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The Canada Reads drama continues, with terrorism accusations and Facebook rebuttals

A White Cedar anti-bullying campaign image posted today to Nemat’s Facebook. Coincidence? (Image: Facebook)

Since when did the Canada Reads book competition turn into a Hunger Games–style death match? In yesterday’s debate, colourful Quebec lawyer Anne-France Goldwater accused Prisoner of Tehran author Marina Nemat of telling “a story that’s not true, and you can tell it’s not true when you read it.” (That goes a long way to explaining Nemat’s angry Facebook outburst yesterday.) But Nemat wasn’t the only one to get a Goldwater smackdown; the TV personality also called author Carmen Aguirre “a bloody terrorist,” adding, “How we let her into Canada, I don’t understand.” In response, Nemat again took to Facebook, this time to ask for a public apology from Goldwater (and to post a photo and link about bullying. Coincidence?). While she waits for that apology, Nemat can take some solace in today’s elimination of John Vaillant’s The Tiger—the book Goldwater was defending. Karma (and fuming writers) will get you every time.

The Informer

From the Print Edition

February 3, 2012 | 8:05 am

6 Comments

Jan Wong: Why aren’t schools teaching kids about the pleasures and perils of sex?

The answer is simple: our curriculum is shamefully outdated, and the Liberals are too scared to fix it
By Jan Wong | Illustration by Jesse Lefkowitz

Adam and Eve nibble an apple from the Tree of Knowledge and suddenly realize they’re both naked. Unfortunately, sex ed isn’t part of God’s plan, and He evicts them from the Garden of Eden. These days, some folks in Toronto are acting quite God-like themselves, insisting that the next generation live in innocence and ignorance. Heaven forbid our youth get to know themselves in the Biblical sense.

Our public schools are under attack by an evangelical Christian organization called the Institute for Canadian Values, whose leaders believe, as a basic ideological tenet, that teaching up-to-date sex education in schools will corrupt and confuse our children. The institute is run by a man named Charles McVety, who is quite skilled at getting media attention. Shamefully, most journalists have checked their brains at the door, blandly covering the institute’s actions and claims without questioning their legitimacy or standing up against the influence of the church on the state.

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The Informer

Streetcar Named Disaster

January 27, 2012 | 4:00 pm

6 Comments

Rob Ford tells Facebook why his transit plan is the one Toronto transit users want

(Image: Christopher Drost)

Presented with a transit plan from TTC chair Karen Stintz that would save $1.5 billion on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, contribute to the Sheppard subway extension and bring some form of rapid transit to underserved Finch Avenue, Rob Ford stubbornly dug his heels in and reiterated his commitment to burying the Eglinton line underground. In a note on his Facebook page, Ford insists his own transit plan is “doable,” and moreover, that it’s the plan that city transit users want (apparently, users want “RAPID” transit and they want it in ALL CAPS). He also says that for “100 years, Toronto’s transit system has been based on a backbone of subways” (not true), and that the Pembina Institute supports his plan (it doesn’t). Of course, although Stintz’s proposal appears to be gaining the support of all the right players, we’re not surprised Ford is refusing to budge. If the budget debate has taught us anything it’s that the mayor will turn down a face-saving compromise, even when that compromise is likely the only thing standing between a political defeat and public embarrassment. Read the entire story [Globe and Mail] »

The Informer

From the Print Edition

December 20, 2011 | 8:15 am

6 Comments

Jesse Brown: why smart phones in the classroom equals smarter kids

Fears of cyber-cheating and sexting in school are so last year
By Jesse Brown | Illustration by Till Hafenbrak

When Dalton McGuinty suggested in September 2010 that cellphones and tablets might have useful educational applications, he was savaged by both the press and his political opponents. The Toronto Sun called the idea a “terrible” surrender to already tech-addled kids who want to use gadgets only for Facebook. The National Post likened it to welcoming cigarettes and sharp objects into class. Even Wired magazine panned the idea of gadgets in school as “premature,” citing the potential for distraction, cyber-cheating and a digital divide between kids with the latest gear and kids without. The Ontario Tories picked up all the outrage and ran with it, slamming the notion as “absurd,” a prime example of just how out of touch McGuinty was, and asking, “Shouldn’t our kids be learning math and science instead?” They went on to suggest that if McGuinty gets his way, we will soon have “sexting” in our classrooms.

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

December 16, 2011 | 8:00 am

17 Comments

How bullying became the crisis of a generation

Kids are committing suicide, parents are in a panic, and schools that neglect to protect students are lawsuit targets
By Denise Balkissoon

Mitchell Wilson had a short life. He was born in March 2000 at Markham-Stouffville Hospital to Craig and Shelley Wilson. From the age of three, he had trouble running and jumping. He climbed stairs slowly, putting both feet on each step before moving up. He fell often, and sometimes he couldn’t get up on his own. His doctors thought he had hypermobility syndrome—joints that extend and bend more than normal.

When Mitchell was seven, his mother was diagnosed with an aggressive melanoma. Her treatments left her distant, sometimes testy and mean, and in so much pain that she rarely left her bedroom. “I sort of kept Mitchell away,” Craig Wilson told me.

“He basically didn’t talk to his mother during the last four months of her life.” Wilson often left his son to his own devices while he took care of his dying wife and ran his family’s industrial knife business. Mitchell spent most of his time in his bedroom, playing video games. He comforted himself with food, and by the time he was four feet tall he weighed 167 pounds. Once, in a Walmart, he fell to the ground and his grandmother had to ask store employees to help her lift him.

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

December 2, 2011 | 10:30 am

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Nicholas Hune-Brown: How to die on Facebook

When you’re dead, your Facebook page becomes a permanent digital gravestone, and your family and friends (and quite possibly some strangers) will indulge in a free-for-all of trivializing hagiography. The perils of online legacies
By Nicholas Hune-Brown

It was 11 in the morning on a warm Friday in September when a 16-year-old boy named Akash Wadhwa plunged from the Mavis Road overpass onto the busy 401. Shortly afterward, Peel police found the slain body of his classmate Kiranjit Nijjar in a nearby ravine.

At Mississauga Secondary School, what had begun as a series of horrific rumours solidified, piece by piece, into a single, devastating murder-suicide story. According to reports, Wadhwa, a depressed and troubled Grade 12 student, had strangled his 17-year-old friend Nijjar and then jumped onto the highway. Before he leapt, Wadhwa had left a last message on Facebook: “SUICIDE/MURDER NOTE: Three things I learned in life. What goes around comes around. KARMA is the biggest bitch. You should NEVER CHANGE on people who love and care for you… My one main reason I did this is that life let me down way too much.”

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

December 1, 2011 | 11:30 am

20 Comments

Toronto writer Alexandra Molotkow shares the secrets of her cybersexual education

I’m among the first generation to come of age on the Internet. By 13, I was an expert at chat room sex, spotting cyber-pervs and hiding my secret life from my parents
By Alexandra Molotkow | Illustrations by Dave Lapp

In 1997, when I was in Grade 6, my friends and I sat at the back of the classroom and talked about sex. We would speculate on what it felt like and place bets on how old we’d be when we finally lost our virginity. We would make fun of the way orgasms sounded in movies and imagine what celebrities’ sex lives involved. Later, at home, we’d reconvene on ICQ, one of the Internet’s first major instant messaging systems, which allowed us to have conversations we wouldn’t want our parents overhearing. That was what the Internet was to us: pretty much what a tree house would have been a few years earlier.

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The Informer

The New Normal

November 29, 2011 | 5:44 pm

6 Comments

Adam Giambrone updates his marital status on Facebook

It’s official (Image: Tsar Kasim)

Former councillor and one-time mayoral aspirant Adam Giambrone recently married his long-time partner Sarah McQuarrie, according to, uh, Facebook. The Toronto Star reports that Giambrone changed his marital status on Facebook, provoking an outpouring of likes and comments. Apparently the wedding took place at One King West, although Giambrone, true to form, couldn’t help but post a link to a Torontoist story about transit cuts in the minutes leading up the big moment. At the time of publication, the like count on his post is 135.

• Giambrone and McQuarrie now husband and wife [Toronto Star]

The Informer

From the Print Edition

November 8, 2011 | 10:35 am

2 Comments

The Q&A: Why the director of the Munk School of Global Affairs Janice Gross Stein won’t be our friend on Facebook

By Malcolm Johnston | Photograph by Daniel Ehrenworth

One of the essays in your new book argues that privacy has become an endangered species. Can you explain?
Threats to our privacy have proliferated. The Citizen Lab here at the Munk School discovered a group operating through servers in China that was able to remotely access people’s webcams. Think about that. As we’re sitting here, someone is hacking into your computer. When you go back to transcribe this interview, they will have a picture of you and a record of everything you have done.

That’s mildly terrifying. But it doesn’t appear that the general public is too concerned. We post every conceivable detail of our lives on Facebook and Twitter.
Well, that’s the really interesting contradiction. Threats to our privacy abound, and yet people voluntarily share intimate details through social media and email.

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

November 7, 2011 | 10:25 am

2 Comments

Reason to Love Toronto: because our geeks are gaming gods

Sept. 20, 2011, 3:57 p.m. George Brown gaming graduate Billy Matjiunis at Ubisoft’s Wallace Street studio (Image: Sean J. Sprague)

Video gamers are often maligned as dweebs with vitamin D deficiencies and a dearth of flesh-and-blood friends, but that probably described Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg at one point, too. We’re not saying that nephew of yours who posts his Call of Duty missions on YouTube will be the next great tech entrepreneur, but he could be, and Toronto has become the right place to be if he wants to try. Take the success story of east-end studio Capybara Games, whose app Sword and Sworcery ranked only behind Angry Birds on sales charts in March. Or Queen West’s Get Set Games, whose ultra-addictive Mega Jump has been downloaded 17 million times since last May. The triumphs of these smallish firms are part of the reason giants like Ubisoft and Zynga set up shop here, contributing to what has become a $240-million-a-year industry in Ontario. Traditionally, luring console kings into the workforce has been a challenge, which is why we’re big fans of George Brown College’s spiffy new video game incubator. Launching this month, it’s a gleaming space that puts game design students and start-ups side by side. The gadgetry is a geek’s fantasy: a soon-to-be-installed 3-D motion-tracking studio that captures and reproduces human movements with jaw-dropping accuracy, and a sea of tricked-out computers that would give Watson a run for its money. Tech wizards who might have headed to Silicon Valley after graduation can now get schooled and land a job in the same place. And if they invent the next Facebook, well, we can say we saw it coming.

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The Informer

Ford Focus

October 27, 2011 | 2:35 pm

11 Comments

Rob Ford releases a statement: he admits to dropping an F-bomb, but claims things are not be as bad as they once seemed

Image: Christopher Drost

The story of Rob Ford’s encounter with the CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes took a potty-mouthed turn this morning with news that Ford allegedly berated 911 dispatchers and insisted that he was, in fact, “Rob Fucking Ford.” But now the Globe and Mail disputes these claims, reporting that the CBC’s story is inaccurate, as does Doug Ford, offering a competing interpretation of the events in an interview with the Toronto Star. The mayor also released a statement on his Facebook page this afternoon, providing his own take as to what went down that fateful morning. Read the entire statement, after the jump.

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The Informer

Ford Focus

October 20, 2011 | 11:30 am

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Krista Ford: Lingerie Football League player turned revolutionary

Krista Ford, niece of mayor Rob Ford and daughter of councillor Doug Ford, rocked the sports world yesterday with the news that she was leaving the Lingerie Football League. “It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make thus far, however, I had to stand up for what I felt was right,” she wrote on Facebook. The Toronto Star reports that Ford’s team, the Toronto Triumph, cut four players after losing their first game by a wide margin. Ford and others then quit in protest. But the Star leaves out one crucial detail regarding Ford’s retirement: her decision to use a quotation, often attributed to Malcolm X, in her Facebook post: “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.” Oh, dear. Read the entire story [Toronto Star] »

The Goods

From the Print Edition

October 13, 2011 | 2:32 pm

1 Comment

The Thing: the idiot box is now bigger and badder than your average smart phone

Just because you can watch TV on your smart phone doesn’t mean you should

Television studios spend fortunes shooting in high definition, creating special effects and paying good-looking actors—and it’s not so their shows can be watched on iPads. This season, passive viewers and diehards alike should consider watching TV the old-fashioned way: on TV. The wafer-thin Samsung Plasma 8000 Series isn’t game changing, but it does exactly what a TV should do in the age of the Internet. It has built-in Wi-Fi so you can stream shows without cumbersome commercials or awkward network scheduling, and it comes loaded with social media apps like Skype and Facebook, so you can discuss The Office’s new boss with friends in real time. But the best part is that you can do all of that on a blisteringly sharp 64-inch plasma screen—the kind of screen that makes even the latest iteration of The Bachelor seem worth watching. With 26 weeks of new episodes ahead, it’s time to start clearing your social calendars. Samsung Plasma 8000 Series 64-inch TV, $4,000. Bay Bloor Radio, 55 Bloor St. W., 416-967-1122.

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

September 27, 2011 | 11:35 am

5 Comments

My Digital Sabbath: how one writer learned to stop checking Facebook and love life offline

I can’t say specifically which fabulous new technology made me decide I needed a break from all fabulous new technologies. For years I had been blissfully work-playing and play-working in the miasma of plugged-in life, writing magazine columns while live-streaming baseball games and listening to music and IMing and playing online chess and checking my email every two minutes, and not worrying whether performing five or six tasks simultaneously might limit my ability to perform any of them adequately. Maybe it was the iPad, a device designed, as far as I can tell, to allow you to watch television while you’re watching television. A friend told me about trying to talk to her teenage son while he was on his iPhone. “Why are you always looking at that thing when I’m trying to talk to you?” she asked. He answered: “Where do you think I learned it from, Mom?”

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The Informer

The New Normal

September 26, 2011 | 4:30 pm

Comments

Markham voting study suggests more people vote when voting is easy (as in, voting from your living room easy)

(Image: Alberto Garcia)

Markham has made voting in municipal elections as easy as indicating your preference for hockey over politics, an experiment that has apparently shaken some non-voters out of their complacency. The city offers online voting for advanced polls, and a recent report finds that—surprise—making voting easy and hassle free can result in significantly more people casting ballots.

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