Stephen Weir articles, editorials and popular social media weir postings

Caribbean Canadian Music With a Cause Remembered   By Stephen Weir   Standing inside the Friars Museum beside the two curators of the new free exhibition - Rhythm and Resistance - I listen as they tell the history of the Caribbean music scene in downtown Toronto. I am being schooled about what made Toronto the North American hub for Calypso, Ska, Rock Steady, Reggae, and now Hip-Hop music.    The Friars is the only museum in Canada (or even the world) that is housed inside a drugstore. The store has a micro-museum on its second floor and is l ocated at the epicentre of what was once Toronto’s Music City – Dundas and Yonge Streets.    The store is located where the Friars Tavern and later the Hard Rock Café stood. South of Dundas Square, it was a Jazz and Blues club until it closed in 1976. Two years later the Hard Rock Café took over the building and it truly did what the name suggested – it rocked loud and hard until 2017 when the structure was re...

Spectators at last year's Caribbean Carnival Festival parade in Toronto Media manage to quickly link Eaton shooting with North America's largest Caribbean Canadian festival Late last week I joked with my associate Craigg Slowly (@ThatTDotGuy) that it would be only a matter of time before CFRB right wing on-air host Jerry Agar would link the Eaton Centre shooting with the Caribbean Carnival Toronto (the carnival formally known as Caribana). Don't know if Agar has taken a run at us yet, but, other media outlets have indeed made the tenuous link between an inner-city gang shooting at the Eaton Centre and North America's largest Caribbean cultural event. The Globe and Mail on Saturday did a feature on public safety at Yonge and Dundas and somehow managed to use the Caribana name.  The reporter, Kelly Grant, listed some of the murders that had occurred near the Dundas / Yonge intersection. In that list was the 2005 murder of a Brampton man in Dundas Squa...