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Horsemeat poised to make a comeback in the U.S.

(Image: James Byrum)

Top Chef Canada made headlines (and alienated horse lovers everywhere) earlier this year when it featured horsemeat during a classic French cuisine challenge. The scandal prompted an in-depth investigation of the industry by the ever-intrepid Toronto Star, which explained how a 2007 slaughtering ban in the United States led to a boom in Canada’s industry. Now, according to a story in the Chicago Tribune, horsemeat may be making a return to the U.S. market in the coming months.

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

August 3, 2011 | 9:00 am

22 Comments

How the G20—with its burning cars, broken storefronts, violent beatings and mass arrests—ruined Bill Blair’s popularity

By Nicholas Hune-Brown | Photographs by Daniel Ehrenworth

Family business: Blair planned on becoming a lawyer, but followed his dad into the TPS.

On June 26, 2010, Bill Blair was in the middle of the most complicated week of his career. The G20 summit had transformed the peaceful city that Blair had spent most of his life protecting into something closer to a police state. Protesters filled the streets. Steel fences sliced through the downtown core, guarded by black-masked riot police. Busloads of officers had arrived from across the country—cops who didn’t know Toronto’s streets and were technically not even accountable to Blair. Decisions about G20 security were being made by the Integrated Security Unit, a coalition of police and armed forces. The RCMP was responsible for controlling the area within the summit fence. The Toronto Police Service, assisted by officers from 21 provincial police detachments, was left with the rest of the city. The division of responsibilities was so unclear that as the summit began, even the head of the police board was confused about exactly where the ISU’s job ended and the TPS’s began. Blair was worried. International summits like the G20 rarely ended well. The chief had studied recent summits in preparation for the event, and what he found wasn’t encouraging. In Genoa in 2001, police had shot a protester to death. In 2009, rioters looted stores in Pittsburgh. Blair hoped to learn from history’s mistakes, but with tens of thousands of protesters meeting thousands of police officers, there were plenty of opportunities to make new ones.

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The Informer

Election Whoas

April 6, 2011 | 12:05 pm

1 Comment

Watch a comparison between strikingly similar ads: one for Stephen Harper, one for a U.S. Republican candidate

The Liberal Party of Canada is sending around a video implying that Conservative Leader Stephen Harper has borrowed American material for one of his campaign ads—even though the ad itself seems to suggest that it’s super Canadian to vote Tory. (Frankly, it didn’t t make us want to vote for him so much as to buy surplus 2010 Olympics gear from The Bay.) The Conservative commercial in question appears to borrow heavily from a similar ad for Republican Tim Pawlenty, who has launched a bid to unseat Barack Obama in next year’s American presidential election.

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The Dish

Opening

March 21, 2011 | 11:35 am

8 Comments

American chain Five Guys wades into Toronto’s burger wars

Five Guys Burger and Fries in New York’s West Village (Image: Angela N.)

Subway may have just surpassed McDonald’s as the world’s largest food chain, but that doesn’t mean the burger craze is dead. Patty pushers like M:Brgr and The Burger’s Priest have been going gangbusters since opening (the same can’t be said for Oh Boy! Burger Market; RIP), and now there’s a new kid on the block: Five Guys Burgers and Fries, a Virginia-based restaurant chain whose business is sizzling stateside (pun intended). There are already two outposts just outside the city, in Vaughan and Mississauga, and a new location is set to open at 800 Warden Avenue in Scarborough in either June or July.

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

December 16, 2010 | 9:00 am

4 Comments

Q&A with Dominic D’Alessandro: the former CEO of Manulife tell us how to turn Toronto into a global financial capital

Tenacious D (Image: Adam Rankin)

What have you been up to since you left Manulife a year ago?
I sit on a number of boards, so I’m as busy as I want to be. I’ve also been playing golf. I just got back from Pebble Beach.

How did you play?
I started off really terrific, then I reverted to form. I’ve got a double-digit handicap.

You’ve also been involved with launching a think-tank called the Global Risk Institute. How did it come about?
Canada emerged from the financial meltdown in far better shape than other countries. We should be proud of that. The GRI will build on our reputation as a good risk manager and lend gravitas to Toronto as a financial capital. People quote stuff that comes out of Brussels and Geneva and New York. We’d like them to reflect on findings that come out of Toronto.

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The Informer

The Feds

November 25, 2010 | 11:35 am

3 Comments

National media totally excited that Canada might get mentioned on Wikileaks

Like all good Canadians, we can’t help but notice when Canada is mentioned in international media, whether it’s The Daily Show, The West Wing or The Economist. So the news that Canada has finally made it into a Wikileaks document dump has us positively transfixed, of course—and the same can be said for the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail and CBC. According to the Globe, this dump is expected to be really juicy:

“These revelations are harmful to the United States and our interests,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said. “They are going to create tension in relationships between our diplomats and our friends around the world.”

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The Informer

The New Normal

November 3, 2010 | 12:15 pm

1 Comment

George Smitherman, Rick Mercer and other Canadian gays appear in It Gets Better video series

Tim Gunn did one. Hillary Clinton did one. Hell, Barack Obama did one. Seems as though making an It Gets Better video has become the kindness trend of the year, and Canadian celebrity gays refuse to be left behind. A new video released yesterday features Rick Mercer, Rex Harrington, Diane Flacks, George Smitherman (still sadly wearing his mayoral campaign button), Tommy Smythe, Enza Anderson, the cast of MTV’s 1g5g, Joeffer Caoc, David Dixon, Deb Pearce and Peter Fallico all discussing how much their lives improved as they came out, grew up and gained confidence. The It Gets Better project was kicked off a few months ago by American sex columnist Dan Savage as a reaction to a spike in suicides among teenage homosexuals. The videos assure young gay people that existence improves as life goes on.

The Informer

Mayor May Not

August 24, 2010 | 12:37 pm

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Ford’s up, Rossi’s down and Miller could still win: Toronto gets a confusing new poll about the mayoral race

This telephone poll of 400 people was conducted by Ipsos Reid, for Global News, Newstalk1010 and the National Post

Political junkies in the city were finally blessed at 4:04 yesterday afternoon with the news they’d been waiting for: a new poll! Released by Global News, the poll confirms what everyone already thought: Rob Ford is in the lead (32 per cent), George Smitherman is behind him (21 per cent), and the other three front-runners are trailing badly. In particular, Rocco Rossi—once the darling of the anti-Smitherman forces in the city—is now rapidly approaching what statisticians call “the Mammoliti zone”; at seven per cent, he’s almost within the poll’s margin of error. (The Rossi campaign announced yesterday that it would be changing management now that rumours are swirling that Rossi’s own campaign manager was urging him to drop out and endorse Smitherman.)

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The Informer

Mayor May Not

August 20, 2010 | 12:59 pm

6 Comments

Reaction roundup: the best things said about Rob Ford’s worst week

If a mayoral candidate named Rob Ford has a Wednesday filled with such questions as “Is Rob Ford prejudiced?” and “How prejudiced is Rob Ford?” it’s safe to say it was a bad week. Then, when Thursday starts off with a press conference to announce exactly how many criminal charges the candidate has faced in his life, well, that goes from bad to terrible. Add in the fact that Ford’s misremembering of important details kept chumming the waters for the sharks in the press corps, and this is probably the worst week in Rob Ford’s political life so far. It’s not just Ford’s opponents who have been buzzing over the past 48 hours—the entire city is reacting. Here, our roundup of what was said across the city.

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The Informer

The Yanks

August 5, 2010 | 4:25 pm

3 Comments

Five things we learned about Canada from Esquire magazine’s grudging cross-border compliment

The stories just keep on coming: Canada has weathered the economic crisis relatively well, thanks to our prudent and stable banking system. We’ve been praised for it in The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and, earlier this week, Esquire. The monthly offers the compliment only backhandedly, though. Esquire expresses complete surprise that Canada could actually do something right, and dedicates a sizable amount of text to explaining why we suck so much. Below, the five key things we learned about our homeland from the glossy men’s mag.

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The Informer

Mayor May Not

August 5, 2010 | 11:03 am

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Is John Tory ready to concede that his 15 minutes is up—again?

Early on, we called John Tory‘s mayoral indecision a “Hamlet act.” Well, it now looks like Tory might finally have read the play, only to discover what the price of waffling can be. According to a Toronto Star blog, Tory is now leaning—once again—towards no.

The source said his enthusiasm has waned, apparently after hearing sobering advice that he should have announced and started organizing earlier, the reality that most of his advisers are committed to other candidates and won’t defect, and that [Rob] Ford won’t drop out under any circumstances. In fact, Ford, a past ardent Tory supporter who entered the race only after Tory said in January he was staying out, has been signalling that his old friend would be in for a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle battle.

Tory is also aware of the haunting prospect of coming up short yet again. After losing a provincial byelection last year, he resigned as leader of Ontario’s PC party, and in 2003, Tory lost the mayoral election to David Miller.

Tory has oscillated pretty wildly throughout 2010, so we’re most inclined to take his lastest musings with a grain of salt (he’s got another month before the city’s registration closes). But if Tory was only leaning towards running because he thought Ford would drop out, this starts to feel more solid. Ford gives every appearance of being in this race for the duration, and not-so-gently let it slip that Tory would get no quarter from Ford and his weird YouTube ads.

This whole Tory situation reminds us of when, in the midst of the pitched battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats in the U.S. started yearning for Al Gore to jump in to the race and unite both sides. Of course, that never happened and the Web-savvy upstart beat the candidate who long ago thought she had the thing wrapped up.

Of course, we’re not sure if this counts as Web-savvy.

• Consultations lead Tory to reconsider mayoral run [Toronto Star]

The Informer

Summit Survivor

July 19, 2010 | 10:26 am

25 Comments

Officer Bubbles takes Toronto

This G20 thing just isn’t going away. A video by Real News that went viral on YouTube last week shows a young woman blowing bubbles being threatened with arrest for assault. “If the bubble touches me, you’re going to be arrested for assault,” Constable Adam Josephs tells Courtney Winkels, who was, in all fairness, blowing multiple bubbles. In further justifying his reaction, Josephs explains that there’s detergent in the bubbles that could get into a policeman’s eyes. Another cop in the video seems both perplexed and amused by the whole exchange.

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The Informer

The New Normal

July 6, 2010 | 11:18 am

3 Comments

Queen’s RIM job: five wonderful things Elizabeth II can do with her new BlackBerry

On Monday, our royal sovereign joined the ranks of famous BlackBerry owners (Barack Obama, Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, Kristin Cavallari, etc.) when she toured Research in Motion headquarters in Waterloo and was given a personalized Bold 9700 model by RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis. Sure, it’s been rumoured that Queen Elizabeth II already has a BlackBerry, but now that it’s official, we thought the time was ripe to suggest five things she could do on her new gizmo.

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The Dish

Bottoms Up

June 30, 2010 | 1:41 pm

1 Comment

Ladies’ choice: women are apparently better beer tasters than men

Drink to that: women know their beer (Image: AdmlCrunch)

In February, when Stephen Harper chose Molson Canadian as his prize for winning a bet with Barack Obama, we wondered why he didn’t choose a better brew. Other than the fact that he has lame taste in beer, there’s another explanation: it may have been due to his Y chromosomes. In fact, some brewers are saying that women are inherently better at tasting beer than men.

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The Informer

Summit Survivor

June 29, 2010 | 5:25 pm

2 Comments

Five things we learned from Jon Stewart’s coverage of G20 Toronto

Jon Stewart shows G20 leaders how to put the moves on Toronto women (Image: Comedy Network)

We’re as guilty as anyone for noting that coverage of the G20 was kind of sparse in the international media, but we knew that our summit (and its associated riot) had finally hit something of a media bonanza when it was featured on the most reputable source in fake news, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Last night’s segment dedicated to G20 Toronto told the Comedy Central audience exactly five things about Toronto that are worth repeating.

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