The Hatchet

The Toronto police have had a rough few months.
Back in May, while the police service was still reeling from the fallout of the worst corruption scandal in recent history, three off-duty TPS officers were arrested in Barcelona, Spain.
In typical fashion, the Toronto police withheld most of the important details from the public, citing concerns for the ongoing international investigation. A police spokesperson called the allegations “serious” but said little else.
And they refused to reveal the names of the officers.
But soon, the press began piecing together more of what had happened. And a disturbing picture began to emerge.
The three officers had been arrested in connection with an alleged violent, sexual assault.
But there was one detail that seemed to get under everyone’s skin and garner most of the attention.
The fact that when these off-duty police officers were arrested and charged with a serious crime in a foreign country, they allegedly had the temerity to flash their badges.
That detail came to dominate the conversation around this story. And how could it not? It’s an almost cartoonish example of how many police officers feel that they’re above the law — apparently, even foreign laws. How could an action like that mean anything other than — “I am one of you. And we protect our own”?
But as the coverage of this story played out, I couldn’t help but notice that the emphasis on the flashed badges detracted from what should be the more pressing concern here.
Three sworn officers were arrested and charged with sexual assault, assault and resisting arrest. One of them was alleged to have fled the scene and was found two days later at an airport.
And if history is any guide, the police will do their best to keep this case shrouded in secrecy.
So we wanted to talk to someone who actually went to Spain and spoke to people on the ground about what happened. The details may be disturbing, but it’s important that the public knows about these allegations.
Allan Woods is a veteran Toronto Star reporter based in Paris. Normally, he covers international politics. But when this story broke, he made his way over to Barcelona, and put together the most comprehensive report that we have on this story.


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If you were an openly gay man in Toronto in 1980, chances are that you would’ve thought that life was getting better.
After all, the last decade had seen so much progress.
Homosexuality had been partially decriminalized back in the late 1960s. A few years later, Toronto had become the first city in the country to ban homophobic discrimination in municipal hiring. Pride parades and festivals were a regular occurrence. There was a thriving queer nightlife and queer press and queer arts scene.
George Hislop, an out-and-proud gay man, was running for city council, and even the sitting mayor, John Sewell, was pro-gay.
Was there still discrimination and hardship? Of course. But more and more people were coming out of the closet, and even the broader society was starting to slowly embrace people with different sexual orientations.
But then, things started to change.
George Hislop lost his run and so did John Sewell, largely because of homophobic attacks in the press. In 1981, the Toronto Police launched Operation Soap, raiding multiple gay bathhouses and arresting almost 300 men. And though the community mobilized — taking to the streets and the courts to fight back against such blatant aggression — all of a sudden, progress doesn’t look nearly as certain.
And it wouldn’t have been long before you started to hear the rumours — something was going around. Some kind of a disease.
You’d notice people around you getting sick. Young men, in the prime of their lives. You’d see the purple blotches peeking out from under sleeves and shirt collars and you’d wonder what the hell could be happening.
And then, one by one, you’d see those people start to die.
By 1982, the disease had a name — AIDS. But the government wasn’t doing anything to help. And most public officials wouldn’t even say the word out loud.
And so you get together with a few other people and decide that something needs to be done.
That is, in essence, the origin story of one of the most impactful grassroots organizations in recent Canadian history — the AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT), our first so-called “AIDS service organization.”
ACT has had a profound impact on the country, and the world at large. It was a beacon of hope at a time when social conservative forces were ascendent across North America. It spawned other important organizations, like AIDS Action Now! and Casey House, that had their own out-sized impacts. And for decades, it was the largest and most prominent entity of its kind in Canada.
But late last year, ACT announced that it was closing its doors. And as someone who covered the AIDS epidemic for years, this came as quite a shock to me. So I wanted to dig into what happened and take a look back at ACT’s unique history.
And what I found was absolutely fascinating. If we examine ACT over the decades, we see so many examples of the various dilemmas that plague any organization trying to do good in the modern world:
Should you set out to help people or allow people to help themselves?
Is it better to work within the system or to fight it from the outside?
When do charity fundraisers stop being a way to help more people, and become something that exist solely to keep on fundraising?
I spoke to Kevin Hurren, who wrote an excellent profile about the history of the AIDS Committee of Toronto for Xtra, that digs into all of these questions.
To Learn More
“The many eras of the AIDS Committee of Toronto—including its final bow” by Kevin Hurren in Xtra.
How to Survive a Plague by David France
Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism by Tim McCaskell
“The Last Pandemic” by Arshy Mann & Jordan Cornish in COMMONS

The Montreal police have arrested and charged the friends of an unarmed teenage boy who was shot and killed by the Longueuil police last year. Meanwhile, the police officer who killed Nooran Rezayi is a free man.
The whole thing stinks of a cover-up.
The full force of the state is being deployed against a group of teenagers in order to silence them, smear their reputations and whitewash the unjustified and unjustifiable killing of an unarmed child.
And it's all because Quebec’s policing establishment understands what it would mean for the public to see Nooran Rezayi’s death for what it is — a moral outrage, where justice must be served.
To Learn More:
The Killing of Nooran Rezayi from The Hatchet
"11 charged in connection with events leading up to fatal police shooting of teen Nooran Rezayi" by Alessia Simona Maratta & Phil Carpenter in Global News
"SPVM cracks down on Montréal-Nord unit suspected of co-ordinated racist behaviour" in CBC Montreal



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There’s an unfortunate tendency to talk about the cops as some kind of a monolith.
And don’t worry, I’m not about to go on some lecture about how not all police officers are bad. I just mean that we often miss that police forces are complex, political institutions with competing centres of power.
There are the police boards that are supposed to govern these forces and maintain civilian rule over the cops; the police chief and upper management that run the force and oversee the day-to-day operations; the rank-and-file cops who actually do the police work; and the union that represents them.
Even in relatively well-run police forces, there’s inevitably going to be tension between these different levels. But it’s not uncommon for those tensions to turn into outright infighting and backstabbing, which can have profound implications everyday people.
That’s one way to think about what’s been happening in Saint John, New Brunswick.
The city’s police chief Robert Bruce has been in his position since 2021.
And over the last year, tensions that had been building between him and everyday officers have spilled out into the open in dramatic fashion. A police union rep was dragged out of a city council meeting by force. Numerous harassment complaints have been filed against the chief by the officers working directly with him.
And you have a police force where one out of every five officers is on leave, putting a major drain on the city’s resources.
But the chief claims that at the heart of all of this is simply the police union playing dirty, and refusing to go along with the change that is necessary to modernize the Saint John police force and make it more accountable.
So what is actually going on here? And who’s in the right?
Andrew Bates, a reporter from The Telegraph-Journal, joined us in The Hatchet studios in Toronto to help us make sense of this mess.To Learn More:
"Chief said wounded officer 'had it coming to him,' lawsuit alleges" by Andrew Bates in The Telegraph-Journal
"Chief says he faced 'resistance' to change from union" by Andrew Bates in The Telegraph-Journal"Saint John police union rep forcibly removed from council chambers" by Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon in CBC News
"Saint John police Chief Robert Bruce announces retirement amid conduct complaints" by Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon in CBC News

For the last few years, it’s become almost a cliché to talk about how we’re in the middle of a new era of accountability when it comes to sexual violence.
Whether it’s the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein or the ongoing revelations from the Epstein Files, the rich, famous and powerful appear to be having their crimes exposed and, on occasion, even punished.
Here in Canada it’s been no different. There have been numerous media exposes on the prevalence of sexual violence in arenas as varied as media, sports, business, politics, the service industry and so many others.
But when it comes to actually prosecuting these alleged crimes in the legal system, Canada’s track record has been much more mixed.
The Jian Ghomeshi trial, which kicked off Canada’s #MeToo movement years before The New York Times expose on Harvey Weinstein, ended with an acquittal.
On the other hand, billionaire fashion mogul Peter Nygard is now serving eleven years in prison for sexually assaulting four women in Toronto at the height of his fame and power.
Quebec technology billionaire Robert Miller was arrested and faced two dozens charged, including sexually assaulting minors. But last year he was found unfit to face trial due to advanced Parkinson’s disease.
And last year’s Hockey Canada trial, maybe the most high-profile case of them all, ended without any guilty verdicts.
If there’s one takeaway that I have from all of these trials and the way that they’ve been covered, it’s this — each trial comes to represent the whole in the public’s mind. Each individual case became a litmus test on whether or not #MeToo has gone too far or not far enough.
And the trial of Frank Stronach has been no different.
Stronach is one of the most recognizable and influential billionaires in Canadian history. The founder of Magna International, an auto parts manufacturer, he has long been considered to be a leading light of Canadian industry. And he never shied away from the spotlight, making himself a near-constant public figure in the worlds of thoroughbred horse-racing and politics, both in Canada and in his birth country of Austria.
But two years ago, he was arrested and eventually charged with eighteen alleged sexual crimes involving thirteen women, from a period that spanned from 1977 to 2024. And when the stories first broke, it was hard not to see just how remarkably similar most of the accounts from the alleged victims were. From the outside, it seemed like these charges would lead to a successful prosecution and significant jail time.
But today, that no longer appears nearly as certain.
Stronach is facing two separate trials, the first of which wrapped up in April.
And that trial has been an unmitigated disaster for the Crown.
During the course of the trial, it was revealed that the police hadn’t even tried to verify whether or not Frank Stronach was in the country for one of the alleged assaults. Prosecutors were upbraided by the judge for allowing an accuser to knowingly lie on the stand. And the Crown was forced to drop charges related to three of the seven accusers, putting into question the entire course of the prosecution.
The judge is expected to deliver her verdict as early as this week.
So what happened here? And is any of this indicative of a broader trend or a larger point?
Stronach’s defence team certainly thinks so. Here’s what defence lawyer Leora Shemesh said in her closing arguments.
“I say with the greatest respect that the pendulum has swung so far the other way that we’ve really lost our ability to balance and respect our constitutional norms. This “Believe all Women” and the “#MeToo” movement and political platforms of not challenging women or testing their complaints really have no place in our criminal justice system.”
So is she right? Is this a case of #MeToo gone too far?
I’m not so sure. Part of me suspects that if this trial is indicative of anything, it’s about broader failures of police and prosecutors to take their jobs as seriously as they should. That it might be part of a pattern of procedural laziness that has doomed so many other high-profile cases in Canada.
Here to talk about it all is Joseph Brean, a reporter for The National Post, who has been covering the trial from inside the court room.
We go in-depth about what actually happened during the trial, whether or not it represents broader failures in the justice system and if criminal trials can ever bring justice for historical sexual assaults.


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