Amateur videos posted on YouTube and security tape footage show several officers surround the front door of a streetcar, stopped at a corner, near Victoria’s Spa and Rehabilitation Centre. Passerby Markus Grupp began filming just a few minutes past midnight. The shadowed figure of one officer in particular is especially chilling: his arms unwavering, gun raised and pointed at the doorway, where a person stands. They shout to drop the knife, the figure shouts back calling them pussies. “If you take one step in this direction with that foot …[inaudible] die,” shouts an officer. The figure moves slightly, met with three bullets, followed seconds after by at least six more. The body falls, and is seen to be Tasered.

Const. James Forcillo, who fatally shot Yatim, is a six-year veteran from 14 Division. He has been suspended with pay. The SIU is investigating, assigning six investigators and two forensic investigators. The unit has not yet interviewed Forcillo, whose lawyer says is “devastated.” As National Post columnist Christie Blatchford quotes activist Bromley Armstrong in her thoughts of the tragedy: “If I should beat my wife, you don’t ask my cousins to investigate.” Here, Blatchford is using these words to illustrate how police would investigate each other before the formation of the SIU. Post-SIU, however, the mistrust remains, this isn’t the first time someone who needed help was killed by police instead.

Hundreds participated in the protest Monday evening. It started at Dundas Square and led to the spot Yatim was killed, Dundas West and Bellwoods Avenue. A brief and heated stop was made outside a local police station. Yatim’s  mother and sister were in attendance and requested the march move forward. Later, event coordinators wrote on the Facebook page Sammy’s Fight Back for Justice, “we are not here to terrorize the O.P.D that is not our mission. We are only here to fight for Sammy’s Justice and hopefully have stronger laws correlated to prevent this from happening to anyone else.”

Toronto police chief Bill Blair said at a Monday press conference that he understands the public’s concern, “The public also has a right to demand that the Toronto Police Service examine the conduct of its officers and to ensure that its training and procedures are both appropriate and followed. This will be done.” The same day, city councillor and TTC chair Karen Stintz wrote on her website, “Speaking as an elected official, and as a parent, I was disturbed.”

Witnesses reported seeing Yatim holding his penis and a knife, up to three inches long. “He did not seem mentally present,” says passenger Ing. The 505 driver evacuated the streetcar’s passengers, Yatim was left on alone and police were called. It was right they were called, but the officers did not do what they were trained to. According to The National Use-of-Force Framework for Police Officers in Canada, lethal force is to be used in response to “Grievous bodily harm or death.” The videos show Yatim standing, moving slightly, then being shot at least nine times. He was not Tasered first, but after. There was no attempt shown at negotiating. The Toronto Star collected instances where police have disarmed people with knives, without any fatalities, or even guns being raised in some. “He was cornered on an empty streetcar,” tweeted city councillor Janet Davis, who also questioned where the Mobile Crisis Intervention Team (MCIT) was. The Toronto Police website says, “As a second responder, the MCIT will answer calls, along with the primary response unit, that will ensure the client in crisis and those close to them are safe.”

Michael Eligon died on my street- he didn’t need to. Either did 18 yr old Sammy Yatim. He was cornered on an empty streetcar! #MCIT #topoli

— Janet Davis (@Janet_Davis) July 28, 2013

It isn’t known for sure whether or not Yatim was suffering mentally, there wasn’t a chance to find out. He wasn’t given the chance. The 18-year-old recently graduated from an all-boy Catholic school, Brebeuf College School on Steeles Avenue East. He planned on studying healthcare management at George Brown College in September. He and his sister, Sarah, moved to Toronto from Aleppo, Syria five years ago. They lived with their father after their parents’ divorce. His mother and extended family stayed in his home nation. Yatim’s uncle, Mejad “Jim” Yatim told The Star, “Sammy used to spend the summers with his mom in Syria until the situation became so dangerous.”  Canada was supposed to be safer. The bereaved uncle adds, Yatim fit in with his friends by wearing hoodies and “pants lower than his father (Nabil) would stomach.” Nabil, who returned home early from a business trip after hearing the news, now says all he wants to do is bury his son.

After arguments of his pot use the teenager moved out of his father’s home in June. He and friend Nathan Schifitto moved to another friend’s place. Josh Ramoo and his seven-year-old son, Braden Scopie opened their doors to the teens. When Scopie talked to the Star, he told them he was sad, “He was my friend.”

Screen capture of The National Use-of-Force Framework for Police Officers in Canada

Yatim planned to move into his own place come September, but in the meantime renovated the room he shared with Schifitto, described by Ramoo as “a teenage dream room.” He searched for a job (his last was at a McDonald’s six months ago) and went with friends to help out on construction sites.

Joshua Videna was a friend of Yatim’s, “He seemed a little bit different, a little bit more stressed in life.” Videna says his friend would say, “I gotta get my life straight. I’m 18-years-old and pretty much not going anywhere.”

Sasha Maghami says she was Yatim’s best friend. When she left for a five-month trip to Australia on July 21, he asked her not to forget about him. Before she left, she says he seemed less talkative and playful.

He was a teenager.

A visitation for Yatim will be held today from 6 to 9 at Highland Funeral Home in Scarborough. His funeral will be tomorrow at 11. Facebook group Justice for Sammy invites people to attend the Toronto Police Services Board meeting Tuesday August 13 at 1:30.

Shell Canada’s operations in Alberta’s oil sands are clean and green, and simply the victim of nasty rumours spread by environmentalists trying to tar the company’s reputation. That is, if you believe the “six-week Canwest special information feature on climate change, in partnership with Shell Canada.”

Canada’s largest media company teamed up with the oil giant to produce a series of features that showcase how Shell is tackling energy challenges and environmental responsibility. The full-page, feel-good features ran in six Canwest dailies—the National Post, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal and Vancouver Sun—six Saturdays in a row in January and February 2010. The six-part series also appeared in the Toronto Star as a pullout section.

The series profiles friendly Shell employees who share what motivates them to work in Alberta’s oil sands—Canwest style is to avoid the use of “tar sands”—otherwise known as one of the world’s largest and most destructive industrial projects. There’s the climate change expert (a goateed grandpa clutching walking sticks), the chemist (a longhaired family man who dabbles in acting) and the environmental management systems coordinator (a young woman in a Cowichan sweater who spent countless hours as a child flipping through National Geographic). The features include “myth busters” to clear up so-called misconceptions like the idea that Shell’s oil sands production is too energy-intensive, pollutes the Athabasca River and results in “dirty oil,” among other allegedly tarnishing falsehoods. The only myth, however, is that these features are editorial content. The fact is, they’re paid advertisements for Shell.

While advertorials designed to look like newspaper stories are common, they are usually clearly identified as advertisements as urged by regulatory groups like Advertising Standards Canada. This is essential so readers don’t think the material is subject to the same standards and ethics of journalistic stories: accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and accountability.

Nowhere did the word “advertorial” or “advertising” appear on the Shell ads. Rather, “Canwest special information feature on climate change, in partnership with Shell Canada” was inked across the top of the page, suggesting an editorial partnership between Canwest and Shell, a major newsmaker. Seasoned journalist and outgoing chair of the Ryerson School of Journalism Paul Knox says the wording is euphemistic. “You’re either trying to disguise the advertorials as editorial content or you’re not,” says Knox. “And if you’re not trying to disguise them, what’s to be lost by being reasonably explicit about the terms?”

When asked this question, Canwest director of communications Phyllise Gelfand said: “We feel very strongly that the language was clear enough and that readers will appreciate it.” However, when asked to elaborate on what the language means, she said: “I’m not going to go into semantics with you.”

Gelfand pointed out the information features were presented in a different font, layout and style than the papers’ editorial content. However, the ads ran during the lead-up to the Olympics and during the Games, when many papers were using different layouts. Lifestyle spreads (fashion and homes, for example) also often take more colourful and creative layouts, not unlike the Shell ads. (In the Star, the pullout section was printed on a differently coloured paper.)

Advertorials are often distinguished from editorial copy by not placing a byline on the piece. But in this case, Alberta-based freelancers and Canwest contributors Brian Burton and Shannon Sutherland were credited. Both Burton and Sutherland have covered Shell and the oil industry for Canwest. Burton has 20 years of experience in corporate communications for leading energy corporations, according to his LinkedIn profile, which also states his goal: “to advocate successfully for my clients in the court of public opinion.” For Sutherland’s part, her bio on one magazine site says when she’s not “interrogating industrialists” she’s hanging out with her kids.

Click to enlarge

The advertorials also appeared on Canwest papers’ websites—on homepages as top stories and in the news section, with URLs that looked like those of any other news story. Just like regular news, readers could comment on the “stories.” Canwest refused to respond to allegations the campaign included seeded comments, meaning a slew of positive comments about Shell were posted and negative ones deleted in an effort to further sway public opinion. “I am not aware of this,” said Shell spokesperson Ed Greenberg. “I know you appreciate that anyone, whether or not they work for Shell, is entitled to read any newspaper or magazine they want and form their own opinions from what they read.”

When Sierra Club Executive Director John Bennett spotted the features in the Ottawa Citizen, the former newspaper reporter and ad sales rep was shocked by the one-sided nature of the information. “I could not tell they were ads,” Bennett says. “They looked and read like editorial content.” He only learned the features were ads when he contacted the publisher of the Citizen to complain about the unbalanced coverage. The nonprofit environmental advocacy organization promptly filed a complaint with Advertising Standards Canada. However, because Sierra Club went public by issuing a news release, ASC did not accept the complaint: it’s against the rules for special interest groups to generate publicity for their cause through the complaint process. Sierra Club also filed a complaint with the Ontario Press Council, which has not yet adjudicated the matter. The council’s advertising policy states ads that look like ordinary news stories should be clearly labelled as advertising.

Despite dismissing the complaint, ASC Vice-President of Standards Janet Feasby says advertising designed to look like news stories is of growing concern and ASC will be publishing an advisory on the subject to bring the issue to the attention of advertisers, media, and the public. Feasby points to a recent precedent decision, in which the ASC found a “special information supplement” in a newspaper that extolled the virtues of Neuragen, a homeopathic product, was presented in a manner that concealed the advertiser’s commercial intent. “It was clear to council that it was advertising, not information.” Like the Shell features, an ad for the company was included at the bottom of the page.

ASC can force advertisers and publications to remove ads, but often it’s too late: the ads have already run and the damage has been done. The only loser is the reader, who may have read and wrongly interpreted the ad as a news story. Papers that blur the line between advertorial and news content risk their credibility and their relationship with their audience. “The problem with these advertorial exercises is they muddy the waters and you’re placing obstacles in the way of a reader who’s trying to figure out, ‘What is my interest here, and what’s behind what I’m being told?’” says Knox, who teaches media ethics at Ryerson. “It has the potential to undermine the trust that your audience has in you and that’s fatal.”

The seriousness of this matter is magnified when the subject of the advertorial is a controversial one, such as climate change. “[These ads] play on public complacency, they play on the public’s hopes that the environment is being protected,” explained the Sierra Club’s Bennett. “One of the reasons we have so much difficulty advancing the environmental agenda in the face of overwhelming public support is because people can’t imagine there are governments or companies not trying to do the best they can. When you get misleading advertising like this, you play to that inborn need for people to believe that things are being looked after.” You also play into the inborn need people have to trust the media to provide them with honest coverage.

While Shell insists it produced the features to clear up “misconceptions” about climate change and its environmental commitment, the company has a track record for producing misleading, greenwashed advertising. In 2008, the Advertising Standards Authority in the U.K. denounced a Shell newspaper ad that described tar sands projects as sustainable, saying it breached rules on substantiation, truthfulness, and environmental claims. A year earlier, the ASA found another Shell ad guilty of greenwashing—this one featuring refinery chimneys emitting flowers. Still, Shell defends its ads.

“We were getting feedback from Canadians that all they were seeing and hearing was one-sided information [about climate change], so [the feature campaign] was done to try to balance the discussion,” said Greenberg. “Don’t you think that’s fair?” Readers?

Illustration by Matt Daley.

When Google, citing concerns over security and censorship, pulled their operations out of China in March this year, they were widely praised for taking a stand for democracy. But Google’s move wasn’t the first time a Western entity had taken the moral high road in regard to China.

In fact, almost 200 years ago, the British government also stood up for its beliefs. After they had expended countless resources developing an opium industry, China shut down its borders to the drug, claiming that addiction was taking its toll on Chinese society. The Raj, seeing not only its business threatened, but also its ideals of free trade and capitalism, twice sent its navy to war to force China to open its borders. Britain won, and China had to relent.

Of course, comparing an enforced opium trade with online free speech may slip into exaggeration. But when Google indignantly left China, an important point was lost in the sanctimonious chatter: to many in China, the difference between the Google of today and the Empire of yesterday isn’t as clear as we might like to think. And as the web increasingly becomes a battleground for cultural and political exchange, it’s worth remembering that history is never as far in the past as we might hope.

In the aftermath of Google’s departure, the chorus of satisfied approval was overwhelming. Though Google itself treaded with the kind of care any profit-minded company might, the press was less tactful. When Google launched a chart that tracked which services China had blocked, prominent tech journalist Steven Levy called it an “Evil Meter.” Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff suggested that China was simply a bully, and that Google had “beat an honourable retreat.” Meanwhile, the National Post and the Globe and Mail did their best to cast the decision in moral rather than economic terms. The complexities of geopolitics and culture were reduced to a tired old approach: “Western values good; China bad.”

One might say “fair enough”: we are talking about a totalitarian regime here. But a few hundred years of Western global domination means there’s just no way to get around the optics of a massive American multinational saying its moral views are the right ones. In light of history, that kind of ideological dogmatism comes off as more than a little paternalistic.

But Google is not a parent and places like China, with their own histories, cultures and practices, are not children. To make matters worse, Google’s business model is essentially a paragon of Western democratic capitalism: disseminate information without restriction and then find a way to make money off the ways people access it. This may seem neutral, but it isn’t. It relies on the idea that spreading knowledge and information is an inherent good because an effective social system empowers individuals to find out things for themselves, and change their lives accordingly. For us, the sovereign individual is everything.

By contrast, even in contemporary Chinese thought, what still reigns is the idea that the community gives people their place in life, and the structures of ritual and authority give life order. The individualism that underpins Google’s business model is frequently seen as both arrogance and selfishness because it seems to prioritize the individual over the knowledge of the state and its rulers. The questions Google raised in China weren’t simply a matter of “repression,” but of how people locate themselves in reality. This fact seemed to be lost on most Western journalists. (About the only dissent in the technology press came from Gizmodo’s Brian Lam, himself the son of immigrants from Hong Kong, who wrote a piece titled “Google Would Remind My Grandpa of the Arrogant White Invaders.”)

Is it a noble goal to try to spread values and ideals that seem to have benefited the societies that have adopted them? Sure. But principles like democracy and freedom of speech don’t simply float down from the sky into open arms below. They are borne out of centuries-long processes rooted in social, material, and intellectual change. To assume their universal good—as Google and the Western press seemed to—is to deny their historical and cultural specificity. And at a certain point, it ceases to matter what is “objectively” right when such presumptuousness and arrogance only serve to galvanize people against you.

For all that, it’s worth noting that when Google did leave China, many there weren’t too affected. They had Baidu—a Chinese search engine, albeit heavily censored, that is the sixth most-visited website in the world and is still growing. And this is the thing, really: a Western navy can no longer force “our” way of thinking on the world, because power is no longer centralized in the West.

But history rattles noisily still, and the values of an open, democratic web aren’t universal or even necessarily right. And some, presented with the image of Google getting up on its moral high horse, find it hard to forget an armada of ships, their holds stocked with opium, barging their way into the Canton harbour.

In the interest of Awareness, here’s our quick roundup of some Earth Day links and other environmentally topical reading:

Earth Day Canada has a handy guide to Earth Day events across Canada. Plenty happening today and over the rest of the weekend.

The New York Times on Earth Day as Big Business. The Globe and Mail chimes in with what seems like self-parody: “Four stock picks for Earth Day.” Really.

Carbon offsets are a scam, says the Christian Science Monitor in a new series of articles examining the industry:

They are buying into projects that are never completed, or paying for ones that would have been done anyhow, the investigation found. Their purchases are feeding middlemen and promoters seeking profits from green schemes that range from selling protection for existing trees to the promise of planting new ones that never thrive. In some cases, the offsets have consequences that their purchasers never foresaw, such as erecting windmills that force poor people off their farms.

Carbon offsets are the environmental equivalent of financial derivatives: complex, unregulated, unchecked and—in many cases—not worth their price.

Heather Rogers also calls foul on carbon offset projects in the current issue of The Nation.

Via this Worldchanging blog post, a recent TED Talk by Catherine Mohr about the hard reality of building an environmentally friendly home, eschewing the kind of green sentimentality that fuels carbon offsets and diving deep into the actual data. It’s short, funny, and educational:

Climate fight! University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver announced yesterday in a press release that he is suing the National Post for four articles it wrote about him over the past few months. Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis, says the Post “attributed to me statements I never made, accused me of things I never did, and attacked me for views I never held.” The four articles in question are “Weaver’s Web,” “Weaver’s Web II,” “Climate agency going up in flames,” and “So much for pure science.” Suing the Financial Post op-ed page for their ridiculous environmental reporting may seem like suing the sun for shining, but Weaver is one of the country’s top climate scientists, so this bears watching.

Rabble has some suggestions for Earth Day–related things to do on university campuses across Canada.

The David Suzuki Foundation is running a series of book swaps across the country until April 24. If you haven’t read it, it’s new to you — and might save some paper as well.

Finally, Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians sends a dispatch from Cochabamba, Bolivia, where she’s attending the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth:

The CBC could be a force for CanLit. Why isn't it? Illustration by Dushan Milic

If Clive Owen were a Canadian author, maybe the CBC would finally review books. Katrina Onstad, a film columnist for CBC.ca, begins a recent review: “The International opens with a long, extended close-up of Clive Owen’s face, following which I jotted in my notebook: Five stars!” As a taxpayer and a citizen who believes in a public arts dialogue, I’m glad that the CBC pays Onstad to write intelligently and entertainingly about Hollywood film. Notably, however, our taxes don’t fund Hollywood film.

Our taxes do fund Canadian literature. Most CanLit gets some level of government subsidy. We pay millions each year to support CanLit through writing and publishing grants, libraries, and literary festivals. That’s a good use of public funds. Unlike our support for the auto industry or Bombardier, we actually get profitable job creation from arts funding. But we subsidize CanLit with one hand and then give the CBC more than a billion dollars a year with the other. Why, why, why does the CBC pay people to review Hollywood films that will cost you $13 to see but refuse to tell you whether the $25-$40 books you subsidize are worth your time and money?

Book reviewing in Canada has never been strong and recently got worse. Last year, several papers, including the Toronto Star, reduced their book coverage by as much as 50 percent. The Globe and Mail’s stand-alone books section ceased to stand alone and was folded into another section of that paper. Last spring, CBC Radio cut the literary debate show Talking Books so Shelagh Rogers could tug her aural smile through some author interviews. Interviews do a good job of showing us which authors interview well. But they don’t tell us what makes novel X better than novel Y. Noah Richler’s book about CanLit, This Is My Country, What’s Yours?, repeatedly mentions that the 2002 Booker Prize shortlist was half-full of Canadians but never once concedes that only two people in Canada—the Toronto Star’s Geoff Pevere and the National Post’s Philip Marchand—make a living reviewing books.

As a nation, as a culture, we have only two salaries devoted to helping us choose where to invest our reading time and money. Two! (Note to bloggers: I said “make a living reviewing books” and “salaries.”)

CanLit has been a big industry since the late ’60s (when government funding created it). That our literature now wins international renown and our private media doesn’t reliably tell us, or the world, what does and does not make for good CanLit is lamentable and, quite simply, immature. That we spend more than a billion dollars a year on the CBC and they don’t review Canadian books is unthinkable.

Oh, wait, right, we’re supposed to think that the annual CBC Radio shouting match Canada Reads counts for book reviewing. After all, it allows Olympic fencers to give sound bites of literary analysis. Each year, a different aging Canadian musician gets a few minutes to champion one book and pooh-pooh four others. Not enough.

The show can be fun and informative. As a judge, comedian Scott Thompson got to say (while speaking of Frances Itani’s Deafening) that describing the contents of a handbag is not literature. Amen. But as a genuine book-reviewing vehicle, the inadequacies of this show versus an Onstad-like book columnist on CBC.ca are many. First and foremost, as radio and a five-sided debate, the format is too unwieldy for a reader who wants to do an informative search about a particular book. Second, we can’t ever forget the show’s Survivor-style elimination gimmick. Lastly, the show is doubly ruined by its (pointless) devotion to celebrity panelists and the flawed CBC celebrity barometer. Former Prime Minister Kim Campbell was a panelist in 2002. If I want advice on how to keep David Milgaard in prison, Kim Campbell’s the source. But for book reviews? Aside from Canada Reads, CBC books coverage consists solely of interviews and reporting, and nowhere tells you what books are good and why.

Qualified, incisive, and accessible critics shape the culture they analyze. Filmmakers as diverse as Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson have expressed their debt to New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. As director of Britain’s National Theatre, Laurence Olivier brought in influential critic Kenneth Tynan to help run it.

Dear CBC: give me a reliable, regular and intelligent book reviewer. Not more Randy Bachman.