In the Blog
Mid-Week Round Up: October 15
Illustration: Erin McPhee
Don’t forget, the Shamie Awards are THIS FRIDAY (October 16th)! Get your tickets now! We’ll see you there!
In an epic game on Wednesday the Toronto Blue Jays beat the Texas Rangers to advance to the American League Championship Series! Toronto is EXCITED.
The Girl Guides of Canada have officially welcomed transgendered children in to their organization! They have developed guidelines meant to respect and accommodate all children identifying as female. This move, lauded by advocacy groups, is a particularly important way to honour identity for a large population that has very little legal or social autonomy.
The world became a little bit less radical this week; influential Detroit activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs passed on Monday at the age of 100. “She left this life as she lived it: surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas,” said her friends and caretakers Shea Howell and Alice Jennings. Watch some of her appearances on Democracy Now! here.
We are a few short days from the election and more than 3.6 million Canadians voted in advanced polls this past weekend. That’s a 71 percent increase from the 2.1 million Canadians who voted in the 2011 election. This year there were more advance polling days and more eligible voters, bumping up numbers and boding well for Election Day turnout. For information on how influential the youth vote is in this election, check out this article.
Filed under glaringly obvious, a study by McGill professor Jason Carmichael has found that Canada’s justice system is totally, massively racist and classist. He found that the number of police officers on the ground in any particular city is directly correlated, not with crime rates, but with the size of the city’s visible minority and lower-income populations. With more police officers comes more involvement with the criminal justice system in the groups they police. And if, according to this study, city officials are adding higher numbers of officers based on the size of the poor population and the visible minority population, this means higher incarceration rates in those two groups.
Filed under terrible moves, the Ellen DeGeneres Show parodied Nicki Minaj by airing a skit styled after a ‘90s sitcom wherein the Minaj family (even the pet dog) all have giant backsides. Everyone knows you don’t mess with Nicki.
Although this week marks Canadian Thanksgiving for us Northerners, folks south of the border celebrated Columbus Day on Monday. This day, wildly inaccurate in its inception, celebrates a hugely problematic figure who, among other things, stole Native American lands, enslaved an entire population of people and wiped out half their numbers. In an amazing move, Indigenous populations in Alaska and Denver have taken this day back, renaming it Indigenous Peoples Day.
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March. Thousands of Black rights activists gathered at the National Mall on Saturday to celebrate the anniversary and call for policing reforms and changes in Black communities.
