- Niigaan Sinclair has some thoughts on the recent incidents at the Food Fare on Portage Avenue, suggesting that the common factor in these and other incidents may be a lucrative black market in meat. He has some interesting things to say:
The motivation for the incident is unknown and the investigation is ongoing, but what is more likely: a teenager stealing food for himself or selling it?
Poverty is driving individuals who don’t want to enter the highly profitable but highly illegal and dangerous drug trade and instead sell something easily shoplifted and sold for a high margin.
It may also be that the stakes of thefts in smaller shops like Food Fare are much higher, leading to the spate of violent incidents.
Ask any of the big-box grocery stores on the outskirts of the city and they will tell you theft of meat is their primary problem. Stealing from a big corporation isn’t often noticeable or cause for the business to fold.
I do take issue with one of the things he says though:
Meat thieves may also be providing an essential service.
As one source who works for a front-line, North End social justice agency told me, it’s a way “poor families” can get cheap access to decent meat.
It's better described as something that's seen as an essential service. Food is definitely essential, but meat is not.
- One of the people the mainstream Canadian media love to consult as an expert when they're doing a story about the food distribution and retail industry in this country is one Sylvain Charlebois, a professor of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University. He's one of this country's most quoted academics on any subject, and is almost a minor celebrity (complete with a nickname, "The Food Professor"). Notably, he has been quite vocal in the media lately dismissing any suggestion that grocery chains are overcharging, and especially the current Loblaws boycott campaign. Which is kind of unsavoury given his rather interesting relationship with Loblaws. Oh, and it's worth mentioning that he used to be a dean in the university's Faculty of Management until he suddenly resigned his post a couple of years ago after an investigation was conducted into allegations of bullying and harassment. In other Loblaws-related news, a Shoppers Drug Mart in Toronto apparently posted an ad for a volunteer position in their store. That's right - they tried to get a volunteer to "provide support to the staff". After it went viral the ad apparently was removed. I wonder why?
- Last June, Britt Leroux of Windsor, Ontario had a clash with a chap who goes by the name of Bubba Pollock (really!) on social media over her support of 2SLGBTQ+ rights. His response? He gathered a whole bunch more information about her, drove two and a half hours from his home in London, and paid a visit to the hospital where her dying father was in palliative care during visiting hours. He then took a selfie with her unconscious father, and then posted the photo to the comment thread. He has now pleaded guilty to harassment, and is awaiting sentencing. He already has a criminal rap sheet that includes sexual assault and distributing intimate images without consent, and is apparently a supporter of the White Lives Matter movement.
- The US is expected to impose a 100% tariff on electric vehicles imported from China. It's widely suspected that the main reason is fears that American automakers can't compete with them.
- A child under the age of 5 has died of measles in Hamilton, the first fatality in Ontario in 35 years. And no, the child was not vaccinated.
- The ban on single-use plastics has become the latest front in the culture war, complete with a Conservative MP railing against attempts to replace plastic with more benign materials as "woke".
- Alberta RCMP have concluded, using "investigative genetic genealogy" (which involves the comparison of DNA samples with a database obtained from those services like 23andMe and Ancestry.com) that a serial sex offender who died in an Idaho prison in 2011 was responsible for the murders of four young women in Calgary in the 1970s.
- Scottie Scheffler, the world's top ranked golfer has been charged with assaulting a police officer with his car after the cop tried to stop him from driving around a roadblock on the way to the PGA Championship in Louisville, Kentucky. The roadblock was in place because the police were investigating a fatal accident. Rather strange behaviour for someone who professes to be a devout Christian.
