Compelling, in-depth coverage of the people and stories behind the news and their opinions.
by Hans Wienhold One slow afternoon, I was given a delivery order. The instructions were to pick up a prepaid order from The Love Shop on Parkdale Ave. N. The bag they handed me contained some lubricant and a red
Read more
Reputable organizations took government money in exchange for telling the public the scarcely tested vaccines were safe by Donna Laframboise Why was it so easy for the mainstream media to convince a portion of the Canadian public that the trucker Freedom
Read more
No one saw it coming. It came out of nowhere. Much like the attacks on 9/11. It was one of those surreal moments in your life. Everyone knows where they were on 9/11. But for the beef industry a more memorable day was May 20, 2003. That was the day the Canada/US border slammed shut with a shockwave that hit not only the aforementioned trading partners but 40 additional countries that trades with Canada.
Read more
Probably no one, not even his biggest fans, would put him in the same class of writers as Ernest Hemingway. However, as a Bullshit Detective, Hans Wienhold is in a class of his own. (In fact, in his Taxi News bio he proudly describes himself as a “Welfare Recipient at Senior’s Welfare; Self-Employed; and also, a Climate Scientist at BS Detective Services.”)
Read more
“Then I managed to contact a reporter who worked for the New York Times, who told me what was happening to me was exactly what was happening to him. His stories were being shut down, he was being blocked. As he saw it, we had two options. One of them was quit and be a whistleblower. Or just stay, and fight it out, and keep trying to push those stories through.
…I was just reeling from all this because I thought, you know, we have betrayed our audience on a massive scale. Massive.”
At its May 17th “Go-Get Family Style” launch event, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi stressed the company’s safety features which include dialling 911 in case of emergency (although, Uber’s Terms explain “In the event that you need to place a 911 emergency call on behalf of your teen, the dispatcher you’re connected with will see your location, not your teen’s.” How would that help?)
As a parent and a consumer, the sheer number of sexual assaults by Uber drivers in Canada and around the globe set alarm bells ringing.
As the publisher of Taxi News, I cringe recalling comments from an Uber driver who laughed that he didn’t drive for the money: “It’s to meet chicks, man, the chicks you meet at closing time!”
Read more
On Thursday, May 18th 2023, an earthquake occurred. On that day three senior journalists described under oath how Canada’s mainstream media broke the rules and failed every ethics test during the COVID era.
Media coverage of the Freedom Convoy was so obviously dishonest because journalists had, by then, gotten used to torquing the news outrageously. After two years of mindlessly parroting every official COVID talking point, they’d ceded their independence so thoroughly they no longer cared about the audience to whom they were meant to be delivering a public service. Taking orders from above, they were playing follow-the-leader.
Last Thursday, at a National Citizens Inquiry hearing, Marianne Klowak talked about resigning from CBC Winnipeg. In disgust and despair. After 34 years on the job. In her words, “I had witnessed in a very short time the collapse of journalism, news gathering, investigative reporting. And the way I saw it is that we were, in fact, pushing propaganda.”
Read more
I dragged myself to the Committee meeting room and took my seat in the row of speakers. Everyone was there for the same reason: to ask for funds for their program from the limited Tourism budget. My group, Taxis on Patrol, was asking for $7,000 to help fund an annual program which presented awards to cab drivers that had helped improve safety on Toronto streets. It also had a strong impact on improving the often-tenuous relationships between the cab industry, the city, and police.
My favourite Taxis on Patrol (“TOPS”) story was of a driver who saw a woman being beaten by a man on the street. He swerved to the curb and threw open his front door: the woman jumped in, he auto-locked the doors and just kept driving.
In our most famous file, a driver had a mother in the back seat whose fevered baby had gone into convulsions. The driver contacted dispatch who contacted 911 who walked the driver through every step to restore the baby to consciousness – we actually got permission to release the dramatic 911 tape of that event, and when it was played for Metro Council, several of the councillors were crying at the end of it. The baby lived.
Read more
The city had opened a Pandora’s Box when it initiated the restricted entry, equity licensing regime. By the time I entered the business, the city was trying to find a way of extricating itself from this system.
The main problem with extrication was that too many industry participants had invested their lives in the system the city had created. Thus, any move to eliminate the equity plate system was met with strong opposition from those who stood to lose everything they had worked for.
The city opted for a stealth approach.
