He is a noted environmentalist, a political activist, a self-made musician who uses his music as a force for change, wrote the National Post July 17. So when news leaked out of a village in upstate New York that Barenaked Ladies front-man Steven Page has been charged with cocaine possession, the story was not just about another musician facing another drug charge.
Promoters on the children’s circuit may be reluctant to book the band while the allegations against Page are unresolved, said Rob Bowman, music professor in York’s Faculty of Fine Arts. But he stressed the whole matter is being blown out of proportion; Page has not yet been convicted. “What people do in their private life, as long as it’s not working its way into their public art, is not affecting children badly,” he said. “On some level, [all people], including Steven Page, are just regular human beings, carrying on their lives and sometimes hitting little bumps like this.”
- Bowman also spoke about the arrest on CBC Radio July 16.
Osgoode profs say Victoria police are ‘overreaching’ in booze searches
Victoria police spokesperson Sgt. Grant Hamilton says searches of hundreds of revellers the police performed on Canada Day were legitimate, because the BC Liquor Control and Licensing Act allows searches if they have “reasonable and probable grounds” to believe alcohol is illegally possessed, wrote Maclean’s in its issue dated July 28.
But Alan Young, criminal law professor in York’s Osgoode Hall Law School, says that’s not true. “There is no general power to search people” just because there have been problems in the past, he says. Besides, carrying alcohol in a backpack isn’t a crime. Young’s Osgoode colleague James Stribopoulos agrees. “Drinking alcohol in public is an entirely different matter," he said, "but the complaint suggests that the police did not wait until alcohol was actually being consumed.”
Young says this may be a case where police “overreach” and hope the courts will back them up. But whatever the outcome of the civil liberties complaint process, he says it still won’t clarify the law. The only way to find out for sure whether the searches were legal or not would be if someone fought a charge – or decided to sue the police.
Flat tax is not more simplified
According to Neil Brooks, a tax expert at York’s Osgoode Hall Law School, the idea that flattening tax rates will simplify the tax system is “patent nonsense,” wrote Rod Hill, a professor at the University of New Brunswick Saint John, in a letter to the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal July 17 about that province’s proposal to institute the system. Why? Because the complexity of the tax system lies solely in determining what income is going to be taxable.
Brooks writes, “once someone’s taxable income is calculated on their tax return, a Grade 3 student can calculate the tax owing no matter now many rates there are.” It’s just one simple calculation on the tax return, no matter how many rates there are. He adds that “the corporate income tax and the GST are both flat taxes and yet they are every bit as complicated as the individual income tax.”
So why is the government touting a flat tax as "simpler"? I think it’s because the arguments for it are so weak that they’re desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel, wrote Hill. With no respect for the truth, they’re offering up whatever hokum they find there.
York student to perform opera recital as cancer fundraiser
You can’t sing opera without passion, wrote the Belleville Intelligencer July 17 . Rising young Foxboro singer and York student Gabrielle Crawford has that in spades. But she also has a passion for helping win the war against cancer, specifically breast cancer.
Crawford will put her two passions together and perform in a solo recital in Westminster Church on Saturday at 7:30pm. The blue-eyed Gabrielle, 21, describes herself as a “spinto” soprano, or one with the ability to sing high notes with power. “I think I was singing before I could talk,” she said with a laugh in a recent interview as she reviewed her family’s extensive musical involvement.
While no one in her immediate family has been afflicted with cancer, she has been exposed to it often with people she knows and loves through her involvement with Westminster Church, especially, and other friends she has met. Last fall, she got actively involved in The Campbell Family Institute cancer centre at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto where she was attending York University, and also the annual Weekend to End Breast Cancer as a participant in a 60-km fundraising walk.
On air
- Pat Armstrong, sociology professor in York’s Faculty of Arts, spoke about a planned investigation into standards of care at Ontario nursing homes and her book, Critical to Care: The Invisible Women in Health Services, on CBC Radio July 16.