How to invent news when there isn't any

Have you heard about the crisis in Canada's largest big-city police force?

Yup, there's a crisis with that runaway budget. It's "out of control," as we've been told innumerable times by every news platform in the land.

The front page of Canada's newspaper of record has an ominous foreshadowing of the ugly stories to be found inside today's edition, and front and centre, taking up a full third of the front page, is a picture of a Toronto Police badge and the words "THE RECKONING."

It's gotta be bad if a serious news purveyor like our national newspaper of record goes all caps on the reckoning.

The reckoning starts with a very scary graph on page M1. Oooohh is it scary! It takes up almost half a page to show us that the Toronto Police Services budget has gone from 600 millions in 2001 to an astonishing 1.1 billion today!!!

Oh my goodness! No wonder Toronto can't afford to fix potholes!

Naturally, with a buildup like this I'm gonna read the story for sure. Sounds to me like some of those professional journos are earning their pay for once... unless those guys are unpaid interns...

Sure enough, three paragraphs in I stumble over the out-of-control billion dollar budget meme.

Oddly enough, nowhere in the entire story do I encounter the words "inflation" or "population growth."

I suppose that's because if you took those factors into account, the actual increase in policing costs per person has been entirely inconsequential. Yes, it's gone up marginally, but that's it. There's no story here to speak of.

So what's with the big hoo-ha?

Here's a brief quote from page M4 that gives away the game; "...bringing in lower-paid civilians to performs (sic; proof reading has gone down the shitter in this age of efficiency) traditionally done by officers."

So THAT'S what's up! There's a crisis in the out-of-control police budget, and we can only wrestle that crisis down by turning reasonably well-paid unionized police jobs into shit jobs!