Today is the first anniversary of Andrew Wilfahrt’s death. His father Jeff told me he sees no particular cause for commemoration or celebration. I cannot quite agree.

Purveyor of gentlemen’s style advice to hapless nerds Jesse Thorn needs to just man up and pay for captioning of his successful online video podcast and DVD. The cost – mere hundreds of dollars – is easily handled by the $2,328 Thorn raised on Kickstarter above an already-healthy $68,000 budget.

Gareth Thomas (q.v.):

[Your] life in six words?

“My family has always loved me.”

(CORRECTED) If you’re deaf, don’t call the Toronto police or fire departments and expect to be able to communicate, unless you can actually speak and hear. Neither department has a plan to accommodate deaf people.

Evidence:

1. A Toronto family (deaf parents, hearing kids) suffered a tragic fire. Toronto police and fire never called an interpreter; the fire department patted itself on the back that a fireman showed up who had minimal pidgin knowledge of ASL.

2. A deaf man was arrested during the G20 and denied access to interpreters who were readily available. Interpreters didn’t show up to two of his court dates but eventually did at another hearing, where charges were dropped. Under §14 of the Charter, interpreters must be provided in court. There were no other interpreters at any time in the arrest or judicial process, reports held.

Toronto Police spokesperson Mark Pugash did not respond to my request for comment. But, many days later, Wendy Drummond of Pugash’s department disingenuously wrote back to ask if I still had a question. Of course I do, I told her, and heard nothing back. Toronto Police played games and refused to answer easy questions about their policies in dealing with deaf people. (If they exist.)

Toronto Fire didn’t respond at all.

I argue that both organizations, and indeed the entire public sector, have an affirmative duty to provide at the very least interpreters for deaf users of sign language. The Eldridge case, decided by the Supreme Court of Canada almost 20 years ago, held that hospitals have such an obligation. I don’t see much of a difference in application between a hospital and a fire or crime scene.

No matter how you slice it, though, what we have here is a systemic, and now known, denial of the Charter and other rights of deaf people by the two government departments most implicated in life-and-death crises – police and fire. Toronto Police and Toronto Fire put deaf people at risk because they have no procedures in place to communicate with them, I hold.

This sounds like a great subject for journalists to explore

I certainly ran that idea by the writers of both the articles cited above; only one responded. That is just as well, because the other writer, Wendy Gillis of the Star, covered the deaf-family case so atrociously it bordered on professional misconduct – calling the parents deaf-mute (later corrected online); relying on a teenage son to interpret; sensationalistically insisting that the parents’ inability to “scream” was somehow relevant; and refusing to follow obvious leads, like the family’s lack of audio-visual fire alarms and an evacuation plan and the fire department’s inability to communicate with them. I saw a CBC TV segment that also failed to follow those leads and induced that same (traumatized?) minor child to act as interpreter. The standard of coverage was low, but Gillis added insult to injury.

I’ve been working on this issue since December and have taken it as far as I can on a budget of nil. I presume the mainstream media, which can afford to investigate this issue properly, will simply ignore it until somebody dies, at which time the media will blame the victim for being “mute” and unable to “scream.”

Update

Wendy Gillis wrote in to say she too believes police and fire departments’ inability to communicate with deaf people is a story with legs and that I shouldn’t have gotten any other impression. She also notes that the references to screaming were in heds (typically written by editors, and fungible) and were not in body copy. True – and her piece quotes one of the hearing kids: “We were trying to yell that we were OK, but no one could hear.” It seems that blame for an overreliance on yelling and screaming applies to editors and a source, not Gillis.

I appreciate the correction.

Which exact opponent is McGrath addressing here? Is this opponent or interlocutor, as is often the case, imagined? Who exactly has been failing to note CBC’s ratings success? Who exactly has recently volunteered complaints about the cancellation of Intelligence?

A nasty piece of work with a legion of indecent fans, Denis McGrath still hopes people not as dumb as Ghomeshi’s chase producers will consider him a pundit.

Updates

• (2012.02.12) Next up on Q – pot calls kettle beige (sic throughout): “There’s a sociopath who clangs around the Toronto internet critiquing everybody & everything, & never saying a positive thing ever.”

  Yes, and he wrote Charlie Jade. Denis McGrath has nothing but imagined opponents.

• (2012.02.15) Who’s complaining about the cancellation of Intelligence? Not its creator.

  Despite having landed at one of the hottest shows on television after the unhappy end to his CBC run, there is no gloating. And there is no bitterness.

  “I had a very lucky, long, very successful play in Canada, and I have zero complaints,” says Haddock. “I was able to work at home and write about the city I knew, and that was a great, lucky, rare – very rare – thing.”

Here we have the convenience store attached to the no-name gas station at Queen and Carlaw. As recently as five years ago, Queen St. was overrun with gas stations and car lots and auto-body shops. I see now this one is undergoing a change. On paper, I was in the right place at the right time to snap this photograph.

A dull-grey plain sign under the horrifically oppressive dull-grey skies of a Toronto winter. Exactly the wrong kind of photo to rush to publish. I have sat on this one for some weeks. I see why now.

Square-on, centred, airless, anomic, despairing photographs of ruinous architecture and of absences are, I realize, harmful not artful. I came to understand this when I began to reject Modernist architecture – for houses in the city, at least. I understand why I’ve barely been able to glance at a photo by Burtynsky and have never had the slightest interest in watching a full-length documentary showing hours of same.

Like everyone else, hits on my photos have decimated in the Aughties. They’ve nearly done the same again in the last two years. With no viewers to speak of, there is now almost no reason to publish a photograph; as a rationale, “self-expression” goes only so far when exhibiting into a vacuum. When what you’re shooting is no better than a vacuum, the jig really is up. Life-sapping pictures of antisocial nothing that will leave you feeling worse are a genre that needs to be put to rest.