Canada’s Sun News Network, dubbed “Fox News North” by the media, is barely on the air for half an hour when Ezra Levant, icon of the Canadian right, starts off the debut edition of his show, The Source, by broadcasting images of the Danish Mohammed cartoons.

“What’s the big deal? We just showed it. Nothing bad happened,” Levant tells his audience as a magazine spread of the cartoons appears on screen.

For Levant, this is more than what must to him seem like a spectacular opening to Sun News (if it causes riots in the Middle East, all the better for ratings, eh?), it’s also something of a personal issue. Levant was dragged in front of the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal in 2006 when the magazine he ran at the time, the Western Standard, ran that very cartoon spread. He became something of a hero to free speech advocates with his bravado performance in front of that tribunal, challenging both its notions of human rights and its legitimacy. These days, Levant prefers to parrot Glenn Beck with accusations that George Soros is a Nazi collaborator, so it’s nice to see him harken back to a time when he had more substantial things to add to the political debate.

To be sure, “Fox News North” has nothing to do with Fox News. It’s the new broadcast arm of the Sun newspapers, a chain of low-brow tabloids in Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and elsewhere, basically a Canuck version of the UK Sun tabloid (right down to the scantily-clad page three girl), and similar in tone to the New York Post. But while both the UK Sun and the NY Post are Murdoch properties, the Sun papers in Canada aren’t. The Sun chain has been annoying Canadian progressives for nearly four decades now, and the papers have largely settled into a secondary role in the Canadian media landscape. The tabloids, along with the new network and a local TV station in Toronto called Sun TV, are owned by a Montreal-based company called Quebecor, and Rupert Murdoch has no part in it.

But right off the bat we get a sense that this network has more than a little in common with the ethos of those Murdoch properties when Krista Erickson (think “Gretchen Carlson North”), one of its anchors, appears as a page three girl in the Sun papers Monday morning. Clever marketing gimmick (maybe, if you’re not particularly interested in women viewers), but not exactly inspiring for those of us looking for evidence of serious journalism. So for me the question is just how well these stale, economically challenged and increasingly irrelevant tabloids will be able to make the jump to the brash, attention-grabbing, almost hypnosis-inducing style of Fox News.

At first glance, pretty damn well. It looks like Fox News; it feels like Fox News. The chyrons look like Fox News chyrons. The hosts are dressed like Fox News hosts. It all looks like Fox News, right down to the mild orange filter that gives the guests and hosts a healthy, tanned look. And make no mistake — right off the bat we’re engaging in the culture war. The Daily Brief, 6 p.m., hosted by David Akin, has as its first topic health care reform. “Report: Canada’s System Broken,” the chyron warns. Here we go. Time for an all-out attack on Canada’s universal health care system.

But wait a minute. What am I hearing here? Could this be a sound, rational argument about spiraling health care costs and the options available? Hold on a sec. Did someone mention raising taxes as a way of continuing to fund the system as it exists? My ears can hardly believe what they’re hearing, but I’m pretty sure someone has just made the sober point that we are probably doing ourselves a disservice by setting up a false “binary” view of health care (the Canadian system versus the US system) and that we should look to Europe for better ways to operate universal health care schemes.

Nobody mentioned “socialism.” Nobody screamed “class warfare.” For a moment, I closed my eyes and just listened, and it could have been “NPR North.”

Okay, so maybe it was just that one issue. After all, privatizing health care is a hard sell in Canada. Up next on Daily Brief is a report on Vancouver’s government-sanctioned heroin injection site. Now things are getting juicy. Sun News is clearly hitting all the big culture-war issues for conservatives. Now the sparks will fly.

But wait, what’s this? The report begins with the correspondent (blonde, attractive, well dressed) informing us of a study saying the safe injection site has reduced drug deaths in Vancouver. And I’m pretty sure that, through the fog of shock now engulfing me, I can hear Akin mention that some three-quarters of the people living around the site support its continued existence. Case closed. “Fox News North” is against the drug war.

So, hmm. Maybe it’s just their first day. Maybe they haven’t got the hang of it just yet.

Not all is lost for the culture warriors, though: No fewer than three prime time shows devote a segment to attacking the CBC, Canada’s state broadcaster, with Levant popping up to accuse CBC’s Vote Compass interactive graphic of trying to fool conservatives into thinking they’re liberals. Add to that the Sun tabloids running the same stories criticizing the CBC, and this all begins to look more like a concerted attack on a competing broadcaster than actual reporting….

But even with all that it all comes off a little too … sane. The oil sands are good, Ezra says, because we can use the profits to build schools. Almost makes sense to me. It’s all seems actually thought out in advance, too calm and too… well, Canadian. In a whole evening of viewing, the expression “government bolshevism” only grabs my attention once. So maybe this is more “Fox News Lite” than “Fox News North.” Can you even do a (somewhat) polite, (mostly) respectful, (sometimes) thoughtful version of Fox News? These hosers are damn well going to try.

So far they’ve only hit on the big hot-button issues that resonate among Canadian conservatives; tomorrow they’re going to have to start covering the election. And when they do, the Canadian political establishment will start paying attention.

But will I? Watching Sun News tonight was fun, in the sort of way watching a car wreck on the freeway is fun. But Ezra’s going to have to do better than a lame attempt at angering Muslims if he wants me to tune in again.

Cross-posted at Dirty Hippies.

I was going to stay away from the pedantic yet strangely compelling controversy over Canada’s census, that entirely unlikely hero of the summer news cycle, involving statisticians arguing with politicians over data reliability and whatnot.

But I can’t keep silent after what our dear Minister for Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Treasury Board president said yesterday.

Keep in mind, the reason the Conservative government gave for switching from a mandatory census long form to a voluntary long form was all about privacy. It was absolutely wrong, the Tories said repeatedly in identical-sounding sound bites, to threaten someone with jail time for not divulging how many bedrooms they had in their house.

OK, fair enough, I suppose. Not exactly at the top of my list of government outrages, but a fair, if minor, point all the same. But check out what Stockwell Day had to say on Tuesday:

The Conservative government says it won’t compromise and keep the long-form census mandatory and may actually consider scrapping it altogether.

Treasury Board President Stockwell Day says some European countries have found other ways of collecting data which Statistics Canada compiles by compelling co-operation under threat of fine or jail.

“We’ve also looked at the fact that with the high degree of sophistication and integration of computerization and data these days, do you need to go through that whole process at all?” he said at a news conference Tuesday.

“Countries like Norway, Denmark, have dispensed with this type of information-gathering years ago,’” he added.

Hold on a second here. The reason that many European countries have done away with the census is that they data-mine other sources for information — everything from banking records to school attendance sheets. In some European countries, you are required by law to register with the police when you change addresses. Police files, therefore, are a useful source of demographic information.

Is this the sort of privacy protection that our dear head treasurer envisions? Is this really better than a never-used provision in the law that allows for jail time if you don’t respond to a mandatory census form?

I don’t think the Conservatives’ aim in switching from a mandatory to a voluntary census was really to reduce government intrusion into our private lives. That was made pretty clear when the Conservatives rejected a compromise that would see jail lifted as a penalty for not filling out the long form — a purely symbolic move, since plenty of people refuse or fail to fill out the long form and no one is ever prosecuted. But the Tories said no, it’s not the jail time, it’s the principle of the thing.

Well clearly it isn’t the principle of the thing either. Because what Stockwell Day has suggested is the single largest expansion of government intrusion into our private lives in Canadian history. Right now we have a census that collates anonymous data — it collects info on your household, but doesn’t link it to your name or social insurance number. When the Tories get their way and Statistics Canada starts collecting data from our bank records, our hospital records, our school records, etc., etc., there will be no way to be certain that our privacy is guaranteed. In fact, our privacy, by definition, won’t be guaranteed.

There are only two possibilities here: Either the Conservatives have no grasp whatsoever on the issue on which they’ve decided to stake their reputation, or they are out and out lying about their motivations.

I think the former is likelier. This was a decision made on a whim by a libertarian wind that blows through this government, and when the issue became much larger than the PMO ever expected, they decided to stubbornly (stupidly) defend their position to the end. So they are grasping for reasons why they did this, one day telling us they’re protecting our freedoms, the next day unwittingly threatening to take them away.

But the latter is also possible. If they are lying about their motivations, then to what end? The conspiracists out there argue that Harper’s Tories want to degrade the quality of data. One argument is that, by harming the quality of data, you harm the ability of governments to provide services — a very good condition to have in place if you want to argue, down the road, in favor of privatization of government services.

The other argument is that the Tories simply don’t want to see more detailed information about marginalized communities, poverty, growing visible minority groups, and so on. Statistical press releases declaring “Poverty up in aboriginal communities” puts pressure on the Conservative government to do things it doesn’t want to do, like help people.

I don’t know. You can speculate until the cows come home as to the secret motives of policymakers and never get any closer to the truth. But at this point I am at least certain of this much: The Tories’ census decision is a political, fiscal and practical mistake.

A fiscal mistake, in that the new voluntary census will cost $30 million more than the old mandatory one; hardly a sharp move from a government that just finished lecturing the rest of the world on fiscal responsibility.

A practical mistake, in that anyone who knows anything about this will tell you that the next set of census data will be incomparable to earlier sets; Canada will be in a fog of ignorance as to social, demographic and cultural trends.

And a political mistake, in that the Tories, instead of wisely accepting a compromise that should have satisfied their professed concerns, have decided to fight an all-out war over this one, a war that could end up with the largest intrusion into Canadians’ privacy ever.

If that happens — if it turns out Stockwell Day is talking about real government policy, and not just talking out of his ass like he usually does (see Day’s claim that Statistics Canada is lying about Canada’s dropping crime rate because people are not reporting crimes, something for which he himself has no evidence) — then the Tories will have blindly, arrogantly, stubbornly and pointlessly walked us into this disaster.

For that, they would deserve nothing less than an electoral booting.

UPDATE

This completely slipped my mind: Britain’s new Tory-LibDem coalition government is planning to scrap the census. Here’s how they plan to cull statistical data from now on (from the Telegraph):

The Government is examining different and cheaper ways to count the population more regularly, using existing public and private databases, including credit reference agencies….

Mr Maude said the Census was “out of date almost before it has been done” and was looking at ways to count the population more frequently — perhaps every five years — using databases held by credit checking firms, Royal Mail, councils and Government.

The post office? It’s no secret at this point that the UK has had a penchant for authoritarianism in recent years, what with their huge databases of children’s fingerprints, plans to track every vehicle in the country, and even different laws for different people, but tracking the population through addresses on envelopes? Wow.

As for using “government” databases, I imagine that could mean anything from your medical records to your criminal rap sheet to your history of drawing unemployment insurance. If this is what Stockwell Day has in mind, he damn well better come up with a better excuse than safeguarding privacy, because this is one government policy that clearly does the opposite.

It’s been hard not to notice the Conservative government’s flimsy and bizarre war against the CBC, sparked apparently by the public broadcaster’s use of pollster Frank Graves and its coverage of a new book that says Christian groups have gained the gears of power in Canada via the Conservative Party.

But the larger gripe seems to be Graves. The pollster, the Tories say, is a Liberal insider who once urged the Liberals to win elections by waging a “culture war” against the Conservatives.

For the Tories, that’s a scary prospect. A culture war in Canada would end unfavorably for conservatives, who haven’t been able to muster more than 37 percent support at the polls in decades. Just look at the issue of the Tories’ refusal to fund abortions as part of a G8 maternal health initiative. Setting aside the embarrassment of having Canada find itself to the socially conservative right of a US administration (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton backs abortion funding), an interesting dynamic played itself out among Canadians on this issue.

Back in March, before the issue hit the front pages, 46 percent of Canadians wanted abortion funding as part of maternal health foreign aid. Now, two months later, with Harper and the Tories opposing abortion funding, fully 58 percent of Canadians want abortion to be funded. In other words, the moment it started looking like the Conservatives were going to do something to make Canada more conservative, the public rebelled. The Conservatives can’t win a culture war, not in Canada anyway.

Which is why this fight against the CBC is so strange. Because, in essence, the Tories have launched a culture war against Canada’s public broadcaster. The CBC may not have the highest ratings, but it’s the station on which every red-blooded Canadian has been watching Hockey Night in Canada since mommy and daddy strapped them into size-two skates at age three. It is as Canadian as apple pie is American. Outside of conservative Western Canada, attacking the CBC isn’t going to gain traction as a political issue for the Tories.

So why do it? John Doyle at the Globe and Mail has a theory:

It can be seen as a ghoulish attempt to demonize the public broadcaster, to isolate it and, one suspects, an attempt to batter the CBC into compliance. Or one could imagine an even more ominous scenario: the possibility that the current battering is the minority Conservative government’s manner of preparing the public for a major cut to CBC funding and the eventual beleaguerment of the CBC as a fringe broadcaster….

Such is the ferocity and frequency of the attacks on the CBC that one might wonder if, along with diminishing the CBC’s status, the side-effect here is to elevate the role of private broadcasters. These are strange times in Canadian broadcasting. Local television has been eviscerated as private broadcasters point to shrinking revenues.

I agree with Doyle to the extent that he frames this as a possibility. And I also agree with his assessment that “Canada would depreciate as a country if the CBC dwindled into a fringe broadcaster, something like PBS in the United States,” and that the Tories’ claims of bias are “ridiculous” because “any viewer of the CBC-TV news these days sees an elaborate attempt to reflect the views of the right.”

Indeed. And if the Tories really do see an anti-conservative bias in the CBC (as opposed to simply claiming they see it, in order to gain leverage against the network), then I would say it may be a case of projection bias — maybe they think the CBC is out to get them because they’re out to get the CBC.

Like authoritarians everywhere, Marcus Gee at the Globe and Mail uses the fear of crime to convince people to part with their privacy and submit to a police state. In an article entitled “Toronto would be safer with a camera on every corner,” Gee makes the standard argument for planting CCTV cameras on every corner: Accept our surveillance state or be murdered.

In typical fashion, Gee uses a recent homicide in the news to show us that we would be living in a safer city if there were cameras everywhere — just to make sure you understand that, if you don’t support police cameras watching our every move, YOU ARE SIDING WITH MURDERERS.

What’s really amusing about Gee’s piece is how utterly banal it is. (What was Hannah Arendt’s phrase? The “banality of evil”?) It presents absolutely no new argument here that would convince someone who hasn’t yet made up their mind one way or another. It does, however, fall into some perfect little stereotypes relating to how these arguments play out. For example, Gee writes near the end of his column:

If CCTV still creeps you out, remember that you’re already on camera every time you walk through the mall, enter a parking garage or go to the bank machine. If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. If you’re committing a crime, watch out. There may be cameras watching. The more the better.

There you go. The innocent have nothing to fear. Or, as it would come out of the mouths of Hollywood-movie Nazis, ze innocent haf nussink to feah. And just above that laughable stereotype of an argument for fascism, Gee asserts the following:

Then, of course, there is the whole issue of privacy. Opponents of CCTV say it is taking us toward an Orwellian world where the state can follow our every move. While it’s healthy to worry about Big Brother, those fears are overblown.

Nobody watches the live video being recorded by the handful of CCTV cameras in Toronto. The only time anyone sees it is if police request footage for a crime investigation; otherwise it is simply stored and then automatically erased after 72 hours.

You see — fears of a police state are “overblown,” because “nobody watches the video” anyway. Ah, well nothing to worry about then. Because of course, we know that municipal employees are never corrupt, that a police officer or a transit guard would never use these technologies to spy on people for their own purposes. Nor are they greedy, and would never consider selling footage to private detectives or TV stations. Never.

Ultimately, though I agree with Gee’s assertion. More cameras would make the city safer. And here are some other ideas that no doubt would make the city safer:

– GPS tracking devices on everyone’s ankles.

– Portable body scan devices, Manchester Airport-style, that would allow police to remotely check under your clothing for weapons, drugs, etc.

– Security checkpoints at major intersections.

– Soldiers, armed with machine guns, patrolling subway stations and shopping malls.

– Clockwork Orange-style psychological reprogramming for repeat offenders.

– Constant monitoring of all electronic communications — phone, email, Skype, etc.

– A Department of Pre-Crime to pre-arrest people considered at high risk of offending, based on psych profiles, etc.

All of these technologies are or will soon be possible. All of these technologies can be argued for using Gee’s hackneyed old arguments. Where we draw the line on a surveillance state will depend on our collective will as a society. How much freedom and privacy will we sacrifice for additional safety?

I used to think that Canada was relatively immune to the police-state arguments that have been so successful in the United States and Britain. But now I watch as the news media grow ever more hysterical about crime, even as the crime rate in Canada continues a decades-long downward trend. And when arguments like Gee’s start showing up in the newspapers, the signs are all there that our will to preserve Canada as a free society is weakening.

A strange propaganda battle has been playing out in front of the entire Canadian television viewing public of late. On the one side is a group calling itself “Stop the TV Tax,” which is telling us that the broadcasters are about to convince the government to slap a ten-dollar-a-month “TV tax” on all Canadians who purchase cable TV. They’re saying get involved and stop this injustice.

On the other side is a group called “Local TV Matters,” which is telling us that the cable companies are blocking an effort to save local television from bankruptcy, that local TV is threatened by a precipitous drop in ad revenue, and that unless we tell the government to act, we won’t have local news on TV anymore. They’re saying get involved and stop this injustice.

Naturally, these two astroturf campaigns are being run by the companies involved. The “Local TV Matters” folks are a consortium of Canada’s major broadcasters, who want to charge cable companies for carrying local TV station signals that are free over the air. The “Stop the TV Tax” folks are the cable and satellite companies, which are telling us, point blank, that if that happens, they are going to pass the cost on to the consumer — hence the notion of a “tax.”

Both campaigns are disingenuous. The cable companies have grabbed the ten-dollar-a-month figure seemingly out of thin air. The numbers being discussed would be closer to six dollars per month. (Granted, the ad says “up to.”)

But the TV Matters campaign is far worse. Check out the website — you can’t tell that what they’re talking about is a new fee on cable companies. And the idea that this money would save local stations and therefore local TV content is bunk. As others have noted, local stations have been closing for years. They’ve lost their local identities: The CBC doesn’t even brand its local affiliates separately anymore; CTV barely does; Global TV never did. Not to mention that a new fund, amounting to one percent of broadcast distributors’ revenue, was already set up this year to support local news in markets of less than one million people.

So ultimately I side with the TV Tax people. The cable and satellite providers are some of the wealthiest companies in Canada, and I ‘m loathe to defend their monopolistic fiefdoms, especially when they’re making clear that any charge they incur they will dump on me. But when it comes down to it, it’s patently unfair to charge the consumer, via cable company or any other method, for channels we have no choice but to purchase.

The CRTC mandates that cable companies carry the signals of any local (”local”) TV stations in the area where the cable service is provided. You can’t buy cable service without getting these channels. So charging for them is, in effect, a cable TV tax. From the consumer’s perspective, it’s not a “local TV tax” because the people who get local TV from the air don’t pay it. It’s just a new tax, is all, the funds from which will be given to subsidize TV broadcasters, which subsidies they can use any way they want. (They haven’t committed themselves to actually spending the money on local content.)

So I have a proposal that will resolve this problem: If the local TV stations want to be a paid-for service, their purchase should be optional like all other pay-TV channels. I’m perfectly willing to let them charge for their channels — but I should have a choice whether to buy what they’re selling.

And given that they’ve recently convinced the CRTC to allow them an unlimited amount of commercial time per hour, I have a feeling I won’t want to pay for their services. I shudder to think what reruns of all my favorite ’70s sitcoms will be like once the broadcasters chop them down to make way for fifteen minutes of commercials per half-hour. It’s not enough that they want to pollute our brains with a constant stream of consumerist propaganda — they want to charge us for it, too.

Well, no thanks. I can think of more than a few people who would love the opportunity to trade in their ad-ridden “local affiliates” for HBO or the sports-channel packages. Which is precisely why the CRTC won’t allow it to happen. Von Finkelstein and the gang will argue that Canadian society would fall apart if people stopped watching local TV broadcasting. After all, the whole point of creating the CBC and mandating Canadian-content rules and limiting foreign ownership of media was to “build the Canadian nation.”

Well I’ve got news for you, CRTC. The days of nation-building via television are over. Who actually watches local TV anymore? I watch the national and American news channels, and leave the TV tuned to one of the cable movie channels by default. My girlfriend is a cooking-channel addict. Many of my friends stick to the pay-channel shows. Others just download whatever they want to watch via torrent. Yet others are collecting their favorite shows on DVD and don’t even watch “live” TV. The local affiliate? Good for sports scores at 11:25 pm, and that’s about it.

You know who is watching local TV? The people with rabbit-ear antennas, the ones who never made the jump to cable. The only people who WON’T be paying the new TV tax, if it happens.

So time to let ‘er rip and let the local channels compete in the brave new five-hundred-channel universe. If the CRTC is worried about the disappearance of Canadian culture from the airwaves (cablewaves?), they’re going to have to address the matter in a completely different way anyway. Forcing people to pay for something they don’t use won’t convince them to buy locally.

After dissing Michael Ignatieff for months for being a) a neo-con dressed in liberal clothing, and b) spineless, I find myself having to re-evaluate the man.

Today, we found out that — thank God — Canadians won’t be going to the polls to vote in yet another federal election (at least for now), as Prime Minister Stephen Harper is now being propped up by the “socialists” and “separatists” he so thoroughly despises — and it’s all thanks to a brilliant bit of political brinkmanship by Ignatieff, the politician I love to hate.

Ignatieff’s popular support dropped five points overnight when he announced at the end of last month that the Liberal Party would no longer support the Conservative minority government. It looked, prima facie, like a terrible strategic mistake on Ignatieff’s part. Canadians didn’t want to vote in an election that would have been the fifth federal vote in nine years. But it wasn’t a mistake, and here’s why.

Ignatieff had been backed into a corner by the strategies of Harper and the opposition parties. Harper’s tactic of making every piece of legislation a confidence vote was smart thinking, as it forced the opposition to ante up every time there was a vote: Support government legislation, or face another election. Meanwhile, the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP had taken to announcing their intention to vote against government legislation the moment it was announced, thus forcing Ignatieff’s Liberals to be the ones to take the fall and support the government.

Over time, Ignatieff came to look weak and spineless. He was seen as talking tough and then hypocritically rolling over for the Conservatives. So when he announced that his party would no longer vote for any Conservative initiative, the aim was to break that cycle.

And it worked. From here on in, the fact that the Liberals will always vote against Conservative legislation will be a part of the political background in Ottawa, a given. And whenever there is legislation before the House, all eyes will be on the NDP and the Bloc, to see if they support it or force another election. Ignatieff has successfully turned the tables, maneuvered himself out of the corner, and is now free to criticize the government all he wants without looking like a hypocrite. It’s the Bloc’s and the NDP’s turn to look weak and spineless.

Essentially, Ignatieff played a huge game of chicken with the other opposition parties, and won. It was a big risk, but it worked.

Was the risk worth it? Yes. From Ignatieff’s position, even if he had lost the game of chicken and another election were called, he would have been in a decent position. Ignatieff understood that, as time went on and he was seen supporting the Conservatives more and more, his credibility as an opposition leader would fade. From his perspective, better to have an election now than later. Not to mention that polls show only the Liberals with higher support today than during last year’s election. The most likely outcome of an election today would be a reduced Conservative minority government, a reduced NDP and Bloc presence in Parliament, and a robust new Liberal caucus. That’s why he was willing to play chicken. As much as he didn’t want an election, he knew everyone else wanted one less.

But the outcome Ignatieff really wanted is what happened today — the Conservative government surviving thanks to the support of the “socialists” and “separatists.” Harper’s ads have been slamming Ignatieff for contemplating a possible coalition government with the NDP and Bloc last year. Now it’s Harper himself who is doing business with the socialists and separatists. The Conservatives’ strongest talking point has been severely damaged.

And Ignatieff has bought himself much-needed time to rebuild his reputation as a credible alternative to Harper. Freed from his corner, he will now go on the attack against everything the Conservatives do. If and when an election comes, the NDP and the Bloc will be blamed, and Ignatieff will emerge looking strong and decisive.

Well done, Mr. Ignatieff. Well done.

Judith Timson in the Globe likens the Michael Bryant affair to The Bonfire of the Vanities, “because beneath the facts lies a bubbling cauldron of social resentments, mistrust of authority and other prejudices that may well tell us more about ourselves than about anything else.”

I would go a step further, and say that what has erupted in Toronto since Monday night is little short of a culture war.

The initial story is stunning enough: Michael Bryant, a former attorney general of Ontario, finds himself charged with criminal negligence causing death and dangerous operation of a vehicle in the death of one Darcy Allan Shepperd, a bike courier.

The Globe has a vivid recreation of the incident:

Around 9:45 p.m., security camera footage shows Mr. Sheppard on his bike, pulling up around the driver’s side of Mr. Bryant’s car on Bloor Street, just east of Avenue Road in front of United Colors of Benetton. The strip of Bloor Street was under construction that night, leaving only one lane in each direction.

Mr. Sheppard gestured at the car and got off his bike when the car struck its back tire.

Witness Raajiv Rajadurai, 23, said the accident didn’t look serious, but the cyclist seemed agitated. He saw the cyclist slam his backpack onto the car’s hood and then grab the driver’s side mirror as the vehicle sped away. The convertible’s top was down.

“The driver was going so fast that at one point the biker was holding on to his car and there were sparks coming from the bottom of his shoes,” Mr. Rajadurai said, adding Mr. Sheppard wasn’t wearing a helmet.

[...]

Police say Mr. Sheppard – still clinging to the driver’s side of the car – hit a tree, a mailbox and possibly a fire hydrant before falling from the car, in front of the construction crew.

You could hear hitting, something, bam, bam, bam,” one worker said.

They said Mr. Sheppard was run over by the car’s back tires as he fell, landing in front of make-up retailer Sephora.

Damn.

For anyone living in Toronto, as I do, this story hits close to home. We in the 416 know just how close this tightly-wound city is to an incident like this at any time. Conflicts between drivers and cyclists — or drivers and pedestrians, or pedestrians and cyclists — happen here all the time.

The pedestrians and cyclists resent the road-hogging drivers. The drivers resent the self-righteous cyclists and intersection-blocking pedestrians. So no wonder the moment this story broke, Michael Bryant and Darcy Sheppard became the flashpoints for long-simmering resentments.

The intersection where this tragedy occurred — the corner of Bloor and Queen’s Park, a mere two or three hundred meters from the building where Bryant worked as the province’s top law enforcement officer — is the same one where, a few years ago, my girlfriend was nearly mowed down by a young female driver in an expensive European car who drove right through Bloor Street on a red light while talking on her cell phone, slamming on the horn and giving the finger to the pedestrians desperately scrambling to get out of her way.

Which brings me to the class-war element of this story. The accident happened in Yorkville, the snazzy neighborhood that hosts the Toronto International Film Festival every September. Add to that Bryant’s car — a Saab convertible — and his pedigree — he’s a Harvard grad — and the Bonfire of the Vanities picture is complete: A rich, arrogant member of the aristocracy mows down a working-class kid. Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of culture war.

The Toronto Star jumps right in with sympathy for the two-wheeled. “Angry cyclists stage protest,” trumpeted the top headline on its website Wednesday, complete with pictures of grief-stricken bike couriers embracing. The paper also takes the cops to task for giving Bryant “the VIP treatment” during his brief period in police custody.

Not surprisingly, the slightly more posh Globe and Mail seems to side with the four-wheeled. “Bike victim had a police past,” screams one headline.

“The cyclist killed in an altercation with former Ontario attorney-general Michael Bryant had been drinking and was involved in a confrontation with police earlier in the evening,” begins a recent Christie Blatchford column.

For all the claims in the media of “moral quandaries” and “complexities,” I think everyone’s mind is made up. All that remains is the legal process. Bryant’s day in court will be Toronto’s own little O.J. Simpson trial, pitting group against group, exposing the divisions latently tearing at the fabric of this city.

Some say Bryant will get tough treatment from the cops, because he re-instated civilian oversight of police. Some say he’ll get an easy ride from the prosecutors who, until not long ago, were his employees. And we can safely expect that, whatever the verdict, it will be attacked as biased and politically motivated by one side or the other. Or both.

Gonna be an ugly autumn in Hogtown.

Michael Ignatieff

“Just visiting” may or may not be Michael Ignatieff’s status in Canada, but it certainly is a good description of any position he happens to hold.

With Stephen Harper well into his fourth year as prime minister, attention now turns to who will succeed him as leader of the Conservative Party. Ordinarily, we would have a pretty good idea by this point who the major candidates are.

So who are the candidates to replace Harper? Well, there are none. Typically, successor prime ministers come from inside cabinet, but Harper’s cabinet is a circus side-show of fools, idiots and fuck-ups. Rona Ambrose and Gordon O’Connor were running, walking, breathing jokes; nobody much likes Peter MacKay and Stockwell Day; Lisa Raitt is an embarrassment to the nation; and John Baird just shot himself in the foot when he told Toronto, quite literally, to go fuck itself.

[ADD: On second thought, maybe Baird's comments weren't so bad after all. Maybe they got us the streetcars.]

It’s really little wonder that Harper doesn’t want his cabinet ministers talking to the press, that he insists on all communiques being cleared by the PMO in advance. Just look at what happens when one of these clowns opens their mouths.

The truth is that, however we may feel about Harper as prime minister, any possible successor from within the current Conservative Party talent pool is bound to be worse. It would be like moving from George H. W. Bush to George W. Bush.

What the Conservatives need is a leader who can bring the party back to the Canadian political middle, someone who can give an intellectual edge to the Conservatives in an era when conservatism is increasingly synonymous with stupidity. And that leader just happens to be … Michael Ignatieff, the current leader of the Liberal Party.

Why? Because Ignatieff is a true modern conservative. The proof is in the thousands upon thousands of words he has expended as a TV commentator in Britain and a professor at Harvard. Time and again in his writings he has shown himself to be what is known in poli-sci classes as a “classical liberal” — or, in North American political parlance, a paleo-conservative.

First and foremost, Ignatieff came out in favor of the Iraq War. Let me pound this point home: If Ignatieff had been prime minister in 2003, Canadians would be fighting in Iraq today. This is exactly the same position Stephen Harper held.

Unlike Stephen Harper, however, Ignatieff changed his mind and decided that the Iraq war was a bad idea — but only after it became clear that his support for it hurt his electoral chances.

At least Stephen Harper has the courage of his convictions.

Ignatieff supported the Iraq war because he believes the West should interfere in regional conflicts throughout the world, with force if necessary. Granted, his reasons for supporting Western imperialism are quite “liberal” in one sense — people around the world are suffering, he says, and we have the capacity to help, so we must. But in another sense, this is just nineteenth-century jingoism all over again; we must take up the White Man’s Burden and save the darkies from themselves. Perfect paleo-conservatism if I’ve ever seen it.

But last week, Ignatieff really showed his true colors when he supported Bill C-15, the Conservatives’ attempt at bringing American-style hellfire-and-brimstone “justice” to Canada. Bill C-15, a fairly wide-ranging crime bill, provides for mandatory minimum jail sentences for, among other things, growing a single pot plant.

At a time when the United States is busy overturning its own mandatory-minimum laws because of their ineffectiveness, costliness and unjustness, Stephen Harper’s cabinet of clowns is busy repeating America’s mistakes one ill-advised policy after another. And Michael Ignatieff just went along with the worst of it.

It was likely a political calculation — you don’t win many votes by opposing sending criminals to jail. But this is the Liberal Party of Canada we’re talking about — the same party that six years ago put forward a bill to decriminalize marijuana (and then let it die on the floor of the House when it became clear George W. Bush would send the DEA to build a hundred-foot-tall wall on the Canadian border if the bill became law). For Ignatieff to support mandatory minimums for marijuana is an earth-shattering turnaround. This is not the Liberal Party we once knew (and voted into power).

Since Ignatieff put his name on Bill C-15, my interpretation of those negative ads the Conservatives have been running against him (”Michael Ignatieff — just visiting!”) has changed drastically.

I used to think the ads were stupid. How can you tear down a Canadian politician’s reputation by pointing out that he’s a professor at Harvard and a quasi-celebrity talking head on British TV? Canadians love that cosmpolitan stuff. But now I think those ads point to a deeper truth about Ignatieff. “Just visiting” may or may not be Ignatieff’s status in Canada, but it certainly is a good description of any position he happens to hold.

I find it interesting that the most articulate Liberal Party leader in decades, if ever — a man who made a career of talking in front of students and cameras at some of the highest institutions of learning in the world — expresses opinions so meekly as opposition leader. Where does Michael Ignatieff stand on the carbon tax and/or carbon credits? Where does he stand on Afghanistan? Health care? North American integration? The economy? Does anybody know? Perhaps he’s keeping quiet because he knows his ideas are considerably to the right of the Liberal voting base.

My guess is that, once people begin to understand Ignatieff’s track record, Liberal party support from the left will bleed to the NDP. Socialism isn’t the dirty word it used to be (like, six months ago), so while Ignatieff chases the right-of-center vote in a futile attempt to wrest it from Harper, he’ll face an exodus from the left end of his party to the New Democrats.

That will put Ignatieff in a tight spot. Right now, I give him considerably less than a 50-50 chance of winning a majority in the next election. But if he were to defect to the Conservatives, the whole political picture would change. As a Liberal, Ignatieff is way too far to the right; as a Conservative, he would pull the party back to the center and make them a credible alternative to the Liberals for the first time since Mulroney.

Let’s hope he really is just visiting, and quickly moves on to the Conservative party, where he belongs.