There were some concerns that Ontario Premier Doug Ford would be slow to transition from campaigning to governing after winning a majority in the June provincial election. To be fair, there were plenty of hints during the summer session that he wasn’t quite ready to shut down the campaign.
 
But there is no doubt today.
 
The campaign is over. The Ford government is in full blown governing mode. 
 
The Premier has made it abundantly clear that he will do pretty much what he wants, when he wants – because he can.
 
He commands an unassailable majority in the legislature. That means he sets the agenda. He drives the agenda – because he can.
 
That point was made unequivocally when Ford announced his intention to invoke the Notwithstanding Clause in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms to override the Ontario Superior Court ruling that declared his Better Local Governments Act unconstitutional. He dismissed any notion that it was an over reach on his part. He insists it’s the prerogative of his duly elected government to decide what’s best for the people of the province. The judge, he emphasized, was “appointed” by the former Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty. (Not quite. Superior Court appointments are made by the PM of the day who was Paul Martin.)
 
Premier Ford simply reasoned he is using all the tools available to him to ensure his bill is enacted. He did it – because he can.

So, the Premier would be correct when he points out he is doing what is legal and allowed. It’s the same argument he used when he decided he would reduce the size of Toronto City Council.

Ford slashed Council in half - because he can.
 
So, for all the sound and fury that will consume the oxygen of the political stage in the coming days, our question and focus should be on “What does this really mean” and “What’s next?”
 
Thanks to Doug Ford, Section 33 of the Charter is now simply a political “tool” in any premier’s toolkit to use to lash back against an appointed judiciary to ensure “the agenda” of the elected body of the day is achieved. Ford is bucking the conventional view that if you invoke the Clause you are somehow ‘going nuclear’, that you are somehow going to risk a political backlash.

This premier has decided that the Notwithstanding Clause isn’t reserved for ‘extreme’ circumstance, i.e., insurrection or acts of war, being preached by some. It's not a 'break-glass-in-case-of-a-constitutional-emergency' tool.

And he would be correct. That was never its intention nor how it’s been applied to date elsewhere.

It’s important to know and remember that Section 33 of the Charter exists because former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed was properly concerned that the made-in-Canada constitution would shift power from elected officials to the judiciary, giving the courts the final word. Lougheed was right then. Is he right now? Doug Ford thinks so.

And let's remember, the Notwithstanding Clause was cast as an anti-Canadian, anti-rights cudgel primarily because Rene Levesque used it first to preserve  separatist language laws in Quebec. Of course, the real irony in all of that is Levesque refused to sign onto the homegrown constitution and its companion Charter.

Quebec and the country survive that 'crisis.' Doug Ford is betting that we can and will survive this "nuclear" constitutional option.

And the Premier’s made it clear that he will happily and easily apply it whenever timing, process or a judge of the land disagrees with his own constitutional interpretation.
 
Because he can.

We better get use to it.

Colin Kaepernick is the face of Nike’s 30th annual “Just Do It” campaign. And it took all of 6 seconds, (about the time needed to read and comprehend Kaepernick’s tweet to that effect) for the campaign to catch fire and explode on social media. It read: “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt”
 
What makes this so incendiary is Kaepernick is also the face of the ‘take-a-knee’ campaign in the NFL. He lost his job as a starting quarterback because he refused to stand for the pre-game Star Spangle Banner in 2016. He says he was protesting racial injustice in the United States. He hasn’t been able land a pro-football job since.
 
The reaction, on both sides, is entirely predictable. At one extreme there are those who are burning their Nike apparel, some have even found it necessary to share video of them urinating on their shoes. Otherwise, there is a legion of  converts vowing to make Nike their brand of choice for athletic wear.
 
I have little doubt that this will soon be the subject of a presidential tweet that will slam “failing Nike” and raise this ‘elitist campaign’ to a capitol offense against the POTUS (people of the United States), not to mention a personal affront to the White House resident.
 
In the clichéd short term – Nike wins when you consider all the earned media its enjoying. Good or bad, the discussion and comment about the campaign will be on cable news teleprompters for days. This is the opening week of the NFL regular season after all, so it will reignite the interest and attention in what made Colin Kaepernick famous (or infamous) to non-football enthusiasts.
 
So, it’s easy to say Nike’s opportunistic and timely in it’s use of Kaepernick. But it’s more than that.
 
This makes perfect sense for the Nike brand. Nike isn’t about running shoes or hockey helmets or sweat-wicking workout wear.

It’s also about you doing the right thing – whatever you think that may be. One campaign encouraged us to let girls play organized sports – Just Do It. Another highlighted an elite athlete who ran 80 miles a week and 10 marathons and year; he lived with HIV – Just Do It.
 
So the Kaepernick campaign isn’t out of character for Nike. Nor would I say is it all that risky. The notion that Kaepernick stood up for something he believed in, that was beyond himself, is a growing trend in athletic marketing.
 
The emphasis is on unselfishness rather than winning at all cost.
 
Graeme Newell is the President of 602 Communications; he specializes in emotional branding. He says we’re all familiar with sports marketing campaigns that focused on winning as an individual accomplishment. Teamwork isn’t part of the narrative.
 
But that’s changing since Millennials have asserted themselves as a primary market for sports gear. Newell says advertising to that demographic is changing the definition of winning.  He points to a Nike ad from 2014 in which Lebron James wins for his team and his community.

Millennial values have forced  the marketing narrative to shift from me to we. Newell says Nike’s not alone. There is a growing list of purpose driven companies that have reformed their business model to capture that shift. It affects everything from hiring protocols to customer engagement. Their success is based on their ability to make their brand about their consumers’ experience.
 
Nike saw this coming years ago. If there were a brand for emotional branding – it would be Nike.
 
You’re missing the point if you think this new campaign is about Kaepernick’s brand. It’s about a powerful Millennial market. It’s about a company willing to take its own advice to confidently venture outside of the comfort zone and “Just Do It”.

The question being posed this week is whether we are over-stating John McCain’s heroism and statesmanship only because he presents such as stark contrast to the incumbent President of the United States. And I suppose that’s a possibility. But consider these quotations: “We were born to love and we were born to have the courage for it” Does that sound like the current president?
 
How about “I don’t know how you could impeach somebody who’s done a great job.” Does that sound like the current president?
 
It’s more likely and accurate to say it is the president, despite his worst efforts, who amplifies what is honourable about the late senator. It’s hard to believe, but the president looks worse than you would otherwise expect when he’s seen in the light of John McCain’s political career and personal sacrifice.
 
Throughout his life, McCain learned from experience, allowed his thinking to evolve, to publicly admit mistakes and even reverse his political positions on some key issues. And no one ever accused him of flip-flopping primarily because it was widely understood that Senator McCain was driven personally and politically to put his country first.
 
Does that sound like the current president?
 
During the 2008  U.S. Presidential campaign, McCain bucked the advice of his handlers and publicly supported George W. Bush’s commitment to ‘the surge’ in Iraq. The former Air Force pilot insisting he’d rather lose an election than lose a war. You may not agree with his position but you can’t argue that he was prepared to put the good of his country (as he saw it) ahead of his personal and political gain.
 
Does that sound like the current president?
 
That campaign lasted 18 months and, by some estimations, John McCain led the polls for no more than 10 days. But he refused to take the low road.
 
Does that sound like the current president?
 
McCain had the opportunity to play to the lowest common denominator among voters but refused to do so. The best example is when he was confronted by a ‘supporter’ at one of his town hall meetings who said she didn’t trust Barack Obama because “he’s an Arab.”
 
McCain shut her down, deftly and respectfully correcting her misunderstanding. He told her Barack Obama is a “decent family-man, (a) citizen who I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign is all about.”
 
Does that sound like the current president?
 
It’s worth remembering the comment McCain made in his concession speech to Obama. He took personal responsibility for the defeat. He accepted it with grace and composure.
 
Does that sound like the current president?
 
This week McCain will be officially honoured in 3 cities over 5 days. He will lie in state at the Arizona State Capitol, at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and at the U.S Capitol.
 
Yet, on this day, the U.S. flag flies at full staff over the White House in Washington. According to reporting in the Washington Post, the president pulled the plug on an official White House statement that cited McCain’s heroism and acknowledged his extraordinary service to his country.
 
That has been the cause of hyper and breathless reporting on the cable news networks; it’s been footnoted by the McCain family’s demand that the incumbent president not attend his funeral; and it’s prompted earnest commentators to authoritatively declare that McCain and the president had a rocky relationship.
 
But it’s more accurate to say there was no relationship between the two men. So it certainly shouldn’t be surprising that the president isn’t welcome to attend McCain’s funeral. And it’s not about being a friend or foe – remember, McCain ran against Barack Obama and George W. Bush, and both former presidents have been invited to deliver eulogies.
 
Who among us could imagine the current president being half as gracious and self aware in the face of defeat or death? His behaviour is, and has been, typically un-presidential, so his petty, immature, disgraceful snub of John McCain is not at all surprising.
 
I made the point on my Weekend Morning Show on NEWSTALK 1010 in Toronto (you can stream it thru the iHeartRadio app:) that our American friends should mourn the passing of respectful debate and honourable politics when they note the passing of John McCain.
 
But the Senator said it best in his final memoir, “The Restless Wave”, written with Mark Salter.
 
“I’d like to see our politics begin to return to the purposes and practices that distinguish our history from the history of other nations. I would like to see us recover our sense that we are more alike than different. We are citizens of a republic made of shared ideals forged in a new world to replace the tribal enmities that tormented the old one. Even in times of political turmoil such as these, we share that awesome heritage and the responsibility to embrace it. Whether we think each other right or wrong in our views on the issues of the day, we owe each other our respect, as long as our character merits respect, and as long as we share, for all our differences, for all the rancorous debates that enliven and sometimes demean our politics, a mutual devotion to the ideals our nation was conceived to uphold, that all are created equal, and liberty and equal justice are the natural rights of all. Those rights inhabit the human heart, and from there, though they may be assailed, they can never be wrenched. I want to urge Americans, for as long as I can, to remember that this shared devotion to human rights is our truest heritage and our most important loyalty.”
 
McCain’s final thought reflects some fairly recent history – a time when disrespect wasn’t the only way to disagree, when political foes could be personal friends.
 
But it’s hard to imagine this current era of “Ya-but-debate”, driven by ad hominem insults and digital media bullying, led by the current House of Cowards in the West Wing and Congress will soon reflect ‘the better angels of our nature.”

The ‘family’ at the centre of this story issued a written apology to “every Canadian” for the national angst we suffered because their kids, (not just the little girl), made up a story about a scissor wielding attacker who cut up an 11 year old’s hijab as she walked to school last Friday morning.
So? Is that it?
It’s certainly not the end of it for the family and the kids involved. They will always be the ones among their friends, peers and neighbours who told “the lie” that got way out of control. And that will be there penance.
There remains a constituency of Canadians who want the apology to be made publicly in front of the media – just as the false accusations were made. We should all be thankful they didn’t choose that route.
Otherwise, the story will fade in the media because there are other squirrels to chase. But there are some important questions to be asked and answered yet.
First, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) needs to explain how this little girl and her family were trotted out in front of media? With all due respect to my friend Ryan Bird, manager of corporate and social media relations at the TDSB, this was not wasn’t the family’s decision to meet the media. They were invited by TDSB manager for media relations and issues management, Shari Schwartz-Maltz.
Schwartz-Maltz should have known better. She didn’t just mis-manage an issue – she created one.
Second, the Toronto Police have to share some of the blame here. I realize the news conference spectacle was stage managed by Schwartz-Maltz, but I can’t remember police ever making a ‘victim’ available to the media before the investigation had barely started. Victims, never mind a minor, are never identified in a case like this. Police should have stepped in and stopped the family from making their media appearance.
Then there is the role of the media in all of this. (Forgive me, but this might get down in the weeds for the news nerds.)
You certainly can’t blame media for reporting the story quickly. Toronto Police tweeted out the report of an assault at 8:33am and had a suspect description posted about an hour later. It was an urgent and a disturbing story.
But there are small things throughout the various reports that stand out for me. One thing is the role the younger brother played in all of this. The Toronto Star noted that he offered an eye witness account of the suspect attacking his sister for a second time.
According to the Toronto Star reporting, "(he) said he watched as his sister’s attacker again approached her, scissors in hand." He made the story all the more believable.
For whatever reason there was no suggestion in the aftermath that these siblings were co-conspirators; all the focus was on the big sister. (Although, I suspect little brother had some explaining to do at home.)
It makes me wonder if the school mate who loaned the girl a spare hijab took part in concocting the tale or if she was caught up like everyone else.
I’m not sure it would have made a major difference in the reporting of the assault, but I find it hard to believe more wasn’t reported on how the story was told at school. Who was the first adult to get involved? Who saw the damaged hijab? What was the victim’s emotional state when she arrived at school? (She was a pretty cool, collected customer standing in front of mics and cameras.)
It’s not that it was poor reporting, but there was far more sizzle than steak in the offering. Whether it’s a general lack of resource or experience, the first reporting never felt complete.
But when I went back to find the reports from last Friday to see whether there were video clips that might answer some of those questions – low and behold, the stories had been scrubbed from the sites of two television news outlets. A third still had the ‘first story’ as copy but the video attached was the ‘updated’ version of the story, which only dealt with the police conclusion that it was a hoax.
To add to some questionable editorial ethics, newsrooms don’t seem to be naming the little girl in the updated stories. Some have gone so far as to blur her face out of photos taken at last Friday’s news conference.
Lemme get this straight. We were okay naming Khawlah and showing her face when she was considered a victim – which is contrary to conventional journalistic practice. But now that the story’s been proven a lie, she is nameless and faceless?
Really? It’s as if the story never happened!

Fifty years ago, today, Martin Luther King Jr. celebrated his final birthday. Seventy-four days later, Walter Cronkite would tell the nation: "Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the apostle of non-violence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee." 

On the night of King’s assassination, presidential candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy broke the news to shocked supporters in Indiana, suggesting, "In this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in."

How would America answer Kennedy?

There will be no shortage of discussion about King’s legacy today and in the coming 74 days as we approach the anniversary of his murder. Most of it will likely focus on "how far we've come" in the past half century and we will be treated to replay after replay of his soaring rhetoric - left captivated by his mastery of charismatic cadence. 

 And there will be the predictable backlash of screed warning us not to pay tribute to this false prophet, reminding us of "evidence" that King was a womanizer and unworthy to wag his "holier-than-thou" finger at anyone - let alone white America. 

He will be characterized as a provocateur who used extreme tactics to incite violent response. To an extent, that's true.
 
​King's civil right's victory in Birmingham, Alabama was won by not only provoking a violent response from Bull Conor, it took on national and historic significance because it was school kids who were being beaten and jailed. In a letter he penned in a Birmingham cell, King made his mission clear, "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

Today, I am a 57 year old man and a 35 year old father.

Leigh Erin had her first taste of oxygen on December 21, 1982 and she objected rather loudly and fiercely. But she pinked up in a hurry, a nurse swaddled her in a flannel blanket and we were formally introduced.

I observed that she looked like boiled baloney. (Well....she did!)
​
Four days later, Erin, Annie and I spent our first family Christmas at St. Michael's Hospital. They wouldn't discharge anybody on Christmas Day(??)

This year, we will celebrate our First Christmas with Erin, Dan and Piper Jules in our family home.

We all celebrate a First Christmas - every Christmas. Of course, the hymns we'll sing and the services we'll attend this weekend will celebrate THE First Christmas.

​I wrote a song by that title in July 2005. It came to me a couple of weeks after brain cancer killed my friend Jules Tonus. (Piper is named after him, btw.) I sang it last year at our performance of The Promise. You can listen to it here if you like. https://soundcloud.com/dtrafford/first-christmas

I share it, not to bring you down, but to encourage you and yours to simply embrace this Christmas as a first.

Merry Christmas!

I, like many of you, have you been watching what qualifies as the healthcare debate in the land of the free. The only thing that’s bi-partisan about this exercise in democracy is the lowest common denominator equal-access scream-fest driving the US cable news format.

For all of its warts, I can’t imagine trading our Canadian ‘universal’ healthcare for the abomination that they’ve glued together south of the border. I understand – first hand – the shortcomings of the Canadian system – but I know that paying my medical bills is unlikely to bankrupt me in my senior years.

The House of Representative has passed a new Healthcare plan that ‘fixes’ the plan championed by President Obama. I will leave it to the cable news network ‘specialists’ to pronounce on who will live and who will die in the land of the free.

The land of the free- where Americans have the constitutional right to be a mass murder victim - mowed down in a hail of high calibre semi-automatic gunfire because they have the right to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The same land of the free where legislators routinely and on script offer bowed heads, "thoughts and prayers" and requisite moments of silence to salve sorrows, erase memories and cleanse the slate in preparation for the next bloody, fatal assault we know is coming.

The land of the free where vile racists and libelous, bald-faced liars have the constitutional right to spew venomous, alternate facts and conspiracy theories without accountability.

The land of the free where you have the constitutional right to bear arms and the right to free speech without accountability, without regard for "the cost."

The land of the free – where you don't have a constitutional right to healthcare (because it's all about "the cost") – where you’re simply left with the right to dwell in the home of the brave once your benefits run out.

What comes around goes around.

With that in mind, it’s worth noting we witness the ascension of Donald Trump to President of the United States mere days after it was announced that the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus has popped its big top for the last time.

P.T. Barnum’s show may have ended but it’s been replaced by the MAKE AMERICA THE GREATEST show on earth. It’s been booked for four years, could be extended to eight and will be performed LIVE and continuously at 1600 Pennsylvania Blvd, (aside from the impromptu road show stops). It promises to be NEVER THE SAME THING ONCE. It will take your breath away 140 characters at a time with death defying Twitter posts.

This 21st century newer, bigger, better, great-again show has all the rubber necking qualities of the original American three ring spectacle.

Phineas Taylor Barnum, like the 45th President, was an inveterate self-promoting huckster who is often quoted as saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute” and “Every crowd has a silver lining.” Imagine how great his show might have been if he’d been able to avail himself of reality tv and social media!

​Barnum’s brand was burnished by his live acts and curiosities, highlighted by his menagerie of mutants and hoaxes.

There was no height too high for his hype. Barnum apparently felt no compunction to overstate or overblow a promotional claim so long as the paying public left the show feeling that they’d got their money’s worth.

All sounds a little familiar, eh?

Barnum had his Hippodrome, his freaks, giants and exotic woman.  Trump has his towers, the WWE and beauty pageants. Barnum had fire-eaters. Trump fired apprentices.

But Barnum had no time for fraudsters who deceived the vulnerable to make a buck. He actually testified against a photographer of the day who claimed he could photograph dead people! (The photographer, by the way, was married to a ‘healing medium’.)

Even for all his bluster and over-hyped self-promotion, the Circus King drew a line. He couldn’t abide “fake news”.  He made it his mission to expose the “tricks of the trade”. So maybe it’s poetic that the spectacle he founded announced its demise this week.
​
A century and a half later, the United States has elected the first Flat Earth President who rode a wave of unprecedented populism that was whipped up by a wilful acceptance of wilful ignorance and falsehoods, and it landed him in the White House.

I’m already seeing and hearing the holly jolly push for us to separate our cash from our wallets. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Even the frenzied chaos of Black Friday and Cyber Monday has some entertainment value to it.
 
Above all, say what you will about the ‘stress’ of the season and the crass commercialism – Christmas comes with its own brand of joy and excitement. That applies to non-believers and believers alike.
 
I fully expect the editorial calendar will kick in sooner than later and a lazy media will create outrage out of incidental complaints about seasonal salutations and the placement of Christmas trees.
 
Whatever. REJOICE!

This will be the second year that I have managed to collect a select group of accomplished and gifted musicians who help me ‘kick off the season’.
 
We are producing and presenting ‘The Promise’ on November 26 and 27th at St. Michael’s Centre for the Arts (1515 Bathurst Ave. in Toronto). For those of you who liturgically attuned, you will know that is the first weekend of Advent – the four Sundays preceding Christmas – the season of preparation.
 
‘The Promise’ is a musical and poetic journey through the Advent, Annunciation, Christmas and Epiphany stories – based on music I wrote for the St. Bonaventure Youth Choir over a fifteen-year period. It’s unabashedly all about Jesus!

It’s not intended to take the holly and the jolly out of the season. It’s intended to put your gift giving in context.
 
This year, we are hoping to raise funds and awareness for St. Clare Inn. It’s a transitional home in Toronto supporting women who live with mental health challenges. The story behind the Inn is a remarkable one – inspired by the death of a homeless woman who routinely slept on a park bench at the corner of Lawrence and Leslie. That’s in the middle of one the most affluent neighbourhoods in Canada. You can more about St. Clare Inn here.
 
Help us help make room at the Inn. Join us and experience The Promise.

Obviously, to have their picture taken!
(Read on MacDuff!)

I had the distinct privilege of spending four days in the hallowed halls of Abbey Road Studios this past summer. I was there with friends to record some of our music.

At the risk of sounding inarticulate and stating the obvious, it was awesome, (as in awe inspiring, full of awe!)
Here's how it rolled out on Facebook over four days in London.