JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

"Better news: Social Services Minister Frank Drea shuts out the hoopla in the Legislature over the alleged budget leak by reading the Racing Form." Photo by Jeff Goode, May 1983. Toronto Star Photographic Archive, Toronto Public Library, TSPA_0044604F. As anyone who reads my work may have noticed, I often write about political history, especially when it's relevant to current events. This section of history is filled with the elements that inspire storytellers: heroes, villains, tortured protagonists, inspiring ideas, depressing reality, sudden twists in fortune, backroom intrigue, and all other kinds of drama.  What I try to avoid, especially when drawing parallels to the present, is armchair quarterbacking. I don’t want to come off as someone who has the answers to everything but never actually attempts to fix what is being criticized. The person who growls a lot with plenty of bark but no bite. Which sometimes makes me wonder if, to back up my convictions, I should con...

Agnes Macphail, September 12, 1926. City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail fonds, Fonds 1266, Item 8807. Today marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most important federal elections in Canadian history. When voters cast their ballots on December 6, 1921, they elected the country's first female MP (Agnes Macphail), ended a decade of Conservative rule (under Robert Borden and Arthur Meighen), ushered in the William Lyon Mackenzie King era, and, via the Progressive Party, smashed the two-party system which had served the country since Confederation. I wrote about this campaign and its impact for TVO a few years ago , but never got around to writing a "bonus features" post like I usually do when I've gathered plenty of interesting material. The centennial of the election feels like the right time to haul research discoveries out of their slumber on my computer. Toronto Star, October 7, 1921. A cringey-from-modern-perspective profile of Macphail. Flesherton Advance...

Sometimes, while easing myself into a work session, I compose Twitter threads of things discovered while browsing through old newspapers. Sometimes these discoveries are made in the midst of research, sometimes through lazy browsing of online archives. This weekend marks the first time in nearly a year I've spent time in my hometown, Amherstburg. Taking advantage of the beautiful weather the first two days I was down here meant wandering around town and the rest of Essex County. Today is not so lovely, so I've parked myself in my Mom's dining room, where, depending on the angle, I can stare out into the lush greenery of the south end of town along the Detroit River. So, as an easing-into-work-you'll-see-in-a-few-months exercise, I decided to flip through the pages of the Border Cities Star from the second weekend of July a century ago. Instead of throwing this material onto Twitter, it seemed like a good excuse for a blog post where I could expand on some of the storie...

This post offers supplementary material for an article I recently wrote for TVO , which you should read before diving into this post. Click on images for larger versions.    The ads produced by the province to explain the implementation of minimum wages in the Golden Horseshoe. These versions originally appeared in the June 11, 1963 edition of the Globe and Mail .      Toronto Star, September 6, 1963.  How the Progressive Conservatives presented the minimum wage during the 1963 provincial election campaign. Small ads like these were used to tackle the various points of the Tory platform, including topics like margarine colouring. Note the local candidates spotlighted in this ad, who range from Minister of Labour Leslie Rowntree to future disgraced hockey figure Alan Eagleson.       Toronto Star, September 17, 1963.  .    Toronto Star, September 21, 1963.  A Communist campaign ad...

This installment of my "Ghost City" column for The Grid was originally published on February 12, 2013. Portrait of William Peyton Hubbard, 1913, by W.A. Sherwood. When William Peyton Hubbard was born in 1842 it’s doubtful his father, a freed slave who had arrived in Toronto two years earlier, imagined that the infant would become one of the city’s most powerful politicians. The road to that accomplishment took time: Before Hubbard entered politics in 1893, he baked cakes and drove a horse cab, occupations that were the norm for the city’s small black population.

This installment of my "Retro T.O." column for The Grid was originally published on July 24, 2012. And, as we predicted, people are still devising burial plans for the Gardiner. Jarvis Street, east side, looking northeast from Lake Shore Boulevard East, showing Gardiner Expressway under construction, 1963. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 5603. “I’ve looked at this darn thing from one end to the other and I can’t think of anything I would like to change.” Frederick Gardiner’s verdict on the expressway that would bear his name was not one future municipal officials shared. Within a decade-and-a-half of the Gardiner’s completion in 1965, grumblings arose from City Hall that the elevated section through the core should be knocked down. Like clockwork, every few years a plan to bury or replace the freeway emerges. Each plan is initially greeted with relief that the waterfront will soon be rid of what many people have perceived as an eyesore and bar...

This installment of my "Retro T.O." column for The Grid was originally published on May 8, 2012. Shortly after becoming mayor of Toronto, Mel Lastman was asked if he worried about his wife Marilyn’s verbal snafus. “All the time,” he said. “But I find it cute and if people don’t like it, too bad.” The same could be said of Mel’s odd outbursts, yet few found it cute when Lastman uttered a death threat against CBC reporter (and current city councillor) Adam Vaughan in May 1999. Thanks to a police leak, it was an open secret among City Hall reporters that Marilyn Lastman was caught shoplifting a $155 pair of designer pants at the Promenade Mall Eaton’s on April 19, 1999. According to the police report no charges were laid “due to her age as well as no outstanding offences on her record.” Sources close to Marilyn believed the pressures of Mel’s job had resulted in depression and prescription drug use. The incident was kept quiet until the satirical magazine Frank published a ...

Toronto Sun , November 3, 1980. After a nine-month slog, the 2014 municipalelection campaign draws to a close today. Amid its stranger-than-fiction twists and turns, a sad truth has emerged: there is a segment of Torontonians who have discovered they can get away with boldly displaying small-minded attitudes we like to sweep under the carpet. As Ward 2 candidate Andray Domise observed in atweet this morning referring to a gawdawful Andy Donato cartoon of Olivia Chow published in the Sun, one of the campaign's big problems is "that we've given racists, sexists, xenophobes a platform of legitimacy in TO politics." From attacks on Chow's ethnicity to the mutilation of signs for Islamic candidates, it hasn't been pretty.

The Telegram , December 28, 1923. Does being the first name atop a ballot help one's political career? Likely not; otherwise, Said Aly would be among the critical contenders in this year's Toronto mayoral race (though thankfully his name sits just ahead of our city's perennial racist candidate). It didn't aid Magnus Austin Brillinger (1882-1939) in the 1924 race for the two trustee positions up for grabs in Ward 6. When the votes were tallied on New Year's Day, he finished third behind future TTC chair W.C. McBrien and veteran board member Dr. John Hunter. Better luck next year for the St. Clair Avenue West pharmacist, right?

This post offers supplementary material for an article I wrote for Torontoist , which you should read before diving into this piece. Source: The Telegram , Dec 6, 1966. While researching this piece, I was struck at several parallels between Dennison and Rob Ford, namely what we'd now call "retail politics" and campaigning on being mindful of taxpayer dollars. (There were major differences: Dennison was a teetotaller, displayed leftist tendencies during his early political career, and didn't make a public spectacle of himself). Several months before the 1966 municipal election, Toronto Star city hall columnist Ron Haggart looked at Dennison's chances, using language that could have been adapted by his successors in 2010: But Dennison can by no means be written off. He has helped literally thousands of ordinary persons during his years as an alderman and controller at City Hall. He efficiently keeps in touch at election time with those whose problems have c...

Cartoon by Sid Barron, the Toronto Star , November 23, 1962. Click on image for larger version. Adjust the dates to match this year's election (October 27, for the record), and you could easily recycle this cartoon. Some voters may feel as if the world ended long ago during the current drawn-out, fiction-writers-couldn't-make-this-stuff-up narrative.

This post offers supplementary material for an article I wrote for Torontoist , which you should read before diving into this piece. If only more mayors kept scrapbooks as extensively as Allan Lamport did. To say the dozens of brittle, flaking volumes sitting in the City of Toronto Archives were a valuable resource in preparing this profile is an understatement. Throughout his political career, Lamport clipped every article mentioning his name and pasted them into the type of scrapbook you can easily pick up at Staples or Wal-Mart. During his mayoralty, volumes are organized by newspaper, which is especially helpful in the case of the yet-to-be-digitized Telegram . Warning: due to the condition of the scrapbooks, you’ll need to brush the flakes off yourself after viewing them.