Well, start bailing, this ship’s goin’ down.

Late yesterday afternoon word came out that Munir Sheikh, the head of Statistics Canada the body responsible for the national census, had canceled a town hall meeting, previously scheduled as an information session for StatsCan employees about the scrapped long-form census. The fact that the meeting was canceled at the last minute raised more than a few eyebrows, and we all waited to see what would happen next. Then, later into the night, the news came: Sheikh was resigning his position.

And now, the boat begins to sink in earnest.

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I love it, the debate surrounding the long form census. It’s exciting, it’s engaging, and if nothing else it’s great to see (and hear) that this kind of discussion can be had in this great country of ours. It can be, right?

If you’ve read my blog for more than a little bit then you know that I try my best to present a non-partisan view of things. Really, I try, but sometimes honesty can be mistaken for partisanship, I think, if you read me the wrong way. For example, I could say something like, “Stephen Harper runs a tight ship, giving little to no control over to his Ministers, with even the smallest governmental details passing across his desk,” and you could mistake that for a pot shot at our Prime Minister. But, truly, I’m not one for pot shots and when I say something like that I mean it as more of a fact than an opinion. The sentence following that one will be an opinion, but that’s more obvious. And why is this so important? Because I believe that a discussion about scrapping the mandatory long form census should be one that transcends politics altogether, let me tell you why.

Stephen Harper runs a tight ship, giving little to no control over to his Ministers, with even the smallest governmental details passing across his desk. I don’t necessarily agree with his style, but that’s why I didn’t vote for him. Still, while a lot of the time this kind of control factor can be nothing more than bothersome for policy makers and politicians it can be, at times, detrimental to our national health and identity. There are examples of this in the national housing strategy, our international agreements, and key pieces of criminal justice legislation. Harper has the final say and sometimes the only say, it seems. Discussion be damned, and for certain issues this simply does not fly; in my opinion the long form census is one of those issues.

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If there’s one thing that Canadian politics is good for (and maybe there is just one) it’s the introduction of new and fun terms to our collective lexicon. Remember our pre-Olympic love affair with the stodgy term prorogation? Ah, those were good times, listening to newscaster fumble over that unnecessarily complicated word, grasping at straws to try and explain how in the heck it was even legal, nevermind moral to just up and cancel Parliament.

But if you’re a political junkie like me you love these kind of moments in the Sun. Your heart skips a beat when the popular press picks up on a new polispeak word and runs with it. Well, friends, it’s happened again.

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If you ever watched wrestling in the mid-to-late 90’s then you might have heard of Dwayne Johnson, The Rock. He was a bit of a dink, kind of full of himself, but a really good wrestler. He has this catch phrase, an insult really, he’d use the term “jambroni”. If you’re a moron, according to The Rock, you’re a “jambroni”—and who better to tell you you’re a moron than a professional wrestler.

That said, whenever the name “Adam Giambrone” came up in the news, the first thing I thought of was The Rock. And the name came up often: as the head of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) that tends to happen. But this week Giambrone’s been in the news for another reason, for being a “jambroni,” as The Rock would say.

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If you’ve been following the stories surrounding the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) then maybe you’ve heard about today’s little press scrum. If not, let me fill you in on the events of the past few weeks to bring you up to speed.

Criticism of Toronto’s transit authority began when a picture, and then another picture, of a sleeping TTC employee surfaced online. The picture showed a TTC ticket-taker asleep in his booth, feet kicked back, having a grand old nap. Following that, videos, pictures, and anecdotal reports began appearing online depicting TTC employees engaging in all manner of bad behaviour. Some were sleeping, some were rude, and some were taking ten to twenty minute coffee breaks with a bus load of passengers.

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An incredible clip from the CBC archives featuring a young Lloyd Robertson interviewing a “street surfer” or “skurfer” in 1965.