Monday 28 November 2011

Police mourn ‘devastating’ loss of two service dogs

Photo courtesy of Toronto Police Service
They’re some of the city’s grittiest crime investigators, sniffing out narcotics, looking for clues at shooting scenes and helping to find missing children.

They are often the unsung heroes of the Toronto Police Service, but they have earned the respect of some of the toughest officers on the force.

Toronto police are mourning two service dogs who died from illness last week.

See my report in the Toronto Star.

Thursday 17 November 2011

Peanut butter to jump by a third in January

Devin Bird grabs a jar of peanut butter while shopping at the Food Basics discount grocery store on Pape Ave.

“It's a good amount of what I need,” says Bird, an out-of-work vegan. “It's got protein. But most of all, it's cheap.”

But it won't be as affordable next year. Like many common foods, peanut butter is on the rise due to rising fuel costs and changes in weather.

With a colder, more humid climate, Canada imports 80 per cent of its peanuts from the U.S. Recent droughts in the country's south have raised peanut prices dramatically. Last month, Canadian peanut butter producers warned customers to expect a 35-40 per cent price jump around January.

It's these kind of price fluctuations that make the job of Toronto's largest food bank even harder.

“It’s a pretty challenging situation,” says executive director Gail Nyberg, of Daily Bread Food Bank.

As cost-effective protein with a long shelf life, peanut butter is listed among the group’s 10 most-needed items.

A jump in its price is a triple threat for her organization. The food bank predicts higher demand from customers and fewer donations from the public, but also less value when its uses from its funds.

When Daily Bread doesn't get enough donations, it purchases food to-the-need at wholesale prices.

Peanut butter cost $14.50 a case last October. The group's current rate is $16.95 and they've been told to expect $19 early next year.

Nyberg says price jumps have become part of running a food bank. Tuna and rice, also among Daily Bread's most-needed foods, have fluctuated drastically in the past two years.

“We’re entering our holiday drive with some pretty lofty goals,” Nyberg says. “We didn’t reach them at Thanksgiving. But we'll try our best.”

The work year's almost over for Joy Carter, spokesperson for the Georgia Peanut Commission.

It's a month after the state's peanut season and Smucker's has just announced its commodity costs have peaked. After raising the price of Jif peanut butter by a third earlier this month, the company predicts no more price hikes.

“This drought started back in the spring and really hurt production,” Carter says. “But this is the reality of farming. You adjust when you see something coming.”

Farmers contract their land around February and often rotate peanut crops with corn and cotton. Like any small business owners, they are granted loans at rates determined by how stable banks deem their investments.

“This year, the corn and cotton crops were given a much higher per-acre loan,” says Leslie Wagner, executive director of Southern Peanut Growers. “This encouraged farmers to have fewer peanut crops”

Higher interest rates, coupled with a drought and rising fuel costs, meant a 13-per-cent drop in peanut production and a boom in sale prices. In the past three decades, the price of peanuts has only reached this year's rate twice.

Though farmers are protected by charging more for cost-intensive crops, such price jumps are a risk for Georgia's $2-billion industry. Universities in the largest peanut-producing state are researching drought-resistant seeds and cost-reduction methods like better irrigation.

Climatologists have linked this summer's drought to the annual La NiƱa pattern, which has been exacerbated in recent years by exceptionally hot temperatures.

The U.S. drought is part of a series of weather events affecting global food prices, though a comparatively trivial one. Last summer, Russian faced its hottest summer on record. Forests fires engulfed one-third of its grain crop, leading to an 11-month grain export suspension that drove up food prices in countries like Indonesia, where 45 per cent of household income goes to food.

In Canada, consumers only spend about 12 per cent of their income on food. Though the rise in price for peanut butter and other foods will hit those with limited income, Canadians have a variety of sources of protein.And, at least in East York, consumers seem up for the challenge.

“What can you do? Peanut butter's like everything; the cost goes up and up,” says Sonia Alce, eyeing a peanut butter sale poster. “If you love it, you're going to have to stock up.”

“Oil's gone up; everything's gone up,” says Janet Coker, a grandmother on a fixed income. “But you make do. Wages rise too, but not as quickly. You just have to budget and be smart about it.”

Before leaving Food Basics, Bird grabs another jar of peanut butter, on sale at a 75-cent discount.

“I'd normally wait for half-price, but this could be it,” he says. “It's time to stock up.”

Wednesday 2 November 2011

How to talk to grieving families

I wrote a post for the Toronto Star intern blog about how to speak with grieving families (and why).

It's a tough part of being a reporter, but it adds a lot of value to your story. It also makes someone more than a name and cause of death.

See my post here.

Murray Brewster speaks to Centennial journalism students

'We knew that Afghanistan was a failed state'
Murray Brewster, CP's senior defence correspondent, came to Centennial to speak with us about journalism. In our question period (j-school, so a scrum) I asked him about the detainee document scandal. He was both thorough and kind enough to reply to my email pestering afterwards. I finally had a chance to sit down with his book and recommend it to anyone interested in Canadian political journalism. It will inform you, give you context and make you angry.


The story took a while to go through editing; it's dated October 15, 2011.



Canadian Press journalist Murray Brewster says a recent UN report corroborates his findings of severe mismanagement of Afghan detainees by Canadian bureaucracy.

Brewster, a journalist for 27 years, visited Centennial College on Wednesday to discuss his experience as a Canadian Press correspondent in Afghanistan.

“What you write could potentially get people killed, and that is a very, very sobering notion,” Brewster said. “Disagreements in that part of the world are often settled with a gun.”

He added that despite the dangers of reporting, it is essential to have independent journalists cover the wars their country fights.

“It is important for us to bear witness to those events because those events are happening in our name,” Brewster said.

His talk came two days after a UN report found “a compelling pattern and practice of systematic torture and ill-treatment” in Afghan detainee centres, with 46 per cent of randomly selected respondents reporting torture.

As senior defence correspondent with The Canadian Press, Brewster broke the late 2009 story of whistleblower Richard Colvin’s allegations that some Afghan detainees who Canadian soldiers had turned over to Afghanistan prisons were then tortured.

“That particular story came out of a healthy sense of outrage,” Brewster said. “What I was watching was a man who wanted to testify but the government wanted to silence him, and it just snowballed.”

The detainee scandal lead to a high-profile inquiry, thousands of released but redacted documents and unanswered questions about whether Canada violated international humanitarian law in a war it entered 10 years ago last week.

Last Monday's UN report is just one of ongoing developments surrounding the issue, one that Brewster says reinforces his findings, but is “not much different than the many U.S. State Department warnings over the years.”

In his talk, Brewster often touched on what he calls the federal government's “tight hold on information” around the war in Afghanistan.

“There was what I consider to be a burden that went with covering the story,” Brewster said. “A burden of responsibility to cut through a lot of the B.S. that we were being fed.”

His book, The Savage War: The Untold Battles of Afghanistan, was released this month. In one chapter, Brewster details the detainee document fiasco and subsequent document dumps.

In March 2010, the parliamentary committee examining the allegations released 2,628 pages of partially redacted documents, followed by 4,000 more this June.

“There was nothing in those documents that would have been considered a smoking gun; you wouldn’t expect it to be there,” he said. “Because government has become much more savvy about what it puts on paper.”

Brewster cited an internal 2007 memo released in June that warned the foreign affairs minister about Afghanistan-related documents released in an NGO-lead Federal Court case.

“A challenge will be managing the suggestion that the content of material released is inconsistent with government of Canada messaging,” reads the memo, originally classified as secret.

“The documents leave one with the impression of (redacted) flawed Afghan judicial system and of detention facilities that fall (sic) well below UN standards. The assembled material may seem to suggest that government of Canada messaging on the detainees issues for the last 12 months has been out of sync with reporting from the field.”

The memo then suggests that such material would “present significant political and communications challenges,” leaving the impression that the government should have known “there was the potential for mistreatment of detainees.”

Brewster said the memo “speaks volumes” about both a lack of transparency and bureaucratic failures in managing information. He stressed that the scandal does not concern the conduct of Canadian troops, but rather how Canada and NATO presided over detainees.

“I think the question revolves around whether they should have been handed over to Afghans,” he said. “We knew that Afghanistan was a failed state.”