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Tuesday September 22, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday September 22, 2020

No charges laid at ‘mega meet’ car rally in Ancaster; Premier Ford calls gathering ‘totally unacceptable’

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is calling an impromptu car “mega meet” that saw several hundred people gather in an Ancaster parking lot Saturday night “totally unacceptable” amid the COVID-19 pandemic. 

July 29, 2008

Speaking to media Sunday, Hamilton police Supt. Will Mason said officers arrived at the parking lot of the Ancaster Cineplex Cinemas at 771 Golf Links Rd just shortly after 6 p.m. following a tip from the Project Eliminate Racing Activity on Streets Everywhere (ERASE) team.

Mason said the task force — which consists of the OPP as well as York and Peel Regional Police forces — had informed Hamilton police that an event coined “Mega Meet 2.0” was planned for that evening in the area. 

When officers arrive on scene, Mason said they found a “large group” of vehicles already setting up in the parking lot. 

Over the next hour, Mason said the group “swelled” to completely fill the movie theatre lot, the adjacent Indigo bookstore lot and had “spilled” into the smaller surrounding lots.

In a statement Sunday, Ford said the “reckless behaviour” seen in the lots was “totally unacceptable.”

“While Ontario has made incredible progress in the fight against COVID-19, we cannot take that progress for granted,” he added. 

With an initial response of three Hamilton police officers, Mason said the force called in the ERASE team for assistance to “prevent a repeat of previous incidents.”

May 26, 2020

No charges — neither traffic violations or for gathering in large groups — were laid during the police response, said Mason. 

On Saturday morning, Ford announced that the province would be clamping down on the number of people allowed at social gatherings in Ontario to slow the spread of the virus. 

Effective immediately, private, unmonitored gatherings are to be limited to 10 people indoors and 25 people outdoors. 

Saturday evening’s event garnered several hundred people — well beyond the limit, said Mason. 

“The goal at that time was to disperse the crowd as quickly as possible. That helps us mitigate both the risk of COVID-19 as well as the risk of street racing,” he said. “Stopping all of those individuals and issuing fines just exacerbates the size and the duration of that gathering.” (Hamilton Spectator) 

 

Saturday September 19, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday September 19, 2020

Bold plans of federal Liberals grounded by resurgent COVID-19

The high-flying trial balloons the federal Liberals launched just a month ago, after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prorogued Parliament, have all but disappeared amid the ominous clouds of rising COVID-19 numbers across central and western Canada.

August 27, 2020

It bears noting that the bold and ambitious new agenda team Trudeau was foreshadowing just a few weeks back has been overshadowed by the renewed urgency in Ottawa and provinces to our west to deal with the resurgent health crisis and the prospects for additional economic misery that come with it.

Most folks will recall that soon after pulling Parliament’s plug on Aug. 18, Trudeau and his newly minted Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland were bullish, not only about a post-pandemic recovery, but about a green recovery. There were also musings from within the federal government about lasting changes to Canada’s employment insurance and income assistance safety nets.

But back then the curve was flat. In mid-August, Canada was posting about 350 new COVID-19 cases daily.

Beginning in late August and accelerating through September, the number of new cases identified daily has spiked back up to over 1,000 — levels not experienced in Canada since late May or early June. The majority of those are in Quebec and Ontario, although the West is also experiencing a resurgence.

October 20, 2018

The rise in case numbers and the fear that they portend a second wave of the virus, has tempered or delayed the government’s longer-term ambitions and refocused the Trudeau Liberals on immediate measures that are required to respond to the health emergency and its economic toll.

The government’s longterm vision of transformational change to a green economy and a more robust and enduring income support program has given way to the reality that Canada remains in the grip of the coronavirus.

It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the trial balloons about a bold and ambitious new agenda were intended, not so much as a preview of the upcoming Throne Speech, as a distraction from the controversy that surrounded the government when Parliament was prorogued.

September 1, 2018

Prorogation meant that several parliamentary committees examining the controversy around an aborted billion-dollar federal contract to the WE charity went into hiatus. The prime minister and former finance minister Bill Morneau had close ties to the charity.

That controversy seems a long time ago now, although when Parliament resumes following Gov. Gen. Julie Payette’s reading of the speech Wednesday, those committees are likely to resurrect their inquiries. (Chronicle-Herald) 

 

Friday, June 14, 2013

Friday, June 14, 2013By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday, June 14, 2013

It’s checkout time at the City Motor Hotel

For SaleA neighbour with a truck said he’d help her move, but Kim Coulas has been waiting all day. When she tries calling, his phone is off.

“I’m screwed,” she says, removing a cigarette from a large Ziploc bag. “I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”

It’s 4:30 p.m. on Thursday. City staff are standing in the parking lot, waiting for the keys to the City Motor Hotel. It was supposed to be vacant by now.

Romolo D’Angelo, the city’s director of facilities management and capital programs, says 10 rooms were occupied when they arrived in the morning.

Most people left without incident, but Coulas is one of two still here. Her belongings are packed and stacked in duffel bags and wicker baskets outside her room, but she can’t move them alone.
She calls another friend and waits some more.

Coulas says she doesn’t know where she’ll go when they show up. She’s been here for a month, ever since she and her husband divorced and she left her rented house.

“Divorce was easier,” she says of living at the hotel.

She’s been here once before — a decade ago, when she moved to Hamilton from Beaver Creek, Yukon. She says the same people owned it, but it was a lot nicer then.

“They just took this place and they ran it into the ground,” she says, pushing a busted pane of Plexiglas out of the window of her room and leaning through. “Every cent they could get out of it they milked it and that was it. It’s a shame.” (Source: The Hamilton Spectator)

February 28, 2007

There’s nothing new about drawing parodies of common logos and advertisements. The most popular thing to do these days is to satirize well known current movie logos and add a humourous political or social twist. The most recent parody I drew came when the mostly forgotten remake of that campy classic movie the Poseidon Adventure hit the theatres. With regard to ad parodies, off the top of my head I recall Osama de Toilette products, and East End Hamilton cereal.

I couldn’t help but recall as I drew today’s parody of Downy Fabric Softener some stickers that I vaguely remember as a kid growing up in the 70’s. Until I did a Google search using keywords like ‘sticker’, ‘ad’, ‘parody’, and ‘1970’s’, I never even knew that the things I was recalling in the deep recesses of my childhood memories actually had a name: Wacky Packs. Here are some examples:

Yep, cheesey, gross, kinda dumb, but a nice introduction to innocent youthful rebellion against mass marketing in the 1970’s. And there are hundreds of them, many of them created and drawn by an artist working for the Topps bubblegum company — Art Spiegelman — which quite frankly, is news to me.

From the website, wackypackages.org, there’s a reprint of an article in the Oct. 1, 1973 issue of New York magazine which best describes what Wacky Packs were all about. Here’s an excerpt:

What are Wacky Packages?, you may well ask. Putting it simply – too simply in fact – they are a new twist on the classic bubble gum card, that hoary ruse created to sell the uneatable to the unbearable. They are also, in a time when polls show public belief in institutions at an all-time low, seedling skepticism in its purest form. If a stick-on bubble gum card can take an old faithful cereal like Cap’n Crunch, change it into Cap’n Crud, and become the Munchkin madness of the year, maybe somebody up there better take a long look at what’s turning the kiddies on – and off.

In their minor art form, Wacky Packages are revolutionary. Gone are the jocks and rock stars, the traditional card ploys. Wacky Pack puns are the Mad magazine effect leaking sideways into the under-culture. Yet when they were tried out by the Topps Chewing Gum Company six years ago, under the guidance of former manager of product development Stan Hart (a regular contributor to Mad), they went nowhere. Now the times are obviously right. Watergatian Weltschmerz is nibbling the collective unconscious, and Wacky Packages are selling rampant with their put-downs of products that kids have had thrown at them and into them daily by TV and Mom. From air-ball breakfast cereals to dishwashing detergents that make ladies beautiful, familiarity seems finally to be breeding contempt – and a generation of gripers.

Be sure to checkout the many more examples of wacky packs / vintage ad parodies on the Internet.

FEEDBACK

Holy cow, Mr. Mackay, I didn’t realize how much you have veered to the right.

Your accusations of Dion being “soft” on terrorism are the exact same perceptions of the opposition that Mr. Harper has been propagating ad nauseam. Not only are these perceptions extreme, but the imagery you have chosen in your cartoon is intensely personal and vile. You should join Ramirez, the neocon American editorial cartoonist, as an embedded mouthpiece for entrenched conservative policies.

No, I am not a Liberal.

– A. Abbott (March 2, 2007)

——

I used to skip lunch and buy wacky packs. Those were the days, I guess I had about 350 of them. Not including the ones I stuck on the walls, car, bikes, school hallways. bathrooms. They were great. Of course I bought the whole new set from an e-bay auction, they are still cute, but nothing can compare with opening a new pack of wackey packs hoping to complete the set.

– dwells (March 6, 2007)