Sears Canada has sent all the dummies packing. The final days of the department stores came with yet another tale of pensioners who expect to get screwed. Despite initial bargain-hunter carnage, though, the Fairview Mall location shuttered with a whimper last month—it's due to be replaced by Indigo, which aspires to liven up more dead shopping centres. An appropriately dystopian retail scene was supplied at Scarborough Town Centre:

Loblaw’s bread price-fixing panacea smells half-baked. A lawyer launching a bid for class-action certification against the grocer calls the gift card offer “a misleading and deceitful public relations campaign.” Meanwhile, the calls to turn the $25 credits into a food bank donation are getting louder.

“Everyone is King” seeks to mitigate King Street pilot complaints. Mayor John Tory and councillor Michael Thompson signed a Toronto Star op-ed defending the streetcar scheme and announcing a public art competition for spring. Another promotion, “Eats on King” hopes to enliven the strip's winter sidewalks, as restaurants claim they’re being drained by abysmal foot traffic. For his part, councillor John Campbell has taken aim at a forthcoming transit adjustment, on the grounds that it will support expensive eateries too much:

Albert Schultz accusers are co-signed by 280 artistic allies. “Harassment at Soulpepper Theatre Company,” an open letter in the wake of a lawsuit from four actresses, comes with a hope that the compay's board of directors will “acknowledge the harm these women, and others, have suffered.” Contrary revelations have little chance of changing Schultz's fate, though, as Margaret Wente laments.

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Won’t anyone think of the paperboys? The print news media has likely entered a “year of reckoning,” as publishers wait for feds to be as mindful of the newspapers' needs as they are about supporting Facebook. But amidst Ottawa losing eight Metroland weeklies—the result of Torstar swapping them to Postmedia, which closed them—comes the story of 12-year-old Sebastien Tubb, unsurprised that his $11 per week delivery gig is ceasing to exist.

Oprah Winfrey might be elected before Jagmeet Singh is. The decision of the NDP leader to avoid the House of Commons—at least until a seat opens up in a riding where he feels a “genuine connection”—looks unlikely to change through 2018. In the meantime, Singh happily hangs back with nothing but respect for his president:

Fire and Fury buoys another book. Randall Hansen, a U of T professor, has had a spike in Amazon sales for his 2009 book about the Allied bombing of Germans during the Second World War. He owes his overnight success to a similarly titled Donald Trump exposé. Demand for the 359 print copies of the latter book at the Toronto Public Library (which ordered 29 at first) has exceeded 2,000 holds, prompting TPL to suggest 13 alternatives, including David Frum’s Trumpocracy.