Montreal Mayor Michael Applebaum was arrested this morning, facing 14 criminal charges including fraud against the government.

This is the next story in a continuing saga of fraud and crime in Montreal’s mayoral office - Applebaum’s predecessor was Gérald Tremblay, who resigned in 2012 after allegations of crime and fraud. Laval’s mayor, Gilles Vaillancourt, resigned earlier this year for charges including (wait for it) gangsterism. Yes, that is something you can be charged for. Gangsterism.

Nevermind…

The French-language CBC has decided, in the face of a backlash, to re-rebrand itself.

The company apologized and revised a marketing plan that would have seen its traditional name, “Radio-Canada,” essentially wiped off the public stage.

The idea had triggered complaints from a union representing some of its employees, condemnation from its political bosses in the federal cabinet, endless ribbing in social media, and coverage in the New York Times.

“We apologize for the confusion that was created in people’s minds when we introduced the term ICI as a common denominator for all of our platforms,” CBC/Radio-Canada president Hubert Lacroix said in the statement.

“Our intention was never to distance ourselves from Radio-Canada and everything it represents. However, Radio-Canada has heard the message loud and clear that the public has been sending us over the past few days.

On Monday, a headline on the English-language CBC site said, “Radio-Canada retreats on rebranding company as ICI.” Later in the day, the most popular reader comment under the CBC story, liked by a margin of 123 votes to four, was: “Good! The whole idea was stupid.”

From the NP

Forty artists have made this years Polaris Prize long list, including Tegan and Sara, above. The list will be cut down to ten in July, and the winner will be announced in September.

The Polaris Prize is Canada’s most prestigious music award, a prize of $30,000 to the album judges choose to be the best, disregarding music sales and genre.

The long list is:

• A Tribe Called Red – Nation II Nation
• Alaclair Ensemble – Les maigres blancs d’Amérique du Noir
• ANCIIENTS – Heart of Oak
• The Besnard Lakes – Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO
• Louis-Jean Cormier – Le Treizième Étage
• Daphni – JIAOLONG
• Mac DeMarco – 2
• Evening Hymns – Spectral Dusk
• Hannah Georgas – Hannah Georgas
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor – ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
• Chilly Gonzales – Solo Piano II
• Jim Guthrie – Takes Time
• Hayden – Us Alone
• Zaki Ibrahim – Every Opposite
• KEN mode – Entrench
• Kid Koala – 12 bit Blues
• Kobo Town – Jumbie in the Jukebox
• Pierre Lapointe – Punkt
• Lee Harvey Osmond – The Folk Sinner
• Les soeurs Boulay – Le poids des confettis
• Corb Lund – Cabin Fever
• The Luyas – Animator
• Majical Cloudz – Impersonator
• Metric – Synthetica
• METZ – METZ
• Danny Michel with the Garifuna Collective – Black Birds Are Dancing Over Me
• AC Newman – Shut Down The Streets
• Old Man Luedecke – Tender is The Night
• Lindi Ortega – Cigarettes & Truckstops
• Peter Peter – Une version améliorée de la tristesse
• Purity Ring – Shrines
• Rah Rah – The Poet’s Dead
• Rhye – Woman
• Daniel Romano – Come Cry With Me
• Colin Stetson – New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light
• Suuns – Images du futur
• Tegan and Sara – Heartthrob
• Al Tuck – Stranger at the Wake
• Whitehorse – The Fate of the World Depends On This Kiss
• Young Galaxy – Ultramarine

Queen Elizabeth II and Stephen Harper during a private meeting at Buckingham Palace on June 12, 2013. Harper arrived in Britain ahead of the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland on June 17-18.

Lawrence Hill’s 2007 novel The Book of Negroes is becoming a TV miniseries, which will air on CBC and BET.

Published in 2007, The Book of Negroes tells the story of an African woman named Aminata Diallo who is kidnapped from Africa and sold into slavery in the southern U.S. She later makes her way to Halifax and, finally, to England at the turn of the 19th century.

Filming is slated to begin in the fall in South Africa.

I am very excited, I loved the book and I’ve had the opportunity to see Hill speak and speak with him and he is absolutely the nicest person. So glad for his continued success!

PS - some trivia for you:

• Hill’s father, Daniel Hill, is a Black Canadian historian and human rights specialist, and has received the Order of Ontario and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada (read more about his extraordinary life here).
• Lawrence Hill’s brother is Dan Hill, who became popular in the 70s/80s with his hit single, “Sometimes When We Touch” (you obviously know this song but if not click here). Quite the family!

Astronaut Chris Hadfield announced today that he will be retiring from the Canadian Space Agency, ending his 21 year career. He said he would take the opportunity to take on new professional challenges.

Best of luck in the future to Chris Hadfield, who made global headlines this year when he used social media to tell the world about his life at the International Space Station.

Hadfield will also be moving back to Canada - he has been living in Texas since his days as a fighter pilot in the 1980s.

From the CBC.

Above is a photo of Michael Stark and Michael Leshner, the first same-sex couple in Canada to have their marriage legally recognized by law. They were married ten years ago today in Toronto, after the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld a ruling from a lower court that found the previous marriage law to be unconstitutional.

The story made headlines around the world - as far as England and China - and in the press they were dubbed “The Michaels.” They talked to CBC this morning about the significance of that day, and you can watch the video here.

The couple have been married for 10 years, but together for 32. Happy anniversary, Michaels!

Ottawa’s Mark Hutt has been found guilty of first degree murder of his wife, Donna Jones (above). Donna Jones died in December of 2009, after her husband doused her in boiling water and waited two weeks to call 911. After the burns, she had also sustained injuries such as  broken nose, two black eyes and many cuts, bruises and scrapes on her head, knees and legs, and shot her with a pellet gun (an autopsy found 29 pellets within her body). Her cause of death was septic shock - she died from infections of the wounds she had sustained from the burns. If she had been able to seek medical help right away, she would have had virtually a 100 percent chance of survival.

Cheers erupted the courtroom when the guilty verdict was called. May you have a long, slow, painful death, Mark Hutt.

Donna Jones was 33 when she died, and was a rising star within a human resources department within the federal government. She was bubbly, kind, and much loved by friends and family. RIP Donna Jones.

French-language CBC is changing its name, from Radio-Canada to ICI (which means “here” in French for those anglophones who don’t remember doing attendance in French class).

Today is World No Tobacco Day!

Almost 20% of Canadians 12 and over smoke, and close to 17% deaths in Canada can be attributed to tobacco. Worldwide, smoking kills one in ten adults. But in 2010, 60% of Canadians who had beens smokers had quit. One year after quitting smoking, the risk of coronary heart disease falls by half. About 10 years after someone quits, the risk of dying from lung cancer falls by half.

From the CBC.

RIP Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who died today in Toronto at the age of 90.

Morgentaler is well known in Canada, both revered and hated, for crusading for access to safe and legal abortions. In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada declared existing anti-abortion law unconstitutional, much in part to Morgentaler’s work as an activist for the cause.

An interesting passage from the Globe and Mail:

Dr. Morgentaler had a complex relationship with women all his life. As a child, he felt his mother didn’t love him as much as his younger brother; as a doctor, he performed thousands of safe, but illegal, abortions on desperate women with unwanted pregnancies; as a social and political activist, he worked to repeal Canada’s draconian abortion law in order to give women control over their reproductive lives; as a medical administrator, he opened eight clinics across the country to try to give women equality of access to abortions; and, as a man, he was a consummate philanderer who married three times and conducted many extramarital affairs. “He was a man who loved women and couldn’t be monogamous,” Catherine Dunphy wrote in her 1998 book, Morgentaler: A Difficult Hero.

Dr. Mortentaler was born and raised in Poland, and was imprisoned at Dachau for being Jewish during the Second World War. After surviving the Holocaust, he immigrated to the United States and finally to Canada in 1950. He attended the University of Montreal, where he received his medical education, and was one of the first Canadian doctors to perform vasectomies and to provide birth control pills to the unmarried.

He became a Member of the Order of Canada in  2008, “for his commitment to increased health care options for women, his determined efforts to influence Canadian public policy and his leadership in humanist and civil liberties organizations.”

RIP Dr. Morgentaler.

Ottawa was crowned with the award of Most Boring City according to the inaugural Boring Awards in Toronto last night.

Ottawa beat out Laval, Que., Lethbridge, Alta., Abbotsford, B.C. and Brampton, Ont. 

To add commentary, I lived in Ottawa and I think there is tons to do! Culturally, mostly.

Today’s Google doodle was in recognition of 140 years of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, formally the North West Mounted Police.

The NWMP formed when PM John A. MacDonald grew concerned about liquor trafficking and a general lack of government control in the western provinces. Today, the RCMP are the main police force for three territories and eight provinces, and are one of the most recognized police forces in the world.