This Big Smoke's On Fire

2/14/17

DEPARTMENT OF THE BIG SMOKE:

There are two sorts of fires burning in Toronto.

One is real. The other is metaphoric.

The first sort concerns what seems to me a rash of fires in Toronto, including today's massive one at The Badminton and Racquet Club, near St Clair and Yonge, a part of town I love. Maybe there aren't these days more than there have been, but it sure looks like there are--houses, industrial buildings, apartments, sports clubs. Is it a wave of arson, a series of coincidental accidents, both? What the hell is going on?

The second sort concerns, slightly old news, Toronto's Gay Pride's decision to exclude the typically exemplary and certainly multicultural men and women who serve and protect us, including Gay Priders, our police, that is to say, from Gay Pride's 2017 instalment of their annual parade. 

That ridiculous decision came from the imprecations of Black Lives Matter, Toronto Division. And the hysteria animating the imprecating is of a piece with a BLM, U.S. Division, bigwig spokesperson calling Justin, aka Joe, Trudeau a white supremacist, a formulation in which only the colour is right. 

So from Pluto is this calumny that even our own not shy Rex Murphy, a consistent and hard edged JT lampooner, rose to Trudeau's defence. The inanity, the toxic insanity that some people are breathing in and exhaling days: it's stunning. Do Black Lives Matter (too)? Of course. But if the measure of the matter is this kind of unhinged exclusion and this kind of toxic, inane, insane rhetoric, then they're mattering, I'm sorry to say, rather somewhat too much.