The Post:

Such teenagerish behaviour is not particularly unusual for the veteran watchdog. Indeed, Marin has gotten in a number of public spats on Twitter, which occasionally end with him “blocking” his critics. He once wrongly identified a police officer he believed to be the source of of antagonistic social media comments towards him; more recently, he took to Twitter to criticize Justin Trudeau’s decision to back the Liberal candidacy of former Toronto police chief Bill Blair. Needless to say, this is not the behaviour we expect from the office of Ontario’s ombudsman.

The Globe:

Using his public office as he did was wrong for an officer of parliament. He showed extremely poor judgment when he endorsed snarky comments that compared the Wynne government to a “banana republic” and asked “Who’s more corrupt and needs oversight #FIFA or @Kathleen_Wynne?”…That’s not the kind of sober oversight an ombudsman is supposed to provide. That he is willing to portray himself as “a shining light in a sea of corruption” – another Twitter comment he endorsed – raises valid questions about his impartiality. The job has gone to his head…

Again, if any beleaguered OOO staff want to talk to a reporter they can trust, email ombudsman7777@gmail.com. No names. 

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The Palma Violets gig is done, and so is “Ritalin Boy.” He’s out. Long time coming, etc. Ten reasons for it.

1. The sexism. Misogyny – endless misogyny. In the songs he wrote denigrating women, in the things he said, even when we (and the women in our lives) asked him to stop . He wouldn’t.
2. The substances. He was wasted all the time.  He played lousy when he was wasted, and he wasn’t pleasant to be around.
3. The dishonesty. He said he was the founder of Facebook in Canada. He wasn’t. It was a lie. It became national news and a national embarrassment. He actually claimed a song he wrote about Jesus getting aroused was a “Christian anthem.” The media laughed at him for that.
4. The erratic behaviour. He smashed a glass door at the home of his ex, and she (rightly) called the cops. To him, she was the one to blame. She wasn’t. He was. There was a lot of that kind of stuff.
5. The serial disasters. If we had a buck for every time he’d been fired from a job, we’d be rich. He was getting flushed all the time. It was always someone else’s fault, however. He’d treat band practices like they were his personal therapy sessions. We got tired of it.
6. The unreliability. He said he was going home for a vacation, then sent us a message saying he was running for office. We wished him luck, found another (great) guitarist and kept going. When he lost, we took him back. He was resentful about the new guy, however.
7. The jerkiness. He was a jerk. He is a jerk. He treated the new guy like dirt. And when the new guy didn’t give him a job (after he’d again been fired somewhere, see point 5), he went nuts on the guy.
8. The snobbery. He was in his forties, but a trust fund loser. His mother bailed him out all the time. Despite that, he’d never pay for a damn beer or a damn pizza. Nada. He was the moochiest mooch you’ve never met. And he would make nasty remarks, too, about the musical ability of the rest of us. He was better than us, no doubt, and he made certain we all knew it. He looked down on us.
9. The centre of the universe. It was him, to him. He didn’t give a shit about anyone else’s stuff. All he cared about was his own problems – and he had plenty. When we met with him to try and work it out – and when we told everyone else has challenges, too – this was his response: “I don’t care.”
10. The crazy. All of us knew he had issues. All of us knew there were some deep-seeded problems. We kept quiet because the band was supposed to be about fun. He – because of the sexism, the lies, the endless-crises, the snobbery, the self-centredness – made it not fun. At all.

He’s out. We’re going to keep going and have fun.

Best of luck, Ritalin Boy. You’re going to need it.

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He’s a nice guy, but I don’t think his departure matters too much.  Things hadn’t been going particularly well for some time – see here and here and here and here.

There’s plenty more, but I think everyone gets the point: this guy was never going to have the political skills of Stephen Harper. And MacKay, perhaps, knew it before the rest of us did.

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Aren’t we handsome?

Left to right:
Steve Deceive, Winkie Nuclear Age Smith, Bjorn von Flapjack III.
Missing: Davey Snot.

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Quote:

So watch out for door to door fraud by this despicable hate group. Danforth Music Festival and Beaches Blues Festival are owned by Leroy St. Germaine, the same waste of skin who owns and publishes Your Ward News. If they come to your door asking for money, you might want to report it as fraud…

And James Sears, YWN’s new editor in chief is all kinds of anti-Semitic crazy lately. His most recent tweet is a Holocaust denial video featuring “pastor” Steven Anderson, the leader of a Christian fundamentalist hate group from Arizona.

A few days ago, I contacted Toronto Mayor John Tory about this problem, which has literally thousands of people in East Toronto very upset. I will let you know when I get a response.

Meanwhile, below is a screen cap of the Twitter feed of James Sears, the editor of Your Ward News. He also goes by the name of “Dimitri the Lover,” via which he advocates sexual assault – a crime for which he has pleaded guilty in the past.

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if you reappoint this guy, you need help. 

Signed,

Ontario

  

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But God help you if you actually say that out loud. I mean, Olivia Chow may pretend that she doesn’t know you!

“David Hulchanski, a professor of housing and community development at the University of Toronto, has spent years documenting how Toronto evolved from a mixed-income city to an increasingly segregated one. His “Three Cities” research [PDF], which was updated earlier this year, shows that from 1990 to 2012 the average household income in a number of neighbourhoods, such as North Toronto, increased by more than 20 per cent. In roughly the same number of neighbourhoods, though, average household income declined by 20 per cent. Meanwhile, the number of middle-income communities, which accounted for the majority of Toronto in 1990, dropped to less than a third of all census tracts.

…Wealthy Torontonians are increasingly concentrated in downtown and midtown enclaves, while low-income residents are relegated to the inner suburbs, with limited access to transit, grocery stores, and other essential services.”

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By Elise Hategan, who knows what she is talking about:

“…And then comes this – news that a hateful, xenophobic rag called Your Ward News, put together by a network of nutcases and old Heritage Front members, one of whom none other than Gary Schipper himself (under the alias of J.J. / Johnny Jensen), is being distributed to 50,000 homes in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood by Canada Post. Yes, our very own Canada Post has, somehow, after evaluating the garbage Your Ward News contains, ruled that it didn’t fit their own definition of what constitutes hate material.

So – despite objections from postal carriers, despite articles from mainstream press and articles on activist websites, Canada Post continues to distribute hate propaganda. Which clearly is an offence under Section 319 of the Criminal Code…

Twenty years ago, these hateful bastards – or rather, “unscrupulous fanatics” as Judge Tremblay-Lamer put it in her judgement writ – were ordered by the courts not to RECORD their hate messages. They served their prison time, they scurried underground like the cockroaches that they are. But now they’re back, putting their hate in WRITING. And what are WE as a society doing about it?

Nothing.

…Worse yet, they have an office now and public funding. And they have Canada Post and the police condoning it, to boot.

Please tell me that everything I did twenty years ago wasn’t for nothing.

TAKE ACTION.

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Here’s what Senior Statesman Ed Broadbent says:

The polling done by the Broadbent Institute shows Canadians support those ideas.

“Time after time, we find on almost every issue, a majority of Canadians are social democrats,” he says.

“On tax policy, on (the) Canada Pension (Plan), a whole range of issues that are reasonably described as social democratic, there is a significant majority of Canadians that are on that side.”

Broadbent says the long-term trend shows voters are warming to the NDP.

“One of the things that is happening now, and we’ll see if (it) persists in the election, is where some of those (voters) were split in their partisan positions, they’re increasingly coming behind the NDP.”

Leaving aside how ridiculous it is that “polling done by the Broadbent Institute” in a story about Ed Broadbent is considered in any way relevant, let’s reflect on the big question of the moment: is the NDP’s rise permanent?

Personally, I think it isn’t just an NDP thing. There are a number of variables at work, here:

• Justin Trudeau peaked too soon.  That – plus the serial gaffes, the paucity of policy, the arrogance of an inner circle who have angered legions of Liberals, and the emerging consensus that he “just isn’t ready” – have crystallized at precisely the wrong moment for the Liberal leader.  For two years, his message was: “If you are looking for a progressive alternative to Stephen Harper, I’m the only guy that fits the bill.” After Alberta, after months of slow but steady NDP growth, that is no longer true.
• The NDP, and their base, ain’t what they used to be. When the trade union movement started to founder and lose relevance, everyone thought that would be a death knell for the NDP.  It wasn’t.  In fact, it helped to de-radicalize the Dippers in the eyes of many voters.  Simultaneously, another thing happened: the Dippers chose to be what Norman Spector once described to me as “mature social democrats” – that is, Romanow-style balance-the-budget types who see government as a force for good, but not the solution to every problem.  The Kooky-York-University-Sid-Ryan-nationalize-everything-hate-Israel types lost out.
• Angry Tom, Angry Voters.  Plenty of pundits – me among them – thought Mulcair’s genetic predisposition towards anger would kill him, just as it had back when he was a Quebec Liberal.  It didn’t.  In fact, Tom’s anger turned on many more voters than it turned off – because they, as it turned out, were angry too.  Voters were looking for a politician who was angry as they were about the federal Conservatives, and about the direction in which the country was headed.  And along came Prosecutor Tom, all righteous indignation and fury, giving the Tories what-for in Question Period.  Mulcair matched the popular mood.
• The key attributes of the leaders.  Innumerable focus groups have been conducted about Messrs. Harper, Trudeau and Mulcair, of course.  No news there. Moderators in these groups typically ask participants for one or two words to describe each leader.  Here’s what they’ve gotten back, over and over: Harper is “serious, experienced.” Trudeau is “progressive, new, change.” Mulcair is “serious, progressive.”  See the problem for the Tories and the Grits? Only one leader – Mulcair – embodies positives of each of the other options.  He’s “serious and progressive” at a time when voters seemingly want both.
• The media have bought into the Harper narrative on Trudeau. Reporters spend almost as much time with Justin Trudeau as his family does, perhaps more.  And they have concluded, with considerable reluctance, that Harper’s shorthand on Trudeau – now contained in multi-million-dollar ad buy coming soon to a television near you – is accurate.  He really isn’t ready yet.  Nice guy, not ready.

There are other variables at work, but I think those are the main ones.  Can New Democrats sustain the resulting dynamic over barbecue season? Hard to do, but not impossible.

As a public service, I offer only four words of caution: 1. Adrian 2. Dix. 3. Olivia 4. Chow.

Both of those people were initially considered inevitable winners, too, weren’t they?  In the latter case, I saw up close what the electorate eventually saw.  Chow was a lousy communicator, she didn’t offer much in the way of ideas, and she didn’t inspire.  Similarly, Dix lacked Christy Clark’s verbal dexterity, he played it too safe, and he had the worst debate performance in modern times.

Nobody can accuse Angry Tom of lacking communication and debate skills.  Nobody can say that he isn’t putting ideas out there, or occasionally taking risks.

But you Dippers out there in the Internet ether know I speak the truth, don’t you? 

Orange Crush, the drink, can go flat in no time at all.

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When someone says something "changed everything," you know something didn't.

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) May 26, 2015

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