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It’s been a horrible week.

On this week’s show, Charles and I talk about the Yonge Street massacre – and also the rapist Bill Cosby, and related gender issues.

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From next week’s column in the Hill Times.

Twenty-nine years earlier: it is around four o’clock in the afternoon, on a bitterly-cold Wednesday. I am a lawyer at an Ottawa valley law firm, and volunteering for Jean Chretien, who is also working as a lawyer, at the firm next door.  We are preparing for Chretien’s announcement, in just over a month, that he is going to seek the Liberal Party leadership.  And then the news starts to trickle in.

A “man” with a rifle has started shooting up the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.  He has wounded dozens of people – and he has slaughtered 14 young women.  Because they are women.

Stunned, we listened to Michael Enright interview a student at the school, Genvieve Cauden, on CBC Radio.  What happened, Enright asks her.

“We all go on the floor and we go under the desks. After, he shot people. He shot girls. I just closed my ears and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to know what’s going on. I received a shot in my head,” and then she paused. “But it’s not bad. It’s OK.”

“It just grazed your head,” Enright says.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Cauden says.  “After, the guy killed himself.”

The guy in Toronto, who was apparently following the precisely same Satanic, women-hating manifesto, didn’t kill himself.  As the entire world saw, he wanted a Toronto cop to do that for him.  The cop – amazingly, bravely – refused, and arrested the alleged mass-murderer without firing a shot.

After his arrest, the usual bullshit happened.  Politicians offering “thoughts and prayers,” instead of actual policies and measures to prevent something like Ecole Polytechnique and Yonge Street from happening again. Online losers, sitting in their mom’s basement and calling it Muslim terrorism – when it was decidedly neither.  Media lavishing attention on the alleged killer, instead of his many victims. 

The usual bullshit.

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1. Why do some people always bicker over whether it was terrorism or not? It was mass murder. Isn’t that enough?
2. How could he be driving for as long as he did on Yonge Street (half an hour) – as far as he did (more than a kilometre) – and no one shot him, or rammed his van, or both?
3. What do those early stories mean, when they say that he was known to police?
4. Why do politicians always offer thoughts and prayers? Why don’t they instead offer policies and ideas that would prevent something like this?
5. Who was that truly amazing cop who caught the killer without firing a shot? Where does bravery like that come from?
6. Who are the ones who took pictures of victims to post on Twitter? Can we find them and shame them?
7. Why do we always give these mass murderers what they want, and profile them? Can’t we, just once, lavish that much attention on the victims alone?
8. Has anyone started a fund to help the families?
9. Why do we need to hear from anyone other than the mayor and the top cop? Why do federal and provincial politicians insist on being seen at the press conferences?
10. Why did this happen, and how can we make sure it never happens again?

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I am active on Twitter. I admit it.

Some people apparently read me on Twitter, too, and I (mostly) enjoy interacting with them. Here’s what the last week has been like. Lots of interaction.

A “reach” of over five million. I don’t know what that means, exactly, but I know this: me and others are clearly drawn to Twitter.

But I’m repulsed by it, too. Perhaps you are, as well. Because, you know, Twitter is also often terrible.

Its creator, Jack Dorsey, has a more benign take on President Pisstape’s preferred platform, naturally. Speaking of Twitter’s beginnings, Dorsey says “we came across the word ‘twitter’, and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds’. And that’s exactly what the product was.”

Well, no.

In my experience – and in the experience of not a few others – Twitter is often anything but inconsequential. It is the place where neo-Nazis and white supremacists go to spew hate and frighten minorities. It is where misogynists come to threaten and demean women – with dark promises of rape and murder and blackmail. It is where the mob is, most days, digitized torches and pitchforks at the ready.

Facebook is for falsification. Twitter is for defamation.

Case in point: a proud Beaches-area neo-Nazi named James Sears publishes a “newspaper” against which we have been doing battle for years. We have had some successes, but we aren’t nearly done yet.

Sears also has a Twitter account, under the name “Dimitri the Lover.” He fancies himself one – although the law sees him differently, having charged him in the past for sexually assaulting women.

I block Sears’ Twitter account, but I also periodically scan it for material that may be useful in the five legal actions we’ve initiated against him and his Hitlerite winged monkeys (two criminal, two civil and one administrative). A few weeks ago, I found a Sears tweet that contained the foulest expressions of anti-Semitism and race hatred. I won’t reprise it here.

I reported it to Twitter, however. I pointed out – yet again – that they had become a willfully-blind accomplice to the dissemination of Naziism. I demanded they remove it. They speedily acknowledged receiving my complaint.

This weekend, I finally received a brief notice from Twitter that they’d dealt with my complaint, here:

Wow. Had they finally kicked Sears off Twitter? Really? I went over to Sears’ account and this is what I found.

A birthday tribute to Adolf Hitler. Complete with swastikas, a declaration that the Holocaust was a hoax, and “Hitler was right.”

Twitter, with its “chirpy” name and “inconsequential” bits of information, is neither chirpy nor inconsequential. It is the haters’ village square. It is the place where subhumans like James Sears have found their voice. With impunity.

Dorsey shouldn’t have called it Twitter.

He should have called it Sewer, because that’s what it so often is.

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Did my usual Thursday thing with Charles, and it was illuminating, as usual. We discussed drugs and sexual harassment and even found room to squeeze in a few laughs. Check it out.

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Abacus (with whom Daisy proudly does work, full disclosure, etc.) has a fascinating poll out about who is in the so-called Ford Nation, what they think, why they think it, etc. etc. It’s here.

Now, in recent weeks/months, some folks have been asking me: “Warren, why don’t you hate Doug Ford as much as me and my friends in the Annex do?  Why do you say nice things about him?”

Well, two reasons.  One, I like him.  I’ve written about why, here.  When I was being used as a human piñata, Doug was the first guy to call me.  In politics, you tend to remember calls like that.

Two, the claim that Doug Ford is Donald Trump is fucking idiotic.  The Doug Ford I know is readily seen here – I encourage you to watch all of it – and he bears no resemblance, in any way, to the Mango Mussolini. (Some days, as I told Evan Solomon on his CFRA show yesterday, I’m not even sure Doug is an ideological conservative.)

Why is Doug winning?  Lots of reasons.  Weariness with the Ontario Liberals.  Suspicion about the Ontario New Democrats plans.  But, mainly, I think it’s because his opponents have greatly underestimated him.  I used to work for a guy, remember, who was underestimated all the time.

And Doug is sort of like that guy, that little guy from Shawinigan.  And, he’s like Ralph Klein, Mel Lastman, René Lévesque, Jean Chrétien. He’s like all of those populist-type politicians who are anti-politicians.  He doesn’t look a matinee idol, he doesn’t use perfect grammar, he sometimes (and often) says the wrong thing.

And people like him/them for it.  They don’t like Doug despite his failings – they like him because of his failings.  Get it?

Don’t believe me?  Check out this Abacus slide.  It tells why he is ahead, and why he is likely to stay there.

Comments are open.

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By now, you have heard all about the two real estate brokers who were seated in a Philadelphia Starbucks last week, waiting for another man to meet with them for business.  The two real estate brokers were black.

The white, female Starbucks manager called the police, who came and arrested the two men.  They were led away in handcuffs, while other patrons, all white, shot videos and protested what had happened.  The two men were eventually released, without charges, in the middle of the night.

Along with several million other people, I was disgusted by what Starbucks had done – particularly when I saw their non-apology “apology.”  So, I did what several million others had done, and took to social media.  I tweeted this:

.@Starbucks, that’s the problem: there’d been no “incident” at all. They were just two black men waiting for a friend. The “incident” was caused by *you*. pic.twitter.com/xalGzxWZuA

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) April 14, 2018

That tweet was retweeted more than 600 times (and counting), including by author Cory Doctorow. It was “liked” close to 2,000 times. And Twitter said that it had been seen more than a quarter million times.  The videos of the arrests were seen many more times than that.

That all reminded me of three things:

1. Its failures are well-documented – the misogyny, the threats, the hatred – but Twitter (and Facebook, whose failures are legion) can sometimes be a force for good.  It can connect with people and mobilize them.  It can even get a corporate global behemoth to pay attention, and react.
2. I’ve been writing about, and opposing, racism for more than three decades.  In 2008, on the extraordinary night when Barack Obama won, I thought it might signal the end of racism.  That was profoundly naïve, of course, as racism has only gotten worse – and now we even have a white supremacist as Obama’s successor.  Race, and the divide over race, remains the dominant socio-political factor in the United States – and is a dominant factor in other supposedly-tolerant nations, like ours.
3. Starbucks attracted a tremendous amount of attention, here, because (a) it is as ubiquitous as the Catholic church, and (b) because (clearly) many people regarded it as some sort of progressive and enlightened bulwark against the nativism that is now rampant everywhere (see point two, above).  I suspect this incident would have attracted zero attention if it had transpired on the sidewalk outside that Philly Starbucks.  There would have been no videos shot – at least not by white people.

What does it all mean?  It means the beast of racism is still awake, and that social media can alternately feed and punish it. It means that Starbucks can be counted on for only lattés, not wisdom.

Also: everything sucks.  One step forward, two steps back.  Always.

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July 2017: the Assembly of First Nations have gathered for their 38th general assembly in downtown Regina.

Thousands of indigenous people from across Canada are in attendance. Along with speeches, seminars and cultural events, there is a trade show.

Dozens of businesses and organizations have paid thousands for booths to advertise their services and wares at the trade show. One of them is the inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

The booth is empty.

There are two folding chairs, a few folding tables, and a sign: “National Inquiry into MMIWG,” it says. Photocopied.

No one is staffing booth. There is no literature, no displays, nothing.

My wife is a paid attendee at the AFN general assembly. She tries to take a picture of the empty booth with her iPhone, and an angry woman approaches her. The angry woman demands to know why she is taking a photo. Dissatisfied with the answer she gets, the angry woman goes to complain to organizers.

The next day, the booth is still empty. No staff, no materials, nothing.

And the sign is gone.

My wife and I happen to be visiting the then-Premier of Saskatchewan, Brad Wall, that same day. We show him the picture. He shakes his head. “That is a disgrace,” I tell him. He doesn’t disagree.

And “disgrace,” generally, has remained the best word to describe the Trudeau government’s inquiry into the murders and disappearances of thousands of indigenous woman and girls. It is a multi-million-dollar disgrace, in fact, one that the father of the Minister of Justice – himself a hereditary chief – called “a bloody farce.”

“I would think that young [Justin] Trudeau should darn well know that this thing is not working and he should fire these people,” Chief Bill Wilson told CBC a few weeks before AFN’s general assembly.

“It just makes me sick. People have been sitting on their hands for…months, spending a good ton of money and they haven’t done a doggone thing.”

And, in the intervening months, the inquiry has more or less continued to do just that: spending a good ton of money, and not “a doggone thing.”

A summary of the myriad controversies that have followed the inquiry everywhere it goes:

• Scores of resignations of high-profile resignations, including an executive director, two communications directors, and various managers and directors of operations and community relations.
• Routinely seeking a bigger budget and being behind schedule – and, at one point, demanding millions more from the federal treasury before a single witness had been heard from.
• Incompetence that is so profound and so pervasive, the Native Women’s Association of Canada was moved to issue a scathing report slamming the inquiry for “a lack of communication that is causing frustration, confusion and disappointment in this long-awaited process” – and for actually inflicting “desperation” among the very First Nations families they were supposed to serve.

And then, last week, the latest revelation: the inquiry issued a multi-million-dollar, sole-source contract with a law firm. A contract that stinks.

The unseemly little contract was discovered by Brian Lilley of Ottawa’s CFRA. Reports Lilley: “It’s a staggering amount for a contract that only lasts 8 months. The law firm McCarthy Tetrault is being paid $5,320,766.60 in a sole sourced contract. A contract worth almost 10 per cent of the inquiry’s $54 million budget,” he writes.

“What is the work for? Well at this point, that is unknown. Despite phone calls and multiple emails, my simple questions to the inquiry have gone unanswered. Given all the coverage of problems at the inquiry, a contract like this should raise questions and those questions should be answered.”

The sole-sourced contract was to run from September 6, 2017 and end on May 15, 2018. It wasn’t put up for competition because, Lilley reported, it supposedly related to “Consulting Services Regarding Matters of a Confidential Nature.”

A confidential nature.

As such, Lilley wasn’t told why McCarthy Tetrault was handed this sole-sourced, “confidential” sweetheart deal. We did figure out the math about the cost, however. Lilley worked it out. “[The] $5.3 million fee is for a contract that lasts just 251 days. That works out to $21,198.27 for each day of the contract. If we assumed a 10-hour work day, that would mean McCarthy’s is billing out at $2,119 per hour.”

Read that again: $2,119 an hour. Considering that the standard rate is $235 an hour, this contract is an obscenity.

(Full disclosure: I know the usual hourly rate because that is what I was periodically paid to work with First Nations for Liberal and Conservative Prime Ministers as a Ministerial Special representative – until I was terminated by inquiry champion Carolyn Bennett, without explanation and over the objections of officials, immediately following the October 2015 general election.)

More than two thousand dollars an hour. As the Minister of Justice’s Dad said, this “inquiry” was and is a farce. It should make everyone sick.

After this writer condemned the contract online, a spokesperson for the inquiry wrote to the Hill Times. The spokesperson wrote that the contract is for “the electronic processing and analysis” of documents by a little-known McCarthy Tetrault business arm. As in, documents provided by witnesses.

Get that? We are paying millions for some clerks to “process documents.” Not even professional legal advice.

As Lilley put it: “For too long the families at the centre of this inquiry have had to push for answers on their loved ones. They shouldn’t need to push for answers on this [sole-sourced contract] as well.”

Well Carolyn Bennett give us answers?

Don’t hold your breath.

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