Toronto Mike'd: The Official Toronto Mike Podcast - Matt Elliott: Toronto Mike'd #329

Episode Date: April 24, 2018

Mike chats with Matt Elliott about yesterday's Yonge Street tragedy, his coverage of the Rob Ford years, his work with Metro and what's next for him.

Welcome to episode 329 of Toronto Mic'd, a weekly podcast about anything and everything. Proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, a fiercely independent craft brewery located here in Etobicoke. Did you know that 99.9% of all Great Lakes beer remains here in Ontario? GLB, brewed for you, Ontario, and propertyinthesix.com, Toronto real estate done right, and Paytm,

an app designed to manage all of your bills in one spot. Download the app today from paytm.ca. And our newest sponsor, Camp Tournesol, the leading French summer camp provider in Ontario. I'm Mike from torontomike.com and joining me is City Columnist Matt Elliott. Welcome, Matt. Hey, thanks for having me. I almost introduced you as Samson. Samson? Because you've got the hair.

Oh, yeah. And that's obviously what gives you your strength. Yes, that's exactly it. That's why I never get it cut. Avoid a woman named Delilah. Hey there, Delilah. Hey there, Delilah. Something New York City.

That's right. Plain white tees. Yeah. Classic now, right? Can you name a second? Can you name a second song from Plain White Tees? They had a song... No, I cannot do that at all. I'll wait. I'll give you some time.

I could also say you remind me of Homer Simpson when he had Demoxen. Remember he got Demoxen? Oh, yeah. And then he became super successful. Because the confidence. Yeah, the confidence confidence and he had the it was harvey firestein firestone firesteins yeah but harvey firestein who uh played his uh secretary yeah and i remember that scene like it was raining out you know and and i can't remember but uh harvey gave uh homer his uh his umbrella or something.

And it was like this. He was just there to serve Homer. Don't you see? It was inside you all this time. That's right. Early season Simpsons actually had like some nice emotional moments. Listen, I know you're a little younger than me, but I'm old enough that I had, you know, it was appointment viewing.

It was Thursday, then Sunday, but it was appointment viewing, of course. But you knew you were going to get a gem of an episode. Like it was the golden era and you were going to get a beautiful, wonderful episode. You were guaranteed. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, no. And I like I'm young enough. My parents didn't like me watching The Simpsons for a long time, which is weird. But then I got into it. And yeah, I remember watching it weekly and just really knowing that it was always going to be quality. Well, Barbara Bush just passed. And I remember she said something disparaging about Marge being a bad mom or something. And then Marge wrote her a letter. Yeah, that's right. It's

unbelievable to think about now because like The Simpsons, there's not really anything objectionable from that. Oh, no, I raised my kids on The Simpsons. That's why they're menaces to society. on The Simpsons. Guess why they're menaces to society. Absolutely. But you're born in Toronto? I am born in Oakville, Ontario. So close, but yet so far. Doesn't count. Does not count as Toronto. When? How old were you when you moved to Toronto? I grew up in Oakville and then for university, I went out to Halifax to the University of King's College. And then I moved back to Toronto after a year in Hamilton, Burlington area in 2008-ish. So I've been here like 10 years. I think we'll count that. I think there's sufficient time to live in the 416, I would call you a Torontonian. I feel at home. And you literally just, correct me if I'm wrong, but you waltzed over here from

Humber College South Campus. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the semester is over now, but it's a usual route for me. I just finished my marking. And yeah, so this is not a part of the city that I knew super well until I started teaching over there at Humber College. And now I quite like it. It still takes a while to get out here. I do like a streetcar, then a subway, then a bus. Did you come from Parkdale? Corkdown, actually. Corkdown Distillery District area.

Oh, yeah. Okay. Why do I think you're coming from Parkdale? I don't know. Your crack research team has let you down, Mike. Who's coming from Parkdale than someone else? Okay. Yeah.

That is quite a trek. They're not streetcars right now, but they're buses now, I guess, because streetcars not working right now because of track stuff. Right, yeah, the Queen Streetcar that comes all the way out here has been off for seemingly forever, but what I actually do is I take the King Streetcar

from my house up to the subway at Broadview and take the subway all the way across to Kipling and then get on the bus. So I get to experience all of the TTC's vehicle types. And that's exciting for me as a transit nerd. You just need to introduce some wheel transaction. Oh yeah, there you go. That last little bit there, I could just call up a wheel trans.

It's a tricky play. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it. Wow. Okay. So I want to, if you don't mind, I need to talk about yesterday, what happened yesterday. And I'm not talking about the, I'm not talking about the exciting May belief win yeah that was good which i felt like after the day we had as a city like just to kind of and we'll talk perspective is everything but just to be able as a as a big time leaf fan just to watch a game we had to win and we played our asses off

and we held on and we forced a game seven yeah Yeah. Of course, in Boston on a Wednesday. But let's talk about what happened on Yonge Street between Finch and Shepard yesterday. So right now we're recording. So this was almost exactly 24 hours ago. I think it was like just before 1.30 p.m. And a gentleman, a man who has been identified as Alec Manassian, he was driving this white rental van

and he intentionally struck a number of pedestrians on Yonge Street between Finch and Shepherd. And at last count, I saw 10 are dead and I believe 15 are injured. And the video, we've all seen it now though the video of the police

officer apprehending the uh alleged killer and i mean let me just tell the story i guess and then we'll actually talk about this but uh it's clear that the um alec manassian wants the police officer to shoot and kill him yes it's a suicide by cop sort of thing, definitely. And I mean, watching that footage, and you have a few different angles. You have that one angle where you can hear, and then you have the up top angle from up top. And then he's doing almost like everything you would want to do

to get a cop to shoot you dead. Yeah, he keeps yelling, you know, I shoot me, I have a gun in my pocket. He's holding, I think it's a cell phone something black and um supposed to i think look like a gun uh but the police officer uh in this case seemed very well trained in de-escalation and it's really something to see the way he just refuses to shoot and fire his weapon and manages to take this guy down uh without injury or incident it's amazing it's actually it's unbelievable it's unbelievable because we're so shoot and fire his weapon and manages to take this guy down, uh, without, uh, injury or incident.

It's amazing. It's actually, it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable because we're so used to, I mean, who's the cop who shot the guy in the streetcar? Forcillo? Oh yeah.

James Forcillo. Yeah. With Sammy, a team in the streetcar from a few years back. This is the polar opposite. Absolutely. Yeah. No,

in that case, it, you know, the, that was a, it was an odd trial and how he was charged or found guilty of attempted murder, despite the fact that Sammy, a team ended up dead. Uh, but. No, in that case, that was an odd trial on how he was charged or found guilty of attempted murder despite the fact that Samia team ended up dead.

Right. But, you know, it was an incident where you, you know, I'm not an expert, but you look at an incident like that and you immediately think, like, wasn't there a way to avoid shooting this kid

so many times? I mean, they would close the streetcar doors, barricades, something. And he just had a knife. He didn't, I mean. He just had a knife, yeah. And he was on a streetcar,

so, you know, my mind immediately goes to, how do you shut, can you shut the doors? You can shut streetcar doors from outside the streetcar. That is a thing they can do. shot when situations escalate with police officers. So in this case, if we are looking for any kind of a bright side from something so, so terrible to happen in our city and something that just makes you so sad, there is that. There is this one police officer who did the right thing. I mean, I referred to it earlier today as de-escalation personified. He's alone. He's on his-escalation personified. Yeah. And he's alone. He's on his own.

There's no backup. Yeah. No, they should be showing this video in training workshops and police academies, you know, across the country, across the world even. Because, you know, I can't find any fault in the way he handled this situation. And he seems so confident that this person did not have a gun. Yeah. And even, I mean,

and you see in the footage, you know, in the footage we can see, oh, it's probably a cell phone. It looks like a mobile phone. Yeah, to me it looks like. But I mean, he's reaching in his pocket

to try to like, no pun intended, but trigger the reaction. Yeah, no, he's doing like the classic sort of cowboy thing where you're reaching for a gun in your holster and looking like he's about to draw. And I think this police officer, you know,

I guess just assess the situation, did some sort of probability in his head. Is it likely that this guy has a gun on him? If he did have a gun on him, why was he holding something that wasn't a gun at the time? I guess it's something that would go through your head. But to do all that in such a high stakes, dangerous situation and make the right call, that's the thing that really impresses me about how it was all handled. We need to, you know, we know the name of the killer, alleged killer, Alec Manassian. We don't know the name of this police officer yet, but I hope we learn his name and we celebrate him because I think that was a beautiful example of policing. And the rest of the world seems so...

I saw articles from the BBC and from the U.S. publications, like, how is this guy... How is he still alive? This was the subject of these articles. Yeah. How is this guy still alive? And that's a sad state of affairs that people just assume in a situation like this, police officers are always just going to immediately start firing every bullet they have in the direction of somebody. Right.

Because that is the case far too often. And it does happen in Toronto. So I don't want people to think that, you know, because we had this really extraordinary incidence of a Toronto police officer behaving the right way, that means that all Toronto police officers are behaving like this across the board. Because obviously that's not true. No, we just talked about one who... Yeah, exactly. No, you're right. Absolutely right.

And so that's... So you're right. When something like this happens, like a senseless tragedy like this, and there's 10 dead and 15 hurt, I think one, at least one is in critical condition. And you look for like the bright spots, if you will, like the silver dead and 15 hurt. I think one, at least one, is in critical condition. And you look for, like, the bright spots, if you will, like the silver lining and the chaos. And you can point to, you could definitely point to that police officer apprehending the suspect

without firing a single bullet. Yeah, I think you look for moments like that, you know, and maybe it's morbid, but I don't want to remember uh how it felt when i saw those images of the people on the street you know what i want to remember in the future is is things like that moment things like the national anthem at the least game last night which was oh my gosh very emotional moment for uh everybody watching and i was just like i know boston scored the first goal but i was just thinking just

score that first goal because the acc was going to go nuts. And because all of that, like you carried that all day and now you're going to watch something as silly as a hockey game. Yeah. But that anthem was gorgeous. The stars and symbols matter. And even, you know, all the people outside in Maple Leaf Square, because there, you know, I guess was some thought, are people still going to show up? Are people going to be afraid or whatever?

And there was none of that, right? People showed up and watched their hockey team and they watched their hockey team win in the end, which made it really nice. I liked that we didn't, I want to say we didn't overreact, like in the sense that this was terrible, absolutely terrible. So senseless. These people had a nice day walking at lunch on Yonge Street are now dead. Yeah. Terrible. But we didn't, there was no thought, and I mean, it never crossed my mind,

like, of course the game will still happen tonight at 7 p.m. at the ACC, and people will still come to Maple Leaf Square, and we will go about our business. If anything, it kind of shows

Toronto's got this, kind of understood this wasn't part of something bigger. Like, this wasn't, this was one person, and we don't, we'll talk like this wasn't this was one person uh and we don't we'll talk motive in a minute but uh one person who did something uh awful and caused uh innocent people to die but this wasn't part of some bigger uh security concern no there's no

national security implications it's it doesn't have any of that aspect to it which uh is is a positive uh for people and but just in general i mean this is one of the realities of life is that danger exists and things happen and you can't let that define you in the way you live your life uh in a city like toronto or anywhere else in the world. No. And this motive is key. I know what I know, which is very little at this point, but I can say NBC News, for example. NBC News published an article that I read that said that, let me read it, it said,

it looked like mental illness is basically the initial, some initial thoughts from the people they talked to that looked like mental illness might basically that the initial some some initial thoughts from the people they talk to that look like mental illness might be the motive here is that a motive mental illness not really a good cause contributing factor right lots of people are mentally ill and and don't do anything like this so you want to be careful of course there but i mean there also is this uh facebook post that's been well that's next when talk about. Let's talk about that. Yeah. I'm very curious, as yourself being a journalist, I'm very curious about this. So I was watching The National last night after the Leaf game, as a lot of people were.

And they ran with this. I saw it on Twitter earlier. Somebody at Global News had tweeted something, and it was like a screen cap. So basically, a Facebook post that appeared to be from Alec Manassian, in which he, I would say, lionized Elliot Rodger and referred to himself as an incel, which I learned yesterday. An involuntary celibate. An involuntary celibate person who was seeking revenge on society. So I have not heard anything official from Toronto Police.

Revenge on Society. So I have not heard anything official from Toronto Police. But I found it interesting that the CBC kind of, they did say they couldn't substantiate that it was written by Alec. But it seemed risky to me for CBC News to kind of put this out there when my first initial thoughts were that it might very well be fake. Yeah, it has a lot. It smells a lot like a 4chan troll thing. And the people on the 4chan web forum are known for after things like this to spread a bunch of false information

and, you know, put photos of the suspect that clearly aren't the suspects and link it to various things like they just like to cause havoc and troll people. So it does. It did look a lot like that. And I mean, I don't know the decision-making process that happened with The National, but my feeling when I watched the segment was, wow, they are really jumping on this early. Yes. And I think that's it.

And it felt very risky that this could come back and bite them in the ass. And I mean, your CBC here, you have integrity. You know, some will argue otherwise, but I would argue they have integrity to lose. This is the price of being first instead of being right. After every story like this, there's always

a bunch of stories that float around and turn out to be false. There are people saying that this guy was Middle Eastern right after the attack happened, and that was not true. But that bit of information flew pretty far in the hours that people believed it. And it's still out there. Some people probably still believe it. So you really need to be

careful. And I don't get the benefit of being first in a situation like this. I think it's more important to be right. But I, you know, I have been following this this morning. And Matt Braga, who is a CBC tech guy over there, a really good reporter, one of the best tech reporters in the country. He has confirmed with facebook that the facebook page was real and it looks like the post was real as well so in this case it seems to be uh you know a hunch that played out but i don't know what they knew at the time they went live on the national last night what you know like let's so that's that's interesting okay so i did not know that. But my thought were, okay, let's assume this is real. Because, of course, if this is just some screen cap, well, you're silly to assume this is real.

But if let's assume a journalist verified that this was actually what you would see, it was actually somebody appalling to be Alec Manassian on Facebook. And these were the words written. If you assume that to be true, you see a couple of things that struck me. One is the posting of his picture. Now, I saw his LinkedIn profile, so that is his go-to picture for these things.

I have one too and a nice Root shirt that I wasn't allowed to keep, by the way. They came here, they put me in a Root shirt, took my photo and took the shirt with them, but they did give me a gift card and I bought the jogging pants, sweatpants I'm wearing right now that's more useful than a root shirt anyway i think so but uh so it showed the time to time that they show that the

picture was uploaded for the profile was march so assuming this is indoctrinated in any way this isn't somebody trying to you know trick the fact. That picture was uploaded in March 2018. Right. But what was weird was if you showed people, like some journalists would share a screen cap of it on their phones or something, and you would see, for example, you'd see the time being, let's say, 3.30 p.m., and then it would show that that update we're all talking about now, the incel update, would be like one hour old,

and then you would realize, okay, well, this incident happened about 1.30. Like the math never worked on that. So I'm just assuming he was using a different time zone. Yeah, time zones can be funny in that case. So who even knows? There's still a lot of questions I have about this Facebook post. And again, like, I think it's an interesting part of the story, especially, I mean, if it's true, it's an interesting part of the story. But I don't think it's so interesting that it, like, I think it's an interesting part of the story, especially, I mean, if it's true, it's an interesting part of the story. But I don't think it's so interesting that it's like, here's your headline from this incident. Like, we immediately need to get a bunch of people on TV talking about the incel movement and, you know, the 4chan. Like, it just feels like maybe you wait and do that tonight, you know, once you have more pieces of information about what happened.

But, I mean, they have more resources than I do. So, I would just love to know exactly what the internal deliberations looked like here. You're right. The whole incel Elliot Roger thing, which I only, honestly, I only learned about it yesterday. I feel like a lot of people, I'm sure. Yeah. I'm out of that loop there. You are not involuntarily celibate no no no uh no thankfully but uh and if i was i wouldn't take revenge on society i promise that good job but um what was i gonna say to me on there uh but um so what was i gonna say here so like um i've lost my complete last picture but elliot roger incel yesterday uh it'll come back to me later what this train of thought was, Matt. But we all digested a lot yesterday.

But, oh, yes, this is what I was going to say. Okay. I think the purpose of maybe shining a light on that so quickly was essentially to say religion was not his motivation here. Yeah. That's a good point, actually. This is what I actually tweeted this yesterday. I said, look, first of all, my unf unfollow trigger is sensitive this afternoon okay and the second thing is and i said speculating here serves no good ever like um so many people want to make politicize it and make this about immigration and point to uh i don't know tie it to you know

somehow decide this is a terrorist attack and ISIS is behind this, which is, you know, should that motivate, you can't just jump to that conclusion. No, and there was zero evidence that that was the case and there's zero evidence now that that's the case. So, yeah, I do think, you know, maybe the instinct on some journalists' side was, you know, to course correct, to correct from these false assumptions out there was to report quickly on what the motive might actually be. But my worry

is just that in your good intentions to course correct, you overcorrect or you correct in the wrong way. You just don't want to run the risk of fighting misinformation with misinformation. But, you know, the reporting today has been solid. And I think we'll, I mean, I guess the other thing is this guy is still alive, right? So through the court cases, there will be some more concrete information about motives, whatever they are. And it won't just be based on speculation from social media postings or whatever else on the internet.

No, yeah, that's a good point. I know they were, he lives in Richmond Hill, so I did see that they were, you know, at his home yesterday seeing if there was any evidence or clues in terms of motivation, et cetera, et cetera. But yes, so we're all learning about elliot roger and the the in the incel and i'm i was when i you you're the one who kind of told me that this has now been you know

good tech writer can verify this is true because i felt like maybe they were biting on it too quick and that this would turn out to be some big big 4chan hoax and but i do think if you do verify it's true i definitely think this is part of the story like i mean motivation and this is is key i think in terms of understand in terms of yeah i'm not saying we need to understand this entire this movement so much as we need to i think i think knowing knowing his motives here like why he did it i think that's something yeah and this this is way off the beat i normally focus on but there are like the whole idea of the Internet radicalizing young men, you know, with things like the incel movement, things like the Proud Boys, things like Gamergate. I'm still trying to figure out Gamergate.

Yeah, there's not really much to figure out. I've read a lot about it, but from what I can tell, it's just about a bunch of guys who love video games, who really dislike women. And when I attempt to go deeper than that, it still ends up just coming right back to that. Matt, the two things, and I feel like I'm a pretty savvy guy, but the two things I struggle with the most, I think, are GamerGate and cryptocurrency. Those are kind of linked, I think. I think a lot of GamerGaters are into cryptocurrency. I'm probably pissing off a lot of people right now uh but yeah no uh cryptocurrency yeah when people start talking about blockchains and things that's just uh it just feels like something i don't want anything to do with i like my money the way it is that's right that's right i keep

hoping like eventually like sort of like with gamergate where gamergate kind of went away so it was kind of like okay i never really figured it out like it's moved on now it's okay but the cryptocurrency i'm waiting like for the same like maybe uh that'll kind of disappear into the uh abyss and then it'll be okay that i never really understood yeah i think you're you're probably not going to be a point like 10 years from now when you're like, oh, man, if only I had taken the time to understand Bitcoin in 2018, I'd be so much better off. I don't see that in your future. That's right. Now, Matt, later we're going to get into your career and some of we're going to go back in time and it's going to be a lot of fun.

But are you covering Toronto? What are you covering Toronto for any MSM publication at this point right now uh no right now what I'm doing is spending a lot of time meeting people for coffee and having like 19 coffees a day and I'm doing that too we should be for coffee yeah we should the thing is I don't really like I'm not even a guy who like loves coffee but this is just like the thing you do and you're and it's cheaper than meeting for beer yeah it's true but sometimes less fun that's right uh so yeah i'm doing a lot of that right now i got a few things that i might fight on but you know it's it's i'm taking my time to figure out what

exactly i want to do next and we will get to this but you are uh i always talk about um so the comedian mike mcdonald passed away recently and you to some, I don't know, average Joe on the street or whatever. And they kind of know the name in the face, but they're not really, but maybe. And, oh, yeah, I kind of remember that guy on something or other back in the day for a little bit. Not a big celebrity, right? But then you talk to stand-up comics let's say okay and they're like this guy was the greatest stand-up in the history of the world and it's like they just want to talk about how amazing mike mcdonald i wouldn't be doing what i do about mike mcdonald and he was

oh my god he blew us all out of the water every single night so it's like he's a he's a comics comic comic yeah that's a comics comic. Comics comic. Yeah, that's a thing. You talk to, and we'll get into this, but you talk to any journalist in the city about Matt Elliott. And it's like, Matt's the, he's the best. He's the greatest. So you are like the journalist's journalist.

Journalist, journalist. You will land on your feet. We'll get to this. I'll take that. You will be fine, my friend. But we'll get to that very shortly. One thing I do want to say while we're talking about the 10 people who perished on Yonge Street and 15 injured. This is like a good, if you're looking to help, if you can.

And I just went through this experience. And there's a million questions. And there's a lot of reasons why you'll get disqualified. I happened to pass all, I passed the audition as John Lennon said, so I can donate blood. Okay. So now I think the number was, I actually booked another appointment and they said, you have to wait 56 days. I got a phone call from blood services and they said, you can't go to this appointment. It hasn't been 56 days. So my problem is making sure I wait the two months. But if you can give blood, you should give blood. Like I

learned this way too late in life and I wish I could go back in time and I've been doing it since I was old enough to give blood. But yeah, go to blood.ca and you can like right now, like you can pause this podcast or put it on in the background. You can multitask. Yeah. Go to blood.ca, find a clinic near you, the appointment even your first one like just do it and then

by the way after your first one they send you like uh they tell your blood type first of all which is kind of fun to know but then you get a it ties to your login and you can track like things that are fun like they gamify it like so you can say how long did it take to get however many leaders they take and it's like they gamify it a bit which can say how long did it take to get however many leaders they take and it's like they gamify it a bit which is kind of fun too like you try to beat your record that is fun this is reminding me that i need to do this uh that's my jets with that yeah i have not i have not donated blood in like the social media era so i'm curious to see uh how that kind of stuff well you know when i did it last was at humber college so you have no excuses they go

there once in a while. No excuses. Yeah, I'm there. Now you can all, I mean, I was the old guy. You'll be the old guy when you get blighted at Humber College, too. Toronto stuff, I want to just lighten it up. But unless you want to, maybe, what did you think of the city's response to the tragedy yesterday? Like, I always felt like this would happen in other cities. And I'd always say to people who were with me at the time,

I'll say something like, you know, Toronto's a big city. It's only a matter of time before something like this happens. And then you don't know how you'll respond until it happens. And I was really proud of our response overall. There's always except some idiots are going to blame Trudeau or Wynn for something or other. There's always going to be

an idiot out there who will use it to promote their own agenda or political agenda or whatever. But overall, the city's response I thought was amazing. You mentioned the anthem at the game. Just the vibe. And today, it really is, in my opinion, it feels like and of course, not for the families of people who lost loved ones. That's tragic.

That could never be replaced. But it is business as usual for Toronto. Yeah, absolutely. It doesn't feel like there's a sense ones that's tragic that can never be replaced but it is business as usual for toronto yeah absolutely like it doesn't feel like there's a i mean there's a sense of sadness hanging over the city but there's not like a cloud of despair hanging over the city uh i thought the response yesterday was was good from you know tori did a good job as the mayor of the city uh making sure to sort of keep people calm but also i think emphasizing that message of diversity and tolerance and uh you know the strength of toronto all the people coming together like that that stuff is it

can be a bit cliche but i think it's important for uh somebody in charge to say especially when you consider that there's certain politicians and places of power these days that might not say things like that we're gonna get to him him later, but did you wonder aloud to yourself what things would have been like yesterday if the previous mayor was in power? Yeah, I think about that a lot, when Tory's up speaking versus what Rob Ford would say. And Rob Ford did not have...

I mean, there were incidences. The Eden Senator shooting, I think, was under Rob Ford. Yeah, it was. And it was okay, but there was definitely, with Rob Ford and with politicians like Rob Ford, there's always a bit of unpredictability and chaos that follows them around. And I think in cases like this, what you really need from your politicians, from political response, is just calm and a willingness to let things play out before you start talking about making rash decisions. I mean, Rob Ford, one time I remember him saying that he was going to

ban all the criminals from Toronto. I remember this. Yeah. Deport them or whatever. How are you going to identify all the criminals? I guess. And I don't think borders work that way. Build a wall around the city that is popular now, or somewhat uh but yeah no so we don't need stuff like that you know so it's nice that that's not something i have to be writing columns about because i don't really want to go back to to that kind of thing it's really not worth considering um and then you know stuff that i also like was just the logistics you know like go transit ttc go transit was saying for tdc riders you can get on the Go Trains for, you know, TTC fare free or whatever it was. And today they're saying to people who can't get into their parking garages around the

area, you can park for free in TTC lots, like that kind of stuff gets overlooked. But like logistically, when you're talking about big organizations working together to make things a little bit easier for people, that's really nice to see. That's government doing things right. It's, yeah, how can I help? And if, yeah, that's really nice to see. That's government doing things right. Yeah, how can I help? Yeah, that's something you could do to help. And I think that's important. It is, yeah. Oh, that's great.

Do you like pizza? I love pizza. Do you have a favorite Toronto pizza place? Oh, that's hard. And don't be embarrassed if it's a chain. We won't judge you, Matt. But you have a go-to place if you're hankering for a slice. There is a place on Queen East

called Descendant Pizza, a Detroit-style pizza. Really, really good. I don't get it as often as I should. Often when we do order pizzas, it's because we are being super lazy. And in that case, we call the Domino's down the street,

which I am a bit embarrassed about but it's there and it's fine but it's cheap man you gotta watch your budget exactly exactly the good pizza yeah right because there's a place called il passano and it's like oh when you're feeling like celebrating i don't know if it feels like an important event or something yeah you might go big and do that because that's going to cost you twice as much as dominoes and i gotta feed these four kids like some of them just like dominoes i mean you can get like an extra large for like 12 bucks or something and two of those and everybody's full like otherwise or i can spend almost 50 and get the good stuff exactly so it really depends what you're in the mood for dominoes or whatever i mean pizza pizza i don't

do because i really you know i'm not a fan they don't sponsor this podcast that's fine no pizza sponsor yet do you have a favorite because Because I have a favorite of the chains. Oh, yeah? Like, I can tell you, I really like Pizza Nova. Yeah, Pizza Nova's pretty good. It tastes the most, I don't know, Italian or fresh. Something like the sauce and the bread. Like, I really like Pizza Nova.

And of all the chains, like, if I have to go for a chain, that's my favorite. Yeah. No, that makes sense. I mean, I would probably, because when we moved into Cork town it was still like under construction that's where the pan am games village is so there was not a lot of options for anything so when domino's moved in down the street that just became the place we got pizza from but i it's we're seeing all these businesses open now so i have my fingers crossed that we'll start seeing some variety of pizza types in the area and that will be uh very nice do you have a favorite toronto

bar uh favorite toronto bar well are you a bar guy long time when we first went to toronto we started going to betty's on king east and betty's has an interesting history because it used to be called the betty ford clinic and then they got a letter from the actual betty ford clinics saying you cannot use our name like this. It's confusing, but only confusing, kind of disrespectful, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Like it was, it was an ill-advised move. You could see why you thought it would be funny. We will start a bar. Anyone trying to like quit alcoholism. That's really kind of mean.

Oh, absolutely. So they changed their name to Betty's, but they blew up the cease and desist letter. It's still on the wall of the bar. Of course. As like a piece of history there. So, uh, Betty's has sort of been our longtime bar. It's still on the wall of the bar. Of course. It's like a piece of history there. So Betty's has sort of been our longtime bar.

Who's we? Who's this person that's become the we? I have this thing. It's Erin, who is my girlfriend of 12 years. And it's one of those things where I call her my girlfriend. And then I think there's got to be a better term for that. Your lady friend? Lady friend. People use the word partner partner I think like people think I

have like a law firm or something oh I was gonna say uh because if you say partner they're gonna assume it's a gentleman oh I could I mean that'd be fine with a name like I guess I could go either way but yeah uh but yeah no I just for something using the word partner just doesn't really feel right to me too businessy yeah. Where's the romance there? So, you know, for some, like sometimes when it's like a guy who's like renovating our house or something, I'll just refer to her as my wife, even though we haven't gotten married. It's easier.

Yeah. But this is like, you know, an official media thing. I don't want to put out incorrect information on the record. So my girlfriend, Erin, long, long, long time girlfriend, Erin, we moved to Toronto together. I've always lived together in the city. She's the we. She's the we. You plus Aaron are the we.

That's right. Going to Betty's. No longer the Betty Ford Clinic. That's right. Yeah. Of course, I got to find out these details matter. Okay. So Aaron.

Okay. Got it. Just got it. Yeah. Write that down on your iPad there. 12 years. 12 years. So I famously told my current wife that I don't believe in marriage.

I don't believe in marriage. Right. But you're married. I got married twice. Right. But the first time I was so young, I didn't know I didn't believe in marriage. So that's like I just, I was ignorant and young, very young. Second time, I really, I still, I didn't, I don't believe in marriage.

I told her like, I want to live together and I'm happy to give you... We can have children together. We can have a life together. An all-gamous life together. Basically, everything but the ring. She told me that it was important to her to be married before she has children.

Okay. She wanted to have children with me. I realized I'd be an asshole not to marry her because it matters to her. Anyway, where am I going with this? Except you and Aaron, none of my business, of course. But are you of the same opinion that you don't need this unnecessary legal paper?

Yeah, I think that's part of it. You don't really get a lot for getting married in Canada. I think in the US you get better tax benefits or something, but in Canada and Ontario specifically, there's not really a lot for it there. I think I'm in a similar boat to you that if Erin had said, you know, I really have always dreamed of getting married

and I want to get married, I would have said, sure, let's get married. But that's not an opinion she has and hasn't developed over the years, which is fine. And then there's just i don't like i like going to other people's weddings but the idea of like doing a wedding planning a wedding being in the center of the tension it's pricey too oh yeah it's no way you live near where i got married the second time uh distillery district yeah i've been to a lot of good

weddings at the distillery district the art gallery oh yeah yeah no there's it's this story is funny actually because you can go there on like a saturday or sunday and there's like four weddings going on simultaneously and they're all taking photos and trying to avoid getting each other in the background of their photos that's right that's right and you need a permit too we got a permit i'm sure some try to get away of not having a permit i'm sure but uh you definitely need a permit to take photos uh at the distillery district you do yeah uh yeah no it's it's a nice it's nice to see the distillery develop and it's cool that people like i you know the weddings i've been there have been a lot of fun so i'm happy to keep going to weddings but the idea of uh being the star of a wedding does not really appeal to me i know i totally see that but though you know aaron would be the star man

oh that's true yeah i'd be the second you'd be the schlep who's there in a supporting actor situation at in the distillery we had coffee at our wedding from Balzac's, which is there. I just read the... Finally, I don't know why it took so long, but apparently you know this, of course, that black plastic lids of coffee cups. Yeah. They can't tell the difference between the conveyor belt and the black plastic, so you can't recycle it? Yeah. Any kind of black plastic in the city can't be recycled.

I bet you the offender list i mean that's like 99 of the city that's been screwing up because who hasn't thrown a piece of black black oh yeah no why would you even stop to think like about the color of the thing you're recycling like it doesn't apply in any other case but balzac's uh their their lids are because you know the big big guys like the huge guys like the starbucks and the tim hortons and mcdonald's they already had lids of... Because the big guys, like the huge guys, like the Starbucks and the Tim Hortons and the McDonald's, they already had lids of a different color.

Right. So they aren't in this bad club. The Balzac's had black plastic coffee cup lids and I just read today in the Star or something about they're finally going to change the color

of those. Yeah, there's a few chains that I saw, smaller chains like Balzac's and Dark Horse Espresso, I think. And I think Second Cup might be on that list. Yeah, Second Cup might probably be on that list as well.

Because, I mean, how hard is it to change the color of your lids? That's not even really a branding thing. I guess somebody thought black was the coolest color for coffee cup lids. Well, it is. But usually then once you find out that you can't actually recycle that, then it's like, okay, maybe the next batch we order will be gray. Yeah, gray, green, blue, pick a color. It doesn't matter green works

too so you you said earlier that you don't really like coffee even though you've been having lots of coffee but where's your you have a go-to coffee shop uh yeah right around the corner uh odin coffee and espresso is one of those new little businesses that opened up in cork town and they spent a lot of time making the place really nice and architecturally cool. So good coffee. Happy to go there. It's funny.

My brain has been trying to figure out whether I knew this area was called Corktown or not. Yeah. I'm not sure I knew this. It's one of those things. I mean, there's the Corktown Common Park, which opened a few years ago.

People tend to know that. But it used to always just say, I live near the distillery. And I've started saying Corktown now because i feel like it's breaking through people are aware of everyone thinks they're in mimico when they come to see me here and i stick to my guns and i'm like nope you're in new toronto new toronto i know i always found that kind of shady that there's like a new toronto and i'm in the old toronto i think you're better than me worry where you use the cottage i think that was old Toronto. That's right. I think you're better than me. Where you used to cottage.

I think that was the deal. Yeah, that's right. We were just in cottage country. You take the streetcar to the cottage. Back in the day. Do you speak French? I remember I took French and I remember a thing with a talking pineapple trying to teach me French in school. We'd watch a video with a je suis and a na.

Yeah, je suis too. Like you're like a French philosopher. Yeah. I am, you are. Yeah, I can do the conjugations a little bit. But yeah, most of my French sadly has left my brain

and been replaced by like stuff that happened at City Hall committee meetings. So now a message for all the parents listening. You don't want your kid to end up like, Matt, where all that French

has disappeared. So send your child, if your child is between the ages of four and 14, send them to French camp. The largest French camps in Ontario belong to Camp Tournesol. Also, as I've learned, because they're doing this 3-month

sponsorship, and I've learned a lot, I've learned that I like to say Tournesol. It just feels good. Camp Tournesol. Yeah, you get to use a little bit of an accent there. And I get to play Nana Miscuri. When this is over, because this is the time when parents are putting

their kids into camps and stuff in the summer. So three months, March, April, May, I think. But when this is over, I'm going to miss Nana, Nana Muscuri. Yeah.

What we're listening to right now, which is... Can't groove out to this song. I guess you could still play it. I guess I could. But then, I don't know, that would be weird. A little odd, yeah.

Who's going to stop me? Nana? Although she's still kicking and touring at the age of 83 there you go so whether your child is francophone

in French immersion or has no French experience Camp Tournesol has a day camp or an overnight experience for them so go to campt.ca

get your kid into a French camp and when you sign them up for something and like i said there you got introductions to french day camps you've got uh overnight camps in ontario if they're from 8 to 15 years of age there's a leadership program for grades 6 to 8 there's a 13 day trip to quebec they even have tutoring in french via skype so if you sign up for anything at campt.ca use the promo code Mike

and you can save yourself some money. Do that! Right on cue. You see how that song ended up? Yeah, that was impressive radio right there. Matt, I hear this is more impressive than anything, that you're getting free beer just for making the trek from Humber College where you were

busy marking... What were you marking? Like tests? Yeah, the course I teach is more like they get a mark for every class so I was about three weeks behind so I had to go through and remember what uh how they did those days on uh on the stuff we were doing and then give them assign the marks for that and now I'm done so I don't think about it anymore and I know I should have asked this oh Oh, yeah, I wanted to move on. I know. But what do you teach? I'm in the journalism program over there. There's a four-year journalism degree. And the class I've been teaching is a class called News Now. So it's kind of cool. The way it works is like they come in on the Tuesdays I teach. We have a meeting in the morning where we talk about the top stories of the day. We break things up into sports news entertainment and then they go and they write stories and they film videos and they update websites and social medias

basically they act like a newsroom so i know it am i too old can i can i go to this you can go to this yeah bike over it'd be great yeah it sounds like i do this thing uh called tmi so every morning i record like three minutes of like things you should know or whatever. Today I did one all about yesterday's incident on Yonge Street there. Yeah, that's, I think I could fold that into my like independent project or whatever. Yeah. Get marked on that. I think I'd love this class. Maybe we'll have you over as a guest speaker.

You can talk about producing. Another class had me over as a speaker and gave me a $100 Walmart gift card just for speaking to the class. Really? I do this a fair bit, and I usually just get coffee cups and things like that. So I don't know how you swung $100. $100 at Walmart. Yes. Wow.

True story. So anytime you want me to, I'll negotiate that again. Yeah, your price might be too high. You have a six-pack of beer in front of you from Great Lakes Brewery. That's awesome. Enjoy that. I definitely will. Protect it when you're on public transit taking that home.

Yeah, I might get a plastic bag for you or something. I can probably score you one. I'll score you one of the local no-frills bags I have upstairs for sure. Yes, I was just thinking with this nice weather we've had recently that the patio at Great Lakes Brewery is going to be a destination for me on like early in the afternoon. I can go over there, have a $5 pint. They got the octopus, I think one of here,

is the Octopus Wants to Fight, which is back. Yeah, IPA, nice, nice. One of my personal favorites. Very cool. Enjoy the Great Lakes beer. I absolutely will. It will not last very long. It won't get you home, will it?

You're going to go over to the waterfront there. I'll stop at the brewery on the way home and try to fuel up. You should. The pint glass, you can pour that beer into your new pint glass from Brian Gerstein at propertyinthesix.com. Brian, great guy.

He's at 416-873-0292. Or just go to propertyinthesix.com and you'll find out how to contact him. Brian has recorded a special message for you, Matt. Amazing. So listen in. Propertyinthesix.com recorded a special message for you, Matt. Amazing. So listen in. Hi, Matt. Brian Gerstein here, sales representative with PSR Brokerage and proud sponsor of Toronto Mike's.

Winter is over. You know what that means. Spring market time. Give me a call at 416-873-0292 to help you out with any of your real estate needs. I'm so pleased to connect of late with a couple of Toronto Mike's listeners who've reached out to me and welcome more. Matt, what do you think of Josh Matlow's request for a judicial inquiry looking into the subway planning process? Josh calls transit planning in Toronto dysfunctional and it is hard for me to disagree. Where do you stand on

this issue and will we ever see Metrolinx have full autonomy to plan and execute the transit file for the entire GTA without political interference and personal agendas? Wow. Good question. He doesn't kid around. No.

Yeah. And I want to hear your thoughts on the transit file but i just want to warn you last time no not last time a couple times ago ed keenan was here yeah and we talked transit and i fell asleep during the discussion but because but please uh i'm sure that won't happen this time i'm listening yeah i'll give you a high level overview uh or answer anyway uh Scarborough subway judicial inquiry. I think it makes sense to look into what happened with the Scarborough subway and what continues to happen because the planning process was ridiculous. It was approved at zero percent design, which is an odd decision to say, oh, this like no design work has been done. But we're going to authorize billions of dollars to be put forward for a project like the Scarborough subway. So there's, there's stuff that, that needs to be uncovered and a judicial inquiry would be a way of going about that. That said, I don't think that this

council is going to vote for a judicial inquiry into the Scarborough subway. I think they are more likely to vote to just sort of continue on with the way things are so unfortunately for the city unfortunately for josh matlow uh this is not something that is high on my radar as something that i think is going to really matter much in the end uh and then uh as far as metro links goes and getting rid of like the political involvement in uh political involvement in in transit uh i think that would be great but even if you change things and give Metrolink all the power in the world and get the city council out of it or get the province out of it, it's still going to be some politics involved. So what we just have to do as people is watch what the politicians are doing and try to push them to make smarter and better decisions. How much of this crapola is a result of Rob Ford confusing LRT with streetcars? A huge,

huge amount. It is. There's a video on YouTube of Josh Matlow actually talking to Rob Ford about this subway versus LRT thing. And it's very clear that Rob Ford's belief was the Scarborough LRT was going to be like a streetcar running down the center of roads in Scarborough. Right. And that is not the case at all. They basically were going to use the existing trail that the SRT runs on and it's off road and would not interact with traffic basically at all. But Rob Ford could not be convinced otherwise,

and because of that and the idea that voters in Scarborough just would go gaga for anybody who promised them a subway, we went down this path of $3.35 billion, probably $4 billion, maybe $5 billion. What did it cost to cancel Transit City? $70 million. That sounds like pocket change after the other figures. That's money that's just burnt.

It went towards nothing. How many people would be served? I can't remember the numbers, but at the time it was overwhelmingly sensible. The amount of Scarbarians that would be... Is Scarbarian a word? I'm not allowed to say that, am I? Scarborians?

Scarborians? You go for it. Yeah, Scarborough residents. Okay, fine. Because I know it's a Tobokokian section of words. But okay, the people from Scarborough would... More people from Scarborough would have been served by, I think, seven different stops. Yeah, seven stops on the LRT versus three stops in the subway in the original plan and then down to one stop.

One stop. And so you're really not getting much. You're getting five-ish kilometers of tunnel. And it's $6 trillion, as you said. Yeah, I know. It keeps going up. So yeah, I wish there was a happy ending that I could see for this whole thing, but I am pretty cynical about it.

Yeah, now I remember why I fell asleep the first time. It's a protective mechanism because if you actually focus on the chaos and the insanity, it will destroy you. So you need to sort of gloss. You need to just kind of move on. And again, I'm not a NIMBY guy. This is a big city

and people in Skrbo are as much a part of the city as I am, of course. But I'm so physically far removed from the Skrbo station. You know what I mean? I have difficulty relating. I need people to kind of explain, you know, intersections and stuff in Scarborough. It's very far away. It is far away, but every property tax bill you're going to pay for the next 30 ish years will include money for the Scarborough subway. So,

uh, you got that going for you. Yeah. As long as it covers some, uh, bike lanes, make sure that's in there too by the way you sound great on the microphone uh you should have your own radio show uh i had a podcast for a while podcast is it but i mean like you need to have like a show on i don't know whoever would 10 10 or cbc somebody covering the city like you because you have the knowledge and uh the background and you you can handle a mic well i i do what i can i enjoyed doing the podcast i did some uh work with news talk 1010 i co-hosted the uh what is the live drive whatever the show tour used to host and live drive yeah yeah it was me and ryan doyle we hosted it part of me i guess i'd done this i would be pissed. My phone keeps ringing. You're a popular guy, Mike.

I am popular. All of a sudden, look at that. But yeah, no, I co-hosted the afternoon show one day with Ryan Doyle, and that was fun, except it turned out to be the day Joan Rivers died. Can we talk? Yeah, and that was the thing. I get there, and they'd given me an outline of things we're going to talk about, segments we're going to do.

And I get there, and it turns out Joan Rivers has just died. And they're like, like okay we're doing the entire show about joan rivers and they were like so what do you know about joan rivers and i'm like i know nothing about joan rivers so you should have called me up i know so much about joan rivers my mom watched her uh red carpet shows like that was her thing her jam like in the there was something where they would dissect the wardrobes from the night before fashion police or something yeah that sounds right and joan would just cut people up like oh that's terrible like just the worst things about what people poor poor some poor 18 year old woman would would wear some dress and joan rivers would like

crap all over it and my mom loved this this was her thing yeah no and uh i got my mom on that episode exactly i learned a lot that day about john rivers the things i didn't know before but uh so that was my one experience there and uh johnny carson was mad at her for uh she took a gig with fox i think this is the other john rivers thing joan right yeah it took a yeah went against johnny carson on fox yeah she used to guest host the tonight show right right right right, right, right, right. So Paytm, I've been talking about Paytm for a while now. Paytm, they're on, where are they?

Adelaide near Simcoe. Okay. They have an office there. I dropped by like two weeks ago. I biked over and wanted to check out the space. And they had like a bunch of people working and i'm like oh i guess they're here to service paytm canada and then the guy told me half of them are there servicing india so essentially what you've done is they've done is they've they've hired a

bunch of torontonians to service india which is the opposite of what i think we're used to at this point where they outsource the customer support and stuff to India to service you know Canadians yeah so it's a complete opposite like it's like we're hiring Torontonians anyway great great app this is called Paytm I use it I love it you go to paytm.ca you download the app for free on your smartphone and then you can pay all of your bills there and you not only can use your MasterCard, for example, which I do, which gets me points with my MasterCard, and I can get free groceries at no frills, so I can get a bag, and I can put Matt's beer in the bag so he can bring it home in the TTC.

But also you get points with PayTM. So they've gamified bill payment, and they remind you to pay your bills, and it costs you nothing. And here's the kicker. If you use the promo code Toronto Mike, you get on your first bill payment, you get $10. They give you free money. So go to paytm.ca and use promo code Toronto Mike. Do it up. Matt, you were an IT manager. Yeah, for a while there. Yeah, it's the thing I did.

So that you were an IT manager and then you realized you weren't happy? It's not that I was unhappy. You were too happy. I did some work for a not-for-profit in Burlington, Ontario. That was my first job at a university. Because I went to school for journalism and then at a certain point, while taking journalism courses, I realized I didn't like journalism and really didn't like journalism and hated everything I was doing and wanted to do different things. So I did different things for a while. And that included working with this not-for-profit, first updating their website, doing IT stuff, and then later doing writing for proposals and grants and that kind of thing. And then a bit into management and that kind of stuff. So it was, it was a good arc, uh, but they were in Burlington.

I wanted to move to Toronto. So, you know, I did some reverse commuting for a while, spent some time, uh, in the car, which I did not really like. Uh, so I was looking a little bit for something else, uh, but I did not expect not expect to get into journalism or writing. I thought I might just find another not-for-profit and do more IT stuff or writing management stuff or prose writing or whatever. So yeah, that was my life in my 20s. So at some point though,

because you said there that you didn't like journalism. No. But you then chose a very interesting career path didn't you because yeah no yeah you're not supposed to go to that which you do not like well i mean it was a certain kind of journalism i think i you know because they were training you on how to be a reporter and i to this day don't really have any interest in being a straight-up news reporter who uh you know spends his his or her days chasing down sources and having to do that thing where you pretend to be like, or not pretend, but the thing where you are objective and neutral

about everything. And just like, I have opinions and I like to analyze things. And that was something I always found hard about just doing a news story saying, you know, this happened, here's what this person thinks about it, here's what this person thinks about it, and here's what's going to happen next. That's really important. And there are people who are great at doing that, but that was just not me. So I thought because I didn't like doing that, I probably there wasn't going to be a great space for me in the journalism industry. But then I moved to Toronto and Rob Ford started running for mayor in 2010. And this was the first election I was going to vote in in Toronto because I moved in 2007, 2008-ish, somewhere around there. So 2010 was my first

chance to have a mayoral election to follow and care about. And I remember listening or watching a mayoral debate on, it must have been City News or CP24 or something like that. There were five candidates around the table. There was George Smitherman, Sarah Thompson, Rocco Rossi, Joe Pantalone, and Rob Ford, if you remember those days. I definitely do. Yeah. And one of the things that I remember vividly happening, and this is kind of like my superhero origin story, I guess, but there was a question about how they were going to pay for the things the candidates wanted to do. And Rob Ford said, I'm going to get rid of the land transfer tax. And we don't need to go into the details, but land transfer tax is a tax on real estate. It makes

lots of money for the city because the city has a pretty active real estate market. Rob Ford wanted to get rid of it because it was a tax and he hated taxes. And he was asked, how are you going to get rid of the land transfer tax? And he said, well, I'm not going to tear down the Gardner Expressway, which was one of those things where it didn't make any sense to me. Because I guess his thinking was that there had been talk by David Miller, the previous mayor, about taking down the Gardner Expressway or part of it. And by not doing that, canceling any plans to do that, conceivably you'd save some money and then you could use those savings to get rid of the tax. But they're totally different things.

The Gardner Expressway teardown revitalization is a one-time project. Land transfer tax brings in money every year. But then I remember that the debate just sort of moved past it. Right. Nobody called him on it. Which was commonplace when Bob Ford would do these tangent things. Yes. Yeah. Nobody talked like none of the other candidates really had a chance to rebut. And the moderators, whoever they were, I can't remember, just sort of kept on going and moved to the next thing. And I thought like the

way like I was not it was very skeptical of Rob Ford's political abilities and knowledge of the city. And I was very worried about the fact that he seemed to be getting a pass on everything during this campaign. I think at the time, maybe it was because people didn't expect that he would win. But obviously, in November, he proved them wrong and won the election. So when that happened, I thought, like, OK, I need to I want to get involved in this, you uh, you know, cause I care about the city. I really had grown to love Toronto and still love Toronto. It's nowhere else I'd want to live in, in the world. Um, and I just thought, okay, I need to, to at least keep an eye on city hall. I don't want any one of those people who just has no idea what's going on, uh, politically at the city. And, uh and then is surprised when bad things happen when transit

is services cut or or whatever like I want to know how that is happening so I started a blog and I just thought okay what I'm gonna do I because I was reading a lot about the city and I thought I'll just link to the stuff like I'll anytime I read like a good Ed Keenan column I was writing for the iWeekly or the grid at the time or whatever, or Torontoist would post something that I really liked and thought was important, I would just link to it. Because I thought, I'm spending all this time reading it, I might as well have something to show for it. I've always been a big fan of blogging, even though it's not really a thing that a lot of people do anymore. Yeah, you do it. I blog, by the way.

I started my blog in 2002. Yeah. There's not many blogs active that were around in 2000 and i want to like i see these people on twitter doing like these super long tweet threads right right yeah and like they say smart things and i like it but i just want to respond like start a blog like post this on a blog tweet a link to the blog tweet a link to the blog and it's all there and you're not trying to like. And you could add charts or pictures. Yeah, exactly. You can write in paragraphs.

Like it's a whole new thing. Well, I love, I still use RSS as my Mac. And I'm an RSS. And I remember being really upset when Google discontinued the Google Reader. Yeah. Because that was my RSS Reader. But I picked up Feedly. Yep.

Do you use Feedly? I use a feed bin which is a similar thing i spend like 20 bucks a year on it for rss and it's solid and it works for me actually it turns out i actually ended up liking feedly more than i liked google reader but uh yeah it's almost like not that we are but it's like we're kind of not stuck in 2004 or whatever but the rss and the blogging, I still think it's great. You can bring in these micro-blogging type things like Facebook and Twitter or whatever, but you never own that. But if a blog, it's your real estate,

like your slice of the web, and that's your content to be indexed by Google. And to me, that's important. Then this tweet, this thread that was interesting for like an hour, and then kind of disappears into the abyss. And then I have moments where I think, oh, this thread that was interesting for like an hour and then kind of disappears into the abyss. And then I have moments

where I think, oh, that thing that person tweeted about three months ago was really interesting. I should try to find that again. And it's like, do that. You can search Twitter,

but what are you searching for? How are you going to find it? And RSS is great. People have moved to the email newsletters now, but I don't want to get 19 email newsletters a day. I just want to subscribe to your website newsletters a day i just want

to subscribe to your website and get told when new things are posted on your website but i have to ask because i know he's listening yeah do you subscribe to 1236 i do subscribe to 1236 make mark happy yes yes yes no i i enjoy that one i think it would be fine if it was a blog that i could just subscribe through you know rss but i'll whatever he wants to do i will i like the email newsletter but i do wish that it was also a blog like i the content's there you know what? RSS, but whatever he wants to do, I will. I like the email newsletter, but I do wish that it was also a blog. Like the content's there, you know, just. No, I almost wish like Google would start a service where you could just like use it to subscribe to various email newsletters.

And then you could just like go to that service and check to see the newest editions or whatever. I'm with you, man. That would be like Google Reader, I guess. But why not? So you're blogging. Yeah. What was the name of your blog? It was called Ford for Toronto, which was probably an ill-advised name because it confused a lot of people. But

at the time, and I still am, I was a pretty big West Wing fan. And on the West Wing, there was this recurring theme of Bartlett for America, where the president of the West Wing, Jed Bartlett, his slogan was always Bartlett for America. And I just thought that calling a blog Ford for Toronto in that style would be kind of funny and ironic or whatever. It's a good inside joke for those who watch West Wing. Yeah, exactly. But I had problems with people who would

still think, they would email me and say, I can't believe you're a Ford supporter. Did you literally only read the URL? This is kind of what's irking is now pretty much people will read the headline and nothing further. So it almost, I hate to say this cause this is not for me,

this is not true. And hopefully it's not true. I know it's not true for you, but, uh, details don't matter as much as they used to because the vast majority have no interest in touching the detail. Yeah.

I think there's, there's lots of reasons for that. I mean, part of it, I think, is like the way that Facebook will present like the headline and then like the first two sentences of an article. And people look at that when it scrolls by their feed and think, well, I got the gist of it. And that's not great. But yeah, no, I quickly learned that my clever blog name was potentially confusing a lot of people. It's now a good time.

There's a quote about you in the Globe and Mail. Sure. Let's only read the quote and then we'll talk. So this is the quote. It's about, you're the he in this quote. Okay. He made a name for himself by drawing up detailed online charts of city council voting patterns with devastating clarity.

Did I say with devastating clarity did i say with devastating clarity they have documented the collapse of mr ford's support on council the charts have made such a splash that the commuter newspaper metro recently recruit recruited him to blog so is uh can you tell me a bit about the charts yeah um i mean like i said i started this blog and I didn't think I'd write much of my own stuff on it. I thought it would just be more like linking to things. But one of the things I was fascinated by, and I think if you're like a casual observer of City Hall, some people might not really be aware of this. Everybody's so laser focused on the mayor and what the mayor is doing. But we have a weak mayor system in Toronto.

The mayor is one vote of... Then how did he kill Transit City? Because I never understood at the time, and I still don't... Okay, three things I don't understand. Cryptocurrency, Gamergate, and how Rob was able to kill Transit City. He was one vote on council.

He wasn't. There was no council vote to kill Transit City. But he did kill Transit City. He did in the sense that ultimately the current city was funded entirely by the province so rob ford went out there on like his first day of an office and said transit city is dead and the premier at the time dalton mcginty could have just said uh no like we want at least a council vote indicating that's the case before we start changing the project we've agreed to fund but dalton mcginty at the time i think uh thinking that you know the ford

nation was a real concern for him and was a thing rob ford got 47 of the vote remember like that yeah it's a bit unheard of uh so there was this idea that oh we need to be nice to this guy so instead of asking for a council vote they immediately started or they didn't start changing things as much as they sort of put things on ice in a lot of cases and by doing so i mean money was wasted and projects were delayed years and years and years and years that was the immediate effect and it dies on the vine dies on the vine yeah exactly so uh yeah that you can blame uh ford for that you can also blame uh the premier he was placating ford nation exactly yeah our dalton yeah but please you can also blame the Premier. He was placating Ford Nation. Exactly, yeah. Arr, Dalton! But please,

you're right. The mayor, I think the most important thing of a Toronto mayor is what we saw yesterday, which is to appear a comforting, consistent voice in times like we had yesterday. That's what a mayor is in Toronto. To be the voice for the city, to be the person that

represents the city on the world stage that's written into like the City of Toronto Act that defines what the job is. So I mean, that's an absolutely important part of things. And that's why I think people reacted negatively in some cases when the mayor was going on like Jimmy Kimmel Live in the last term to be made fun of. But yeah, so the mayor is just one vote. So for me, the big question was, you know, Rob Ford. And I think this was something that he used to his benefit when he was running for mayor but he's like a lone wolf right like he didn't have any friends on council he would uh talk about their expense accounts and all this stuff and accuse them of corruption and things like that

so i really wondered early on like how is this guy going to uh win votes on council like he has these things that he wants to do about cutting taxes and, and changing programs and, you know, ripping up transit plans and whatever else, like, how's he going to get the votes? So I thought, okay, there's gotta be a way to track this. So early on I opened up Microsoft Excel and made a thing down the side that had, cause you're an IT manager. Yeah. I had some ability to do this stuff. I spent some time

in Excel. So I listed the counselors down the side and listed the important votes across the top and just started keeping track. And two months into doing this, I thought, well, this is interesting to see how this is trending and how counselors are grouping together. I might as well publish this thing. And

immediately, the public was interested and it did well as a blog post i gotta turn off my phone i can't believe anyways my my apologies matt no problem yes you're so you you published these and then what happened the public was good people seemed interested in it but the bigger reaction was just like the counselors i remember like going to the next council meeting and sitting there and seeing like counselors pulling the spreadsheet up to look at it and see where they were classified uh because i gave everybody a ford nation score so your ford nation

score was from zero to 100 and if you voted with rob ford all the time you were a hundred percent ford nationer and if you were zero percent you were a pinko commie lefty whatever I think Don Cherry called it left wing pinkos yeah it was wear it like a badge of honor I have a t-shirt I have a t-shirt so yeah so and it like one of the things it did is that counselors started to sort of

worry about it because they you know if you were an orthotopical counselor then you wanted to be 100% forward nation like that was something that you could take to your constituents proudly but if you were a north atopical counselor then you wanted to be 100 ford nation like that was a something that you could take to your constituents proudly but if you were somebody in like young and eglinton area uh you know or even parts of scarborough or the beach or whatever and you were high up in the ford nation percentage uh maybe you thought i need to temper this a little bit because i don't want to i don't want to be 100%. I want to be

closer to like 50%. So you could see that councillors were thinking more about their votes because they realized that they couldn't just slip them by and nobody would be aware of them. And then the other thing is that often at council, and people may not know this because it can make you despair for the way politics work. But, uh, counselors often accidentally press the wrong button and vote the wrong way on issues.

And, uh, which you wouldn't think would be that hard because they have like literally like two buttons in front of them. One's green, one's red, uh, that they pressed to vote yes or no on something.

But it happens a lot. And it used to be in some cases, if it was a vote that was like 30 to seven and a counselor voted the voted the wrong way they would just say whatever like people want to change but now you're tracking now they're tracking things so immediately they would stand up and say i need a re-vote on this issue because i don't want to be in the spreadsheet the wrong way this really does speak though to the the importance of local journalism like if you like toronto we're lucky we have people covering such things and yeah but you're like, I don't know, a small barrier or something. You've got to have somebody keeping council in check,

like shining the light on what's happening. Otherwise, the corruption and everything, this is a real issue that we're dealing with as these newspapers close and radio stations let go of their news departments, et cetera, et cetera. I worry about that a lot, you know, because people will focus on Toronto Council and talk about how it's such a mess. And they're embarrassing and they have these debates that go on forever.

And all that can be true. But I guarantee, like, the stuff that's going on in some of these smaller councils where you maybe have one reporter watching or no reporters watching, it's worse. And, like, the one thing that doesn't really happen at toronto council anywhere to the degree that it used to is like outright corruption or theft like there's enough people watching and there's been enough uh things implemented as far as like uh ombudsman's and lobbyist registries and stuff like that that uh prevent that kind of thing from happening on a large scale but in these smaller town councils when you have developers uh looking for deals and sort of nosing their way in uh there's a real chance that there's stuff that could be uh at

least unethical and maybe even criminal in some cases that nobody is aware of but it's kind of amazing in a city as big as toronto in 2010 uh blogger matt is the guy with the online charts that are sort of bringing to light in a very digestible format, if you will, city council voting patterns. As the Globe and Mail said, with devastating clarity. Do you have a tattoo on your body with devastating

clarity? I really like that. Devastating in there is really the nice thing. That Globe profile was really nice and it wasn't just me. There were a bunch of us. Okay, let's talk about that. You're known as the Scoobies. The Scoobies, yeah.

So the Scoobies, you were a part of this Scoobies gang that basically was tweeting and blogging the Rob Ford era. Yeah, and we didn't know each other at all beforehand, but there was a bunch of us that ended up... You can shout them out. You want to shout them out?

They're probably listening right now. There was Neville Park. There's David Haynes. There was Darren Foster, Saul Krom. There were a lot of people. I don't want to leave anybody out. What about like Jonathan Goldsby?

Yeah, Goldsby was always kind of like an honorary Scooby, but not quite in the same. Like Scrappy. Yeah. Like Goldsby, the thing that he was like going to City Hall during the Miller years, right? So he didn't have that just going into the Ford thing. So he was always there, but he was a bit off to the side. But Jonathan Goldsby, a great guy and super talented and one of the people that, you know, like great guy and super talented and one of the people that, you know, like when you start doing stuff and there's certain people that you want to follow you on Twitter because you feel like it's the sign that you hate it. You matter. Yeah. So when I remember the day that Jonathan Goldsby followed me, I was like, OK, this might be a thing that I can make work. And he's working for Jesse Brown now. Jesse Brown in Canada. Yeah. So good for

Jonathan. Maybe I got to get Jonathan in here next. And so the Scoobies, I got you now. So that's the Scoobies you're describing. But sort of around the Scoobies would be people like Daniel Dale. Yeah, exactly. Daniel Dale was at the Star. And Ed Keenan we talked about. Ed Keenan, he wrote a lot of great pieces about Rob Ford during this era.

Yeah, but I mean, he had been doing this before. I mean, most of the Scoobies were people in there there like at the time i was probably 27 28 years old uh and like people were in their mid-20s uh who were in that scooby gang kind of thing and we would sit in the front row normally we're not like the press area at the back i still tend to sit in the front row and not the press area i just like it better to be up close um but yeah no so there were yeah so you had daniel dale and ed keenan robin doolittle and all these people doing uh really great work but then you had uh us doing blogging and tweeting and uh you know taking a different tact with things and i mean rob ford was good for business if your business was covering uh toronto council because uh it was kind of boring before Rob Ford and all of a sudden things sensational

and this is not saying this was a good thing, but it caught the average Joe again. It captured their attention. Like I would tune in and watch council stuff. Rob Ford bowling over people. Like, I mean, this was like the best show on TV was Rob Ford. And I'll be honest, I don't watch anymore.

The John Tory show, it's too sane. Yeah. No, but I do think, like, I hope that what the Rob Ford era did is because lots of people were like you and did tune in to see what was happening and follow the crazy antics that were occurring. But I also think it reminded people that just generally you need to engage yourself with what's going on at City Hall and you can't just sort of think, ah, it's fine. It's not really important stuff. They're just talking about like stop signs and garbage collection and things like that. Like this is serious stuff, multi-billion dollar projects and life or death issues like homeless shelters and policing and things like that. So, uh, you know, I always remember the

night, uh, where they had the all night executive committee meeting where Rob Ford was considering a bunch of cuts to government, including closing a bunch of libraries. And that was such an inspiring thing to see hundreds of people show up and speak against this and say, you know, actually, I am not one of these people who just wants the lowest property taxes possible. I value the services in the city and I value growing a great city. And that's what really kept me going through the Rob Ford era because I was not one of the people that just got a thrill out of like sitting in front of Rob Ford's office waiting for him to come out and tell us about crack cocaine. Like that was never something that really interested me particularly. No, right, right,

right. And so you're writing for Metro. Yeah. And Metro is owned by Torstar. Yes, right. I was kidding. It gets very confusing for us by the guests. Right. Now, well, first let's talk about, okay, so in 2011, the grid named you one of the 50 people who make Toronto better. Right. So good for you. Did you get like a plaque or something? No, I didn't get anything for that. I heard like the 2012 year they did the 50 people that made Toronto better,

that everybody got something. Oh, but not 2011. I did not get anything aside from, you know, a nice little write-up in the grid newspaper that I could show my grandparents and they were proud of me. And a couple more awards. And then I'm going to ask, I'm going to put my case forward that I could be maybe an honorable Scooby. But first I want to talk about in 2013, you won silver in the best blog category at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards. I've never been nominated.

I've been blogging since 2002. I've never been nominated for a Canadian Online Publishing Award. These things, these awards in media are, I won't say, they can be a little bit shady in the sense that,

like, to nominate... Did you buy your second place award? I did not. Because why did you pay enough money to get the first place award? Yeah, that's the... If I was going to buy it,

I would definitely go gold. But yeah, the way these media awards work is your organization needs to submit some money to nominate a certain number of pieces or whatever. No one nominated me. No one nominated you. Yeah, exactly. Torstar wasn't behind my operation. No. You also, I have to point out, in 2014, you won silver again in that category.

Did the same blog beat you both times? No, I think it was different both times, but I cannot remember off the top of my head who was the winner. Walk them offline. I was happy with silver. I feel like gold is kind of showy, whereas silver is just consistent. Now I'm going to try to make a little

case here for the Scoobies. I don't cover it to the extent you do. I'm not known for my graphics or my charts that have devastating clarity. Devastating clarity. Nobody said that. Globe has never said that about me. But I do write about, I wrote a lot about the Rob Ford era. Sure.

I was not a fan of Rob Ford. That's unrelated to the fact I bike a lot. Those are two different things. People politicized biking and called me a lefty for biking everywhere. Yeah, that is weird. I never understood. So if you vote conservatively, if you're a conservative person, you do not bike? Yeah, you'd think

if you're conservative, you don't want to spend money on stuff, you would choose something like biking. It's a cheap way to get around. But I digress. I never understood the politicization of cycling. It would choose something like biking. It's a cheap way to get around. But I digress. I never understood the politicization of cycling. It never made sense to me. That's weird. So I had a commenter on my,

I wrote about this extensively. So if you go to torontomic.com and look up, I don't know, look up the word rinse. Okay, so this guy went by the name rinse. Do you remember rinse now? Yeah, I remember the rinse thing. Did we ever talk during the rinse time or maybe we never talked? I don't think we talked about those. I was talking to lots of like people who covered City Hall during the rinse thing. Did we ever talk during the rinse time? Or maybe we never talked. I don't think we talked about those.

I was talking to lots of people who covered City Hall during the rinse time. Because people always wanted to know, can I confirm who was that? Do I know that person? All these things. But someone named Rince left a comment about Rob smoking crack with the grandmother of their friend Jasmine and the grandmother E. Basso. And this all tied into that Windsor Street home in Etobicoke. Right, the Fabio Basso and Elaine Basso. So this was well before anyone in the public had an inkling that Rob Ford ever used crack.

Right. So it's before all that. Yeah. This comment was left. We all laughed it off. I have these open mics and it collects lots of stuff we all laughed it off uh except then after this after the revelation about the windsor street and the crack use and everything uh and robin doolittle and uh kevin donovan put out the piece about the crack video right uh in retrospect the what that that comment uh was basically

it knew too much you know what i mean, it knew too much. You know what I mean? It knew too much. There's no way that somebody just like took a random stab and happened to land there. And there's Jasmine, and there was a granddaughter of Basso who owned the home. Yeah, the names were right.

And it didn't, none of it, and of course, you know, it's not, I didn't break anything, except to say that I could maybe be like a little Scooby-esque maybe? No, I mean, to get that little tidbit of information out there somehow. Like, yeah, I think that definitely qualifies you as somebody who was moving and shaking. Thank you. I don't mind if I'm a mover or a shaker as long as I'm one of the two.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Did you guys, I can see you guys, you Scoobies, did you ever, when you guys were, you know how in Reservoir Dogs, they're walking to Little Green Bag? How about running around, all hopped up on Scooby Snacks? Oh, Scooby Snacks, yeah. You remember that?

Yeah, that was a good jam. Yeah, no. Is that your theme song? Yeah, no, we never really had a theme song. We used to just go out for beers and talk about how we were going to convince 23 counselors to vote on certain issues. So that was much nerdier than Scooby Snacks.

That's funny. All right. So you're writing for Metro. Right. And in 2014, you become a part-time professor at Humber College. Yep. And in the Bachelor of Journalism program. That's where you were today.

It's very convenient for you because if you were in the north campus of Humber College, that would be a much longer walk for you. So I'm glad it was the south campus. Which, by the way, you mentioned Police Academy earlier, like in regards to what happened yesterday, what they teach in our Police Academy. They filmed the Police Academy one movie at Humber College. Yes, I think I knew that. So you should know that every time you're there,

you should know this is where... This is where Police Academy was filmed. Commandantantless hard this is hallowed ground of cinematic history and of course before police academy uh that was the known as the uh mimico lunatic asylum yep that's right yeah there's still the tunnels and stuff that the people where they filmed uh suicide squad down there yeah yeah and i just did a a tour of that actually, the open doors thing, but I've never done an actual tour through the tunnels. I need to check that out sometimes. It's cool.

It's cool. Uh, yeah, for sure. So yeah, Humber college, you're teaching there. Uh,

so Metro Toronto, um, let me just make sure I don't miss anything before we find out. So Metro, can you share with me maybe, uh, your thoughts on the, um,

your experience on the evolution of Metro? Like they kind of, what it evolved to, it seemed to try to bring the audience online. Yeah. I mean, Metro was a weird thing for me. I think people, it was one of those times in my life, similar to now where I was having coffee with a bunch of people. I remember having a coffee with Ed Keenan and we talked about me doing something for the grid and some other outlets

uh because Torstar also owned the grid Torstar also in the grid uh and it was nice you know people wanted to work with me but I was really reluctant because I like being independent and I mean the blog wasn't paying anything but at the same time I was knew I was just able to do whatever I wanted with it and I wasn't didn't have to sort of pitch things to editors and uh you know line things up but you have to eat i have to eat yeah so some money was nice and then metro comes along and says basically uh we want you to keep doing what you're doing but do it on our website and we'll pay you uh for doing it wasn't a ton of money but it it was some money. So I thought, I really liked the idea of just sort of being able to keep doing what I was doing and not changing. So that was the offer that most appealed to me. And I never really thought it would last. I'm a

bit of a pessimist. And I just thought at the time Metro was pretty small and mostly doing like celebrity stories. They didn't have any full-time reporters. So I was sort of off in my own little section of the website and thought, okay, maybe this will last a few months and then stories. They weren't, didn't have any full-time reporters. Uh, so I was sort of off in my own little section of the website and thought, okay, maybe this will last a few months and then I'll go back to doing things on my own. But, uh, it lasted and it was fascinating because I, you know, always just worked out of my house. I always was independent about everything. You weren't going to One Young Street or whatever. No. Yeah. Before they were on Church Street and then they moved to One Young Street a couple

years in. So I'd go there occasionally to do interviews and stuff with the mayor or whoever was coming down. That was nice. But I always work out of the house and I like working in my house.

So yeah, no, it was, but yeah, I really just sort of kept my head down and kept just producing weekly columns. I never missed a week they wanted me to do something.

So I would do at least one thing a week and then more stuff for the website during the Rob Ford era. And I declined a little bit during John Tory because there's less stuff to write about. But they just kept it going. And, you know, publishers and editors changed. And they ended up bringing in some really great reporters and focused more on like they shifted, I think, to be more like we're going to be the voice of urbanist toronto somewhere in like 2014 2015 era so they talked a lot about pedestrian safety luke simcoe my former colleague there uh who's since left journalism uh he did some amazing reporting on like pedestrian safety in toronto and jessica smith cross did some great city hall stuff and you know we wrote about the Gardener

and tried to advocate for knocking it down as opposed to spending a billion dollars keeping it up and that kind of thing. So it was a lot of fun. But, you know, I was always off to the side doing my own thing, which is how I like things to be. And yeah, enjoyed it. Now, a recent guest on this show is Richard Krause.

Right. And he was writing for Metro. And I didn't know at the time, because Metro just went through some kind of relaunch. Yes. And I asked Richard, I assumed Richard was a part of the relaunch. And Richard told me on the show, he said, actually, he's not a part of the relaunch.

They decided to part ways. You got the similar news? Yeah. I mean, it was weird. Like I said, I had been expecting a call like this in the back of my mind. There was always the possibility that I was considering that something like this might happen. But it wasn't like it was an active decision that anybody made. As far as I can tell, there was never a bunch of people around a table in a boardroom who said, okay, what about Matt Elliott? Should we keep him or should we let him go? That, to my knowledge, never happened. It was just they decided to relaunch Metro as Star Metro Toronto, consolidate some Star and Metro stuff. And as part of that,

the freelance budget that Metro used to have to pay me and a few other people basically disappeared. And when there's no freelance budget, there's no freelancers. Well, I'm sorry to hear this because the paper is lesser for this decision. For sure. Yeah. Why wouldn't you want Matt Elliott covering the city for your relaunched Metro? covering the city for your relaunch. And I have heard that, that it's weird that, you know,

because I'm so focused on doing local columns and providing local information. And the whole way they've branded this is, you know, like we're going more in-depth on local stories. And, you know, it would be cool to be a part of that. But at the same time, you know, I'm impressed I got six years out of them, to be honest. Like six years is a long time to be cranking out columns what's next for you so this news is fairly fresh uh i don't know like a month old maybe i'm not sure but uh what what's next uh i don't know i've got i'm almost at the

point now where i'm like facing like i have options in front of me and i don't know i'm actually like have to make like what are these options put them on the table here let's discuss let's go through the one by one I need like a frozen cons list um I'll make the decision but I really like I'm not in a position where it's like I need to find something that pays the most amount of money because Aaron is independently wealthy Aaron is independently wealthy Aaron is an heiress uh she's not but uh no so I mean we've we're a dual income household so that does help and uh i want to just i don't want to be in a situation like what i really liked about metro and what i liked about the way i've always done this is like on metro i would send in a pitch on thursday saying here's

what i want to write about and they never in the six years i was doing this wrote back and said actually matt that sucks we want you to send us some more pitches and i've done a little bit of work for other places where it's like, instead of something like that, it's like they want you to send in three pitches and they will choose the one they like, or they will reject them all and ask for more. They'll steer you in a certain direction. They want like hot takes on stuff. Oh, I don't like that term. The hot takes. And I'm just not, I don't want to do that. Like I really have realized that what i like doing is just like writing about this city hall and some people think it's narrow and it's less important than provincial politics or federal politics but i think it's important that somebody

is doing it and i feel like i know it and uh did you lose your media access like no can you so you can still because i always i know like i talked to sports people who might find themselves like out of the msm job they had covering the leafs or something and they're still at practice and i'm always like and it's always because they're friendly with the people who give you access because they've been doing it for the msm and they can still have access and they might start a blog so you can you're still you're still covering Council right now independently. Yeah. I mean, I'm sort of,

Council hasn't had a meeting since I got this news, so I haven't really had to figure out what I'm going to do. And I probably will do less of it. But where would we read this today? I mean, next time there's something. That's the thing I'm figuring out.

Like there's a few different websites that are interesting and might be a place to go. I also, you know Like there's a few different websites that are interesting and might be a place to go. I also, you know, there's a part of me that thinks maybe I should just try something independent again, you know, and whether it's a Patreon type thing or whatever. Like I don't need a ton of money to make it worth my while. And I am, if anything, like I understand the business of media and why Torstar did what they did. And, you know know that's business but the one thing that really bothers me is they took all of my content offline and they're saying that it's going to be migrated to the star.com at some point but that's the one thing where i'm just like that that really bothers me i still have everything

i'm gonna find a way to put it back online but the idea that well that's a definitely i mean i will do that for you like you need to have a a graphic mat home on the web where i can access all of your musings and charts it's years and years of city history right and you know in the future there's going to be some kid who gets interested in city politics again because something crazy is going on at city hall and i want them to be able to look back on you know the last time city hall debated a casino or jets at the island Airport or, you know, transit in Scarborough. So I'm a bit worried about just like, I like the idea of maintaining more control over what I'm doing, even if it means slightly less money, because, you know, I'm the kind of romantic that values

the experience and the work and likes to think I make a difference more than it is just this is a job and i do it because somebody throws a little bit of money at me i'm this is uh refreshing uh i'm feeling good hearing this for me because i were cut from similar cloths but uh you're not about you know money isn't everything no and and and you can't always uh you know sacrifice to the highest bidder or not like it's going to sound corny, but in a great sense, it is priceless. The independence

and being completely independent and having a voice and owning your own space in the web and doing your thing. And if you love what you do and you're good at it, which you are, then you'll figure out,

at some point, you'll figure out how to monetize this so you can eat. Yeah. No, I'm excited. And not eating is not something that i'm worried about right now so aaron is feeding you aaron is feeding me with her uh royal money uh yeah no so we're all good you did allude to it earlier but you you have a podcast

now do you have a pod no you have a podcast you had one metropolis yeah metropolis was a podcast for a while but i mean i like to think of it it like, you've been to the Torstar building. My wife works in the Torstar building. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I think all of Canadian media is trying to figure out what to do with podcasts to various degrees of success, and I don't think anybody's really nailed it yet, and it's a thriving

market in the U.S., and there's all these mattress companies that want to throw money at podcasts. I don't know why they're all mattress companies, but they all seem to... Oh, because the markup is so high. Yeah. No, it's because they build this thing for like 80 bucks and they sell it for a thousand bucks. The markup on mattresses is incredible, so high.

That's why you're seeing... And these are mainly not even... They don't manufacture this. It's a white label or whatever. And they're just digital marketing companies. They are not mattress companies. So that's why there's so many mattress companies. That's why there's so many mattress companies sponsoring podcasts.

But yeah, at some point, I feel like Torstar just stumbled across a room they weren't using that turned out to be a studio that was pretty well ready to go. Maybe they used it back in the day when you could call up the star and get them to read the news to you. Well, yeah. Somebody was probably listening to the scanners or something, the police radios or something. Exactly. So they have this studio, and Metro thought, we'll start a podcast, some podcast with all

of our writers. So they tried a bunch of different things they hired a producer ryan eli i don't know if people know ryan but he's a he's a very good audio producer in the city used to do stuff for the score um but yeah so they had us do a podcast about cities it was me luke simcoe and vas bednar and we really enjoyed doing it but it was very clear like the person at metro who was sort of driving this thing like quit or moved on almost the second we started it. And I was like, nobody had any idea what to do. And nobody was like, right. So, I mean, we had some, like the people who listen to Metropolis, those are my favorite people. And there was a bunch of them. Uh, so I'd love to get back into doing something like that. Cause I really enjoy podcasts. I

listen to podcasts every day as I walk around the city. So I just really like it as a form. So it'd be cool to go back into something like that. But you know, we'll see what happens. Well, I think you're a very important voice for the city. Like I think you have, if you're ready, willing, and able, you need to be heard. And whether that's a printed word or a podcast or ideally both, the city needs you. I appreciate that. You didn't know when you were coming over here. Not only do I give you beer and then you get a pint glass, but also this praise.

All this praise. Devastating clarity. You had no idea. You had no idea. Yeah. Now, your council scorecards, they're still online, right? They're still online. Yeah.

I have them on Google Sheets, whatever the Google... Yeah, Sheets, I think. I think it's Sheets. So yeah, I still have them online, and I still update them every now and again for the Tory era of council, but it's not quite as useful as it once was because councillors, I don't think, are as worried about being seen to have voted with John Tory, you know, 90% of the time.

No, it's very different now. It's very different, yeah. Very different now. Did you, you mentioned you listen to podcasts. Have you ever heard the episode of Toronto Mic'd in which Ed Keenan kicks out the jams? I have heard the episode of Toronto Mic'd. See, I wasn't sure where that was going to go because it's always dangerous when I ask that question.

No, I am very behind on my podcast. I'm like two months behind, but I did listen to the Ed Keenan kick out the jams episode a while back. Because he kicked the shit out of those jams. He kicked them hard. Yeah, it was good. So as a teaser, because hopefully at some point I can coerce you to waltz over here from Hummer College again

to kick out the jams. Right, more beer for you. But we are going to kick out a jam today. So I'm going to play a song, kick it out right now, and then we're going to talk about why you dig this jam. I think the people

will know this jam. Ed Keenan had some obscure songs that I was learning about for the first time. This is not one of those. I went more mainstream. I had to stop myself from doing the sha-la-la-la's

with Duritz there it's a classic sing-along song it's a great jam you know what I'm going to tell you now it might not be a cool jam

but it's great that's me not cool but great that's my brand you have cool hair though yeah yeah that does help adam durrett's mr jones yeah well of course it's uh i call it's it's counting

crowing crows yeah not be counting crows counting crows so why this song? For like this. A lot of that, like Ed Vedder does that a lot, like in black, for example. It's like that. I was like, this guy kind of said. Yeah, I'm sorry. It's like a lyric. It's a lyric. Yeah.

I think that was it. Like the Counting Crows or Counting Crows were the first band that I remember discovering on my own when I was 11, 12 years old. You were young, Matt. The album August and Everything After came out in 94, 95. You have the music to listen to because your parents listened to it, and then you have to find the album that you like all on your own. I think some people are music people and some people are lyrics people. I'm a lyrics person.

I like a song that has really good lyrics. And looking back on the Counting Crows and this song or the other songs, maybe it isn't as deep and emotive as I thought it was when I was a teenager. But at the time, I thought this was just genius stuff and really just appreciated on the lyrical level. And this song, particularly when I went off to university, this was the one counting crow song that we played at every party on every in every dorm room, wherever. And it was just one of those things that at the right time of night with the right amount of beers empty, everybody can just sing along. Sha-la-la-la-la-la, yeah.

Shout it out. And it's stuck with me ever since. That works for me, man. I always say, what's the best music in the world? Oh, the music you loved, I always say, as a teenager. But even whatever, back in the day, that's the music that sticks with you forever. Yeah, like you asked me the favorite song of all time,

which is an impossible question, but you have different favorite songs at different times in your life, and the ones that stick around in your mind are the ones that are, you know, at the good times in your life,

I think. So this song's done that for me. Man, it's got this little, this breakdown right here. The bridge. The bridge is always the best part. You can tell he's angsty, like he's going through something. Exactly.

When you're in that sort of tween, teenage era of your life, you feel all the feelings. Absolutely. Absolutely. Want to be big, big stars. We've got different reasons for that. By the way, I'm not truncating this song. I'm not fading it down.

I'm going to let this play out because I'm digging it. Yeah. So, oh, hang on just a second. Man. Their next, I think it's the album after this, that had... What's it called? Cold December or Long December?

Long December. Right. And there's reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last. Maybe this year will be better than the last. That was good, too. I thought that was so deep. Yeah.

I was like, man. Maybe this year will be better thanth last. And I was old enough to know better. And I still do. And I'm like, oh, he's in pain. He's in pain. Adam Duritz, maybe he broke up with Jennifer Aniston or something. I think he dated both Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Crocks at the time. That's why I hate Adam Duritz.

I don't really know what the appeal was. Then he got older and now he looks like a sideshow Bob. Well, he doesn't wash his hair. He clearly... Yeah, what was the appeal? That's a good question. Yeah. I mean, it gave me the hope, though,

like if Adam Duritz can do that, like I could do that. You got a shot. Big finish. He's done shows at me. I'm gonna be X-Tar. Aw. And he delivers the line

almost like he doesn't care exactly it's like fame is actually terrible and you know it's bad it is bad thank you for kicking out Mr. Jones by counting crows and thank you for coming over because I've wanted to meet you for a long time

I follow you on Twitter and I almost feel like I'm gonna do the closing script but you're at Graphic Matt Thank you for coming over because I've wanted to meet you for a long time. I follow you on Twitter. And I almost feel like I'm going to do the closing script, but you're at Graphic Matt. Graphic Matt, that's right. And you're a must follow if you care about Toronto. I appreciate you saying that. You've been so nice to me today, Mike. I've been so nice because I'm going to keep those beers.

I want an octopus once to fight. So thanks for doing this, buddy. No problem. I'm happy to come back anytime. And that brings us to the end of our 329th show. You can follow me. It only took 329 episodes to get you in here. I didn't try hard enough.

I need to try harder. You need to try harder. You can follow me on Twitter. I'm at Toronto Mike. I must follow as well. Absolutely, Toronto Mike. And must listen as well. Everybody should listen. See this? We're just going to pat each other on the back. There's a Patreon as well. Absolutely, Toronto Mike. And must listen as well. Everybody should listen.

See this? We're just going to pat each other on the back. There's a Patreon as well. Give Mike some money. Patreon.com slash Toronto Mike. I actually was going to promote it earlier. I thought I won't because people should be throwing quarters at this guy. But, oh, yeah, don't forget me.

Patreon.com slash Toronto Mike. Matt, by the way, as i mentioned moments ago is on twitter as graphic matt great lakes by the way you could be toronto matt that's how uh vital you are i don't want to hone in on your brand i would get ticked at that i'd lawyer up yeah great lakes brewery or at great lakes beer property in the six.com is that raptors devotee raptors game five on tomorrow that's also uh when the game seven is for Leach and Bruce. Raptors and Leach, same night. And I think they said they're going to share

Jurassic Park slash Maple Leaf Square. They're going to split screen it. Yeah. That's insane. It's going to be something like a sea of blue and red. I'm so nervous because I regard them both as must wins. One really is a must win. Yeah, yeah.

But the other one, for all intents and purposes, we've just lost the two in Washington. The Raptors have to win that home game. They can't lose three in a row. No, sir. So we've got to win them both. Let's do that. Where am I now?

PayTM is at PayTM Canada, and Camp Turnasol is at Camp Turnasol. See you next week. It's really later this week, and it's Ralph and Murdy. Ah, fun. We'll see you next time.