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Instead of the all-too-familiar suggestions of excess police violence or racial bias, the Toronto Police Service, thanks in part to Const. Kenny Lam, looked like a model of proper training and expertise.

There was no opportunity to foment or exploit cultural division. Instead, we saw what can only be described as the real Toronto, an amazingly unified multicultural and multi-racial metropolis. A parade of people from around the globe — Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe — were represented as the media interviewed the workers and residents of the high-rise office and condo towers on the strip of Yonge that itself is a mosaic of international food and retail services. The alleged killer was arrested by a Chinese-Canadian cop in front of a storefront dominated by giant Arabic lettering.

Photo by Dave Abel/Toronto Sun/Postmedia News

There was nothing to exploit.

Or so it seemed until Wednesday morning when, less than 48 hours after the event, the CBC had managed to find a social and political cause to attach to the deaths and injuries: automobile traffic.

On CBC Radio’s The Current, host Anna Maria Tremonti introduced the idea that the deliberate murder of pedestrians by a lone and likely deranged driver could be used to promote the urban planning idea that Toronto is a city where pedestrians are vulnerable due to a dangerous mingling of speeding automobiles and vulnerable slow-moving bicycles and pedestrians.

As The Current played out, the Yonge Street tragedy became the foundation for the promotion of a radical urban-planning agenda known as Vision Zero, an international movement with the objective of reducing pedestrian deaths and serious injuries to literally zero.