Michael Bryant is being held by police in the accident causing the death of a cyclist near Bay and Bloor in Toronto Aug 31
Story from Toronto Star and Sun
Michael Bryant, who recently resigned from the McGuinty cabinet at Attorney General, was taken into custody last night by Toronto Police. He is alleged to have been driving the SAAB convertible that was involved an accident causing the death of a cyclist in downtown Toronto.
Darcy Allan Sheppard, cyclist dead in car altercation photo: Toronto Sun
Bryant, now the head of Invest Toronto, is in police custody and charges are pending against him in connection with the deadly crash that killed a 33-year-old Darcy Allan Sheppard.
Friends say Sheppard was an 18-year bike courier who was originally from Alberta.
Toronto Police traffic services Sgt. Tim Burrows said this morning that police have yet to lay any charges and are appealing for witnesses to contact traffic services to help piece together the fatal incident. Toronto Sun
Bryant accident in depth: CTV
The accident near the intersection of Bay and Bloor Streets involved an impact, according to reports, between the automobile and the cyclist. The cyclist held onto the rear of the car and the driver of the car attempted to “scrape” the cyclist off by rubbing his car up against a posts and a mail box on the sidewalk.
The car crossed into the eastbound lane and the cyclist fell off the vehicle when the car hit the mailbox. The cyclist received injuries that caused his death.
The driver, allegedly Bryant, continued on to Avenue Road which is the next major intersection along Bloor Street stopping at the Hyatt Hotel.
Michael Bryant's SAAB showing damage on the left side where it purportedly hit a mailbox resulting in the death of the cyclist
During the day, Bay and Bloor is one of the busier intersections in Toronto with thousands of pedestrians and vehicles passing by every hour. At 9:45 PM, the time of the accident, the streets are still busy but not congested.
Police are not confirming or denying alcohol was involved or if Bryant will be charged.
Michael Bryant was considered a superstar in the McGuinty cabinet. His appointment to Invest Toronto could be seen as a patronage gift to the Liberal high-flyer.
“His (Bryant’s) camera-hogging independence worked successfully in opposition, and made him friends in the media who were bored by the official Liberal line of calculated blandness. But increasingly, his high-energy performances, though articulate, tried the patience of McGuintyites, who saw him as angling for the Premier’s job.” said John Allemang in the Globe and Mail on May, 29, 2009
How the night unfolded from CTV Globe and Mail
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Last weekend, the Star printed a story about the identity of the woman who brought a suit and shirt and tie down to Metro Toronto Police cells for Mr. Bryant so he could spruce up before his media conference. Her name is Nikki Holland, and she is Bryant’s former communications director when he was in the Cabinet. According to the same story, he had just hired her to work for him at Invest Toronto in the same capacity–she had been media relations director at the Insurance Bureau of Canada.
If you check her Facebook page, you can “scroll” her friends thumbnails by refreshing the page without entering her page, you will see that along with all of the notable Liberal Party hacks that appear as her friends, Bob Rae, Dwight Duncan, Gerard Kennedy, etc., you will find one Adam Radwanski, who is on the editorial board of the Globe and Mail.
On Sept 3, 2009, Radwanski wrote the following “blog” piece which was quite effective in smearing Darcy Sheppard and blaming him for being drunk:
“Drinking and biking
Like most everything else about the Michael Bryant case, Darcy Allan Sheppard’s level of intoxication (or lack thereof) when police encountered him earlier that evening remains very unclear. But the allegation that the officers sent him off on his bike knowing that he was in rough shape – true or not – drags yet another social issue into this saga.
Whatever happened here, there’s no question that attitudes toward drunk cycling are wildly different from those toward drunk driving, at least in urban areas. If you bring your car out for an evening at a bar or a friend’s home, you’re expected to keep alcohol consumption to a minumum. But there’s no similar taboo around cycling. Unless they’re practically falling-down drunk, you’ll often see tipsy people wandering out of bars and hopping on their bikes with nary an eyebrow being raised.
Obviously, the dangers of operating a motor vehicle are considerably higher; you’re likelier to hurt yourself than anyone else if you’re on a bicycle. But there’s still the possibility of striking a pedestrian or another cyclist, or forcing a car to swerve dangerously out of the way, or – as may have been the case this week – winding up in a dangerous confrontation.
The very notion that police would have sent Sheppard on his merry way in a car after he’d been drinking is unthinkable. Maybe it should be no less unthinkable that he’d have been sent off on a bike. ”
Although I am not a journalist, it seems to me to be questionable that this guy should be publishing this kind of disparaging stuff when he is a “friend” of Bryant’s longtime PR rep (Holland), at least to the point of being on her facebook page identified as one. Maybe it should be brought to the attention of the Globe that it ain’t exactly “objective” reporting. It also underscores the tight relations between members of the “media communications” industry and the people they’re supposedly writing about from arm’s length. Incestuous is an apt description. However, from a more social vantage point, it also calls into doubt whether or not the victim’s interests will be paved under in the criminal proceedings to follow Mr. Bryant as this type of spin treatment may also have tainted the pool of potential jurors. Or did Navigator Ltd. not know that when they started to spin their wheels last week?