Diversity Our Strength — that’s Toronto’s motto — and the words people on the progressive side of the ledger espouse and people on the conservative side support, although progressives mayn’t think so.
During the cricket season of brain injury awareness month this June, I have to ask: who is included in the diversity tent? CBC Radio 1 Metro Morning, the show that boasts how it reflects Toronto to newcomers and long-timers alike has been single-mindedly uninterested in interviewing anyone from any brain injury association about this month, about the challenges of navigating life and the city with a brain injury, and the sheer cussed-mindedness of the medical system that refuses to restore people’s brains, opting for the “right balance of rest” and strategies instead. Worse, Metro Morning is on our public broadcaster, who one would think would include every kind of voice imaginable on their shows — from morning shows to news shows like The Current to topical and lifestyle shows. But nope.
All but one morning shows in Toronto — television and radio — seemed to yawn when the press releases about this awareness month went by. Yes, let’s talk about concussions and hockey or football, when some big star writes a book or is injured, but talking about regular folk, car crashes, falls, PTSD from the cruel indifference towards and the navel-gazing abandonment of people with brain injury? Nah.
Millions are affected in Canada. Every Torontonian probably knows someone who has had a concussion or life-altering brain injury. Still, booorrrrring seems be the almost universal response.
Only one morning television show was right there on day one interviewing the Executive Director of the Brain Injury Society of Toronto and a member who had painted a powerful mask representing his brain injury experience. That was Breakfast Television. I guess, despite Rogers gobbling up Citytv, it’s still the only true voice of diversity in Toronto — like when it first launched, it still honours and includes the most sidelined voices.
And on the radio, it was a night-time show on a conservative talk radio station that hosted the pair and broadcasted their voices to Toronto.
So who really believes in Toronto’s motto? The hip, progressive media or the ones right there in the thick of the city, noticing and broadcasting to the public the voices no one wants to hear?
No wonder both the TTC and the city of Toronto have made cognitive accessibility worse under the noses of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and the provincial AODA (accessibility) law. They know no one capable to speaking loudly cares enough to stop them and force them to enact services, policies, infrastructure, purchases that are inclusive of all. So I’ll just be over here in my little corner shouting awareness and knowledge into the void because what else can one do?
