Steve Ladurantaye

Chris Jones didn’t expect to cause a firestorm when he wrote a column for ESPN The Magazine that compared the Montreal Expos to the Florida Marlins.

But one line in particular caught the attention of some of the magazine’s Twitter followers and sparked an instant controversy: “You’re about to witness the Montreal Massacre, Part II, only on a far grander, even more heartbreaking scale.”

Read the story in the Globe and Mail

Mr. Jones swears he didn’t mean to link the Ecole Polytechnique shootings – where Marc Lepine killed 14 female students in 1989 – to the troubles facing a baseball team. Within a few hours of online publication, the magazine tacked an apology to the bottom of the column.

Here’s how it all came together.

So how did this actually happen?

I’m the back page columnist at the magazine. I probably wrote this column about two weeks ago, and it’s my fourth column. I started relatively recently and was pretty excited because this was the first time I took a stand on something. The first three were more feature-ish. So we posted the column this morning, and I made a joke about how it was the first time lawyers had to vet something I had written. I got some nice tweets about it.

When did you get the sense something bad was happening?

My wife had just taken the kids out and I was working on a feature for Esquire, and I was expecting angry responses from Miami fans saying “how dare you suggest this will happen to our team.” And the first message said something about “bullshit,” and I didn’t clue in. I thought it was just about comparing the two cities. But then someone else retweeted it and said “Holy f**k,” and that’s when a cold sweat covered my body. I actually started shaking.

You were quick to apologize via Twitter.

It’s one of those things – I get a poor reception on Twitter sometimes because I fight back when I think people are being unfair. But this was a full on mistake. In a situation like that, I can just hope people believe me when I say I never in a million years would I compare a murder to losing a baseball team.

Aren’t you Canadian?

I’m Canadian, but when it happened my family lived in Australia. It’s all on me, but I was 15 and on the other side of the world. There was no Internet. Obviously I know what it is. If you say Columbine, I’m right there. But if you say Montreal, I think of a million other things first. I thought about it all day – how I didn’t see it. But I just didn’t – and I read that line 100 times. My whole point was that the owner murdered the Expos – it wasn’t an accidental situation. It was the purposeful killing of a team – in my head, I just went to massacre.

What do you say to people who think you knew what you were doing?

As if I would ever do that. If I had even one millisecond where I said “Oh, there’s this reference” I would change it. It would be such an easy change – I was just trying to compare the Expos to the Marlins. I didn’t have to say massacre – the piece didn’t depend on that. I know there are people who don’t believe me. But if they could have seen me and felt the hot flush they would know how badly I felt.

Chris Jones had a very bad day yesterday, and he’s not going to feel much better about things today.

The Port Hope, Ont. writer recently landed a gig as the back page columnist for ESPN Magazine, a U.S.-based sports magazine that does about 2-million copies every two weeks. That’s the good part.

Read the story in the Globe and Mail

An auction in the southern United States.

For $6,000 (U.S.), Wanda Smith bought her dream home in the country.

It might not have been much to look at – the mobile home on a quarter acre of Georgia brush had been vacant for some time and exposed to the elements through broken windows and a leaky roof.

The last owner was foreclosed on, and left in a hurry. The trailer was littered with forgotten items – a child’s doll was on the kitchen counter beside a Mars Attacks DVD. A pair of dirty jeans lay in a heap at the back door.

Read the story in the Globe and Mail

But none of that mattered to Ms. Smith as she raised her hand to bid on the property at a recent real estate auction in Macon, Ga., about 135 kilometres south of Atlanta. Less than 10 years ago it was worth close to $25,000, and she has rented around the corner for years. The persistent crowing of roosters won’t catch her by surprise, nor will the hole in the middle of the bedroom floor.

“I’m going to make it a home,” she said after the auction, her eyes wide with surprise that she had managed to place the winning bid. “It will be my own.”

The small auction is one of thousands taking place each month across the United States as foreclosures continue to happen at a record pace and banks scramble to sell properties at any price to help rebuild their balance sheets.

The sales are helping to clear a backlog of inventory, albeit at a glacial pace, and are also making it possible for those who couldn’t afford a property through the boom years to settle comfortably into a new home while interest rates are low and houses are relatively inexpensive.

It’s just one way the U.S. housing market is struggling to rebuild after a momentous crash that has many properties selling for as little as 50 per cent of the lofty prices they fetched only three years ago. And some for even less.

“These banks aren’t asking me to sell these properties for a lot of money,” said John Dixon of John Dixon and Associates. “They are asking us to sell them so they can get on with other lending.”

Although he has sold thousands of houses for the banks over the years, there’s no risk of running out of work to do. A report from the Centre for Responsible Lending said that at least 2.7 million mortgages issued between 2004 and 2008, or 6 per cent of all mortgages issued in that time, have ended in foreclosure. Another four million are heading that way in the next two years.

“The nation is not even halfway through the foreclosure crisis,” says the report, which analyzed 27 million mortgages made over the five years.

The auction that made a homeowner of Ms. Smith featured six houses, all of them within a one-hour drive of Macon. About 50 people gathered in a small room at the back of a convention centre, with a few more on the line to place bids over the phone.

The auction itself is as much about theatre as it is about commerce. Over two hours, auctioneer (and Mr. Dixon’s son) Drew Dixon worked as hard at entertaining the bidders as he did at driving up the bids. A dozen staff members circulated through the stuffy room, making eye contact with bidders and locking in on anyone who wanted in on the action.

Once a bidder is identified, a staffer will stand beside them and maintain constant eye contact. The employee’s role is to theatrically shout when the bidder decides to keep going, and each has their own signature move. If you take your eye off them for a moment, you could lose your property.

“What? It’s over?” one man complained as the auction ended on a piece of commercial property outside the city that he wanted to develop. “I had at least another $50,000 left to go.”

The houses sold for as little as 20 per cent of the prerecession highs. Commercial buildings retained about half their value, while the valuation on building lots varied wildly depending on neighbourhood.

“For those prices, you may as well buy something to give away as a Christmas present,” Drew Dixon said.

T.D. Brantley has something like that in mind. The retired plumber trolls regional auctions looking for deals, and at the Macon auction picked up two fixer-uppers for a combined total less than $30,000.

The houses are in rough shape, any copper has been stripped out long ago and the previous owners had no incentive to leave the properties in decent shape. But he will fix them and then step in where the banks won’t – it’s a formula he’s repeated dozens of times.

“I’ll sell them to people,” Mr. Brantley said. “I’m the bank, I provide the financing. They give me a down payment, they pay me monthly payments. The house is paid back in a few months, and if they miss a payment then they are out. Either way, I’ll end up ahead.”

So will John Dixon And Associates. The auctioneers have been selling houses for more than 30 years, said long-time staffer Jack Napier. The process works in any economy – in good times the buyers line up to get the best prices. Lately, buyers are harder to find and sellers are lining up to get their properties listed.

“The sellers will take what they can get. It has to be worse than the Depression, how could it not be,” he said, minutes before the no-reserve auction began. “I’ve never seen anything this bad, though. But still, every one of our properties will go.”

The other day, I activated my Facebook Timeline and was presented with three years of crap that I had uploaded to the site. None of it was embarrassing, but it did crystallize many of the thoughts I had in the back of my mind about the amount of content I had uploaded over the years.

I’ve often posted pictures of my kids, and that’s because we have family from out of town who like to look at them. That seemed fine a few years ago for some reason, but privacy-breach-after-privacy-breach and other random Facebook goings-ons had me reconsidering whether that’s a good idea.

It’s not easy to live without a Facebook account any more – it’s increasingly used as a gateway to news sites and other services that I use for my job all the time.

But it’s also really hard to take stuff down. So, rather than scrub the thing I decided to deactivate and start over from scratch. That also helps whittle down the list of 600-plus “friends” I’ve accumulated over that time without actually defriending anyone – there are a lot of people on there I’ve never met and it’s silly to keep reading about what online games they are into at the moment.

I mostly wrote this so that when someone DOES accuse me of abandoning them, as inevitably happens, I can point to the post to prove that nothing mean was happening. Promise.

That’s all.

Small children are about to be big business in Ontario, as an acquisition-hungry Western child-care company takes its controversial blueprint to a province whose daycare industry is struggling to keep up with demand for space.

Edleun Group Inc. will spend millions to acquire seven Montessori daycares in the province – four as-yet-undisclosed centres in Toronto and three in Windsor. Parents may not see prices drop when they take over, the company says, but they also won’t rise as fast as they might have otherwise.

Read the story in the Globe and Mail

Critics, however, charge the company’s unprecedented consolidation of daycare centres threatens to commercialize the education of young children, and will result in subpar services as the company looks to squeeze as much profit as possible out of each centre.

This is the Calgary-based company’s first foray into a province whose daycare sector is under increasing pressure. Governments in such major centres as Toronto are considering cuts to city-subsidized spaces because of a budget crisis, and the introduction of all-day kindergarten has thrown the financial plans of many small operators into disarray.

“We understand there are a number of non-profit operators who worry they will need to vacate their space and this creates an opportunity,” said chief executive officer Ty Durekas. “We believe we are offering what is on par with the public system, and in many cases we are investing more into the classroom than would happen otherwise.”

The company says its model allows it to create new spaces for less – it can buy supplies in bulk and outsource administrative functions to a central office. But critics take a dimmer view.

“The bottom line is this is a business and a business exists to make money,” said Martha Friendly, founder and executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, a policy and research-oriented facility focusing on early childhood education and child care. “And any money that is considered profit is money that is not being spent on children.”

While the daycare sectors in Britain and the United States tend to be dominated by a few large, publicly traded companies, Canada’s daycare centres have remained mostly privately owned and non-profit (a report from Ontario’s Childcare Resource and Research Unit estimates 75 per cent of Canadian daycares are non-profit).

Private equity funds and venture investors have long eyed Canadian centres, but were deterred because of the thousands of small operators. Edleun has stepped in to fill that void, raising more than $40-million to buy centres across the country.

It now operates 2,539 daycare spaces in Alberta and British Columbia in 29 centres. The Ontario purchase nearly doubles its number of spots, to 4,711. It doesn’t plan to stop there – it has some 80 other small centres on its wish list in three other provinces. The company will not say where, although it ruled out Quebec.

Nationally, the Institute for Research and Public Policy estimates there is a need for about 165,000 regulated daycare spaces.

Edleun is counting on its belief that daycare operators feel threatened by economic uncertainty and funding models that are often dependent on government contributions, while at the same time facing increasing operating costs. Better to sell now, Edleun contends.

In Windsor, the company found a willing seller in Julie Roy and her three Children’s House Montessori centres. Edleun will spend $5.5-million to buy the centres, and the 485 spaces they contain.

“I felt like I reached the potential for what I could do privately,” Ms. Roy said. “Having the backing of a multimillion-dollar corporation is nothing but exciting for us. They can offer my staff things I could only dream of offering, and for parents everything stays the exact same as what they are used to seeing.”

Edleun said it will keep existing staff at each facility, and Ms. Roy will take a senior position.