddles young graduates with absurdly large debts. But moaning about a $7.50-a-day food allowance isn’t going to garner much sympathy from me — or, I suspect, from the many students who are stuck feeding themselves on much, much less. ($1 a day: that’s hard.)

Come on kids: drop the entitlement and get cooking.

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Even when the circumstances in pedestrian deaths clearly point to driver error, Toronto police don’t hesitate to point the finger at the person who wasn’t behind the wheel of the vehicle:

Sgt. Tim Burrows said the victim was crossing slightly west of the crosswalk at the intersection.

“It’s difficult to determine who is at fault,” he said. But he added the pedestrian was crossing in a way that was “not predictable and not the safest place to be” but was walking on a green light.

“I’d rather just say that road safety is a shared responsibility and everyone has to do their part and abide by the laws and common sense.”

I’m sure that’s what he’d rather say, because to say otherwise would suggest that the pedestrian was not at fault and, like the vast majority of those struck down by cars in the last couple of weeks, had every right to expect to make it across the street alive if every user of the road was alert and obeying traffic law.

However, it’s just dishonest. If the pedestrian was crossing Davenport “slightly west of the crosswalk” while the car coming north on Symington was turning left, i.e. west, on a green light, the driver could not have been looking while making the turn or else she (as the story reports her to be) would have seen the pedestrian. Take a look at the intersection in Google Street View if you doubt me.

Comments sections of the major papers, always depressing, are full of self-righteous drivers who complain of pedestrians who “dart in or out of traffic.” Toronto police seem to have decided that, all evidence to the contrary, this “darting” phenomenon is the cause of pedestrian-car accidents and is pulling walkers aside to reprimand them for jay-walking — which, of course, is legal as long as you’re not right beside a crosswalk. Wouldn’t it make more sense to educate drivers on that point so they’re keeping an eye out for legal crossers? Perhaps the fact that most of the accidents have actually happened at crosswalks is telling? And I know it’s a lost cause, but perhaps some real, sustained traffic enforcement is a thought?

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Another day, another woe-is-Gen Y story. In all seriousness, Canada’s poor mechanisms of getting new graduates into the workforce are an ongoing problem. But this latest story on the front page of the Report on Business isn’t particularly compelling:

Elizabeth Adams, 24, knows all about timing. She recently graduated with a fine arts degree and hoped for a career as a painter or a photographer in Peterborough, Ont. But she’s failed to find work in her field.

What, really? There are so many things wrong with this, it’s almost hard to know where to start. Elizabeth: it’s not timing, it’s your field. How many jobs as “painter” are there, ever? Or even gallery positions? And in Peterborough(population 135,000)?

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Ah, woe. Carol Goar reports that retiring baby boomers plan to spend time volunteering, but:

But for the most part, the non-profit sector is not waiting with open arms for retired baby boomers with skills to share and time to spare.

“Logically, it should be a great opportunity,” says Michael Hall, vice-president of Imagine Canada, the umbrella organization for charities and non-profit organizations across the country. “But few organizations have the infrastructure to manage volunteers.

“You need to orient them, assist them and integrate them into your team. But where are the resources? Most organizations are stretched thin.”

Mmmhmm. And who, one might ask, was in charge a decade ago when nonprofits were told to “act more like businesses,” convert to a contract basis and stretch themselves so very thin, resulting in the current lack of capacity to manage volunteers?

Yeah. Boomers.

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Infamous subway-riding 9-year-old’s mother Lenore Skenazy details her questionable viewing habits:

We got the DVD set of Sesame Street from the early years. It shows kids just having fun in groups, playing on a vacant lot, playing on the playground and playing follow the leader. Before any of this is shown to you, there’s a warning: “For adult viewing only.” In just one generation, the idea of what’s safe and normal and ideal has changed.

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This is how I felt that day: like something might come swooping down out of the sky at any time, that no place was safe, not the streets I walked along in my new high heels (heading out of the financial district: the streetcars were jammed, traffic at a standstill). When I walked along Bloor St. the sky was blue and sunny and the mood ominous with every store’s door open and every radio tuned to the same station with the same terrible news.

The Economist’s headline later in the week was “The Day the World Changed,” and I thought, as I looked at the peaceful pastel photo of a slow-motion jet careening toward the World Trade Center, that I hadn’t wanted it to.

It was quieter than ever without the jets overhead those few days – I think I was on a flight path, though it hadn’t really occurred to me before – but all the remaining sound seemed a million times louder. And then, for ages, everything seemed more sinister: a plane overhead too loud, a mysterious shutdown of the subway, flickering lights in my old house, sirens. All the everyday sounds of the city, and of an unattacked city at that, now frightening, peace-disturbing.

September 1999

When the buildings were bombed in Moscow it was the reaction I found frightening: the uniformed militia on the street, the guns they carried, their grim faces. The explosions were terrifying enough, to be sure – while you slept, terrorists might come and blow up your nondescript apartment building — and the targets were all in wooded suburban areas, just like mine. But it was the reaction afterward that kept the fear going, the soldiers marching two by two around the blocks, the empty streets, the suspicious looks when you threw even a gum wrapper into a rare garbage can. Everything was touched. I got off the subway to change trains and a soldier halfway up the stairs barked out orders to another who pulled darkish men away to have their papers checked: Him! To the left!

But somehow less terrifying for me to be in Moscow while terrorists worked in September 1999 than to be a thousand miles from New York in September 2001.

The night after the second apartment building in Moscow was bombed – another couple hundred killed in their beds, white faces on people in the metro, talk of a state of emergency, “cherezsluchayniye sitzuatzia” – I was watching the television news, one program after another. ORT for an hour, then RTR, NTV, TV6. I lived in a furnished apartment with another Canadian girl who had been AWOL for the first month and only occasionally home since. The television was a clunker, a 19-or-more-inch that broadcast everything in sepia. And then, that night, as I was halfway through my evening ritual of language improvement (by the third or fourth newscast, I could be sure I was understanding the news of the day with some accuracy), the British owner of the TV set arrived out of the blue to take it back.

After he left I felt slightly scared. Seeing video of reporters in front of already-bombed buildings, uninterrupted by breaking news of other terakti, had been somewhat comforting. Sitting in the kitchen, staring at the fading green-and-brown striped wallpaper while trying to find Ekho Moskvi, the talk radio station, less so.

Some apartments arranged shifts to guard their buildings 24-hours-a-day. It never took off in my building, where for much of the day and early evening there was sure to be someone outside in the lane in front of the building working on a Lada anyway, or the man in heavy black-framed glasses and fatigues doing something with his army transport truck, his mean-looking , sweet-natured German shepherd nearby. I once left the house early in the morning on my way to work and, seeing the dog, backed up pathetically to the building’s entrance again, murmuring, tremulously, “please… I’m scared of dogs… please.” The fatigue(d) man had looked at me in exasperation and assured me the dog was good, gentle, while I cowered nearby. He grabbed the dog by the collar and put it in my path, poor sad lame thing, leg in a cast. That fucking dog made me shake; I couldn’t even imagine how to be scared of random Chechen terrorists.

Narita

Later that year the spectre of terrorism touched my life again. I was on my way home with a stopover in Paris, where the major airport, as many in the U.S. would go on to do, had abolished its luggage checkroom after some bombs in the late eighties/early nineties. Not knowing this, and having planned a four-day stopover, and being met by a friend who knew a convenient route into town on the metro, I ended up dragging six months of my life through a street market in a left bank arrondissement to the hotel. In Tokyo, where, in very precise fashion, garbage cans had been eliminated from the actual subway lines where the sarin gas attack of 1996 had taken place, but not from the many connecting and very analogous commuter train lines, I’d ended each day with pockets full of sticky wrappers, an irritating but not back-breaking inconvenience.

Japan figured into my second terrorist-prompted inconvenience in France, when at the airport the Air France agent checking passports as we boarded the plane flipped through my half-empty Canadian passport looking for something of interest after my unexciting answers to her questions.
“Ahhh… Narita,” she said pointedly. “What were you doing in Narita?”
“I was working in Tokyo. As a teacher.”
“Na-REE-ta,” she said again, turning the passport sideways and upside down. “Narita.”
I might be there still, listening to her hypnotise herself with the magic Japanese name again and again, if I hadn’t grabbed the passport from her hands and proceeded to give my boarding pass to the agent behind her. I was steaming with indignation, halfway through writing a complaint on the tear-out card in the Air France magazine when the Scottish Airbus engineer who was my seatmate arrived.
“Bad flight?” he asked, nodding toward the complaint card. I began to reply but left it as an indignant yelp. After a gin and tonic I’d relaxed and we engaged a game to see just how long the attendant call button could be lit without an Air France flight attendant stopping by. We had to call it quits after an hour and forty-five minutes because I was laughing too hard.

The Special Forces

But what comes to my mind next is another funny story that isn’t really funny. A few years earlier, in Russia, sometime in the autumn, which ends early in St. Petersburg, so let’s say September. I was taking an intensive Russian program at the university and living in a huge dormitory, the obshezhitzye, on a road whose name I couldn’t pronounce on the Gulf of Finland. A thousand students maybe, or hundreds at least, not all students, most Russian, but lots of foreigners in town for different courses. There was security at the obshezhitzye, a turnstile with a plexiglassed kiosk next to it, just like in the metro. The kiosk was staffed by a woman in a flowered pinafore and her husband, who always appeared to be drunk. At night sometimes grandpa came on the shift, while during the day sometimes three or four family members crowded in the kiosk, at no point appearing to pay the slightest attention to anyone going in or out.

Not that it mattered, because all the rooms – miniature suites, really, of two or more bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom – had large steel doors, just like a prison. Apart from the heroin addicts who showed up from time to time to take their stash hidden in the fire extinguisher cabinet at the end of the hall – and the tall black-leather jacketed men who had showed up and kicked the door to the apartment opposite the cabinet, which seemed to have some connection to the heroin (never was I more glad that my name was not Sasha) – the obshezhityze was a calm and secure place. There were two telephones in the entire building and the French female students tried to establish order over the phone chaos by putting up neat schedules for expected calls, which everyone else ignored.

But one day, while I was at class, terrorism struck the obshezhitzye. Actually, not terrorism, although there was some momentary terror involved, all at the hands of the finest special troops, the OMON. Unexpectedly, at some point in the mid-afternoon, a bus rolled up and troops in fatigues (different ones from those described above, more colourful ones, OMON ones) poured out. They ran in some kind of formation, machine guns at the ready, taking positions in order to storm the building. The few residents coming in and out scattered, hiding behind garbage bins and parked Chaikas nearby. No word on what steps the kiosk family took, their authority could not have been difficult to overrun. The poor students who were at home hid themselves under beds, unsure as to what was happening – was there a dangerous criminal on the loose? (Perhaps an even angrier drug dealer.) Or were the OMON hunting down the residents themselves?

Eventually, exercise completed, the special forces troops packed up and left. There was not a trace of their reign of terror by the time I returned from my classes.

The day the world changed
And what is the point to all this reminiscence? In part to point out that at one time terrorism was a foreign novelty, something slightly disturbing that could be left behind by sitting on a plane for eight hours, something to add colour to dinner-party stories about travelling.

And perhaps the point I’m making is that it all seems abstract and overblown when it’s not you that’s the target. Ask any Canadian.

I laugh about it. We all do, especially now, after eight years of packing toiletries in clear plastic bags and shuffling through the airport in holey socks. But there is always a tremor of tension somewhere in my body, one that wasn’t there the day before the day my world changed.

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The Star lovingly recreates Bryant’s last night as a man not under suspicion, while in the meantime, Partisan Hobo notes:

…there’s no PR firm to save the deceased man’s image. I don’t even know him, but I know he came from a broken home, that he is a visible minority, that he has a history of drug and alcohol abuse, that he’s the unmarried father of several children, that he had no formal “career”, that he had more than one interaction with police in more than one city prior to his death. None of this is really relevant to the public interest. Mostly it’s just prejudicial detail that helps some people imagine a man who lived on the edge and was bound to experience violence of some kind at some point.

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Everything about the recent cyclist death on Bloor is upsetting and horrific. Take first the location: Bloor St. outside Sephora, between Bay and Queen’s Park Circle, a pair of blocks everyone has walked along at some point and that were, at quarter to ten on a summer night, far from empty.

Take the absolute insanity of the car’s progression along Bloor, going at high speed the wrong way on the wrong side of the street and then onto the sidewalk to bang into whatever might detach the cyclist from the car’s side, all in front of horrified witnesses.

That is enough to make it one of the grisliest and most public deaths in the city in recent years. But then comes the fact that the driver, charged with criminal negligence causing death and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death, is the former attorney general of the province, responsible for, among other things, stricter legislation on street racing.

I’ve met Michael Bryant more than once. Smart, personable, perhaps somewhat arrogant, but with the drive and accomplishments to make that easier to swallow. I was warned he could be hard to work for — “a difficult boss” — but don’t imagine that description was meant to indicate anything more than impatience and the occasional outburst of bad temper.

I spent a couple of beer-soaked hours defending Bryant and his abilities to two less enamoured ex-Queen’s Park staffers a few months back. And I wrote this on Twitter when he was named CEO of Invest Toronto: “Bryant to Invest Toronto is good news for the city.”

This is upsetting and sad in every way. It’s sad for Darcy Allen Sheppard’s fiancee, children, friends and family. It’s sad for Michael Bryant’s wife and young children, whose lives are changed forever. It’s sad for the city of Toronto, which could have used the energy and drive that Bryant brought to his other portfolios. And it’s just sad in general, because no matter what the circumstances, and we’ll no doubt hear a lot more about them in the near future, no one should die the way that Darcy Allen Sheppard did.

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From the Chronicle-Herald reporter’s affadavit to the Nova Scotia court today. Not only, as it turns out, an effective argument against a frivolous injunction against publication, but also a much-needed reminder for the often acquiescent pool of Canadian political reporters:

In exercising the freedom of the press, The Halifax Herald Limited engages its reporters to gather news of interest and importance to the public. It is an expensive and time-consuming exercise. All media are under financial pressure in this aspect of our business. The sources through which we obtain are not always simply accessed. It is our function to scrutinize and report on government. To do that adequately, we endeavour to be fair but cannot confine our inquiries to government press releases or material government chooses to make available to the public at the time and in the manner that best suits government for its political ends.

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