Sunday, May 19, 2024
Potholes and Cracked Pavement Keep Barton Street East in the Top Spot on the provincial CAA Worst Roads List. Photo: CAA
Media releaseRide Hailing newsTaxi industry newsTrucking

Barton Street East Hamilton voted CAA Worst Road 2023

Guest Contributor

The votes are in, and the CAA Worst Road for 2023 is Barton Street East in Hamilton. Barton Street’s persistent issues with potholes and severe alligator cracking in the pavement have led to its dubious distinction. The road first appeared on the top 10 list in 2019 and has steadily climbed its way to the top now for the second year in a row.

Taking the second and third place spots are roads that at one point have also crowned the top of the list, Eglinton Avenue West in Toronto and County Road 49 in Prince Edward County.

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Photo: RWM
Laugh a LittleOn the Road with Mike MurchisonOpinion/ColumnTrucking

Cattlemen will remember their BSE moment forever

Mike Murchison

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.

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Rev. Dr. Major (Ret.) Harold Ristau Photo: A Citizen's Hearing
News

Retired CAF chaplain says its dangerous to force soldiers to ignore their own convictions

Rita Smith

Canada lost some of its best soldiers during the COVID debacle, the National Citizens’ Inquiry was told by lawyer Catherine Christianson recently.

Christianson’s testimony is supported by Rev. Dr. Major (Ret.) Harold Ristau, who told True North that the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) have been made less operationally effective with the mandating of is COVID shots.

“It’s seriously dangerous to force soldiers to ignore their convictions, from both a spiritual and psychological perspective,” Ristau told True North in a phone interview on May 12th from Kenya, where he moved his family to work as a missionary.

Ristau notes that a soldier being “good to go” on the front line of the battlefield involves healthy spiritual, mental and psychological resilience: the ability to bounce back from trauma. When soldiers lack resilience, they are prime candidates for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

“Soldiers’ mental and spiritual health is affected by three variables: strong values that are supported by the chain of command; confidence in who they are, what they do, and personally believing in the mission; and that as individuals, they matter in the role that they play in the mission,” he explains.

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"Confessions of a Hamilton Cab Driver" by Hans Wienhold is now availabe on Amazon. Image: Amazon
NewsReviewTaxi industry news

A bullshit detector and a sense of humour make life bearable

Rita Smith

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.”)

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Logo of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Image: Wikimedia
Opinion/ColumnTrucking

Journalists & Government in lockstep

Guest Contributor

“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.”

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Uber Canada's office in Toronto.
NewsOpinion/ColumnRide Hailing newsTaxi industry news

Uber to pick up unaccompanied teens

Rita Smith

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!”

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Marianne Klowak testifies at the National Citizens Inquiry, 18 May 2023.
Guest ContributionsNewsTrucking

Canada’s COVID Media Disaster

Guest Contributor

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.”

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Toronto's Hockey Hall of Fame. Is a city judged by the grandiosity of its buildings, or the industriousness of its workers? Photo: HHOF
Laugh a LittleOpinion/ColumnTaxi industry news

Be ready for any surprise

Rita Smith

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.

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