Christian Cotroneo

Penny Loker's CNN Email Makes Ontario Woman A Viral Star

2013-04-18T20:47:35-04:00

What may have disturbed Penny Loker the most about a CNN story about disfigured Vietnamese children and stillborn babies was the caption above the photos.

According to Loker's blog, it read: “Warning: the following photographs contain graphic content of severely deformed children. Viewer discretion is advised.”

Loker was reportedly born with rare birth defects -- hemifacial miscrosomia and Goldenhar Syndrome -- that affected the way facial bones and tissues formed.

A 'viewer discretion' label for children who simply looked different?

In the Waterloo, Ontario woman's own words:

"This pissed me off to no end because the first picture was of this sweet little girl who had the biggest smile you could tell that despite her surroundings she was happy.

"The other reason why this hurt me was because I am different. I am 'deformed' and reading that viewer discretion warning ahead of the article (amounted) to telling me that every time I left the house I should wear a similar warning.

So, she sent an email to the news organization.

“I didn’t expect anything. I just sent it off, thought it would just go into cyberspace, never to be heard from again,” Loker told CBC's The Morning Edition on Thursday.

CNN did reportedly change the photo caption. And went a step further -- reaching out to Loker.

"We invited her to educate us all by sharing her story and allowing us to see the world through her eyes," an editor's note reads on a CNN story featuring the 31-year-old.

And then, as Loker related to CBC, came the flood of emails and social media support. She would later host a CNN online chat and write about her experiences on her blog.

One of the many new online friends who embraced her story wrote, "unfortunately she has also been the victim of... ridicule at times in her life because of her birth defect and appearance.

"We don't care about physical appearances, right? What should matter is only integrity and character."

Another blog, The Virtuous Girl, sums up the spirit of Penny Loker -- a spirit that seems to have reached thousands.

'Even though Penny’s birth defects disfigured her face, she refused to let it affect the person she is on the inside. Penny is beautiful not because of how she looks, but because of who she is. Instead of being negative about her condition, Penny embraced it. Instead of hiding, Penny now seeks to help and encourage other kids exactly like her.'

Rehtaeh Parsons Suicide: Bullying Victims In Canada Are Mounting. Is Anyone Listening?

2013-04-11T13:18:49-04:00

Slut. Fag. Loser.

This is the way their world ends.

With a casual cruelty scrawled on a Facebook wall for all to see.

It’s one of the little deaths suffered by children every day, across the country.

These are not your father’s bullies. Rather, the digital age has given tormentors an unprecedented reach into young lives. From Facebook to texting to Twitter to YouTube, bullies burrow deep into a young, raw psyche -- and deliver devastating blows.

And we, too, suffer that devastation as we learn their stories and their names.

Amanda. Jamie. Michael. And now Rehtaeh, or Rae, as her dad called her.

Earlier this week, the parents of Rehtaeh Parsons made the heartbreaking decision to remove the Halifax teen from life support.

A few days earlier, she had tried to hang herself.

If claims of being raped by four schoolmates are proven, the 17-year-old certainly endured more than most victims.

But the same fatal thread remains. Her father says she was hounded online with a photo of the ordeal.

“They took photos of it. They posted it on their Facebook walls. They emailed it to God knows who. They shared it with the world as if it was a funny animation,” grieving parent Glen Canning wrote in a blog posted on The Huffington Post Canada.

“Why is it they didn't just think they would get away with it?” her father asked.

“They knew they would get away with it.”

Parsons’ death stirred a tsunami of outrage across Canada.

Why didn’t school authorities investigate the assault? A school board spokesperson told the Chronicle Herald they didn’t want to interfere with the police investigation.

And what about the persistent bullying that would ultimately propel this tragedy into national headlines?

Silence.

These questions, of course, always come too late.

Here’s a more prescient one: What will stop it from happening again?

Not just the next headline-snatching tragedy -- but the countless ‘little deaths’ that are adding up in schools and homes and social networking sites and on mobile phones as you’re reading this?

Story continues after slideshow.

To date, anti-bullying measures are little more than a patchwork of local laws and programs -- some provincial legislation, some school board policies, some grassroots campaigns at schools and in communities.

And yet, the vulnerable still slip through the cracks.

After all, could there really be a more more visceral campaign than the one launched by Vancouver-area teen Amanda Todd? She was in the grips of persistent and brutal bullying -- both online and at school -- when she shared her story on YouTube last September.

The nine-minute clip shows Todd holding up cue cards, detailing her ordeals in school after school, city after city.

A month later, she took her own life.

Indeed, the social media knife cuts both ways. While bullies flock to cyberspace, so do their victims to find a forum for exposing the abuse.

Jamie Hubley, an openly gay teen in Ottawa, also chronicled his experiences online -- a series of blog entries that culminated in an online suicide note.

“I couldn't fix my own boy and that's tearing me apart,” his father, city councillor Allan Hubley, told CBC after his son’s death.

Mitchell Wilson of Toronto never got much of a forum at all.

You wouldn’t know it by that wall-to-wall smile, but the 11-year-old spent his short life battling muscular dystrophy. His mother had died when he was just eight.

Then came the demons. And a battle he did not win.

In November 2010, Wilson was attacked by a boy who went to his elementary school. The encounter ended with Wilson losing his iPhone -- and a row of teeth after getting his face smashed into the sidewalk.

The boy told his story to anyone who would listen -- including people who should listen. But his case found deaf ears among police officers and teachers. Ten months later, Mitchell Wilson took his own life, shortly before he was to testify at the trial of the boy who allegedly attacked him.

A judge acquitted a 13-year-old of assaulting and robbing him, The Toronto Star reported, because the Crown did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was the attacker.

Jenna Bowers-Bryanton went looking for a very different kind of ear online.

The teen from tiny Belmont, N.S., dreamed of becoming a singer.

She posted some of her performances on a social networking site.

Cue the armchair critics with that particular brand of ruthlessness that so often comes with anonymity.

"They told her she had no talent, that she was ugly, that she may as well go kill herself," family friend Marsha Milner told CBC.

And, in all all-too familiar refrain, Bowers-Bryanton did kill herself. She was 15.

In the aftermath of her death, an exasperated Const. Todd Taylor of Truro Police Service told The Chronicle Herald, “We need to find something today we can use to put this type of behaviour in check. There is absolutely nothing to stop these young people from doing what they’re doing. There are no consequences. That's disturbing.”

Canadian Forces In Iceland: CF-18 Hornets On Guard For Island Nation

2013-03-28T08:28:17-04:00

Six fighter jets and a few dozen soldiers are this country's only line of defence against foreign invaders.

Just not this country.

About 160 Canadian Forces personnel, along with CF-18 Hornet jet fighters, are hunkering down for a five-week campaign in not-quite-war-torn Iceland.

As the only NATO member without an air force -- and not even a single soldier on its payroll -- Iceland relies on the militaries of others for its defense.

“Basically, it’s a presence patrol. They’re providing surveillance and interception capabilities,” Captain Cynthia Kent, spokeswoman for Canadian Joint Operations Command told the National Post.

Under Operation Ignition, Canadians arrived in Keflavik, about 50 km outside of the capital of Reykjavik on March 18.

During the Cold War, the small town hosted a key NATO air base, monitoring Soviet deployments behind the Iron Curtain. Today, it's known more for whale-watching tours, as well as a festival of lights that, sadly, the Canadian contingent will miss. They are slated to punch out of Iceland at the end of April.

Instead, soldiers will spend their days staring into radar screens and identifying passing aircraft.

Even in the incredibly unlikely event someone decides it might be a nice idea to invade Iceland, Canadian soldiers wouldn't have to go it alone.

Operation Ignition defers the island's ultimate defence to American troops.

Defending the land of ice and fire -- and stunning volcanoes -- has proven a contentious issue for Icelanders.

Viking roots aside, the country has long taken pride in its more pacifist leanings -- even threatening, on occasion, to turn in its NATO membership card.

In fact, the decision to join the organization immediately sparked the most notorious riot in its history. On March 20, 1949, thousands marched on Reykjavik's parliament building to protest the government's decision to join newly minted NATO. After lobbing stones and smashing windows, protesters were quickly smothered by what seemed a heavy-handed government response at the time -- tear gas and beat downs.

In 2006, American forces walked away from Keflavik after holding down the base for 45 years.

A few years later, Iceland was roiling international waters with news that it had signed a $1.6 million deal with private corporation, ECA Program, to refit the aging Keflavik facilities.

Why all the wrangling over an island of some 320,000 people in the frigid north Atlantic?

Well, there's energy.

With 13 per cent of the world's untapped oil, 30 per cent of its natural gas and 20 per cent of natural gas liquid under the Arctic seabed, according to the U.S. Geological Society, Iceland is a key point of access to all that wealth.

That may be why even China -- a historically distant diplomatic relation -- is knocking on Iceland's door. This month the New York Times reported on the budding superpowers positively warm offer to build a 'tourist paradise' in the cash-strapped country's north.

Chris Hadfield Pictures From Space Mapped

2013-03-15T11:13:00-04:00

Space becomes Chris Hadfield.

He's been delivering an unparalleled perspective on our homeworld ever since he rode a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station on December 21.

"India, through a hole in the clouds," the Canadian astronaut tweeted in early January, along with a picture he had taken of patchwork greens and browns under gauzy clouds.

Another snow-speckled image of Canada's northeast harks back to his days as a fighter pilot.

"Goose Bay, Happy Valley, Labrador. I flew CF-18s as an RCAF fighter pilot here," he tweeted.

Then there's Niagara Falls at night, all dressed up in glittering light.

And Cape Town, South Africa, slipping into the burnished blue sea.

And solitary Lake Baikal in Siberia, the "immensely old and deep" reservoir of a fifth of the Earth's fresh water.

They're just a handful of mesmerizing scenes from the man who framed the world. Scores more, cover every continent save for Antarctica. (The space station doesn't quite dip low enough to see it.)

And now, you can marvel at them all on one comprehensive map.

David MacLean, a geography teacher at a Nova Scotia college, has applied a little ground control to Hadfield's heavenly transmissions -- with a few taken by fellow astronaut Tom Marshburn -- and plotted them on an interactive online map.

YOU CAN CHECK OUT HIS CREATION HERE.

MacLean dreamed up the project as a means of cataloguing the space ace's brilliant barrage of images.

"They're fantastic and it's great to be a part of his daily regimen, I guess you could say," he told The Huffington Post.

Clicking on any of those thumbnails calls up the actual photo taken from ISS. And clicking again, enlarges that image to its original glory.

Story continues below slideshow.

As for Hadfield, the 53-year-old astronaut isn't coming down to Earth just yet. In fact, he was promoted earlier this week to commander of the ISS -- marking the first time a Canadian has ever taken the helm of the orbiting lab.

Then there's a certain quirky collaboration with Canadian rockers, The Barenaked Ladies, a chat with Captain K--- err, William Shatner. Not to mention celestial shout-outs to more than half a million of his followers on Twitter.

With the space station orbiting the planet every 92 minutes, there are still so many scenes to be captured. And so many Earthlings to dazzle.

Earlier this week, Hadfield marked Pi Day -- a mathematician's dream date -- with a stunning close-up of the Sahara desert, "looking like the crust of a pie. Perfect for Pi Day!"

On Friday morning, our intrepid spaceman came travelling near his birthplace in Sarnia, Ontario. Or thereabouts.

"Good Morning to Southern Ontario - we're about to fly over! Can you see us?" he tweeted.

Affirmative, Commander Hadfield. We read you loud and clear.

Marc Ouellet, Canada Cardinal: Pope Gig Nixed Over Conservative Concerns?

2013-03-14T10:58:43-04:00

At least Cardinal Marc Ouellet's mother can take comfort in the fact that he didn't get the gig.

"Well, I am keeping my son, in a way," the 90-year-old reportedly said after hearing that Argentina's Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio would be the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church and assume the title Pope Francis.

But for Canadians, those tell-tale Vatican smoke signals must surely represent a disappointment as the country missed its best chance yet to see a fellow countryman lead the world's 1.2 billion Catholics.

And it begs the question: Why didn't the man from La Motte, Que., become the first Canadian pontiff ever?

Since former Pope John Paul II appointed him bishop in 2001, Ouellet seemed a rising star in the Catholic world. In 2002, he became archbishop of Quebec City and Primate of Canada. A year later, he was elevated to cardinal. In 2010, he began serving on the Congregation of Bishops — the powerful body that oversees the nomination of bishops around the world.

The Globe and Mail suggests Ouellet lacked 'the mettle' to be Catholic #1.

He certainly did himself no favours when, in a 2010 interview, he described it as a "nightmare" job.

Ouellet also came under fire for his perceived silence on the smoldering issue of sex abuse in the Church.

"Cardinal Ouellet is responsible for the silence, indifference, the inaction of the Catholic church in Quebec when it comes to sexual-abuse victims," France Bedard, president of l'Association des victimes de prêtres told The Canadian Press."

"His primary goal is to protect the image of the Catholic church."

But what may have really undermined his drive to the Vatican runs even deeper than that — to the early 20th Century writings of a Swiss priest named Hans Urs von Balthasar.

STORY CONTINUES AFTER GRAPHIC

Balthasar died in 1988, but not before penning a massive body of work, much of it extolling traditional Catholic values while rejecting the Church's perceived leanings toward modernity.

"Balthasar challenged what he considered to be the anti-Christianity of Western modernism and believed God could conquer godlessness — appropriate lines of thought for someone like Ouellet, who spent eight years as archbishop of a hyper-secularized Quebec," Michael Valpy wrote for the CBC in the days ahead of the papal conclave.

As such, Balthasar was a staunch supporter of celibacy for priests and would stamp out any notion of allowing women to take the cloth.

One of the most prominent Catholic thinkers of his generation, Balthasar proved a powerful influence on the Church — and, as, the Montreal Gazette reports, a friend to the cardinal from Quebec.

Indeed, Ouellet's doctoral thesis included a discussion on the Swiss theologian's body of work.

Balthasar also happened to have an ardent admirer in former Pope Benedict XVI.

"He's completely in the spirit of Benedict," Michael Higgins, a teacher at Connecticut's Sacred Heart University told The Associated Press before the conclave. "Whether that makes him the ideal pope for our time is a different matter."

As Valpy echoes for the CBC, "By most accounts, Ouellet is another introverted intellectual like Benedict."

Ouellet certainly practised what Balthasar preached. In a 2010 interview with the National Post, he claimed Catholics had interpreted teachings from the landmark Second Vatican Council too liberally.

Was it all a little too introverted — and perhaps, too grounded in yesterday's dogma — to light the way for a Catholic spring?

An article appearing in German newspaper Spiegel suggests the Church was looking to make a clean break from the company men of yesterday.

Citing leaks from the Vatican, the article sees cardinals around the world "sharply critical of the papal administrative machinery."

Ultimately, the Church's lurch into the 21st Century may have led it away from Balthasarian thinking — and, in the process, from the man from La Motte.

Meet The Coywolf: Susan Fleming Film Looks At The Hybrid In Our Midst

2013-02-08T08:24:47-05:00

Susan Fleming was working in the garden one evening when she heard the call.

It came from the darkening hills that bordered her rural property in Uxbridge, Ont.

And sent a shiver down her spine.

"It was just like a baby being killed but also a donkey screaming," she recalls. "It was just the most bizarre thing."

She ended up spending her evenings outside, keening an ear for that haunting sound. The creature that prowled those hills didn't disappoint, sending its strange siren into the night again and again.

"You don't forget when you hear the sound, because it's half howl, half yip. It's really unique."

Consumed by curiosity, Fleming wasted no time in sounding out the scientific community.

And she learned it was the call of the coywolf.

"What we think of as coyotes in this part of the world is really a coyote-wolf hybrid," she told The Huffington Post Canada. "It's a new species. That's a pretty remarkable thing."

Even more surprising, this predator has been living in our midst for decades -- thanks to the social savviness of its coyote ancestry, which allows it to virtually vanish in urban environments.

"They have the remarkable ability to operate under the radar," Fleming notes.

"We're not talking about a raccoon or something small. This is a large animal. Most people have no idea they're there."

Indeed, the coywolf has only been around for the past 100 or so years, but has begun infiltrating cities only very recently.
Fleming, an accomplished filmmaker, heeded the call.

Debuting Feb. 14 on CBC, her new film, "Meet the Coywolf," traces the footfalls of this elusive animal from the cradle of coywolf civilization near Ontario's Algonquin Park to our very doorsteps.

That's where things get really interesting.

Coywolves are flourishing in major cities, as these medium-sized carnivores devour everything from rats to rubbish to Canada Geese.

At one point during filming, Fleming spotted a coywolf skulking off with someone's discarded turkey. And then there's the fascinating interplay between coywolves and their urban playgrounds.

When fire trucks howl near Toronto's High Park, the coywolf population answers, lending their own inimitable call to the chorus.

But coywolves are raising another kind of alarm. With their big, strong jaws, flourishing numbers and increasing ease in urban locales, should humans be afraid of the big bad coywolf?

If you believe some media accounts, certainly. The Toronto Star's Carola Vyhnak writes about this urban scourge "plaguing" the Greater Toronto Area.

She cites thousands in damages caused by these apparently ravenous beasts, which mulched through at least 545 animals back in 2008.

And certainly, their smaller relative, the coyote, has had an increasingly uneasy relationship with humans.

"Over the last 30 years or so, there has been a general escalation of seriousness in encounters between people and coyotes," Erich Muntz, a supervisor at Cape Breton Highlands National Park, says in the film.

"Through the '90s, there were a number of incidents where coyotes were following people, and chasing them.'

In 2009, budding folk musician Taylor Mitchell was killed on Cape Breton's Skyline Trail. It was the first known fatal attack by a coyote on a human.

When it comes to the coywolf, however, Susan Fleming isn't pushing panic buttons. After all, these masters of disguise seem to have long learned the wiles of big city living, padding softly beneath our very noses. And feasting on our excesses.

"There's a lot of garbage in the city," Fleming says. "There's just so much food available.

"One of the things that came up again and again with the scientists is that they're still going about their business the same way they always have. The thing that changes them is when we change."

It's the story of that fine balance between human and hybrid that propels Fleming's mesmerizing glimpse of the not-so-wild kingdom on our doorstep.

And she thinks this story is only beginning.

"It's a fascinating story to watch over the next 10 years."

2012 Canada Crime Stories: Looking Back At The Year's Darkest Chapters

2012-12-31T12:33:54-05:00

"Their solution," the Crown attorney told a rapt courtroom in Kingston, Ontario, "was to remove the diseased limb entirely and prune the tree back to the good wood."

That's how Laurie Lacelle described the murder of three teen sisters at the hands of their parents and older brother.

For patriarch Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed Mohammad Shafia, society was the disease. And images on their daughters' cell phones — all dressed up in smiles and what you might expect girls their age to wear — was all too much.

Restoring honour turned out to be murder.

On June 30, 2009, a black Nissan Sentra was found at the bottom of a Kingston canal. Sisters Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti Shafia, along with their mother Rona Amir Mohammed were found dead inside.

On January 29, 2012, a jury found Shafia, his second wife and their son guilty on four counts of first-degree murder.

For a Canadian public that had followed every dark twist revealed during the trial, the 'disease' turned out to be the warped sense of honour that allowed parents to snuff out the lives of their own children.

Story Continues After The Gallery

THE TRIAL, IN PHOTOS

The Shafia case wasn't the only headline-snatching horror of 2012.

And while we puzzled over one family's 'honour', the motives in other cases were even less scrutable.

Like the brutality visited upon a Calgary man at the hands of 32-year-old Dustin Paxton.

On April 16, 2010, a young man was dropped off at a Regina hospital. Severely malnourished, bruised and broken, his bottom lip had been nearly torn off completely.

Paxton was charged in connection with a long-running series of attacks in Regina and Calgary on the man, who cannot be named under a publication ban.

Asked in court to describe Paxton, the victim summed him up simply:

"Evil. He's smart, mean, twisted. I would do anything not to get beaten any more."

A judge seemed to agree. Justice Sheilah Martin determined that Paxton had beaten and starved his ex-roommate regularly.

"I find there is evidence of wounding, maiming, disfiguring and his life was in danger on two occasions," she said in her decision.

As the Calgary Herald reports, Paxton's sentence is on hold while a court hears the results of a psychiatric assessment.

And then there was Michael Rafferty. The Toronto man was convicted of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and murdering eight-year-old Tori Stafford.

Indeed, his deeds were so dark a Superior Court judge could hardly restrain his rage.

"You have snuffed out the life of a beautiful, talented, vivacious little girl, a 'tomboy diva' in the trustful innocence of childhood," judge Thomas Heeney said during sentencing. "And for what? So that you could gratify your twisted and deviant desire to have sex with a child. Only a monster could commit an act of such pure evil."

Story Continues After The Galleries

If an entire city could count itself a victim, it would have been Toronto last summer, as it found itself under siege from a spate of seemingly random and certainly senseless shootings.

On June 2, gunfire at the iconic Eaton Centre sent shoppers fleeing in horror. By the end of the day, six innocent bystanders had been wounded, including a 13-year-old boy. And one man, Ahmed Hassan, was dead.

Police would soon charge 23-year-old Christopher Husbands with one count of first-degree murder and six counts of attempted murder.

But the 'Summer of the Gun' was not over.

A month later, a block party in the city's east end fell under a hail of bullets.

In all, two people were killed — 14-year-old Shyanne Charles and 23-year-old Joshua Yasay — and 23 others were sent to hospital.

Deadly shootings seem to ring out throughout the rest of the summer, including a brazen execution-style slaying in Little Italy, sparking fears that Canadian cities were spiraling into gangland violence.

Story Continues After The Gallery

Any list of violent crime in 2012 would be hard-pressed to exclude Luka Magnotta.

A small-time porn actor — with a seemingly insatiable appetite for celebrity — Magnotta stands accused of dismembering Chinese student Jun Lin and sending his body parts to various parts of the country by mail.

But the 29-year-old's name has already darkened too many headlines this year to earn another inch in this space.

Check the gallery below for some of the year's most tragic chapters.

Justin Trudeau Alberta Comments Could Derail Liberal Star's Momentum (VIDEO)

2012-11-23T09:13:50-05:00

If Justin Trudeau's pro-energy stance gave him any currency in the West, it was quickly spent — thanks to the ill-timed emergence of comments he made to a Quebec television show two years ago.

"Canada isn't doing well right now because it's Albertans who control our community and socio-democratic agenda," he told Les Francs-Tireurs in 2010. "It doesn't work."

And he didn't stop there, adding, "Certainly when we look at the great prime ministers of the 20th Century, those that really stood the test of time, they were MPs from Quebec. This country — Canada — it belongs to us."

A day later, Trudeau apologized for the comments during a brief media scrum in Vancouver.

"I'm sorry I said what I said," The Globe and Mail reported him as saying Friday. "I'm here to serve."

But the Tele-Quebec interview couldn't have emerged at a worse time for the star Liberal candidate, who is actually trying to win friends in Alberta, as a key by-election in Calgary nears its conclusion.

The Liberals have a rare opportunity to gain a seat in Calgary-Centre, with candidate Harvey Locke threatening to capture what has been a bastion of Conservative power for the last 40 years.

A star contender for his party's leadership crown, Trudeau seems to be single-handedly transforming a battered Liberal party into a national contender again.

While a recent Nanos poll shows the Conservatives ahead with 34 per cent of popular support, the Liberals appeared to make astounding gains. They now trail the Tories by just five per cent and are in a dead heat with the NDP.

Trudeau's candidacy is widely seen as the reason for the Grits' much-improved fortunes, with his name even pushing Liberal support to 24 per cent or higher in the four western provinces — not a traditional bastion of Liberal support.

But the 2010 Alberta comments threaten to derail that momentum.

For its part, the Trudeau camp issued a statement on Facebook, laying blame, predictably, on the Tories.

"The Conservatives are using out-of-context statements made years ago in a long interview. They are clearly concerned that they are losing the by-election in Calgary Centre and are resorting to smear campaigns to stop their slide," the statement said.

“It was a very long interview in French," the statement said. "What he was saying was that Quebecers see a government that doesn’t share their values."

In a brief media scrum in Vancouver, Trudeau said the interview was focused on urging Quebec residents to stop voting for the Parti Quebecois. He also said that he spoke of Alberta but he should have clarified that he meant to say Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

But pundits and analysts were not buying it.

On CBC's At Issue on Thursday night, panellists essentially took turns extolling the damages to Trudeau's prime ministerial ambitions.

Story Continues After The Video

Political analyst Bruce Anderson suggested Trudeau's comments were not only a serious setback to Liberal hopes in upcoming Alberta by-elections, but to Trudeau's aspirations to become a national leader.

Don't call it a mere gaffe, added columnist Chantal Hebert. "To me, that is a major error in judgement and it speaks to something you don't look for normally in a national leader."

During the segment, columnist Andrew Coyne was no less charitable.

"He gave no indication in the interview that he didn't actually believe what he was saying," he said. "If you're running for national office in a famously fractious country where your job is to be a unifier not a divider, this is the kind of thing that's certainly going to be a lot of marks against you."

Newspapers joined the chorus of condemnation. Matt Gurney of the National Post wasted no time in reminding readers why the Liberals were drummed out of power in the first place.

The Papineau, Quebec MP 's words, Gurney wrote, "reek of arrogance".

"This certainly won’t help the Liberals in Alberta, particularly in the upcoming Calgary Centre by-election," he added.

And in the Twitterverse, Trudeau's name was trending for all the wrong reasons on Wednesday.

Story Continues After The Slideshow

Trudeau's comments surfaced on the heels of another Liberal misstep, again involving Alberta.

This week, Ontario Liberal MP David McGuinty resigned as natural resources critic after suggesting Alberta MPs need to expand their energy policies to include the rest of Canada or "go home".

Any bad news for the surging Liberals, of course, is good news for the Tories, who piled on with all the expected enthusiasm.

Federal immigration minister Jason Kenney denounced the comments of both politicians as evidence of anti-Alberta bias within the Liberal party.

"This is the worst kind of divisiveness, the worst kind of arrogance of the Liberal party and it brings back, for many westerners, the kind of arrogance of the National Energy Program, which of course devastated the western economy," Kenney told the CBC.

Anti-Bullying PSA, 'Helping Hand,' Targets Bystanders (VIDEO)

2012-11-20T11:31:22-05:00

Last night I dreamt.

I dreamt I was being showered with memories from my happiest days.

If only those dreams didn’t have to fade. As I awake to what my day will be like.

That's the opening to Toronto filmmaker Rich Obeng's mini-opus on the ravages of bullying — before it turns on a dime to the slings and arrows of this teen's stark reality.

The film, punctuated by jarring images of a a tearful girl holding a noose to her neck, delivers an even more unsettling verdict on the people who make bullying possible.

"Today, you've given me the hand I need to stand tall," the girl narrates. "The hands that you've always dealt me. Those hands will set me free."

The hand to which she's referring is the so-called 'helping hand' that remains idle in the midst of bullying — the hand that, ultimately, helped this teen take her own life. In other words, the bystanders to bullying.

Obeng, who grew up in Toronto's Jane and Finch area, needed only one inspiration for the short — a conversation he had with a neighbourhood mother.

She had a daughter under siege.

"It got to the point where the daughter was contemplating suicide," the 25-year-old tells The Huffington Post Canada. "Thankfully, it never came to that."

As a call to arms, 'Helping Hand' indicts the bystander, for creating a world where a teen's only refuge from the daily onslaught of peers — 'No one likes you.' 'She's such a slut' — is in dream.

Obeng took an aggressive approach to the video, hoping to shake that very complacency with graphic, unflinching imagery. From its blood-red opening title to its stark composition, it plays more like a trailer for a horror film than a public service announcement.

But with the Amanda Todd tragedy still fresh in many minds, Obeng's short needs little effect to resonate with Canadians.

Todd, a Vancouver-area teenager, was found dead last month in her B.C. home. A month earlier, she had posted her own video to YouTube — a heart-wrenching tale of relentless bullying both online and offline. Authorities believe she committed suicide.

Obeng takes his subject down a similar route, while lashing out at the idle bystanders that accommodate bullying.

"She could be your sister or your friend," Obeng says. "If you're not a part of the solution you can also be part of the problem."

On the web: www.erasebullying.ca

Generation Y In Canada: Millennial Dreams Hijacked By Unflinching Reality Of The Great Recession

2012-11-20T04:45:00-05:00

Call it Generation Interrupted.

Bystanders to the economic train wreck of the Great Recession, members of Generation Y have acutely suffered the aftershocks and a painful recovery four years in the making.

Although past generations faced much more daunting challenges — global wars, deeper and more widespread economic depression — this rising crop of Canadians, also known as millennials or echo boomers, has also seen its future hijacked by events not of its own making.

Of the nine million Canadians born since 1980, about five million are over the age of 18. This should be prime time, when careers are launched, résumés built, families begun, and power assumed. Yet millennials are struggling, consumed by worries over jobs and the future, an exclusive poll conducted for The Huffington Post Canada by Abacus Data shows.

The poll paints a complex portrait of Canadian millennials. They are engaged citizens, connected by technology but disconnected from traditional politics. They’re more tolerant than their parents, yet cling to goals that would resonate with their elders — from owning a house before turning 30, to marriage and children, to early retirement.

Above all, the findings suggest that the past four years of economic turmoil have left a profound scar on their collective psyche, most likely shaping their outlook and politics for years to come.

The poll, which surveyed 1,004 Canadian millennials between Oct. 23 and 25, firmly vaults jobs, unemployment and personal finances — the toll of a hobbled economy — to the top of Y's to-worry-about list. Asked what their biggest challenges are, nearly half of the millennials in the poll ranked jobs first or second.

INFOGRAPHIC: Expand

"We've heard a lot about it, but I didn't expect to see it so clearly in the data — how pessimistic and worried the generation is as a whole when it comes to the economy and their future jobs," said Abacus’ David Coletto, a card-carrying member of Generation Y.

"It really does confirm a lot of the discussion that's been going on about the whole notion of 'Generation Doom.' It’s not just true of people looking at us [millennials], but there's a sense among the generation that times are tough.”

Can you blame them? Expectations were high; the collision with reality hit very hard.

Mom never said it would be like this.

ARISE SUPERBABY!

Many millennials were raised in the 1980s and 1990s by doting parents who embraced praise over criticism, success over failure. The education system took the same approach: a child’s self-esteem was paramount; deficiencies were played down.

You can do anything. You can be anything.

For children, it spelled an unprecedented sense of security.

Fully 85 per cent of respondents to the HuffPost poll agreed with this statement: “Growing up, many people told me that I could achieve anything I wanted to.”

Is it any wonder, then, that as the recession took hold and good jobs disappeared, millennials found the landing harder than most?

It’s not that they lack the skills for Canada’s modern information economy.

BORN IN CONNECTIVITY

In fact, the majority of millennials — 79 per cent — say the use of technology is what makes them different from their parents’ generation.

They may not have invented computers or the internet, but as digital natives born into connectivity, they’ve exploited them in ways Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had only begun to imagine.

It’s no longer about setting up email or online banking. Now, it’s chatting live from buses, bars, classrooms. It’s mapping each other’s locations. It’s peer-approving (or disapproving) restaurants. It’s flash-mobbing. It’s ordering a pizza on your phone — without actually having to talk to anyone.

There is, indeed, an app for almost everything.

A study published earlier this year by the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., found a resounding 95 per cent of people aged 17 to 19 were online. Compare that with people between the ages of 50 and 64 who weighed in at 74 per cent.

That same study found the rate of teens using social media exploded between 2006 and 2011 — from 55 per cent to 80 per cent.

Not to kill the buzz, but there may be a point when social media become downright antisocial.

Story Continues Under Gallery..

NO LOLLING MATTER

When Carleton University Professor Eileen Saunders stands in front of a class of fresh-faced millennials, she often asks this question: "Where do you feel most comfortable in terms of engaging with peers?"

Uniformly, students say they would rather communicate through text or instant messaging, Saunders said. Second choice? A phone call.

If all of the above fail, students will grudgingly agree to meet someone face-to-face.

“That mediated interaction becomes the common currency rather than face-to-face interaction,” she said. “To me, that's incredibly depressing information.”

For a millennial, however, the gadget is simply an extension of them.

Consider the findings of yet another youth study. Last May, McCann Worldgroup took the digital pulse of 7,000 young people around the world and got a telling diagnosis.

If they could save just two items from a list, the millennials were asked, what would it be?

Nearly half of those between 23 and 30 indicated that they would rather give up their sense of smell than an item of technology — typically their smartphone or laptop.

As of yet, there is no app for that.

But it’s not just the physical senses that some millennials would surrender in order to breathe online. Many more surrender their privacy.

“Their emotional lives are often lived online in very public spaces,” Saunders said. “What's interesting to me is that it's almost like social networks have become the foundation on which intimacy is built. What happens in that process is young people are losing certain skills. They're losing the skills of direct interpersonal interaction."

But they are a well-travelled generation. Sort of. No one circles the globe quite like a millennial — and in so few clicks.

“We can think of all kinds of benefits in terms of access to information and cultures, that they wouldn't normally have been exposed to in a previous generation,” she said.

But Y’s devotion to digitalia may actually be narrowing social horizons.

"I think we are more self-absorbed,” consultant and millennial Daniel Canestaro-Garcia said. “In social media, you're at the centre of various circles, it feels like you're the happy buzzing nexus of life, watching people intersect ... wherever they are in the world.”

Generation Y’s devotion to technology has helped feed the stereotype of the perennially distracted technomancer — not to mention a clever marketing campaign or two. But real life takes more than 140 characters to express ... much less live.

"I speak Facebook, partially because of my job, partially just to keep up in my social circles," Canestaro-Garcia noted.

But he also tires of “friends diving into their phones when we are at the bar, and they will surface saying, 'Sorry for being so rude,' and then diving back in.”

Story Continues Under Gallery..

THE MILLENNIAL AND THE MYTH

It’s the kind of scene that has spawned many a myth surrounding these multi-tasking millennials. An earlier Abacus survey asked Canadians what words they associated with the generation. More than half saw a generation half empty — branding them "materialistic," "coddled," "lazy" and "entitled."

They didn’t ask Eric Moran.

"I would define myself as evolutionary, dynamic, and versatile," the Toronto artist and entrepreneur said. "My girlfriend would define me as the love of her life. My friends would define me as a crazy, eccentric bearded man. My enemies would define me as an asshole."

He isn’t the only one bucking the brands.

"I clearly see where they [non-millennials] come from," said Kyle Allen, a high-schooler who grew up in Kapuskasing, Ont. "They don't realize we have a lot on our plate. We feel extremely pressured to succeed at all we do."

BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN

Reality doesn’t dote. It doesn’t negotiate. And, as Gen X learned in that seminal 1994 film, reality can bite.

A poll for Sun Life Financial Canada released this month found 90 per cent of people aged 18 to 24 reported feeling excessive stress, compared with 72 per cent of all adult Canadians.

Why? Economic instability and underemployment, the survey said.

HuffPost’s Abacus poll mirrored those concerns.

Asked to rank the biggest challenge facing their generation, 43 per cent of millennials cited the availability of quality jobs as their first or second choice. That compares with student and personal debt by 32 per cent, the cost of education (24 per cent), affordable housing (20 per cent), pollution and environmental protection (20 per cent), health care (11 per cent), and retirement security (8 per cent).

According to the C.D. Howe Institute, Canada’s latest recession officially lasted seven months, from November, 2008, to May, 2009. The same report marks the U.S. recession lasting 18 months -– more than twice as long.

While Canada fared better in the downturn than many other industrialized nations, young people were hit hardest. Youth employment remains 250,000 jobs below the prerecession high, and 2012’s summer jobs were at the lowest level since 1977.

Youth unemployment peaked at 15.2 per cent, though, “noticeably below” the worst experienced in the downturns of the early 1980s and early 1990s, when the jobless rate among youth climbed to 19.2 per cent and 17.2 per cent respectively, a recent paper by the Certified General Association of Canada said.

Of greater concern for Generation Y is underemployment — the problem of part-time and temporary jobs, or jobs that don’t match one’s training. In the Sun Life poll, 30 per cent of Canadians said they were underemployed, but the numbers were highest among young Canadians, with 39 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds feeling they are not being used to their full potential.

Tara Topp has been there — for years. At the time, it seemed like she was running to stand still at work.

"I had a job as a front-desk manager at a hotel and I was trying to tell myself it was only for a little while," she recalled.

"Fast-forward eight years and I was still in the same job, doing the same thing and telling myself only a little while longer."

Topp was weighed down by an economic reality that felt "like a hot bag of nickels," she said.

But she held tight to her dream of becoming a makeup artist, networked with the right people and moved cities to make it happen. In a sense, she credits hard reality for galvanizing her dream – narrowed choices only pushed her to fight harder for it.

"I am doing a job I love," she said. "And, who knows, if the economy, my parents, my skills and environment were different, I may not be where I am now."

Not everyone catches that kind of break. Many millennials are still waiting for meaningful work – with mounting frustration and resentment.

CITIZEN Y

All that millennial angst, however, could go a long way toward transforming Canada’s political scene if someone knew how to tap into it.

According to pollster Coletto, there’s a fairly simple cipher for decoding Y.

"When a candidate goes out there and says 'I need you. You are important. Get involved,' then a lot of young people, a lot of millennials, will take up that call," he said.

"We saw shades of it with [late former NDP leader] Jack Layton. But I don't even think he took full advantage of the opportunities the generation provided. No one has come to us and said, 'I need your support' and 'We can do this together.'"

Millennials don’t appear to play politics like past generations. A dismal 38.8 per cent of voters aged 18-24 cast a ballot in the last federal election, despite the fact that 74 per cent of millennials polled by HuffPost said regular voting in elections is “very important” to being a good citizen.

The majority of millennials said they are good citizens, but few thought it was important to be active in social organizations (35 per cent) or to donate money to charity (28 per cent).

“Honestly paying your taxes” was ranked first on the citizenship question by 81 per cent of respondents.

More telling was the percentage of millennials — just 15 per cent — who felt that active participation in political parties was a very important part of citizenship.

That may jibe with evidence linking low voter turnout to the decline in young people’s attachment to political parties, most recently cited in a study on Canada’s youth vote.

“Young people don't really think it's important to be involved with formal political parties," Coletto said.

"Why pay attention to someone who doesn't really care about us? If somebody — a party or candidate or movement — were to latch on and really ask the generation to get involved, and it was meaningful and authentic, you could see a big change in Canadian politics."

The student protests in Quebec this past summer offered a master class on the political perils of underestimating Y. It all began with a seemingly modest tuition hike — a bid by then-premier Jean Charest’s government to push tuition to $3,793 from $2,168 over five years. No one expected riots, Molotov cocktails and emergency law. No one thought that protesting students could eventually lead to toppling one of Canada’s longest tenured premiers.

In Quebec, you saw an “explosion of activism that demonstrates that there is a core activist inside [millennials]. Maybe not the way it was in the '70s, but nevertheless it can have a huge impact and spread wildly through social media," Coletto said.

Generation Interrupted had simply... erupted.

FACING THE MUSIC

Millennial tension isn’t likely to ease any time soon. This generation is just entering its prime years and looking for a slice of an ever-elusive future.

In a sense, their arms are already tied.

Many polled by HuffPost said they doubt they will be able to retire as early as they had hoped. They worry about debt. Their savings are scant – and, as the survey suggests, millennials don’t even see it as a priority.

Even issues of traditional importance to youth, such as the environment, social equity and the desire for more liberal drug laws, have fallen by the wayside to the all-encompassing pursuit of the most essential goal of all.

Getting a job. Putting a roof above their heads.

And not getting buried in debt along the way.

If millennials have already proved one thing, it’s that they aren’t easily discouraged.

David Coletto sees them as strategists, carefully biding their time, plotting their future course – and yes, worrying a great deal about it.

And yet millennials are equipped like no other generation to navigate these economic straits. They are technomancers, clicking with minds and movements across the globe. They are activists, transforming their social environments in fresh and innovative ways. And they are a potential powder keg of a political bloc.

Interruption or not, this is their time.

For all those who think they won’t meet this challenge, remember: Millennials are their parents’ children – children who were infused with that one abiding mantra.

They can do absolutely anything.

* * *

— With a file from Rachel Mendleson
— Abacus Data has focused research on the Canadian Millennial. Read more here.

What do you think about this story? Join the conversation below or tweet us @HuffPostCanada with the #AskingY tag. We may feature your comments in an upcoming post. You can also check out our Tumblr, and our dedicated page for more from the Asking Y series.

Charest Resigns: Quebec Liberal Leader Quits After Losing His Seat

2012-09-05T16:00:03-04:00

Quebec Liberal Leader Jean Charest has announced his resignation, bringing a long, turbulent career as premier to a close.

"The decision was unanimous. I will leave my post as leader of the Liberal Party of Quebec in a few days, once a new government is formed," he said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon.

"As a father, who will soon be a grandfather, it's as if life was sending me a signal," he added. "From the bottom of my heart, I give a great thank-you to Quebecers. You have been marvelous."

In 2003, Charest ended nine years of Parti Quebecois rule to become premier, only to return it to the PQ in 2012 in a race that was closer than many pundits and pollsters expected.

The 54-year-old Sherbrooke native not only lost the September 4 election to Pauline Marois' resurgent PQ, but also his hometown seat to the party's Serge Cardin.

"I want to say to all of you tonight, and to all of you interested in the future of Quebec, that the result of this election campaign speaks to the fact that the future of Quebec lies within Canada," Charest would later tell a glum gathering at the party's Sherbrooke HQ, garnering, at least, the most spirited applause of the night.

As the Montreal Gazette reports, Charest's absence would give leadership hopefuls a healthy stretch to vie for the job he held down for the last nine years — and rebuild a fractured Liberal Party in Quebec.

SURVIVALIST

For Charest, it's an unfortunate endnote to a political biography that has spanned decades — and crossed party lines.

A practising lawyer in his hometown, Charest won the federal seat for Sherbrooke as a Progressive Conservative MP in 1984. The triumph led to a plum position as minister of state for youth in the Brian Mulroney government. At 28, that made him the youngest member of a federal cabinet ever.

When voters handed the PCs a near-extinction notice in the 1993 federal election, Charest was the party's last surviving cabinet member — making him a rather easy choice for interim party leader in 1995. Again, the unlikely lawyer from Sherbrooke made history as the party's first leader of Francophone descent — battered though it may have been at the time.

The PCs never recovered. Before Charest's career could, he would have to switch sides — a play he made in 1998, as a provincial Liberal. It wasn't until 2003, however, that he managed to wrest control of Quebec from the Parti Quebecois with a majority win.

FEDERALIST

Charest never let voters forget that he was an avowed federalist tilting at sovereigntist windmills.

“I am a federalist," he told a room-full of journalists as recently as August 31. "I am a Quebecer who believes in Canada I think that the interests of Quebec and the interests of Canada do not contradict each other."

While Charest rarely overwhelmed in the polls — and was frequently a target for Quebecers' frustrations — he did manage to earn still another distinction.

Along with Ontario's Dalton McGuinty, Charest was the longest actively serving Canadian premier.

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that both premiers have been accused of overstaying their welcome.

The Toronto Sun went so far as to predict pre-election Charest looked to be going down "like a flaming sambuca."

"A back-from-the-grave Parti Québécois is only part of Charest’s problem; after nine years in power, he can’t outrun the desire for change that dogs all governments long in the tooth," wrote Greg Van Moorsel.

Then again, few premiers have ever had to endure the political travails Charest did.

AN UNENVIABLE POSITION

The health of Quebec's coffers proved one of Charest's earliest challenges as premier. He scrambled to find new sources of revenue — adding a gamut of fees to public services, hiking hydro rates and slapping businesses with a carbon tax.

And his position on the Kyoto Accord won him few friends in Ottawa. Charest was a vocal critic of the federal government's decision to pull out of the environmental pact.

It all added up to a deeply unpopular premier, still freshly into his term — and one dogged at every turn by the PQ's separatist ambitions.

THE GREAT UNIFIER?

In fact, The Globe and Mail recently paid homage to this 'national unity giant'.

"For 17 years, he has thwarted separatist ambitions," columnist Lawrence Martin wrote. "Although he never seems to get much credit, we owe him some."

In 2007, he campaigned hard on the promise of deep income tax cuts, a luxury partly afforded by increased equalization payments from Ottawa and higher tuition fees.

It was the latter, however, that would return to haunt him.

THE STUDENT STORM

Charest may have eked out a minority win in 2007, but Quebec students wouldn't soon forget.

In February this year, the student issue exploded after the Charest government tabled another tuition hike.

Some 165,000 students took to the streets in what has been called the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.

It was a storm that few premiers could weather, much less one of the most unpopular premiers in Canadian history — and the protests quickly spun into a national discourse on civil liberty.

FLAG-BEARER FOR THE SAME OLD?

Of course, students alone didn't take down the surprisingly resilient premier. It was more like a combination of issues that had been simmering throughout his tenure.

Yahoo News writer Andy Radia breaks it down into three overarching factors:

Corruption, especially in the province's building industry, continued to sap away at Charest's image.

Also, Quebec's economy could hardly withstand the rigours of a worldwide slowdown —
a situation considerably exacerbated by the student strike.

And finally, Radia writes, there was that age-old dilemma faced by every long-standing political leader. How do you convince voters that you stand for change, when you've simply been standing around too long?

In any case, Charest's resignation doesn't necessarily signify the end of his political career. And, indeed, it would be hard to bet against a man who managed to tame the PQ in three straight elections.

“He’s young,” a Montreal Gazette source tells the newspaper. “He can do something else. Or he could come back into politics one day.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story stated Jean Charest won one majority government in Quebec. In fact, he won two; one in 2003 and the other in 2008.

McDonald's Opens Vegetarian Restaurants In India

2012-09-04T11:21:00-04:00

Hamburglar is not amused.

McDonald's is heading for greener pastures, opening its very first batch of vegetarian-only restaurants next year.

Making its burger-free beachhead in Amritsar and Katra, India, the fast food giant is looking to capitalize on droves of hungry pilgrims that pour into the region year-round. Katra, home to the popular Vaishno Devi hill shrine, will open its doors first, followed by Amritsar, according to The Telegraph.

The Golden Arches may share an unlikely spotlight with Amritsar's famed Golden Temple, but McDonald's has held down a strong presence in India since 1996 -- spinning the iconic Big Mac into the Maharaja Mac.

The Indian menu also features the carrot, pea and potato medley known as the McVeggie, as well as mashed potato patty called the McAloo Tikky.

Today, 271 of the chain's 30,000 locations are in India, a number the company is looking to ramp up sharply, according to the Financial Times.

The new restaurants represent the first time meat has been outright banished from the menu -- although the company has long catered to local tastes.

“A vegetarian store makes absolute sense in the places which are famous as pilgrimage sites,” Rajesh Kumar Maini, a spokesman for McDonald’s India, told the Times.

McDonald's has been evolving its menu in recent years, mindful of popular trends away from grilled and fried meats -- and bringing in more salads and veggie-based menu items.

The company plans to seriously bulk up its menu line-up for its all-green restaurants, Maini told the Financial Times.

“Since this is going to be an exclusive vegetarian restaurant, we will have to look at opening more products."

Batman Vs. Spider-Man: Toronto Subway The Scene Of An Epic Brawl

2012-07-03T21:04:03-04:00

Spider-Man battles Batman on a Toronto subway car?

J. Jonah Jameson would have had a field day with this.

It seems the wacky web-crawler has gotten himself in another fine mess — and this time on public property.

Don't ask how these 'superheroes' happened to run into each other on the same subway car. Or what led to a clash between heroes who not only operate out of different cities — but different universes altogether.

A fact not lost on the TTC's chief customer officer, Chris Upfold.

"What? Mixing Marvel and DC worlds?" he tweeted.

The heroes certainly weren't talking.

Lucky for us, we've got the video, thanks to Huffington Post blogger HiMY SYeD. A former Toronto mayoral candidate and founder of TorontoWiki.org, SYeD was simply in the right place at the right time.

"Most people's reaction on the train were about the same ... meh," he recounted to The Huffington Post Canada. "Initially, I thought, whatever, I'm tired, I don't really care ... but then as the video shows, it just got hilarious ... and people started snapping photos."

SYeD got swept up in the action, wielding a Nikon camera in one hand, a BlackBerry in the other.

And he's all the luckier for it, as the Spidey vs. Batman video quickly became SYeD's second-most viewed blog at Viewtopia.

"And it hasn't even been a full day yet!"

Toronto's brand of these iconic crusaders have been known to pose for pictures at Dundas Square, but never have their paths crossed until now.

Although commuters were initially hard-pressed to show much interest — a by-product, no doubt, of a public transit system that hosts more than its share of spectacle — they couldn't help but get drawn into this mighty grudge match.

"It did leave me with a smile and a feeling that I got my full token's worth of a ride on the TTC," SYeD says. "Just another day in, or rather under, Toronto."

Here's more, in SYeD's own words, on how he came upon this unlikely clash of superheroes:

It being a wonderful summer's end of long weekend Monday evening, I should have just walked to my downtown home from Yonge and Bloor where I found myself shortly before Midnight.

It being the end of a very involved long weekend, I was beat.

Debating whether to drop a token for a train ride plus a few streetcar stops, I thought what the hell, go home via TTC despite it being so close.

Waited on the southbound platform at Wellesley Station for only a few minutes.

The new Rocket arrived. Cool. Been on them before of course, but these trains are the new norm, better get used to them...

Reaching Dundas Station, Subway doors open. Subway doors close.

They board at Dundas Station, heading South.

I see them. But I always see them posing for photographs around Yonge-Dundas Square, so no big deal.

They, like me, are going home at day's end.

There's a commotion a few cars north of where I'm sitting.

It being the new Rocket, we can see as well as walk the length of the train now in-between subway cars.

The commotion was Spidey and the Toronto Batman, the two fixtures who pose for photographs via donation around Yonge-Dundas Square. They had boarded the train and it wasn't exactly clear how much in character they were.

It didn't appear that they staged this...

Noemi Belanger And Audrey Belanger Investigation: Portuguese Men Sought After Hotel Deaths

2012-06-21T21:31:00-04:00

Thai investigators are looking for two Portuguese men, who were seen on closed-circuit cameras escorting Noemi and Audrey Belanger back to their hotel room, according to the Bangkok Post.

They may have been the last people to see the Quebec sisters alive.

Noemi, 26, and Audrey, 20, were found dead at the Phi Phi Palms Residence Hotel on the popular resort island on June 15.

"Police determined they were dead for about 24 hours prior to that and only found a lot of vomit in the room," Lt. Col. Jongrak Pimthong told The Associated Press.

"There were neither signs of fighting, nor robbery, but we found many kinds of over-the-counter-drugs, including ibuprofen, which can cause serious effects on the stomach."

Initially, local authorities suspected the girls had been poisoned, as findings seemed to suggest a 'toxic substance'.

The Post is reporting that the CCTV footage captures a man taking the sisters back to their room, between 1:10 and 1:14 am. The newspaper identifies the man as 30-year-old Portuguese national Luciano Tinto, who was staying at the same hotel as the Belangers.

Citing a source close to the investigation, The Post reports the sisters were spotted at various night spots on Phi Phi island alongside Tinto and another unidentified Portuguese national.

The Belangers grew up in Pohenegamook near the Maine border in Eastern Quebec, where they worked in the family shop.

Town mayor Louise Labonte described them to the Toronto Star as adventurous and full of promise.

“We lost two brilliant young women,” the mayor told the newspaper Sunday. “It’s of course very difficult for the family and everyone here.”

Relatives of the sisters arrived in Thailand earlier this week. The women's bodies are reportedly back in Canada, according to CBC News.

In the same report, their uncle, Eric Belanger, told the CBC he wasn't certain when the family will learn the results of toxicology tests conducted in Thailand.

Toronto College Street Shooting: One Dead, Another Injured After Shots Ring Out In Little Italy

2012-06-18T16:13:01-04:00

Shots rang out in Toronto's Little Italy, leaving one dead and another injured, as scores of people had gathered to watch a Euro Cup match at a bustling patio.

The shooting took place at The Sicilian Sidewalk Cafe at the corner of College Street and Montrose Avenue.

“All of a sudden we heard five gunshots,” Andrea Dolcetti told CBC News.

She had been watching the Italy-Ireland match when shots rang out.

“It sounded like — first we thought it was broken glass, but then we knew by the fifth one that it wasn't.”

Police locked down the busy stretch, as well as two local schools, while they hunted for a suspect. Students and staff, according to CTV, were allowed to leave the schools shortly after 4:30 p.m. The Toronto Transit Commission diverted the 506 streetcar in both directions for much of the afternoon.

The area between Grace and Crawford streets was shut down for several hours, with a forensics team working at the scene well past midnight.

A description of the suspect was released later in the afternoon. Investigators tweeted they are looking for a man with blonde hair, wearing a white hard hat, safety vest and filter mask, who fled north from the scene.

Police also urged residents to check their property for items that may have been discarded after the shooting.

The Globe and Mail cites a police source claiming the attack appeared targeted as opposed to random, with little danger to the general public.

The scene on College Street, having just ended its Taste of Little Italy festival, was sobering.

"People were standing around looking," local resident Jeff Halperin told The Huffington Post Canada. "People were ducking under the yellow tape."

Soccer fans had clogged the popular stretch between Ossington Avenue and Bathurst Street to see Italy and Ireland square off in an opening round match of the Euro Cup. Even after the shooting, soccer celebrations were a marked contrast with police cruisers and crime tape at the ice cream shop.

It was a scene even police couldn't fail to note. Speaking to reporters near the Sicilian Sidewalk Cafe, Const. Wendy Drummond of Toronto Police Services asked soccer fans to respect the boundaries of the crime scene when they leave the area later today.

It's been a violent start to Toronto's summer, with the CBC reporting, as of June 18, shooting occurrences are up 28.7 per cent from a year ago.

The College Street shooting comes 16 days after gang members were shot dead, and five bystanders wounded inside Toronto's Eaton Centre. One of the injured, a 13-year-old boy,

Christopher Husbands, 23, is charged with one count of first-degree murder and six counts of attempted murder in the shootings.

Police say the shooting wasn't so much gang-related as it was a personal dispute.