The Toronto Scum (Sun) News

WE CANNOT CONTINUE TO IGNORE THE TORONTO SUN’S TOXIC OUTPUT

The Toronto Sun has a history of columnists writing xenophobic pieces — but they are met with a shrug by the rest of Canadian media.

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Is there any accountability in Canadian media for those who fan the flames of anti-Muslim and anti-immigration sentiment?

That question has been on my mind in recent days after a hotel in Toronto temporarily housing hundreds of asylum seekers was almost burned down in an apparent arson attempt.

The Radisson hotel in the city’s east end had attracted the attention of far-right agitators eager to paint the refugees living there as uncivilized, dirty, and dangerous. At one point, three YouTubers, including a white nationalist, went to the hotel to film and harass unsuspecting guests. Meanwhile, dozens of online reviews slammed the hotel for overcrowding and alleged bad behaviour by refugees, many of the reviews originating from accounts that only had left that single review — a clue that it may have been part of a coordinated campaign by online trolls to create accounts and flood the hotel page with angry and often racist comments.

The Toronto Sun’s Sue-Ann Levy gave the campaign more visibility when she wrote three separate columnsabout conditions at the hotel that only cited those suspicious online reviews as evidence. One especially outlandish review claimed that “goats were being slaughtered” in the public bathrooms, an unbelievable smear that Levy repeated uncritically in her Oct. 3 piece for the paper. The Radisson Hotel later said it was “completely false.”