Next stop, Florida!

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A great appointment, and for someone I am quite fond of, too.  He will serve the country very well.

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Worth keeping in mind, however, that this is the same guy who saw Rocco Rossi and Tony Genco as the start of a massive migration of Italian-Canadians to the Ontario PCs, and the end of the Ontario Liberals, too.

UPDATE: Right here.

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Yeah, we’re a world-class city. Yep.

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Son One and I listened to the Toronto Star’s John Honderich on Metro Morning this morning.  He was on to provide the company’s spin on letting go a whole bunch of employees and cutting back at Canada’s biggest newspaper.

Two things.

First: and Son One said it best, as he listened to Honderich say that a paywall was a good idea, because the New York Times had had success with a paywall. “But you’re not the New York Times,” said Son One.  That said it all, I think.  Smart kid.

Two: the media – and others in the business of selling content, in the way that media does – DID THIS TO THEMSELVES.

The example I like to use is compact discs.  Remember when the music industry introduced them, more than three decades ago?  The industry claimed that digitization was the way of the future, and that the public wouldn’t mind re-buying all the music they already owned, in the form of vinyl or tapes.  That was a lie, of course.  It was just another grubby money grab.  Everyone knew it, too.

The music industry’s cynical ploy – their greed – ultimately was the thing that destroyed them.  By pushing a medium that promoted digitized content, they had handed the keys to the vault to citizens.  Enter Napster and the like, who figured out how take digitized content, and shop it around this cool new digital medium called “the Internet.”  R.I.P., music industry.

I have never illegally downloaded music – not ever.  Not once.  For me, it’s an ideological position: I’m a (bad) musician, and I fervently believe unauthorized downloads hurt most the kinds of bands I love, guys like the ones I saw last night at the Horseshoe.

But there was schadenfreude to what the music biz did to itself, of course.  And I had, and have, no sympathy for the corporate geniuses who slit their own throats with the digital money-grab.  They were greedy, and they richly deserved what they got.

The news media’s self-immolation was different, but the result has been the same.  When the opportunity came along to digitize content, they seized on it with glee.  Except – unlike the music industry mavens – they gave their content away.  They made it free.

The Internet was designed to be free, of course.  So the news media deserve credit for how they sort-of embraced that, at the start.  But they deserve no credit at all for never figuring out how to make money off the Internet.

After years of watching themselves bleed all over the floor, they have now decided (mixed metaphor alert!) to shut the barn door long after the horses – and the cows, and the sheep, and any farm animal that moves – have left.  They’re gone, baby, gone.

IT’S TOO LATE.  IT’S OVER. YOU ARE DEAD, LIKE DINOSAURS, YOU JUST DON’T KNOW IT YET.

Digitization changed the world.  It gave birth to amazing new things. It has also killed off some things.

They’re not coming back.

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Seein’ ’em late tonight at the ‘Shoe, with Teenage Bottlerocket.  Ramonesy pop-punk perfection.

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There are no bylines in the Toronto Star’s print edition today.  Journalists there have pulled their bylines, as their collective agreement permits, to protest cuts and layoffs earlier this week.

You can debate whether it is an effective tactic or not.  Personally, I mourn for the loss of every newspaper and every newspaper job.  Our democracy is diminished by the slow death of newspapers – which, whether I like it or not, is fully underway.

The byline strike got me thinking existentially, however.  It reminded me of something that happens to me – and perhaps to you – all the time.

It’s the disappearing of journalists.  For years, you see them on TV, hear them on the radio, read them in newspapers.  And then, one day, they are abruptly gone.  Firings, layoffs, health, retirements, whatever.  Whatever the reason, they’re gone.

And here’s the thing: I forget about them.  People who had been so important to me, every day and for a long time, simply get forgotten.  They disappear, and I don’t notice.  Occasionally, something happens and I am fleetingly jarred into remembering them, and their writing.  But, most of the time, I don’t remember anything at all.

With the exception of a few voices who I will always recall – Jay Scott, Dalton Camp, Peter Gzowski, Lester Bangs, a small number of others – I actually don’t remember most of them when they disappear.  I just don’t.

This, I think, says more about me than the forgotten.  Maybe it says something, too, about how transitory journalism really is.  One minute you’re a big deal, the next minute you don’t exist.

So, selfishly, I ask: when I one day shut down this web site – and I will, I will – will most of you remember it?

I doubt it.

 

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I’ve thought Ontario has been heading towards one all along. Now my Sun colleague Chris Blizzard is prognosticating the same thing, albeit for different reaons.

Bonus: you also get to read about groundhogs being hung by their testicles!

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We were there.

Is it worth taking in?  I’d say yes.  Now, as Olivia herself said: “It’s just a movie,” but it was a pretty good one.

“They took some artistic licence,” she added.  “Jack and I didn’t kiss that much.”  That got a few laughs.

Anyway, it’s worth seeing.  It tells the story of one of the most remarkable election campaigns in anyone’s memory – and it tells the story about a pretty remarkable fellow, too.

(Oh, and we were invited.)

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Free speech is terrific, of course, as long as it’s being exercised in the abstract, or it doesn’t adversely affect you and yours.
That’s why – if you were gay, or a woman, or even just sane – and you came across Bill Whatcott stuffing one of his filth flyers in your mailbox, you could be forgiven for wanting to punch him out.

I know I would. In fact, if I had caught Whatcott trespassing on my property, dropping off one of his propaganda pieces containing graphic images of dismembered fetuses – or one of the ones showing close-ups of the diseases he falsely claimed you get from being gay – I would have been tempted to rip him a new, well, you know. (He seems to be preoccupied with those orifices, like most gay-haters.)

But, being Canadians, none of us are known to have put Whatcott in a hospital for spewing hate. Instead, we’ve arrested him in Saskatchewan (six times) and Ontario (20 times) while the Americans have once. We’ve put him in jail for awhile, too, for causing trouble around a Toronto abortion clinic.

Last week, however, Whatcott hit the big time. In 2005, you see, the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal fined Whatcott $17,500 for dropping his gay-hating pamphlets in people’s mailboxes.

In 2010, the province’s Court of Appeal overturned that decision, saying that spreading lies about gays “must always be open to public debate.”

Really? Well, no, said the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission, which took the Court of Appeal decision to the Supreme Court of Canada. They were joined in their action by various provincial attorney generals, the Canadian Jewish Congress, the United Church and B’nai Brith – more interveners, in fact, than in any other case in the country’s history.

Whatcott was a pathetic loser, a loathsome jerk. But his case attracted a huge amount of attention because many sensible people feared that if the high court struck down Saskatchewan’s Human Rights Code, every other provincial prohibition against hate would soon fall, too. And then all we would have left to deal with extreme expressions of hate would be the criminal law.

After deliberating for 18 months, the Supreme Court last week released their unanimous decision. Whatcott, they agreed, had propagated hatred. He had betrayed “the inherent dignity owed to all human beings.”

The need to combat actual hatred, the Supreme Court declared, is no small thing. It is “pressing and substantial … Hate speech rises beyond causing distress to individual group members. It can have a societal impact. Hate speech lays the groundwork for later, broad attacks on vulnerable groups that can range from discrimination, to ostracism, segregation, deportation, violence, and in the most extreme cases, to genocide.”

They were right, of course. Hateful words always precede hateful deeds.

But offensive speech isn’t always criminal speech, which is why it was critically important, as a society, we maintain a non-criminal legal tool to deal with the likes of Bill Whatcott.

Without the protection afforded minorities by modest human rights codes, all that we would have left is throwing the haters in jail. And that’s not the way to go.

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