P&C Title Hijacked By Toronto Silly Hall

Manipulation by City Hall

By ROB GRANATSTEIN

"It's not political correctness gone wild," says Kevin Sack, Toronto's director of strategic communications. It sure looks that way.

The cover of the Toronto's newest Fun Guide uses a stock photo of a smiling family as art. Well, not quite. What we have is photo manipulation -- at its worst.

The family of smiling people lose dad and have a new, black man dropped into the family via digital editing. Oh, how diverse are we.

The National Post did an excellent job this week of posting the original stock photo, and skewering the city for making Toronto look so inclusive to our entire diverse population that we're ridiculous. "Is this from yousuckatphotoshop.com," asked our wiseacre editorial designer when he saw it. "Diversity is really important," Sack said, adding the city wants everyone to feel included and welcome.

"The policy is not to use various photo editing techniques to make it happen." And, as Sack points out, there are wonderful pictures inside the Fun Guide depicting that wonderful city mosaic.

It's also helped turn City Hall into the cut-and-paste phenom of the web world. At stillepost.ca, keyboard wizards have done their own photoshop job to the Fun Guide, replacing new, black dad with O.J. Simpson, Will Smith (Fresh Prince era), and even Osama Bin Laden. U.S. gossip site Gawker.com mocks the city, too.

Enough yucks. Next time, a real pic please.