City
Morning Brew: Bike Station Pilot Wanes, Liquor License Row, Subway Jumper, No Nobel and No Black Bear Hunting
Photo: "bunny in stroller" by ppelisek, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
Did the summer civic worker strike negatively affect the pilot project for the downtown commuter bike station? It's reached just half capacity up until now. Or is it just not going to be a popular option at all?
David Dewees, a teacher at Jarvis Collegiate who was accused of invitation to sexual touching and luring of teenage boys, committed suicide by jumping in front of a TTC subway train at High Park station on Saturday. Rarely are train jumpers reported in the media, but when you're high profile just before it happens, I guess you make the gruesome news.
City Councillor Joe Pantalone doesn't want Ici, a bistro at Harbord & Manning, to get a liquor license. Come on, Joe... this isn't another shady or boisterous pub (like up on Bloor). And clearly they're not planning to get nearby high school kids wasted on wine and croissants during lunch hour.
Toronto-based scientists Ernest McCulloch and James Till were vying for the Nobel Prize for their discovery of and decades of research with stem cells. But despite stem cells being the future of health care, they didn't win this year. Maybe next time?
City Councillor Micheal Walker wants the city to revamp the plastic shopping bag 5-cent fee concept because he claims that as it stands it's a cash grab for retailers. Not if we bring our own reusable bags though, right?
10 years after being halted, and despite major increases in human-bear contact and nuisance reports, the province is still not ready to bring back the spring bear hunt. Sorry hunters, you'll have to restrict your shooting and skinning to other, less badass animals, like bunnies.
And for everyone who was art-viewing and/or sleeping all weekend, here's what blogTO was up to:
- Roger reviewed the Matt and Kim concert at the Reverb and the Fever Ray show at Kool Haus
- Christopher took a trip up to Blue Mountain to do some scenic fall hiking above the trees.
- Robin caught up with Toronto sextet Brides at Pop Montreal.
- Briony attended the Boot it UP! fundraiser for SKETCH.
- Hamish Grant checked out Kid Koala's latest endeavour, The Slew, at Mod Club.
Discussion
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The Star had an interesting/disgusting article on the topic this morning.
"Our law affords no protection from libel to the dead. So we will assume by his actions, and for the purpose of exploring this awful event, that Dewees was guilty as charged;"
ie, since he's dead, we are allowed to go on for the rest of an entire article talking about how he liked little boys when in the eyes of the law he was still an innocent man.
It's almost as if the author wanted to make sure that David wouldn't be able to get out of his guilt 'the easy way' by wording the article in such a way that his guilt was shown as a certainty ("His kink, a sexual attraction to boys, was the nub of the thing"..."It must have both thrilled and sickened him."...)
Doesn't surprise me coming from Rose Dimanno though. Her articles are often riddled with misinformation, exaggeration and down right lies.
Remember Torstar, you're a news organization first and foremost. You might get lots of web traffic with sensational articles like this one, but when you sacrifice accuracy for flashy and flowery sentences like "This was not some romanticized Dead Poets Society. He was flirting with public exposure and disaster.", then you are no better than Fox News.
As for David Dewees: he saved the justice system a bunch of money.
http://freethroughtruth.blogspot.com/2009/09/oct-blackballs-jim-black.html
As for the accused teacher, 'accused' means we should let the court find the truth, not the media or our suppositions. He may have done it, or he may have been falsely accused. Either way, a teacher's career is shot; it should only be shot if he's proven guilty. Or shall we bring back public lynchings?
Innocence until proven guilty is one of the cornerstones of our entire justice system. You don't simply throw it away because you -strongly- believe someone did something.
I just wish the media would follow the same rules. They have no issues with destroying someone's life based on those beliefs. Yeah, in this case he was likely guilty, but what about the times when the accused are not? Depending on your accused crime you could have your face plastered on a newspaper for weeks and when they finally discover they were wrong you -might- get a one paragraph blurb sandwiched between the horoscopes and the crossword puzzles.
Even if you were charged with a crime, and even if you were guilty of a crime, you still don't deserve for the media to inflate your actual crime.
If you shoplifted a Mars bar, you wouldn't want the world to know that you robbed a convenience store at gunpoint.
The city should have charging stations available for those on e-bikes that need to top up their batteries after a long commute.
Now that the e-bike pilot project is over and e-bikes are here to stay, let's see some forward thinking in regards to infrastructure to support another viable means of environmentally friendly transportation.
And innocent or not, a teacher's career is finished with public accusations like that - and disgruntled students know that.