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!

Plump white politicos shake their booties to lure black votes at Toronto's Caribana/Carribean carnival

Where exactly did that "Carribean" stuff come from?

This party has been around forever and it's ALWAYS been Caribana...

Not "Carribean."

Be that as it may, the Toronto Sun, flagship of the SunPostMedia conglomerate, National Post pretensions notwithstanding, is full-on with the new nomenclature, as you can see here.

And what up with those two roly-poly white guys trying to snag a few votes here?

No harm in trying, I guess...

Our elected representatives need to curb Uber before somebody gets hurt

And people are already being hurt.

People who worked a lifetime to pay off a taxi license, because they were playing by the rules, are being tossed overboard because Uber is being allowed to poach the taxi business.

Mayor John Tory has come out for Uber.

Where does that leave the people who have played by the rules all their lives ?

Who we gonna kick around now that we don't have Rob Ford to kick around anymore?

Why, Rob Ford of course!

Bruce Arthur has a front page rant in today's Sunday Star, ostensibly aimed at Ford's appointment to the Board of Directors of the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Who cares, you say? Obviously the news-hounds at the Star care enough to give this valuable front page real estate over to sliming the former mayor as opposed to some more newsworthy subject, of which there are ample to choose from.

About eight paragraphs in Arthur makes a point of claiming the moral high ground vis-a-vis Ford's highly public battle with cancer. He wants us to know that his gratuitous anti-Ford diatribe isn't in any way personal and that he wishes the former mayor well... in which case not bothering to write a story with utterly zero news value would have been the way to go.

What I'd like to see is a little more spot-light on the current mayor, who ran the most expensive election campaign in Toronto's history. As an old-boy insider John Tory's life has been a never-ending cascade of serendipitous sinecures that speak volumes about entitlement and class privilege.

The Star invested vast resources in tracking down the so-called Ford crack tapes. They should invest just as much looking for Tory's dirty laundry.