Diamond & Diamond gets roughed up. Personal injury law pitchman Jeremy Diamond admitted in a recent cross examination that he’s never done a trial himself. From there, the fuzzy nature of his operation was probed by the Toronto Star. D&D denies any wrongdoing, and the firm hasn't stopped feeding ads to the Star:

The dark side of Hatchimals. Toronto toymaker Spin Master's success has given rise to the inevitable backlash: some worry that the robotic toys will distract kids from human contact, while others accuse Spin Master of contrived scarcity—and then there's the usual crew of online scam artists taking advantage of desperate parents.

Bargain nostalgia starts overtaking Toronto. The final month of Honest Ed’s is the occasion for a piece that frames the store as the last of its breed: “I still recall refusing to wear the orange tab Levis jeans I was bought at BiWay when I was around eight or nine years old,” writes Derek Flack. “I knew that most of my friends at school had red tabs, and I considered it a great injustice to be saddled with this cheaper model.”

Dollarama buys some new bourgeois midtown bona fides. While developers are bullish on reviving the Yonge and St. Clair area, its big new draw this fall is a dollar store in the basement of Delisle Court, which may at least scare the other dollar stores away. Similar excitement is building for Dollarama at Mt. Pleasant and Eglinton.

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Grey market Beatles still for sale at Walmart Canada. Attempts to shut down low-quality Canadian repackagings of early EMI recordings were so unsuccessful that the label behind the project, Stargrove Entertainment, keeps making more of them. A new, misleadingly titled compilation consists of tracks that woldn't fit on any of Stargrove's other CDs.

Trevor Noah turns to Canada to be taken seriously. The Daily Show host has had a wild first year on the job. But a recent Canadian visit to promote his memoir, Born a Crime, was rewarded with CBC features on The National and The Current, where Noah's stories of growing up mixed-race in South Africa distinguish him from the tired rest of the fake news fellowship.

Ricochet sued for $350K over a fake obituary. Journal de Montréal columnist Richard Martineau is seeking damages from the bilingual crowdfunded left-wing website over a joke death notice, accompanied by a cartoon of a dog urinating on his tombstone.