Well I suppose it was inevitable eh? Ever since the Quebec students began marching, the Con media has been attacking them like a pack of rabid hyenas.

The Con liberal Andrew Coyne called them a violent mob. The windy little teabagger Rex Murphy called their protest a self-indulgent parody.

The petty-bourgeois hack Margaret Wente did her ghastly Marie Antoinette impression.

But now Michael Den Tandt has gone one deranged step further, and called for the Quebec students to be caned.

There’s a better way: Dispersal with massive use of tear gas; then arrest, public humiliation, and some pain. In 1994, an 18-year-old American named Michael Fay, living in Singapore, was arrested and pleaded guilty to charges of vandalism and mischief, after he keyed several expensive cars. He was sentenced to four months in jail, a $3,500 (Singaporean dollars) fine and six strokes of the cane, applied to his bare buttocks.

Barbaric? Not really. Arguably, caning is more merciful than incarceration for an energetic young vandal on the cusp of becoming a full-fledged career criminal. Many would probably rather be caned than locked up, given their druthers.

Caned like they are Singapore . . .

And I really don’t know what to say? Except is he serious?  Is it booze? Is it dementia? What kind of kinky stuff is this?

And of course what kind of savage country are we becoming?

You know the other day a friend of mine said the problem is the boomers invented the youth culture. But now they are old, so they hate the young with a passion. And  this is the beginning of a brutal generational war.

But I prefer to think it’s just another sign that Canada, corrupted by the filth of Stephen Harper and his Con thugs, has lost its way.  And doesn’t even recognize that the young are its future. And that they are fighting for a better world.

“When we defend the right to free public education to serve the people and their needs, we confront the bigger fishes that are obstacles along our path. And it is at this point that we must be more ingenious, more intelligent, more committed, more relevant, to avoid falling into the game and strategy of those who wish to divide us, frighten us, those who see us as hardliners, as delinquents.

A better world for ALL of us here now, and all future generations.

And I did point out to my friend that not all older Canadians are on the wrong side of history . . .

Didn’t you just love that fighting senior telling the cops what he thought of them?

Yup. Michael Den Tandt should shove that cane where the sun don’t shine.

The Con media should restrain themselves.

And the Quebec students should keep on marching . . .

A BoB short:

The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission has announced that all broadcasters, cable and satellite providers, and video-on-demand services must silence erratically loud ads by Sept. 1, 2012. The federal regulator had previously told the TV industry that it had one year to turn down the volume. Rogers Communication, Quebecor, and Shaw Communications have all started to install in-house equipment to deal with the problem.

The initiative stems from 304 complaints in 2011 about unnecessarily loud advertisements. Last year the CRTC invited the public to comment and received over 7000 submissions. “Please make sure the noise level of commercials is the same or less than that of the regular programming to preserve our hearing and that of our children,” wrote one respondent.

“This has been a perennial issue,” CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein told The Globe and Mail. “People have been complaining to us . . . we said, it’s time to do something.”

Our American cousins have already passed laws to control loudness on TV. The CALM Act, or Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation, was passed in December 2010. The act requires the Federal Communications Commission to monitor TV networks standards and make sure that commercials don’t spike in volume.

Our bleeding ears thank you all.

- Emily Olesen

An anonymous missive has appeared on

“Ok, RossK, I’ll bite. As a news worker at Postmedia, I think this is an interesting and important question you’ve raised about this odd shift in the commercial media.

It was McGregor and Maher at the Citizen and the National Post who picked up the rifle first, as you note, with the robocall scandal. And now there’s O’Neill. And there are more to come. The Postmedia chain has turned against the PM. Period.

There is no way to understate the importance of that shift. It hasn’t worked its way through the whole empire; you don’t immediately change the attitude or approach of the hundreds of idiots you’ve appointed to management jobs over the years. Or all the columnists, or reporters.

But it’s started.

And it’s huge. It should NOT be underestimated.

The question for us in their newsrooms is: What in the hell can the PM have done to piss off Postmedia (run nominally by the Tory-loving former managers of Canwest, but in reality owned and funded by GoldenTree, a New York hedge fund)?

Well, here’s one theory:

1. GoldenTree invested in the chain in 2010 because newspapers are high cash generators. (Usually, anyway.) Because Canada has foreign-ownership media laws, the new company and its share holdings had to be very carefully structured.

2. But maybe that wasn’t such a big deal, because Harper was making a lot of big, loud promises about opening up ownership to foreign interests. That would mean GoldenTree could unload the chain, or parts of it, in future with relative ease. Hedge funds like to get in and out quickly, and there aren’t a lot of Canadian buyers for a property that big. Quebecor was really the only competitor that GoldenTree faced in 2010 as Canwest lay dying, and Quebecor lost out because it couldn’t put together a big enough offer.

3. Foreign ownership isn’t anywhere on the apparent radar for Harper anymore. At all. Period. Unless he’s in completely secret talks that no one has heard a word about.

4. Postmedia isn’t making money, certainly not at the rate GoldenTree needs it to. As a hedge fund, it would have wanted to move in, tap the cash flow and sell it on. There are lots of more promising cash machines for GoldenTree to move on to.

5. Postmedia executives, including CEO Paul Godfrey, toured newsrooms in BC just weeks ago to announce that while the two papers in Vancouver were still clinging by their fingernails to the black side of the ledger, red ink looms with absolute certainty in the very near future. An online-only Monday-Friday edition of the Province is widely rumoured to be in the works, with staff busy working on a new design for the weekend edition. (Yes, some of this is company trash talk aimed at turning newsroom workers against pressroom workers in talks for a contract that expired about 18 months ago. But that’s not the whole story. True, newsroom workers have taken huge hits; press workers haven’t, yet. And true, pressroom costs are high, and they were high in Victoria, where the chain used them as an excuse for selling the paper there to Glacier. But it is also true that the papers aren’t making the money they should, costs aside. That’s because the company doesn’t understand its product or its readership and can’t think of any other way to fix the problem than to continually cut costs, which in fact only makes the product worse.)

6. Quebecor, which owns the Tory-worshipping SunTV, is now the PM’s best friend and only defender.

7. So should GoldenTree force a sale of Postmedia, with foreign ownership rules still in place, well, the best and maybe only positioned buyer might be  . . . ta da! . . . Quebecor.

8. Which would result in a takeover of the majority of Canada’s news outlets by a completely right-wing company.

9. Say it all together now: Hmmmmmmmm. Can this have been the plan all along?

As I say, just a theory among some of us.

But it would be fair to say that the shift in Postmedia’s Tory coverage is significant enough to have most of our newsroom radar on full alert.

And I would add one other thing, since none of us know where this ride will take us. For everyone feeling so rightly cynical about the media, you will note that there is the odd MSM reporter left who can, when turned loose, still produce. You will note that there were others at the Globe and CBC etc who joined in after the Post kicked off the robocall-fest. I would argue that the heavy lifting was still done by the blogosphere, including you and many of those in your own circle. But I think there is still a rescue-able body of journalists left should the MSM, or any portion of it, come under new ownership that actually understands it own product, readership and social contract — something that Postmedia fails entirely to do.”

In our Politics section right now you’ll find Alison@Creekside‘s response to MP Stephen Woodworth’s Motion 132, which asks Parliament to examine the definition of a human being under Canadian law. Alison doesn’t like his initiative, to say the least. I don’t think I like it either — it seems like a weaselly way to get at what Woodworth really wants to do, which is to re-introduce an abortion law in Canada. But I don’t agree with Alison either. I think we should have an abortion law in Canada. Something like the laws that resulted from Roe v. Wade in the States would do. And no, I don’t think the fact that I’m male renders my opinion meaningless.

We pick up a lot of Alison’s posts from her Creekside blog, because she lets us and she’s a superb writer. Most of the time I read her to find out what I’m thinking. I wasn’t going to publish her post on Woodworth, though — not because I disagree with it, but because I didn’t read it until a few days after the event that precipitated it, and we try to keep things timely around here. However, then a scrap broke out on a site called Progressive Bloggers, which aggregates the feeds of various writers who think they fit that description.

Among these are Canadian Soapbox, The Scott Ross, Fern Hill at Dammit Janet! and Dave at The Galloping Beaver. When the former two published posts sympathetic to Woodworth and his motion (here and here), Fern Hill threatened, via twitter, to “organize a strike by actual progressive bloggers until mysogynists are booted,” and Dave delivered an ultimatum: “The moderators of Progressive Bloggers have 48 hours to respond . . . . They will censure those who believe a ‘debate’ on the rights of women is acceptable and they will do it on the front page of Progressive Bloggers.”

Well, that’s a bit too Maoist for my tastes. Just as Fern Hill and Dave believe absolutely in a woman’s right to control her body, I believe absolutely (or next-to) in the right to free speech, and that’s “free” as in “not subject to re-education or pillorying in the town square.” But to even have to say so, much less make the argument, seems to me so banal, so “Seriously? We’re even talking about this?” (which, again, I understand is exactly how Fern and Dave feel about the matter of choice), that I find it less irksome to simply publish Alison’s piece, even if I am late in doing so, and say, See? That’s how it’s done.

Of course, we aren’t a site calling ourselves “Progressive Blogger,” so I understand the semantic argument, which is what much of the furor seems to boil down to: who does and doesn’t get to wear the appellation. Backofthebook.ca tends to lean left, despite the fact that its editor/publisher is a mysogynistic theocrat-in-disguise (or so I expect I’ll be told), and we are certainly currently dedicated to afflicting the Harper government (including Mr. Woodworth, whenever one of our writers, or you, wish to do so — that’s the comments section down below). But what we really are is a magazine that values good writing, and argument. I have asked various right-wing types to write for us, and the only reason they don’t appear here is that, so far, they haven’t taken me up on the offer. If they did, I wouldn’t anticipate our left-wing types fleeing for the hills. If they did, it would be just as well.

Which is to say we are a magazine, not a silo. The Progressive Blogger affair demonstrates the disadvantage of the latter, whether they aggregate opinion from the left or, as in the case of Blogging Tories, the right. Eventually, the echo chamber becomes deafening.

I see that Mike Wallace is being given a grand send off and is being called a journalistic hero.

The newspapers are full of glowing obituaries, and TV stations have been running clips of his most famous interviews and documentaries.

But funnily enough nobody mentioned the famous documentary LGBT activist Wayne Besen has described as the single most destructive hour of anti-gay propaganda in U.S. history.

The one where Wallace said this:

“The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His sex life, his love life, consists of a series of one–chance encounters at the clubs and bars he inhabits. And even on the streets of the city — the pick-up, the one night stand, these are characteristics of the homosexual relationship.”

This horrible thing . . .

I can’t imagine what a young gay person would have felt watching that broadcast.

I can’t imagine what it must have been to live in a time like that one.

But the next time some old straight person waxes nostalgically about the good old days, I’m going to ask them what they did to stop gay people from being treated like subhumans?

And if they say they didn’t do anything, I’m going to ask them why not? And do they even feel the slightest bit guilty?

Mike Wallace may have been a good newsman.

But he was no hero . . .

A passel of Michael Coren supporters have arrived at backofthebook to defend his “interview” with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on the SUN “News” Network. (I always keep a small pile of ironic quotation marks handy when I write about SUN TV.) You’ll find them milling in the comments section following Rabbi Boteach’s account of the hostilities, which we published as soon as it landed in our inbox. That was on Thursday, a few hours before the program had even aired. Rabbi Boteach has a very good PR apparatus.

One of the commenters takes us to task for not publishing “the response article by Michael Coren.” Presumably he means Coren’s blog in The Huffington Post, which we didn’t publish because HE WROTE IT FOR THE HUFFINGTON POST. See how that works? Our correspondent might better have taken us to task for publishing the Rabbi’s rebuttal before we’d even seen the buttal. But now that the program has aired, it seems obvious to me he was entirely right to call Coren on his obnoxious remarks and behaviour.

You can decide for yourself . . .

. . . but what I see is Coren tipping headlong into the old Jews control Hollywood thing, while adding a twist new to me: And hence, they use their power to make movies that parody Christians. One wonders what movies he means (and so does the Rabbi, who tries fruitlessly to get an example out of him). And then, like that Italian cruise ship captain, Coren looks up from his lifeboat and realizes it’s not where he’s supposed to be. The cruise ship captain’s response was to claim he fell in accidentally; Coren’s is to explain that he doesn’t mean that Jews actually control Hollywood, just that they’re very influential, and goodness, that’s all to their credit!

Oh please. If he wasn’t implying that they control the place, then how is it he figures they can get their malicious portrayals of good-hearted Jesus-lovers onto the screen? By talking others into slandering Christians for them?

Next day, Coren appeared fearlessly on another SUN News Network show to defend himself.

Hilariously, he makes two claims. One is that Boteach is only trying to sell his book. (By appearing on SUN TV in Canada? That’ll be good for two copies.) The other is that he “doesn’t realize my place in Canada. This will probably backfire.”

His place in Canada. Now, I expect Coren isn’t an anti-semite, but he’s obviously a big self-kidder. Outside of cities where the SUN Newspapers are sold, his profile is roughly that of, say, Adam and Morgan. (Who are Adam and Morgan? Exactly.) Or perhaps he means his place as a defender of Israel, but he isn’t exactly alone in that portfolio either. We’re looking at you, National Post.

Of course, being a defender of Israel doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re philo-semitic. It could just mean that you like heavily militarized, legs akimbo, right-wing governments. One wonders if these friends of Israel would be quite so friendly if a less belligerent administration, like the one Yitzhak Rabin led, and got assassinated for, was in power.

But let’s take Michael Coren’s word for it: he loves the Jews, and they, in turn, all over Canada, hold him in high esteem. Now, could he treat the ones who come on his show as guests, rather than test audiences for his truly strange notions of what they do and do not think?

By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Today I had what was probably the most unpleasant TV interview of my life on Canada’s Sun News Network (national). Interviewed by host Michael Coren about my book Kosher Jesus, I expected to be asked about the book’s content. The interview started that way. But then Coren quickly got to a question that seemed to be bursting from within. You’ll have to see the exact show, airing tonight at 7pm, for complete accuracy, and I am writing this about an hour after.

Coren essentially asked me why Jews depict Christians so negatively. He went on about how much the Catholic Church and Christians in general have done for the Jews of late. Yet the Jews continue to be so unappreciative, always questioning Christian motivation, always finding fault with Christians no matter what.

I asked him to justify his claim that Jews depict Christians negatively. He said something like, “What do you mean? Just look at Hollywood.”

Hollywood? I was confused. Weren’t we just talking about Jewish-Christian relations? Where did Hollywood come in, unless, for Coren, Jews and Hollywood were synonymous.

What was the connection between Hollywood’s depiction of Christians and the Jews, I asked. The show went downhill from there, with the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jews controlling and influencing Hollywood dominating the interview. I defended my people against this disgusting slur, a tributary of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that the Jews control whole segments of society, in this case the motion picture industry, which they use to negatively depict Christians as a bunch of illiterate and primitive bumpkins.

From there Coren went on to speak about the negative Jewish depiction of Pope Pius XII, which I battled him on further. This was amazing. The Jews were defaming the saintly Pope Pius? For the record, I have written a great deal on Pius XII, the man John Cornwell, a non-Jewish British journalist, famously called Hitler’s Pope in his best-selling 1999 biography of the same name. Pius was the wartime Pope who never once condemned the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews through all the years of the Holocaust and who, after the war, allowed the mass kidnapping of Jewish children who had originally been given by their families to Christians in order to save their lives. Pius advised, in the form of a typewritten directive discovered in a French church archive and dated Oct. 23, 1946, that church authorities not return to their relatives Jewish children who had been baptized. They must remain Christian and should not be returned to Jewish families.

He was the Pope who famously refused, amid unmistakable evidence of thousands of Jews being shipped to slaughter in Nazi concentration camps, to ever speak out against the Holocaust. This followed Pius’ successful efforts to prevent the publication of an encyclical commissioned by his dying predecessor to condemn Nazi anti-Semitism. This is also the Pope who sent Hitler birthday greetings every single year and who refused to excommunicate Hitler or any other top Nazis who were on official Catholic rolls (to give this context, the singer Sinead O’Connor was excommunicated). He ignored the pleas of President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to denounce the Nazis. He later refused to endorse a joint declaration by Britain, U.S and Russia condemning mass murder of Europe’s Jews, claiming that he simply could not condemn “particular” atrocities. The most he ever did was a single pronouncement during the war on the murder “of hundredsof thousands.” By then, of course, there were millions, and he did not mention Hitler, Nazi Germany, or the Jews in the statement. Most infamously, he was silent when the Germans rounded up Rome’s Jews in October 1944 for slaughter. They were being processed for extermination in a military school a few hundred yards from his window in St. Peter’s. An Italian princess, Enza Pignatelli, forced her way into the Pope’s study and warned him about the imminent assault on the city’s Jewish citizens. “You must act immediately,” she cried. “The Germans are arresting the Jews and taking them away. Only you can stop them.” The Pope assured her, “I will do all I can.” He made no protest and nearly all were later gassed in Auschwitz. Curiously, amid the Pope’s inability to find his voice to condemn the extermination of European Jewry, when the Catholic archbishop of Berlin issued a statement mourning Hitler’s death, the Pope did not reprimand him.

Those who have read my writings, and especially those who have read Kosher Jesus, will know that I have unbridled love for my Christian brothers and sisters, a deep respect and affection I have written and spoken about on countless occasions. They will also know that I was given the great pleasure and honor of being greeted by Pope Benedict in Rome in 2010. They will further know that I am invited to address Christian audiences the world over, including in Israel. And I wrote Kosher Jesus in response to the great Christian yearning to discover the Jewishness of Jesus.

But people like Coren who perpetuate the anti-Semitic canard that Jews both control Hollywood and have contempt for Christians are a serious obstruction to the new era of Jewish-Christian brotherhood and rapprochement. It is an absolute lie that Jews have contempt for Christians. It is likewise a lie that Christians are victims of Jewish hostility, as Coren implies. The truth, of course, is that Jews have suffered mightily at the hands of Christianity for nearly two millennium. But thankfully a succession of great Christian men and women in modern times, led by Pope John XXIII, the greatest of all popes, and then by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both outstanding friends of world Jewry, and joined especially by the 80 million born-again Christians in the United States, the vast majority of whom are phenomenal friends of Israel, have reversed this trend and made Catholicism and Christianity stalwart allies and friends of G-d’s chosenpeople.

Denying the past is not going to increase our friendship just as being limited by it will not either. This is a new time for Jews and Christians. Let’s forgo the old animosities, the old prejudices, and especially the old and ugly stereotypes. Michael Coren owes Jewry an apology. If he’s man enough to give it I will overlook his foul treatment of me, both during the interview and after it was over.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whom Newsweek calls “the most famous Rabbi in America,” was the host of TLC’s Shalomin the Home (which won the National Fatherhood Award), was the London Times Preacher of the Year at the Millennium, and received the American Jewish Press Association’s Highest Award for Excellence in Commentary. The international best-selling author of 27 books, he has just published Kosher Jesus. He is currently mulling a run for Congress from New Jersey’s Ninth Congressional District, running as a Republican. www.shmuleyforcongress.com

Astute readers of backofthebook.ca will have noticed that our metabolism has slowed of late — we’ve been posting less often. This follows a deleriously busy spring and fall, when our traffic skyrocketed (especially for our pieces on Brock Anton and Kevin O’Leary; the latter is still drawing comment).

This is not exactly capitalizing on success. The reason is simple — I run backofthebook off the side of my desk, and when other aspects of my life, which have mostly to do with theatre and academia, decide they need my absolute attention, this online labour of love tends to topple off the side of said desk. I have to hope that it will continue to chug along under its own steam. But when its writers also find their lives made busier by, oh, new babies and new jobs and, well, life, backofthebook.ca sometimes starts to look more like a museum than a magazine.

It’s quite a good museum, when it needs to be. You will now find here over five years worth of strong comment and pithy reporting, largely on Canadian affairs. In fact, we’ve been around so long that Western Standard, which I ripped on in my first post back on Oct. 15, 2006, has disappeared in a welter of unfulfilled subscriptions (which I’m sure Ezra Levant is now using his SUN TV salary to reimburse — right?), and The Walrus, which I also ripped on in that piece, and again here, has actually become good.

But dammit, Jim, I’m an editor, not a curator, and so, with this post, backofthebook.ca will again undertake to vigorously pursue ethically-challenged politicians, under-the-radar Canadian stories, and search engine success. It may take a while to get fully back up to speed — for one thing, and speaking of search engine success, I have to figure out why we’ve fallen out of Google News. I think it’s a technical problem caused by an upgrade to our content management system. (Funny how upgrades almost always make things worse.) It could be, though, a sign of changes at Google, in which case — since Google increasingly creates reality these days — I’ll have more to say on that.

And it would be nice if backofthebook could make even a little bit of money, so that there’s an assistant editor around to run things when I can’t. But you just won’t click on those ads to the right and below, will you? Trust me; you won’t. It’s a curious thing; I run a few other web properties with good click-through rates (which is, of course, how an online publisher actually makes money — when you click on the ads). But it doesn’t matter how much traffic backofthebook draws — the numbers of visitors willing to help pay the writers by patronizing our advertisers remains strikingly low. And you don’t seem to want to use kachingle either (which I think is a brilliant solution to the matter of online micro-payments). So I’m going to have to work on some other ways to generate revenue.

But mostly, it’ll be business as usual again. See you here.

- Frank

One is impressed by just how credulous the reading public — that would be you — can be. You see what I just did there? I just insulted you. Conventional wisdom would suggest that insulting one’s readers is not the best way to start an article. But conventional wisdom is pretty stupid, too.

It’s called “contrarianism,” and it’s what Christie Blatchford and Christopher Hitchens practise and practised, respectively, to a tee. And, as they know and knew, it’s good journalistic business, not least because readers will fall for it every time.

These thoughts — or rather, insults — are inspired by the response to Blatchford’s recent National Post Globe and Mail National Post column on man-hugging (I have trouble keeping track of who she’s writing for this week), and the recent outpouring of tweets and status updates beginning “I still can’t believe Christopher Hitchens supported the war in Iraq, but . . .”. Hitchens, of course, came out in favour of the invasion early on, and remained stridently unrepentant to the end. Blatchford’s column was on a less keen matter — the alleged sissification of the modern male, especially in Toronto — but the widespread astonishment that anyone could hold such an opinion, much less write it down, was about the same.

Dear Stupid Readers: these people don’t write broadsides and columns to be liked — they do it, at least much of the time, to rile you up. Why? Do I really have to write this? Because then you will continue to buy their books and newspapers. Thus endeth Street Journalism 101.

Readers don’t return to a writer or publication because the writer or publication is correct — they do it because, as a seasoned editor once taught me, to my own youthful astonishment, they have developed an emotional connection to the writer or publication. And outrage will do the job as well as any other emotion. The easiest way to forge this sort of codependent relationship with the reader is to look for a widely-held assumption and then argue its opposite. Babies cute? Babies suck. War in Iraq bad? War in Iraq good. Rinse and repeat.

It also gives the writer something new to say. After a decade-or-two of spouting left-wing pieties, even the most earnest of fellow-travellers is liable to hanker for a change of subject. This explains P.J. O’Rourke. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to work the other way as often — right to left — though we are currently seeing a variant in David Frum’s reinvention of himself as a critic of the Republican Party. In Frum’s case, though, it is likely a matter of survival — having been frog-marched out of the clubhouse, he doesn’t have much choice.

This is not to say that these people don’t believe what they write — I have no doubt Hitchens was sincere in his support of the Iraq invasion. It just means that, when they sit down to put their unpopular thoughts out into the public sphere, they don’t get all quivery and “Gee, maybe I shouldn’t say this.” Instead, they go, “Oh goody.” Because they know how you are going to respond.

And so, dear Stupid Readers (as well as the rest of you), you might save yourself a lot of turmoil if, when Blatchford produces her next unspeakable column about how, really, smoking is good for you or Stephen Harper is actually kind of cute, you smile and respond, “Oh, Christie” (and perhaps also observe how freaking funny and well-written her stuff is).

And by the way: Babies really do suck.

A young woman died of a drug overdose in Vancouver yesterday. Her name was Ashley. She became one of the approximately 120 people who will die of drug overdoses in Vancouver this year.

She happened to be at the Occupy Vancouver encampment when she died.

Or perhaps it wasn’t coincidental. Perhaps she had been drawn there by the communal spirit of the place. By a desire for company. Or safety. Maybe she was there because she believed in its ideals. Or wished she could. At any rate, that’s where she was.

It has been instructive, overnight, to watch her death congeal into a reason to shut down Occupy Vancouver, especially among journalists. One watches this, of course, on twitter:

garymasonglobe Gary Mason

Gregor Robertson has no choice now. The OV camp has to come down. Now. This isn’t about politics any longer.

fabulavancouver Frances Bula

Can see why this death an argumnt for shuttng camp. If you claim you’re in charge, you are responsibe. Imagine if a shelter had an OD death

rodmickleburgh Rod Mickleburgh

The point that #OccupyVancouver needs to consider is whether the occupation at VAG makes any sense any more, the original cause is forgotten

garymasonglobe Gary Mason

#occupyvancouver is a health and safety issue now. The original cause is beside the point.

steveburgess1 Steve Burgess

@rodmickleburgh Eventually it was going to be about itself. It always happens.

acoyne Andrew Coyne

@steveburgess1 @rodmickleburgh I agree, except for the eventually part.

Mr. (James Andrew) Coyne, son of James Coyne, the governor of the Bank of Canada from 1955 to 1961,  appears to be saying that the Occupy movement has always been “about itself” — in other words, one big self-indulgent wank. Perhaps we should be grateful: It’s not often Coyne so candidly tips his hand.

One plaintive note of logic was sounded among Canadian journos:

colbycosh Colby Cosh

How can a death at Occupy Vancouver be a cause for breaking up the camp in the absence of any real knowledge of the cause?

colbycosh Colby Cosh

And if breaking up the camp is unconstitutional–which appears to be the consensus among officials everywhere–how does a death change that?

colbycosh Colby Cosh

But by all means let’s overreact; that’s what makes the mainstream media mainstream, dammit.

And so they did — overreact, that is. By the end of the evening, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, in the middle of an election campaign, and knowing that all this self-satisfied hand-wringing would show up in the newspapers over the next 24 hours, had announced that the city would “expedite the appropriate steps to end the encampment as soon as possible, with a safe resolution being absolutely critical.” Good luck with that, Mr. Mayor.

Journalists such as Mason et al. are paid to think — but only for a moment or two. Then they must produce their required column inches of opinion. So, in fact, what they mostly do is react, and, as we have seen, with no less emotion and bluster than most people. They simply have a knack for expressing it better. We can hope that by the time they get around to generating their think-pieces today, they will have gotten over the notion that Ashley’s death is any more meaningful, or any less, than those of the other 120 people who die of drug overdoses in Vancouver every year, and that somehow it means the Occupy Vancouver encampment should be shut down. That is an absurdity. Chasing the protestors off the art gallery lawn will make no difference to the numbers of addicts who die each year; it will simply guarantee that they go back to doing it on the streets of the Downtown East Side, where they may be comfortably ignored.

Of course, maybe that’s the point. Much of the middle-class is discomfited by the Occupy the World movement, and would like to see it go away — why should journalists be any different? But if that’s the case, they should just admit it’s all too messy and amorphous for them, and that they’d prefer to be able to watch football without the distraction. (The Lions game was another trending topic among them last night.) But let them not invoke Ashley and cry crocodile tears for her while they do it.

Because, somehow, I don’t think Ashley would appreciate it.