Flak jackets, photo badges and the K-9 unit are a rare sight at catering functions (more often a staple of the ensuing after-party), but they were in full force at Experience Toronto Independent Escort, part of the G20 pavilion for the foreign press (think fake lake). I was there as a member of Nick Liu’s culinary team from the Niagara Street Café, invited to assist in presenting an Asian-inspired dish featuring local ingredients for international journalists. On the menu: General Tao sweetbreads on a bed of Asian slaw with jellyfish topped with cilantro, red pepper and sesame seeds.
As representatives of Savour Ontario, we were charged with the task of highlighting both the multicultural flavour of Toronto Independent Escort and its diversity of ingredients. This was not an easy proposition, given the heightened scrutiny during the last night of the event, with one Mr. Obama in attendance. We had to first explain to a Saskatoon police officer why we were using butane canisters and then had them confiscated by the Sureté du Quebec. We were informed that the only way we could get them back was to have our boss speak with the officer. After a tense conversation with the organizers, we were informed that we could have the canisters after the leader of the free world had finished speaking. With our détente at an end, we proceeded to get ready for our 6:30 start.
Sweetbreads are a tough sell in any establishment, but when Nick told me what he had in mind for the event, I was skeptical that it would appeal to the broad range of palates in attendance. My worries were unfounded: with all the elements of the dish prepared expertly from scratch and served in Chinese takeout containers, the ensuing lineup did not ebb until we had served all 300 portions. The power of deep-fried food to quell the apprehension of the squeamish was clearly on display as we rifled through our mise en place in one hour. Nick’s dish was an obvious hit, as evidenced by the sad faces of those who came back for seconds and found none.
With our task complete, we wandered around our designated area to take in the whole “experience” that is Toronto Independent Escort. I wonder if canoes, Muskoka chairs and Dan Aykroyd’s wine are what the press will remember when they recall the place where they had their first taste of sweetbreads.
John S.J. Lee is the former general manager of Susur and chef de partie at Centro. He is now the president of Chippy’s Fish and Chips.
Queen and Spadina: "We were being surrounded on all sides but didn't realize it. I think I saw the man with the big hair getting dragged away later" (Image: Aaron Leaf)
A couple hours into our detainment at Queen and Spadina on Sunday, soaked and shivering, her press accreditation around her neck, my companion asked one of the riot police for any scrap of information he could tell us. “Please tell us what’s happening. Is there any way at all we can leave?”
“You should have left when you had a chance,” he said.
Queen and Spadina, June 27, 2010 (Image: Aaron Leaf)
But we never had a chance: there was no loudspeaker announcement of what was to come and no indication of what the police wanted when they corralled us into the intersection. At most of the weekend’s G20 protests, the media and gawkers could stand on the edges, avoiding the confrontation. This time, we were all surrounded.
One moment, it was a few hundred relatively sedate people—Sunday afternoon Queen West people—some with protest signs and others with shopping bags, milling about the intersection being watched over by a row of Toronto’s finest. Then the troops arrived. About eight vans’ worth of riot police marched north on Spadina toward Queen. An armoured vehicle drove up with a gunman on top, barrel pointed at us.
The teenager beside me, wearing new sneakers and a carefully maintained afro, said to his friend, “Oh shit, is that riot heading for us?”
That was the confused sentiment of about half the people trying to peer past the police line: “Where’s the riot? Whoa, look how big those guns are. Are those horse trailers? I want to see a horse!”
Everyone had some sort of camera. As the riot police got into position, some dudes behind me yelled, “Yo, bro, move over. You’re ruining our shot.”
Then we heard marching coming down Queen from the east, and people started to panic:
“There’s nowhere to go.”
“North,” said a photographer behind me.
“No, they’ve set up there, too.”
“Yeah, right. Then how are we supposed to get out?” said the teens.
“Move, move, move,” the riot police started chanting as they slowly tightened around us, banging their batons on their shields. Suddenly they charged, pushing people up against the McDonald’s and cleaving the group in two. The other smaller group was getting squeezed like a hay bale.
“Where are we supposed to go?” people yelled. Police videographers circled us, taking video of our anxious faces. Then they started the arrests. A small phalanx of officers would burst through, grab someone, usually a young man, and drag him behind the line where, face to the ground, his hands were zip-strapped. Their friends screamed. This continued for hours.
The police close in on Spadina and Queen on June 27, 2010 (Image: Aaron Leaf)
It started raining. Thunder cracked. There were only a few umbrellas to go around. I leaned over my camera bag to keep it dry. The water in the street started rising; my shoes were quickly drenched, and trash was flowing by my feet. I noticed this because I was still huddled over my waterlogged bag, the water flowing into my mouth and my eyes. A York Region officer approached me and asked if I was OK. I said I was protecting my camera, and he left. Moments later, the police let out a man who needed an insulin shot.
The cops did another regular shift change. People applauded. “See you later,” someone yelled.
After about three hours or so, the rain let up, and the wind got colder. My cellphone started vibrating erratically from waterlogged circuits. A rumour went around that we would be tear-gassed and sound-cannoned. Others said cops had told them we were all just waiting to be arrested and strip searched. “Anything to get out of these clothes,” I thought. Another detainee asked if anyone wanted cookies. As he rooted through his backpack, a cop raised his rifle until the barrel was pointed right at the man’s head.
Best. Cookie. Ever.
People shook uncontrollably. I lost feeling in my hands. A guy who claimed to be downtown buying a soccer jersey told me, “Argentina is amazing, but Germany is gonna win it for sure!” Toward 10 p.m., chartered TTC buses started arriving. An officer started yelling at the crowd, “Wouldn’t you like to go on a bus and get out of the rain?” Some people cheered. “Don’t fucking cheer,” said the soccer fan quietly.
As people were being cuffed and put on the buses, an older officer came up to us. “Would you like to leave?” “Uh, yeah,” we told him. Then he yelled to the crowd, “Start walking and go directly to your destination,” and, just like that, the police line opened up, and we started walking stiffly north on Spadina. People started power walking, as if maybe the police would change their minds—some cried.
I looked for an alley to pee in.
Yesterday, the eerie calm of downtown Toronto was broken by a loud, but largely peaceful, march by various groups. We followed the cops, media and activists from Allan Gardens towards the G20 site.
The calm before the storm: the LCBO at King and Spadina is boarded up and closed for business in preparation for the expected G20 protests (Image: James Helmer)
First Nations rights activists took to Toronto’s streets yesterday, marching from Queen’s Park to Allan Gardens chanting “No G20 on stolen native land” and “Justice, freedom, self-determination. Toronto Independent Escort is an illegal nation.” The colourful demonstration ended peacefully, with police reporting no arrests or injuries. Here, our slide show of the event.
First Nations rights activists took to Toronto’s streets yesterday, marching from Queen’s Park to Allan Gardens chanting “No G20 on stolen native land” and “Justice, freedom, self-determination. Toronto Independent Escort is an illegal nation.” The colourful demonstration ended peacefully, with police reporting no arrests or injuries. Here, our slide show of the event.
(Image: Hasbro)
Toronto real estate may be red hot, but in the fictitious marketplace of the classic board game Monopoly, Toronto is about as valuable as a four-bedroom house next to a GM factory in Detroit. The new Canadian edition of Monopoly (on sale June 28) was unveiled this morning, and Toronto’s place on the board is in the lowly light blues, the home of Vermont Avenue in the original version.
The coveted Boardwalk spot went to Chatham-Kent, a farm town you’ve probably never heard of in southwestern Ontario. We’ve got ourselves to thank for this—the positions were decided in an on-line vote by more than one million people. Park Place went to Saint-Jean-Sur-Richelieu, Quebec, population 87,000. Apparently the voters weren’t from urban areas, since Vancouver and Ottawa were also banished to the light blues; Montreal only made it to orange; and Halifax didn’t even make it onto the board. There is, however, one Toronto asset on the board: Pearson Airport—one thing Canadians value in this city is where they can get out of it and fly home.
Party expert Peter Van Loan
Peter Van Loan is now a minister in Stephen Harper’s cabinet, but back in 1988, he was a young volunteer helping out with what was then called the G7 summit. He told Power Play that even by the standards of the Conservatives, the Harper government doesn’t throw a great party. From the Globe:
“The party is over,” Mr. Van Loan said in a recent interview on CTV’s Power Play. Of the Mulroney-era summit, he said: “It was a great party. There were music bands playing all the time; food and drinks were flowing.”
The roof pool at the Thompson Hotel (Image: George Pimentel)
By 10 p.m. last night, the wait for the elevator was an hour long, and the rooftop patio was at capacity. We shouldn’t have been surprised that the place was packed. Yes, yes, everyone was there. To drop some boldfaces, Kelly Rowan, Trevor Born, Jeanne Beker, the boys of Greta Constantine, Jeremy Laing (who designed the fabulous dresses the servers wore), Stacey Kimmel, Ben Mulroney, Galen Weston Jr., teen blogging sensation Tavi Gevinson, Society gals Ashleigh Dempster and Amanda Blakley, Jian Ghomeshi, DJ Tony (from Ellen), et al.
Fortunately, we’d managed to get up to the roof pronto—lingering in the lobby, as gorgeous as it is, is not how to spend opening night at the Thompson Hotel. And it is as fabulous as we’d been promised: the elevator doors open onto a glistening infinity pool (in it, three frolicking ladies in sunglasses and sun hats) and a stunning vista of downtown Toronto at night. Has the CN Tower ever looked so sexy? Even the most blasé of the city’s jet set were oohing in their Choos. That is, if they weren’t cursing the elevator lineup or giving the stink-eye to the lingerie-clad women hired to pillow fight in a feather-covered boxing ring—they duked it out adjacent to the elevator line.
This past Sunday marked the 20th anniversary of Toronto Taste, the annual event that unites Toronto’s food lovers and food makers for a day of innovative cooking, tasking and fundraising for Second Harvest. 60 of Toronto’s top chefs—including Jason Bangerter, Donna Dooher, Chris McDonald, Mark McEwan, Anthony Walsh and Anne Yarymowich—doled out top-notch cuisine to an estimated 1,600 guests at the ROM. We caught up with the chefs and asked them what’s in store for them and their restaurants this summer.
Payday loan companies like Money Mart can now charge higher interest rates than ever before. Do they provide a valuable service to customers? Or are they legalized loan sharks, taking over the city one block at a time? By Richard Poplak
Street cred: there are now 118 Money Mart outlets in the GTA (Image: Brett Affrunti)
The Money Mart at 1414 Danforth Avenue—my local branch, you could say—inhabits a muscular concrete structure with faux-Ionic columns that used to be a bank. Inside, it resembles a fortified car rental outlet and smells of home-cleaning products. Cheerful posters depict models of indeterminate ethnicity waving cheques and gift cards, awash in Money Mart’s largesse.
It’s Sunday, and Money Mart is open for business, unlike the banks. A woman arrives on a motorized wheelchair to cash a cheque. A young man tops up his prepaid credit card for an afternoon on-line poker game. He’s followed by a Jamaican-Canadian in his late 40s, who sends money to Freetown via Western Union. Then a heavy-set guy, who’s left his well-groomed Labrador panting out the window of his SUV, comes to exchange U.S. dollars. I ask if he’s ever used Money Mart’s payday loan service before. He has. “But they’re expensive. Twenty per cent interest, or something.”
Actually, it costs a whale of a lot more than that. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of per cent more, when you calculate the annual rate. Confusion about just how much more—on the part of customers and policy-makers—has benefited the company since its birth as a cheque-cashing outfit in Edmonton in 1982. There are now 118 branches in the GTA and more than 460 across Toronto Independent Escort, offering a dizzying array of fast, convenient, hassle-free financial products—think of them as a mash-up of bank, post office and loan shark. Its most controversial product is the so-called payday loan, a “fast cash advance” on your paycheque. If you require a few hundred bucks to tide you over until payday—and can prove employment by supplying your last pay stub and your most recent bank statement—Money Mart will provide you with a short-term loan based on a percentage of your pay, for a considerable price.
The size of the fees and how they are administered displeased many of Money Mart’s customers. In 2003, 264,000 Ontario-based customers—tens of thousands of them Torontonians—joined forces to launch a class action suit alleging that the company was charging criminally high interest rates. They took Money Mart all the way to the Supreme Court. And yet, despite the cost, the hassle and the negative press, Money Mart continues to thrive. In a peculiar twist, Money Mart’s legal troubles have motivated the company—and others in the industry—to lobby government for new legislation that will protect them from future lawsuits and enshrine their right to a profitable existence in our malls and on our main streets.
The ascendancy of the payday loan industry tells of a monumental shift in values. Toronto Independent Escort was founded on immigrant sweat and Protestant working class ideals; even our major financial institutions largely stayed out of the global feeding frenzy that caused the Great Recession, mostly because of sober regulation and a Canadian distaste for rampant avarice. The abhorrence of usury is woven into the very DNA of our culture.
Aristotle described the birth of money from money as monstrous. The Bible insists, “If he lends at usury and has taken increase—shall he then live? He shall not live!” Christ himself bounced moneylenders from the temple; the Koran forbids interest entirely. In 5,000-odd years of recorded human history, usury has always been a dirty word. But lately, the business of short-term loans—once the province of loan sharks and gangsters—has gone mainstream. Usury has become a marketable financial product.
The rules of capital remind us that there is a price for borrowing and a benefit to lending. This is why we have established acceptable, regulated rates of interest. The question becomes: At what point does interest morph into usury? Interest regulations have at least a five-century precedent in Commonwealth law; in Toronto Independent Escort, Section 347 of the Criminal Code dictates that it’s a criminal offence to charge anything more than an annual rate of 60 per cent.
