Jonathan Naymark2013-05-18T19:00:09-04:00Jonathan Naymarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=jonathan-naymarkCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Jonathan NaymarkGood old fashioned elbow grease.Hey Blue Jays, Your Word Play Needs Some Practicetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18963842012-09-19T09:02:21-04:002012-11-19T05:12:02-05:00Jonathan Naymarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-naymark/derogatory slur on his face last Saturday. In general the Blue Jays seem to have a problem with their words. Lord knows that the word "win" has become a meaningless concept to most players during these dog days of September. Even the words "wildcard hunt" were proven irrelevant way back in July.
So for a team where semantics don't seem to matter, it is perhaps ironic that those pesky things known as "words" got the Blue Jays organization and their shortstop Escobar into trouble over the weekend after Escobar was spotted with the words: "Tu Ere Maricon" written on his eye-black.
While these words didn't seem to matter to Escobar, they did seem to matter to the twitterverse, which was quick to point out that maricon is a Spanish word that is most commonly used as a derogatory term for gay people. Prof. Michelle Gonzalez, an expert on Cuban culture at the University of Miami, noted to the Toronto Star that in the Cuban context: "It's a slur referring to homosexuals."
Yet Escobar defended himself telling press that the phrase was harmless: "It was not something I intended to be offensive. It was just something I just put on a sticker on my face as a joke...There was nothing intentional directed at anyone in particular."
But beyond harmless, "maricon" is also meaningless. As Escobar told an assembled press audience in New York on Tuesday, "It's a word used often within teams as a word without a meaning." Presumably the next phrase that Escobar will paint under his eyes will be: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, also a word without meaning.
Outside the bubble of the Rogers Centre, however, words do have a meaning, which is why the Blue Jays brass tried to put lipstick on this pig as quickly as possible hoping that the Escobar scandal would go away quickly if the team met the minimum requirements of appeasement. The Jays handed Escobar a three game suspension and presumably told him to donate his salary to various LGBT charities, including the worthy You Can Play initiative and GLAAD, in an attempt to be as apologetic as they could.
In the meantime the Jays trotted out Escobar to the media for an apology, where, in what had to have dismayed Blue Jays leadership, he told the world that some of his friends were gay. It became quite clear that as Escobar, via translator, told the sports press that a gay person cuts his hair and a gay person decorated his house, any sense of repentance was sucked out of the air like pop fly to left field.
Back to linguistics, oddly enough in a 30 minute news conference addressing a homophobic slur, the word homophobia was used only once. A reporter asked John Farrell, the Blue Jays Manager: "Is homophobia a problem in locker rooms?" His reply: "I don't believe so. You don't see that. I know we're here discussing what was interpreted by some as a homophobic action, but you don't see that."
Even Alex Anthopolous, the General Manager of the Blue Jays, had these vague comments to say about homophobia without actually talking about homophobia:
"What came out of this is the lack of education. The problem isn't going away and this is just an example of it... There is a problem not only in sports, but in society. How do we move forward to help with that problem? This is a problem worldwide and that's why these groups exist."
Fair enough Alex, but what "problem" are we talking about? What groups are these? Apparently no one in the Jays organization can muster the proper usage of their words.
And while Alex was right to note that homophobia exists beyond professional sporting organizations, he failed to mention that in other industries homophobia has become much less of an issue. One of the reasons for this is that there are multiple organizations that are working directly with senior leaders to tackle the issue of homophobia in the corporate world. And as a result, unlike professional sporting organizations, corporate Canada has made significant strides in supporting workplace diversity and inclusiveness.
Out on Bay Street (an organization I sit on the board of) as well as Pride at Work Canada both work with corporate Canada to ensure that workplaces are LGBT inclusive. Both have strong support of senior management from large corporations.
As Ed Clark, CEO of TD Bank, noted to a group of senior TD leaders about TD's burgeoning support of LGBT issues: "To be successful over the long term we must be a place where all of our customers and employees believe that their needs can be met."
And while organizations like You Can Play are trying to do similar work in the professional sporting world, they can't do so when people like John Farrell have the balls to tell the media that homophobia doesn't exist in the locker room. Unless straight athletic leaders (this includes players, owners and managers) are willing to take up the gauntlet of tackling homophobia in the professional sporting world, Escobar will become just another footnote in the history of homophobia in professional sports.
And the sad part in all of this? We only really seem to care about homophobia in sports when someone uses their words incorrectly. Next week -- all will have been forgotten, because to the Blue Jays, words obviously don't matter.]]>Is the Liberal Red Fading?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18453282012-08-30T23:25:09-04:002012-10-30T05:12:01-04:00Jonathan Naymarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-naymark/
Anyone much younger than me has the right to ask: what Liberal Party?
As John Ibbitson of the Globe and Mail asked rhetorically as he examined examining the probable rout of the provincial Liberals in Quebec, the faltering Liberal brand in Ontario, as well as the rudderless national party: "Will the Liberal's Have a Brand Outside of Green Gables?" (Prince Edward Island appears to be the last bastion of Liberal support.)
The common narrative over the past six years, made more valid by the ascendant NDP, is that the Liberals are one election away from being relegated to the graveyard of 20th century big-tent progressive parties.
Without the possibility of electoral success it is expected that remnant Liberal supporters (for the record over 2.8 million Canadians voted for the party in the last federal election) are to simply roll over, hold our nose in the air like the dying gasp of empire and vote for the party that les bon jack built.
The collective end: the removal of Stephen Harper from 24 Sussex, it is assumed, justifies the dirty means.
And yet I, and presumably many, still recoil at the thought of trading Liberal red for bright orange.
For me to switch my vote to the NDP, and presumably for others to do so as well, I would have to believe that the NDP represents the quickest and easiest path to electoral victory. Punditry aside, however, I question whether basic NDP ideology will ever be able to represent a plurality of Canadian voters.
The oft repeated analogy for the NDP's march to power is that of the United Kingdom's Labour Party, which, after being rebranded as New Labour in 1994, went on to defeat the staid 18 year reign of the Margaret Thatcher/John Major Conservatives and also out play the Liberal-Democrat Party in the UK's 1997 general election.
However, this analogy seems too easy. First of all the Liberal-Democrats, or any preceding incarnations of a liberal party in the UK, had ceased to be a major political force following their decline in the 1920s. By the 1990s Labour had been the de-facto second party in the UK for almost half a century.
Furthermore, the success of Tony Blair's New Labour can be credited to a revolutionary shift in the Labour's ideological underpinnings. It was New Labour which saw the party drop its mantra of socialist economic nationalism in support of free market economics.
The Labour Party Rule Book has acted as the Party's constitution since it was written in 1918. Clause IV, once printed on the backside Labour Party membership cards, codifies the aims and values of the Party. It was this clause, which infamously detailed the Labour Party's ideological support for the rights of workers and the nationalization of industry. The Clause, written in 1918, declared: "To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, went unchanged until late into the twentieth century."
Jack Layton and Thomas Muclair's NDP, while undergoing voter growth, is therefore not the spiritual brethren of New Labour. And while there is nothing wrong with staunch social democratic aims, it's just not my, nor I suspect many others, political cup of tea.
So if the ideological trains of Liberals and New Democrats will never meet what can Canada's centre do to temper its growing animus for Harper's conservative government?
The Liberals can be saved by the very ideology which once made Liberal red such a potent political force in Canada.
While the current Liberal constitution, makes no notion of economic capitalism, perhaps ironically, making the Liberals somewhat to the left of those free-wheeling capitalists in the UK's Labour party, the party's constitution does speak to some essential free-market economics: The Liberal Party of Canada is dedicated to the principles that have historically sustained the Party: individual freedom, responsibility and human dignity.
Canada's political future lies in new ridings carved out places like Brampton West, Oak Ridges-Markham, Vaughan, currently some of the largest and fastest growing ridings in Canada. It is in these municipalities, Canada's heartland and Canada's swing states, where the Canadian dream (or what's left of it) lives: the dream that an immigrant (as my grandparents were) can come to Canada and can create, for themselves, unfettered prosperity.
It is in this dream, where the Liberal Party, can find its salvation. Because to the entrepreneurial spirit, which has guided Canada since its inception, what is more a more powerful message: the direction of production for the benefit of social good or for the Liberal power of the individual?
Renewal for the Liberal Party isn't about finding ourselves, or heck, it's not even about finding a leader (as has been on the to-do list since 2006); the Liberal party simply needs to remember where it comes from and why that still matters to Canadians.]]>Every Wildrose Has its Thorntag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.14422712012-05-01T23:18:41-04:002012-07-01T05:12:24-04:00Jonathan Naymarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-naymark/
The conventional wisdom is the Wildrose's imminent electoral success has been nurtured by its Alberta-first mentality; their populist "firewall Alberta" sentiment speaks to Albertans who fear the unscrupulous capitalists from central Canada who singularly wish to profit from Alberta's natural resources.
At 2,700 kilometers away from the country's presumed centre of the universe (Toronto), Alberta is very clearly a different lot socially, economically and politically from many other parts of the true north strong and free.
And though we once lived in a Canada which pleasantly traded French-Canadian Prime Ministers for English-Canadian ones this old Ontario-Quebec compact has been put out to pasture by our current Prime Minister.
In fact, before Stephen Harper, Canadians hadn't voted for a politician so closely affiliated with Alberta since R.B. Bennett -- the man your grade school history books probably mocked for his impotent turn as Prime Minister during the Great Depression. (Joe Clark's stint as Prime Minister in 1979 barely counts).
The old Reform Party slogan went "the west wants in." Well...it has become clear that the west got in.
For political history buffs, the rise of the Wildrose Party is nothing short of astounding. If current polls hold true, the Wildrose, which garnered only seven per cent of the popular vote in Alberta's 2008 provincial election, is set to topple Alison Redford's Progressive Conservative Government on Monday. Redford's party is the current flag bearer of a political dynasty that has been in power for over 41 years.
A mighty wind, one may argue, is about to blow through Canada's most popular prairie province. However, the relevance of a Wildrose victory Monday night will outlast this year's election and the importance of the Wildrose's ascendance will reverberate well beyond Alberta.
As a leader, Danielle Smith personifies an increasingly worrisome trend amongst Canadian politicians who refuse to govern anyone outside of a carefully cultivated base.
Over the last week of Alberta's provincial election campaign, the Wildrose Party was hit by two significant gaffes by potential Members of the Legislative Assembly.
One candidate, Ron Leech, declared he had an advantage as a politician because he was Caucasian.
Another candidate, Allan Hunsperger, had a blog post go viral wherein he declared that gays and lesbians "will suffer the rest of eternity in the lake of fire, hell".
While it was not the best week for the Wildrose Party and for party leader Smith, what is most telling about these "bozo eruptions" was Smith's response. She refused to condemn the bigoted actions of her candidates.
Via twitter Smith replied: "Once again... a [Wildrose government] will not legislate on controversial social issues - [especially] those that have already been settled by the Supreme Court."
She further tweeted, "I will represent all [Albertans] regardless of their race, religion, gender, politics or sexual orientation. Rights are rights are rights."
And again on Friday Smith hosted a news conference refusing to condemn Hunsperger's statement arguing that in a Wildrose-led Alberta, freedom of speech and freedom of religion trump bigotry.
Smith's tweet is nothing more than the modern-day political version of a gentlemen's agreement. She may as well have stood up on a podium to tell everyone that some of her best friends are black (or perhaps black and gay).
And while it would be easy to say that Danielle Smith's Wildrose Party is an Alberta-only phenom, it's becoming clear that Smith and the Calgary School from which her party came are increasingly becoming part of the new normal in Canada's political scene.
The Calgary School is the name given to the pseudo-group of conservative thinkers at the University of Calgary. Members of the unofficial Calgary School have supported Prime Minister Harper. Danielle Smith is considered a member of the school.
The problem with this is that politicians across Canada are dangerously falling to a contagion of disinterest when it comes to social issues outside of those which impact their political base.
For example, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford infamously skips Toronto's Pride Parade. And while one may argue that Ford skips Pride because he is homophobic, one may also argue that he skips Pride because he sees himself not as the mayor of Toronto, but as the mayor of Ford Nation, which does not include Toronto's LGBTQ population.
Similarly, the Harper government's obsessive pandering and cultivation of its own conservative base has seen things like gun control and military spending become major policy planks, much to the detriment of actual economic policy.
The problem with these types of politics is that they create a disconnect between politicians and those who are on the outside. As Chantal Hebert wrote in the Toronto Star on March 2, "It is hard to think of a time when the gap between the rock-solid loyalty of a steadily nurtured government base and the equally rock-solid mistrust of the majority of the electorate that does not support the governing party has been as wide."
Most importantly, it removes the politics of compromise from Canada's political discourse. The politics of disinterest signifies an evolution of Canadian politics.
While Danielle Smith may indeed be a made-in-Alberta phenomenon, the importance of her party will reverberate throughout the country.]]>What RIM's Failing Says About Canadatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13855612012-03-29T07:17:57-04:002012-05-29T05:12:01-04:00Jonathan Naymarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-naymark/
And while lately that philosophy has come under attack as Google extends its perky red, blue, yellow, and green claws into as many parts of the digital value chain as it can, the Google brain trust supposedly believes that a modern media company can "make money without doing evil." It even says so on their corporate webpage.
And while this rosy view of their endeavors may seem hokey to a jaded public which grows increasingly concerned that Google is nothing more than a wolf in sheep's clothing, Google's mission is in keeping with how its major corporate competitors paint themselves with an almost missionary like zeal.
Consider Facebook, which does the following for its users: "To help you connect and share with the people in your life." Mark Zuckerberg even recently declared that: "Our development is guided by the idea that every year, the amount that people want to add, share, and express is increasing."
Similarly Amazon's vision is to be earth's most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.
Regardless of your level of skepticism, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the fourth digital powerhouse Apple, have very clear and very lofty goals for their enterprises. While these four companies are all making very different bets on what our integrated future looks like, the common goal of the "Fab Four" is to own as much of the content purchase, delivery, and playback mechanisms as they can.
The good Canadian patriot in all of us hopefully asks: Where in this messy digital soup is RIM?
The answer, quite sadly, is nowhere.
While much ink has been spilled over RIM's recent fall from grace, there is a part of me that wonders if it is Canada itself which prevented the Blackberry from playing in the big-boy sandbox. I wonder if it was pre-ordained that a tech company based in Waterloo, Ontario would never become the world's dominant smartphone maker?
Unlike Apple, Amazon, Facebook, or Google, RIM seemingly had a much smaller vision for its technological future.
While RIM's corporate mission statement is similar to that of Facebook: "RIM helps users all over the globe connect to the specific people, information and media that makes their worlds go round," I doubt that the company ever saw the Blackberry as part of a broader eco-system of owning, delivering, and selling content.
Witness Jim Balsillie's now infamous and very dismissive reaction upon the introduction of the iPhone, "How much presence does Apple have in business? It's vanishingly small." What Balsillie failed to realize was that while Apple had a nascent knowledge of the cellphone industry (presumably "the business" Balsillie was referring to), Steve Jobs WAS well known for revolutionizing how consumers bought, shared, and stored digital music. .
But RIM never really wanted to create a digital ecosystem: RIM believed that telephony was the pure play. In RIM's 2008 Annual Report, (2008 will probably be remembered as the company's halcyon year -- the last year the Blackberry iOS exhibited market-share growth in the United States), RIM used aspirational quotes from its customers to highlight how effective the Blackberry was as a communications device: "Being in contact makes for less work, more fun, more play." Or, "I can communicate new insights and inspirations immediately."
As its technological competitors leap-frogged it creating entirely new industries around the integration of phones, software, and content delivery, RIM was happily simply connecting customers to other customers, trumpeting its proprietary BBM software and security features as if it was rearranging the deck chairs on Titanic trying to convince the Street that consumers gave a damn.
Even today as RIM releases updates to its orphaned Playbook system, it has developed a product that will only have limited mobile ad support. A lack of mobile advertising disincentivizes app developers from creating software for the Playbook, thus further reinforcing RIM and the Playbook as nothing more than an expensive communication device even as consumers truly start to see the possibilities of the mobile ecosystem.
So does RIM's downfall fulfill a nasty Canadian trope? Does RIM's narrow-mindedness shadow Canada's status as a middle-power? No world domination please, we're Canadian. The Blackberry is like the technological version of Lester Pearson's peacekeepers, a fine and dandy tool during times of peace, but useless throughout a period of prolonged technological upheaval.
In his seminal work on the Canadian identity, Lament for a Nation, George Grant prophetically feared that Canadian nationalism would eventually be superseded by continentalism. A part of this was fear was technological determinism: technology, modernity, and progress would render the idea of "local culture" irrelevant.
In the 1960s, Grant saw Canada as an increasingly liberal state, one which fetishized the "vaunted freedom of the individual," (the U.S.) while moving away from its Marxist leanings. There were technological ramifications to these political shifts too; as Grant noted, "In Marxism technology remains an instrument that serves human good."
This ability to serve human good was RIM's competitive advantage and what made the company Canada's great technological, if not nationalistic, hope. The Blackberry -- a technology that facilitated simple communication -- fulfilled the Marxist intentions of its home country; it just wanted to connect people to others.
The irony in all of this is that for a brief moment in time, RIM attempted to prove Grant's fears unfounded. If RIM succeeded then Canada did not have to become a brunch plant of the U.S. Technology wouldn't be Canada's undoing; rather, it would be our nationalistic saviour.
Sadly, Grant's lament was strangely prophetic. Contintentlism won out. The supposed personal freedoms of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google -- all of whom said: "don't be evil" -- declared war on the one company which actually wasn't.
As Grant himself wrote: When men are committed to technology, they are also committed to continual change in institutions and customers.
Technology changed, RIM didn't. R.I.P.]]>Canada's 1% Aren't So Well Offtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11016412011-11-19T12:00:07-05:002012-01-19T05:12:02-05:00Jonathan Naymarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-naymark/
"I wish I was part of the one per cent," she texted me, with what I could only assume was a sigh.
I quickly reminded her that if I combined her annual income, the value of her inner-city Toronto house, her husband's annual income and the current value of their RRSPs, she was, by definition, part of the revered and simultaneously reviled one per cent.
Surprisingly, it takes a lot less than one would think to be considered a part of the upper echelons of Canadian society.
In fact according to Statistics Canada, an annual income of $89,000 is all that it takes to put an individual amongst the 1.2 million Canadians who make up the top five per cent of the country's tax filers. Even more worrisome, an income of only $181,000 is enough to put someone amongst Canada's EVIL one per cent!
To put these numbers into some perspective, over 1,000 (or one-tenth) of all TTC employees earn over $100,000 a year, and while I'm not here to judge or moralize anyone's salary (a lot of TTC employees make additional money via overtime), it IS fair to argue that there are probably a large number of people who are classified as part of the one per cent, but who certainly don't feel rich every time they look at their monthly credit card statements. Between mortgage payments and working 12-hour days, how many people in the working one per cent have time or money for all of that caviar and champagne? Am I right?
This is not a lament, however, for Canada's upper middle class (don't cry for us, we're already broke). The working rich are working poor because even with high household incomes, they have (to put it nicely) over-extended themselves in order to live in that nice inner-city Toronto house, send their two kids to private school and shop at Holt Renfrew, mostly because they feel like at this point in their lives, and at their income level, they really shouldn't have to live like the frugal students they were in their mid-20s.
A friend of mine admitted to me recently that although she and her husband make over $400k a year, they were struggling to figure out how to afford the monthly payments on a new Toyota.
"A Toyota," she admitted, almost embarrassed at the thought of it.
And while the one per cent is often portrayed as untouchably wealthy, they really aren't. Part of that statistical segment is the working one per cent -- the second tier in the great pyramid of our socioeconomic class structure. These people are the cogs in our great industrial machine; the junior lawyers, the accountants, civil servants -- and this group probably includes some of our teachers, and some of our TTC workers. The working one per cent includes those of us in junior management who, for better or for worse, make capitalism tick. And the working one per cent, a forgotten and overlooked group, is integral to the long-term success of any political movement.
That being said, the working one per cent are never going to give up a night's sleep in our over-priced, semi-detached slabs of real estate, so we can stay in tents and occupy St. James Park. It's not that we aren't really angry about buying RIM shares at $90 and watching them fall in value to $19.50. We are. And it's not that we aren't really galled by the fact that if we earn $89,000, the maximum mortgage we can qualify for is $450k (and Lord knows you can't find a decent house in the City of Toronto for under $600k). We are functionally irate about this.
See, the working one per cent has plenty to gripe about, too. And if anyone truly understands the gross income inequalities that are facing our society, it is probably those of us who live so close to the sun, but aren't quite there and may never get there.
But our problem with the Occupy Movement is that we have bought into the current system and have too much of a vested interest in it to get off the subway train (leaving our eyebrow-plucking friend) and walk over to join the protest movement at St. James Park. It's just too far from where we are (swimming in managed debt).
This leads us to the current state of Occupy Toronto, which was served an eviction notice by the City of Toronto on Nov. 14. Luckily (or not), the Ontario Superior Court gave the protesters a temporary reprieve. A judge argued that the movement should be allowed to stay until a Charter-based challenge on the right to Occupy St. James Park is settled. A ruling is expected Monday.
While some legal scholars, including David Schneiderman, a law professor at the University of Toronto (NB: Schneiderman snuck into the one per cent in 2011 by making $183,000 according to the sunshine list), have used legalese to argue that Occupy Toronto has an inalienable and constitutional right to occupy a public space, writing in the Globe and Mail, "Without question, the protesters are exercising their constitutionally protected freedoms of association, assembly and expression." I would argue that physical occupation is moot.
For the greater good of the movement, which like any protest requires growth if not maturation to continue, it is time to move past physical occupation. Members of the working one per cent will never dip their toes into the Occupy Movement while it is about sitting around a park in a not-so-nice part of downtown Toronto. We'd rather occupy our beds.
If the Occupy Movement is truly the start of some sort of proletarian war, a rebirth of democracy unshackled by corporate greed and a re-working on income inequality, then the working one per cent is a necessary part of that struggle. If Occupy Wherever truly wants to win the war -- they may have to concede their actual physical battleground.
]]>Canadian Blood Services and Elton John: Can You Feel the Blood Tonight?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9314672011-08-19T15:28:41-04:002011-10-19T05:12:02-04:00Jonathan Naymarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-naymark/
Anyway KX (pronounced kicks) is based out of Oshawa, which means its airwaves are filled with Durham specific ads. None are nowhere near as catchy as the best radio jingle in the history of Canadian radio jingles: "Sleep Country Canada why buy a mattress anywhere else?"; however, some of the ads are almost as amusing. Take recent adverts for Canadian Blood Services (CBS), whose latest campaign is so funny it almost made me spit out my fair trade organic milk latte. CBS's radio ads are currently promoting a contest: visit a blood donor clinic and you could win two tickets to go see Elton John.
As Melissa Smith-McGuire, community development coordinator at Canadian Blood Services notes: "Summer is typically a challenging time as blood donation is not always top of mind. I'm encouraging local residents to come together, help save lives and enter for the chance to see Elton John."
Wahoo, I thought: can you feel the blood tonight?! I mean who doesn't love the Rocket Man? And who doesn't want to hoist their smartphone in the air as Sir Elton belts out the classic "Candle in the Wind" and squeal: I wonder if he will he sing the Marilyn Monroe version, or, in light of the marriage of William of Wales to Catherine of Nowhere, the version that mentions England's Rose?
The suspense is killing me.
But then I thought to myself and to Melissa Smith-McGuire: girlfriend, why not kick this contest up a notch? Wouldn't it be truly amazing if Canadian Blood Services got Sir Elton to actually donate his own blood?
But as Shania Twain's "Don't be Stupid" hit the airwaves... epiphany struck: I was being stupid. I remembered that Elton John, a man, is in a civil partnership with Canadian David Furnish, also a man. This would, for those who aren't following my logic train, make them homosexuals. And Canadian Blood Services does not allow gay men the opportunity to donate blood if they have had sex with a man even once since 1977.
In the scheme of things, this isn't as big a marketing screw up as lets say New Coke... but surely someone around the conference table was like, hmm... Elton John, a gay man, can't actually donate blood in Canada, and neither can his partner, also a gay man. So perhaps using them as a carrot to try and get the general population to donate blood... maybe not the best idea?
Apparently not. Looking into the finer points of said contest I did discover that "Blood donations are not required" to win the tickets. CBS is wise to expand eligibility requirements; imagine if the fine print on those freebie Elton John tickets re-iterated what it says on Blood.ca: "All men who have had sex with another man (I guess they're talking about us gays), even once, since 1977 are indefinitely deferred."
While our Charter would view discrimination based on sexuality as untenable for a contest, why then do we allow it for blood donors?
Canadian Blood Services has long argued that banning blood from gay men is "based on health and safety considerations; namely, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the [men who have sex with men] populations." In fact, last year the Ontario Superior Court ruled in CBS's favour, reiterating, that CBS's policy is allowable due to health and safety concerns.
However, even researchers have begun to question the ban, implemented in 1983 (when Trudeau was PM). Mark Wainberg, head of the McGill University AIDS Centre, recently argued in the Canadian Medical Association Journal that CBS's gay blood ban should be re-evaluated in order to allow gay men who are in monogamous relationships the opportunity to donate blood. Some believe that CBS should defer donations by those donors who have had sex with multiple partners over the past year, be they homosexual or heterosexual. Other countries including Japan and Sweden have similar policies.
Yet Canadian Blood Services continues to treat gay men with, what is in my opinion, disdain. Gay men are placed in their HIV high-risk category, defined as, "People who have taken money or drugs for sex. [And] All men who have had sex with another man, even once, since 1977 are indefinitely deferred."
Yes, the CBS groups gays with drug users and prostitutes; activities deemed illegal by the Canadian Criminal Code. Awesome. Thanks guys. Don't let Elton John's door hit you on the way out.
And that, more then anything, is what galls me about this relatively innocuous contest. Canadian Blood Services is using a gay icon as a promotional tool, while endorsing an outdated view of homosexuality by continuing to ban of gay blood donors. This is no better than Las Vegas casino's that invited Sammy Davis Jr. to perform and then refused to let them spend the night. But that was in the 1950s.
To paraphrase singer Adam Lambert, it appears that for the Canadian Blood Services men who have sex with men are there for your entertainment only.
Blood, apparently it's NOT in me to give.
]]>Rob and Doug Ford: Toronto's Brothers Grimtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9118852011-07-28T10:53:57-04:002011-09-27T05:12:01-04:00Jonathan Naymarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-naymark/$774 million structural deficit, may indeed have to close a library branch or two.
Why? Well to quote Colonel Mustard from the movie version of Clue: "This is war... casualties are inevitable. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs." Oddly enough the Toronto Public Library doesn't own a copy of the movie Clue in its collection -- surprising considering it does have over 32 million Books, CD's and DVD's in circulation as it handles over 18 million visits annually.
But before I raise the wrath of the 35,000 Torontonians who've signed the petition: Keep Toronto's Libraries Open and Public, I will also say that perhaps we do NOT need to close any of our beloved libraries.
To close or not to close? That has become Hogtown's question du jour and while it is easy to wax poetic, the correct answer to the problem at hand is unknown to me, unknown to you and has dumbfounded even the highly educated bean counters at KPMG.
Faced with budgetary constraints, things indeed have to change at City Hall. No one really knows how though. Perhaps what we should be doing is closing under-utilized branches while innovatively examining ways to expand TPL's book mobile service; a potentially cheaper and more efficient way to reach remote corners of the City. Such creativity would be better then "Not the Mayor" Doug Ford declaring that library cuts will happen "in a heartbeat" simply because he says so.
But here in elected Mayor Rob Ford's Toronto we don't think in such creative and rational ways. The Fords' Toronto has become reactionary. A reactionary public, led by a reactionary mayor and flamed by a reactionary press has led to the disappearance of any sort of intelligent discourse.
Our sound bite of a Mayor Doug Ford, oh sorry that would actually be City Councillor Ford, is only too happy to say confrontational things to those who dare oppose his wishes. One such victim is the Margaret Atwood, who tweeted her derision over library cuts. Not the Mayor Ford replied: "Good luck to Margaret Atwood. I don't even know her. She could walk right by me, I wouldn't have a clue who she is."
Doug then suggested that Margaret "run in the next election and get democratically elected." Ironic, in the best Alanis Morissette sense of the word, because last time I checked only the good people of Etobicoke North elected Doug Ford. And while he may speak and act as if he's our dauphin the majority of Torontonians did not vote for Doug Ford to become our defacto mayor.
And so we the progressive citizens of Toronto and probably most of your Facebook friends, are all up in arms over the dufus brothers Ford, screaming in our best Helen Lovejoy: won't somebody please think of the children.
Indeed Rob and Doug Ford have become Toronto's Brothers Grim. Not to be confused with our Brothers Grimm.
But oddly enough I don't think that they are bad for business simply because they've raised the specter of having to close a library branch or two; nor do I think they're awful because the Mayor led council to vote on the removal of bike lanes from Jarvis Street. They did, as we sometimes gloss over, vote in support of adding a completely separated bike lane on Sherbourne Ave. Was removing the Jarvis bike line a misguided waste of $400k? Sure... was it the worst thing ever? Nah... even Marcus Gee doesn't think so and he hates Rob Ford.
I do find it unbelievable that our mayor may or may not have flipped the bird to a mother and her six-year-old kid, while driving and talking on his cellphone, without breaking into laughter like a hyena cum 16-year-old teenager caught stealing vodka from his parents.
I think that the Brothers Ford are awful because they refuse to raise pertinent issues in an organized capacity. They practice slap-dash, reactionary politics. The Ford brothers are like some sort of Godzilla who rampages through Toronto aimlessly bent on destruction. Me Rob Ford. You Gravy.
And sadly the Brothers Grim are like our own version of Sarah Palin; only instead of seeing Russia from her house, Doug Ford can apparently see the a TPL Logo, obscuring a Tim Horton's Always Fresh sign, from his Etobicoke living room.
But just as Sarah Palin continues to haunt the American electorate, I suspect that it will be fairly difficult to excise our loser brothers from our midst. Reactionary politics has forever failed to stop the Palin juggernaut, and it seems like reactionary politics aren't quite working against Fords either. Those who love him continue to do so, and those who disapprove of him, are coalescing in strong derision.
So while we should get mad, irate at our embarrassing situation, we can't get angry because a politician has raised the specter of library closings. They may be necessary. However, until the time that whatever opposition exists can deliver a cohesive plan that deals with Toronto's structural deficit -- we're stuck with the Brothers Grim. And unlike the Brothers Grimm -- I'm not expecting a fairy tale ending.
Read the Huffington Post's live blog of the Toronto council session here. ]]>When it Comes to the Media, Nice Isn't Always Better Than Naughtytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9081622011-07-25T01:55:45-04:002011-09-23T05:12:01-04:00Jonathan Naymarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-naymark/
From Prince Charles telling his mistress that he wanted to become her tampon to Hugh Grant throwing a can of beans at the paparazzi, what other country could produce the sublime, and downright bizarre News of the World cell phone hacking scandal whose denouement occurred this past week as Rupert Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, leapt into ninja mode protecting her husband from a shaving cream pie to the face?
Canadian gossip columnist Lainey tweeted: "Am watching this Rupert Murdoch testimony like it's a primetime drama." She's right -- the whole controversy seems overly fictional to our polite Canadian media, which would NEVER think about invading personal privacy to report on the private lives of others.
Canadian national mythology is still very much wrapped up in Papa Trudeau's mantra: "There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation." After 30 years the fact that this sentiment continues to be a top Canadian political quote speaks volumes for Trudeau's ability to seep into our national consciousness; it also may speak to our inability to attract a decent orator to public office, but that is the topic of another column.
In my opinion, the only Canadian publication that would ever go anywhere near using a cell phone for news making purposes was the late (some may say great) Frank Magazine, which was, before it ceased publication in 2008, Canada's only national satire magazine. Remembered for its esoteric writing style, it once ran a competition for young conservatives to deflower Brian Mulroney's daughter Caroline, Frank touched topics few Canadian media outlets would dare.
Instead of hacking into phones, [ED. surely, what's the fun in the illegality of that] Frank used the telephone for other questionable purposes; namely, for its infamous "Frank Pranks" where the magazine would pretend to be representatives from fictional lobbyist groups or masquerade as politicians in order to "dial up windbag politicos, onanist showbiz types, and other deserving victims, then feed them a line and let their egos take over."
The last great Frank Prank was the creation of the fictional website: www.supportlordblack.com, supposedly crafted by a group that was incensed by Lord Tubby's legal problems. The faux website fooled national news outlets and even Conrad himself who wrote: "I am again flattered by such a thing. I will give you all CONRAD WILL WIN shirts when you are here."
Even before the demise of Frank Magazine, Canada's media landscape never had the same sort of animosity that permeates other media markets.
In light of the British phone hacking scandal, such media purity may seem like a good thing; however, there is a double-edged sword in our niceness. As Bert Archer noted in the Toronto Standard, (about a week before the implosion of the News of the World), Canada lacks any sort of true media critic. A dangerous reality, a media critic, he wrote, is necessary: "We need to know people are watching us, expecting more from us, noticing when we fall down on the job..."
Perhaps Canadians are too nice to raise serious issues about who and what our media reports on. One could argue of course that we don't need to -- we're so impossibly polite that our lone satirical magazine folded due to unprofitability -- and the probability of some sort of cell phone hacking scandal occurring in Canada is laughable. Yet there is danger in this complacency.
Say what you will about the News of the World and tabloid journalism in general -- they touch stories that mainstream press won't. While our lack of yellow press ensures that Canadian politicians will never really be outed, nor will the rumoured love triangle of Peter Mansbridge, Cynthia Dale and Wendy Mesley receive as much ink as Anderson Cooper's private life has, it also means that it is relatively easy to sweep important things under the proverbial rug.
Take the curious case of Renata Ford. As Jan Wong noted in her Toronto Life piece, "The Woman Behind the Mayor, Who is Renata Ford?" interest in political spouses leads to accusations of the media overstepping. But surely political wives offer some interest to the public? As Wong notes: "A politician's home life speaks to his character." Frank Magazine, for example, was the first news outlet to talk about Mel Lastman's wife shoplifting. Yet Renata Ford continues to be off limits. Wong asks: "Is the media being discrete, or merely cowardly?"
Nice is not always just about gossip and scandal. In a country where a couple of major conglomerates own an overwhelming majority of our media, it also means it is easy to "shape" the news we receive. For example, Macleans Magazine, owned by Rogers Communications, will rarely talk about Canada's wireless business. Use the Macleans search function to look for Anthony Lacavera, CEO of Rogers rival WIND Mobile, and you'll come up with just one article... And while this isn't censorship, it is, as Archer, would argue: lazy.
Lazy is not amusing. And while the British tabs have provided enough laughter -- Canadians should not simply click our tongue in disgust (and amusement) over the News of the World scandal. When it comes to journalism nice can be just as bad as naughty.
]]>The Emergence of a Canadian Culture Wartag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8931192011-07-09T08:23:07-04:002011-09-08T05:12:02-04:00Jonathan Naymarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-naymark/Maclean's columnist Andrew Coyne argued that Stephen Harper's much maligned $45 million cut to Heritage Canada's budget was not representative of some sort of Canadian Culture War as was then feared.
Instead Coyne argued that Harper's budget cuts were indicative of an emergent class conflict.
In 2008, perhaps Coyne was right. Brouhaha over arts and culture funding was indeed representative of divergences between "ordinary Canadians" and "Canadian elites."
However, I would argue that over the interceding three years (ages in politics) we have crossed the Rubicon from class conflict into what appears to be some sort of cultural conflagration.
For most people the concept of culture war alludes to the United States whose societal dichotomies have been documented since the 1960s if not before. However, the concept was popularized during the Reagan administration, when socially contentious issues such abortion, gay rights and censorship were quick to divide the electorate. In 1991 author James Davison Hunter defined America's two opposing camps as progressives and traditionalists; America has been fighting variants of that same war ever since.
In Canada, however, our culture war has been kept in check by an almost unified belief in the notion of progressivism; a belief that has helped define what it means to be Canadian over the past century. The progressive notion that government involvement was essential to societal betterment was once a beacon for our two largest political parties: the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives.
But progressivism has proven to be a 20th century concept, one that bled out of the sweatshops and mass immigration of our industrial revolution but died with Y2K.
Canadian progressivism has now been sullied in the political arena, married to the electorate's fear of elitism, and exploited by class dynamics where a progressive identity is no longer essential to our Canadian sense of self.
As the demise of progressivism continues, so rises Canada's emerging culture war.
The powder keg erupted rather unobtrusively in 2009, when then Minister Dianna Ablonczy was reprimanded for dolling out almost $400,000 to Pride Toronto as part of the Marquee Tourism Events stimulus program; the event was not stimulating enough for some (socially) Conservative MPs.
Soon members of our national media would join in on the government's fun. Take SunTV's Krista Erickson, whose June 2011 interview with Canadian interpretive dancer Margie Gillis proved to be more of a witch hunt then anything factual. At one point, while flapping her hands in an attempt to mimic Margie's dance moves, Krista asks: "why does this (hand waving) cost $1.2 million over 13 years?" (She is referring to grants Gillis's Foundation had received from the government.)
John Doyle in the Globe and Mail probably has the best rebuttal of Erickson's interview, where, he notes that the Canadian taxpayer pays for a lot of stuff that we may not know about or agree with including subsidies of $327,160 to Sun TV's parent company, Quebecor, to help publish its magazine 7 Jours.
While Gillis' "hand waving" is the type of artsy-fartsy production presumably only appreciated by the upper class, Erickson's interview is classless (in both senses of the word). As Gillis talks about compassion towards the end of the interview Krista bangs the war drums, wondering how she could dare compare her work to the death of 150 Canadians in Afghanistan.
And that crazy analogy is Canada's class war veering off into the abyss of a culture war as we question the very basis of how our national culture relates to our nascent military state.
And a culture war has reared its head in local politics where Toronto's Mayor Rob Ford decided to skip the city's aforementioned Pride Parade to spend time with his family in Muskoka.
But fear not heathens, city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti decided to put on his best Gossip Girl outfit so he could film the city's Dyke March, only to demand that the city revoke future funding due to the political nature of the march. Note that even the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy, which has over the past year struggled with its relationship to Pride and Pride's relationship with Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, doesn't seem to want anything to do with Mammoliti's obsessive fascination with all things gay.
As fall out, Mammoliti and Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday want the city to create a policy that will prevent public dollars from being spent on events that contain political messages. Such a policy would potentially mimic the apparent reasons why federal funding was revoked for SummerWorks, a Toronto theatre festival. While official reasons surrounding its funding refusal are sketchy, the festival is infamous for its decision to produce a play that the Harper government felt was sympathetic to the Toronto18 Terrorists.
In my mind, all of this boils down to the emergence of our very own culture war. The apparent class war over cultural funding is now moot; Ablonczy wasn't reprimanded for funding the Calgary Stampede nor is SunTV advocating for the removal of federal magazine subsidies. Instead an emerging culture war is defining just what it means to be Canadian in the post-progressive era.
On one side we have those who would argue that patriotism should be defined by our military allegiance and inoffensive cultural pursuits while on the other side of we have...
Sadly progressivism is dead -- we just haven't found what to replace it with.
]]>Rob Ford's Gravy Train Hits Huntsvilletag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8830002011-06-23T12:06:26-04:002011-08-23T05:12:01-04:00Jonathan Naymarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-naymark/decision to spend the Canada Day long weekend dockside in Huntsville rather then doffing a rainbow-coloured Hawaiian shirt so he can march down Yonge Street getting sprayed by water guns and pelted with Trojan condoms at Toronto's annual Pride Parade.
After all I threatened to 'Naycott' pride just a few short years ago... and while FordCott isn't as catchy a phrase I can understand his sentiment -- Pride can be overwhelming to the neophyte.
That being said -- I am not, nor have I ever been the Mayor of Toronto. My distaste with Pride has more to do with my own personal fear of the Saturday night line-up at Buddies, which I've spent neurotically wondering: "OMG am I going to have to come here when I'm 40?" Ford, of course, has no such personal conflict of interest (that we know if). In fact, much like the Queen (pun sort of intended) who happily shows up at events and showers the people with her regal wave, these types of appearances are part of the job Ford applied for; he is after all -- his Worship.
The queer community (perhaps rightfully so) fears that Ford's Pride snub is simply yet another phalanx of his presumed homophobia (Ford has rarely engendered sympathy from Toronto's queer community, he infamously said about HIV: "If you are not doing needles and you are not gay, you wouldn't get AIDS probably, that's the bottom line."); however, it is not only Toronto's gays who should raise their eyebrows as our mayor hightails it up Highway 400 next weekend.
All Torontonians, both gay, straight, black, brown, white and everyone in between should be concerned that our mayor seems to have very little interest in attending one of our city's marquee tourism festivals.
For a man who declared upon his election that "Toronto is now open for business" -- Pride, with its plethora of corporate donors, is one of the few events that does just that -- opens our city's doors for businesses and tourists alike. Perhaps most importantly it does so with little government money.
Of last year's $3 million Pride budget, more then one-third was covered by sponsorship dollars (sponsors include blue-chippers as TD Bank). A small amount ($125,000) came from the City of Toronto. While the parade has received federal funding before Pride Toronto infamously received NOTHING in the way of federal money in 2010.
Truthfully Pride Toronto, which continues to be a celebration of gay and lesbian equality, has become a juggernaut of an event. Hundreds of thousands of tourists travel to Toronto for Pride. These tourists spend hundreds of millions of dollars in our city, and in turn kick back thousands of dollars into our depleted tax coffers. The ROI on the City's relatively small investment in Pride is huge: A 2009 study concluded that Pride contributed $136 million in spending; $94 million of that came from visiting tourists.
But while councilor Karen Wong-Tam, declared about Rob Ford: "It sends the wrong message to the [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] community," I would argue that it sends the wrong message to ALL Torontonians. Torontonians deserve and need a mayor who can recognize the importance of such events to the city, its residents, its businesses AND its bottom-line.
After all -- did we not elect Ford because of his supposed knowledge of fiscal responsibility?
I had dinner on Monday night with a conservative political strategist. We ended up chatting about Mayor Ford and I admitted that I found it bizarre that Mayor Rob had practically dropped off the face of the Earth since being elected. It was as if he was trotted out at opportune times for a quick sound bite before retreating into the ether; as has become rather indicative of the Ford administration we are more likely to hear from Doug Ford, the Mayor's brother, then the mayor himself.
"What happens if there's a major disaster in Toronto?" My dinner companion joked "Where's our Rudy Guiliani?." And while he was being somewhat fatalistic his joke was driven home 48 hours later when Ford admitted that he would not be attending Pride. Now obviously Pride is the opposite of a natural disaster but still... it does signal a lack of real leadership. I mean did we elect a leader or a tape recorder?
Truthfully I don't know if Rob Ford is boycotting Pride because he'd rather do anything else then hang out with the gays or simply because he has very little interest in representing our city when he doesn't feel up to it. I know I'd rather sit dockside in Muskoka then go to Pride.
But while the former is problematic from a socially conscious perspective the latter is problematic because of the job that Ford has chosen and was elected to do.
Torontonians both gay and straight are right to wonder if our mayor actually wants to be an active participant in the very city he has chosen to represent.
Seems to me that it is pretty hard to stop that gravy train when you're not even at the station...