In November, Toronto police arrested 11 people – the so-called “Indigo 11″ – on charges of hate-motivated mischief for allegedly postering Indigo founder and chief executive Heather Reisman’s face over a fake quote on the company’s flagship store in downtown Toronto and smearing the windows with blood-red paint. In early January, the first of the defendants arrived in court, and it has turned out that most of them are, for lack of a better word, intellectuals – many with PhDs, and many employed by universities, schools and other cultural institutions.
Their trial, therefore, is about more than an act of vandalism: It is a painfully clarifying reflection on the ideological state of the Canadian establishment.
