The driver who killed a cyclist last night used to be the Attorney General of Ontario.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

I’m NDP, my MP is a friend, I’m a director of an environmental group that supports bike lanes, I’ve been hit twice by cars while I was cycling in Toronto and both times after being hit I caused damage to the cars and scared the drivers away. That being said, I have to agree with Spoons about the Toronto Star. I would add that not only does the Star tend to focus on personal interest and “the little guy”, but also it tends to be very light on facts.

The Sheppart/Bryant story is a good example of how the Star falls down. The Globe and Mail was out first with video interviews of witnesses to the incident. The Globe was first out with Bryant having been the driver. The Globe was the first out with interviews of Sheppard’s Toronto friends. Both papers were scooped by the Edmonton Sun on Sheppard’s lengthy criminal background and his being in a fight with a homeless person earlier that day. All of them were slow to pick up on the aboriginal aspect relative to what I am used to further north in the province. The CBC tended to be about a day behind in its coverage, and tended to gloss over the story.

82

BTW, I’ve represented an aboriginal who glommed onto a vehicle and was thrown off by the driver accelerating.

83

There’s no “Aboriginal aspect” to the story, though, except for the fact that Sheppard had Metis ancestry. His ethnicity had nothing to do with the incident and isn’t really pertinent to the case. If Sheppard had a Korean grandmother, would there be an “Asian aspect”?

84

It is not relevant to the case against Bryant (however, if Sheppard had lived and had been convicted, it would have been relevant to his sentencing under C.C. s. 718.2 (e)).

It is not only relevent, but is highly illustrative of the social issues of poverty, addiction and violence that so very many aboriginals suffer and occasionally die from.

Sheppard came from a messed up family, was messed up himself, but was doing his very best to clean up his life when he relapsed, had a bad day, and was killed in one of his confrontations that day. That is a very common story for aboriginals in Canada. In urban Toronto, aboriginal issues are low priority (and when they come to the public’s attention, it is usually aboriginal protests that make the press, rather than individuals’ matters), but up here in the north-west, were about a third of our population is aboriginal, and where the aboriginal population is the only segmentof the population that is significantly growing, these social issues are of tremendous importance, for it is simply not accpetable that so many people of a particular culture find themselves living in such circumstances, and often dying from such circumstances.

Dealing with the problem requires the public recognizing the problem, which in turn requires bringing out the aboriginal aspect of such matters – not because of any relevance to the prosecution of Bryant (there is no such relevance), but because of the relevance of Sheppard’s life and death to the aboriginal condition in Canadian society.

85

Everything you wrote is true in terms of the issue of aboriginals’ place and treatment in Canada, but you haven’t yet explained the relevance to the Bryant-Sheppard case. More precisely, you haven’t explained why the big newspapers were “slow to pick up on the aboriginal aspect.” What are they supposed to say, exactly?

Sheppard’s being a Metis doesn’t appear to have been a proximate factor in this event, and indeed nobody here seems to have been much aware of who his grandparents were, which is to be expected; in multicultural Toronto it long ago become impossible to be able to tell most people’s ethnicity from what they look like. For the papers to play up his ethnic heritage would smack of either racism or patronization; I can’t think of any way they could make it an issue without looking really bad.

86

I agree that Aboriginal issues have a low priority in Toronto.

Aboriginal issues have a low profile in Toronto because in absolute numbers, aboriginal persons are a tiny minority of the population: only 0.5%.

http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/prof/92-591/details/Page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=CSD&Code1=3520005&Geo2=PR&Code2=35&Data=Count&SearchText=toronto&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&B1=All&Custom=

87

No. No, it isn’t. The Star is more similar on the left to the Globe on the right. There is no left-wing tabloid equivalent to the Sun. (A left-wing tabloid might be interesting, though…)

88

The Star isn’t of the same quality as the Globe, which I’d characterize as economically conservative but only mildly social conservative (much lower in quality and more socially conservative is the National Post).

Left-wing tabloid would perhaps be Now Magazine, though it isn’t the equivalent to the Sun - it obviously caters to a much more literate audience.

In short, I’d say the Star is the equivalent on the left to the National Post on the right - both are middlebrow papers, without the highbrow pretentions of the Globe. The Sun is unique in its relentlessly lowbrow format.

89

The Globe, the Star, and the CBC have now all picked up on the aboriginal issue, with the Globe getting on it earlier, and the CBC coming to it the slowest. Interestingly, Rick Salutin wrote an article for the Globe dealing with Bryant’s spin doctors and Sheppard’s being aboriginal. For those of you who are not familiar with him, Rick Salultin is a heavily left leaning writer and academic who is a weekly columnist for the Globe – so although the Globe is to the right of the Star, it is by no means a right wing paper.

90

His friends and neighbours thought he was drunk. He fell off his bike and got in a fight. I expect that the police simply didn’t think he was drunk enough for them to bother with.

Excerpt from the Globe: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/a-search-for-answers-in-a-cyclists-death/article1275361/

91

I think this might be a better summary than mine. :slight_smile: I haven’t read the National Post for quite some time (I got terminally annoyed by the lousy drawing quality of the cartoons about seven years ago). I used to buy the National Post, the Star, and the Globe and Mail, and bring them to work every day. Someone else would buy the Sun.

It would be interesting to analyse the various papers and find the frequent things that recur in each one.

Globe and Mail: Business is looking up! What’s going on in the world?
Star: Immigrants and poor trodden on! Let’s make the city a better place!
Sun: Tits! Sports! Look at all this crime! Support the police!
National Post: ??? (Haven’t read it for a while)

I’m glad that the Globe is more socially libertarian than socially conservative.

92

I’ve probably posted this before, but I recall once somebody mentioning how the Big Three Toronto papers would headline, say, a government budget that reduced taxes:

Globe: Business Gets Tax Relief
Sun: More Money in Your Pocket! [To patronize the stereo stores that always advertised in the Sun, perhaps?]
Star: Welfare Moms and Kids to Suffer!

This joke was told to me before the National Post came on the scene, but assuming it was around at the time and under the stewardship of Izzy Asper, I’d guess that its headline on the same budget day would be either:

Gov’t Sends Welfare Recipients a Message: Get to Work!

or

Palestinians Attack Israeli Schoolchildren

(The Post under Asper was notoriously pro-Israel, and would often put Israeli stories on the front page above the fold, even when some local/provincial/national story was given this important front-page space by the other three papers.)

93

Gotta hand it to the Sun – when they started up as a reincarnated Telegram, they didn’t have the funds to sink into in-depth reporting, so they ran with a pic of Tiiu Poder. Ever since then, urban Bubbas purchase the Sun every day, hoping beyond hope that it will run a topless or nude Sunshine Girl the way they do in London. And every day the urban Bubbas are dissapointed, which is why they are grouchy and reactionary. Toronto would be happier place with more unwrapped racks, but the Sun doesn’t have the social conscience to do the right thing, despite it being right wing and populist.

94

[hijack]I believe the National Post is also very anti-Tamil in their views. I once read a study that looked at all of the articles about the Tamil population that were published in the Post, and they were overwhelmingly negative. This was at least a year or two before the Tamil protests in Toronto. I’ll try to find the study I read if anyone’s interested.[/hijack]

95

I don’t know if anyone has seen this, but it is an annotated video of the incident from security video cameras. The resolution is lousy (natch). From what it seems to indicate, Sheppard cut off Bryant and Bryant seems to have rammed him in response. After that it is hard to tell exactly what is going on

http://vodpod.com/watch/2161920-annotated-toronto-cyclist-sheppard-killed-bryant-on-security-cameras

96

I’m remembering waaaay back here, but I recall that in the Tely’s weekly TV guide, there was a feature called “Dick Loek’s Women.” Loek was a photographer, and every week, he’d have a photo of a pretty girl (fully dressed, but perhaps in a short skirt). There was the usual stuff about how the girl was a college student who liked various sports and hobbies, but Loek also had a long technical explanation of how he photographed the girl: camera, lens, film, f-stop, lighting, and so on. It was as much a photography feature as it was eye candy. But that was a fully-dressed girl once a week, and in the TV guide–not barely-dressed and daily on Page 3. Anyway, I always thought the Sunshine Girl in the Sun grew from that feature in the Telegram.

97

I agree – although the Sun in London was running sunshine girl pics, the Telegram’s Loek was the foundation for it in Toronto. Notably the sun’s first sunshine girl was found in Henry’s Cameras and was a photography student herself.

98

Interesting. The Telegram predates my time in the GTA a little (we lived in Whitby and got the Oshawa Times, and before that in Peterborough and got the Peterborough Examiner… both of which were bigger then, and still existing in the case of the Times).

I bet you couldn’t get away with that today, especially with a name like Dick Loek. Does the Sun still have Sunshine Girls?

There’s still a convenience store in Long Branch, Thomas Variety, that has a sign advertising the Telegram. The style of the sign has been out of style long enough to be back in style!

99

That’s what keeps them in business: Sunshine Girls: Photos and Galleries | Toronto Sun

100

Ouch! The hit from behind knocking Sheppard onto his hood looked a bit hurty.