The owners of video allegedly showing Toronto's mayor smoking crack go missing in the middle of crowdfunding campaign

The effort by news site Gawker to bust Toronto mayor Rob Ford for allegedly smoking crack is crack journalism work. Toronto is Canada's biggest city. Canada has a $680bn trade relationship with the United States. We can't have them high on crack.

The spangers Gawker has deployed outside New York subway stops to raise money to buy a video purportedly showing Ford crack-smoking, however, smell bad and obstruct pedestrian flow. We exaggerate; Gawker has not deployed spangers. But the website is begging for money from the public to supplement its news gathering budget, so it can afford to pay off the drug dealers who own the video.

It's not a traditional news-gathering technique. It's the kind of thing that causes ethicists of journalism to stroke their chins at double-speed and could outright kill the more delicate newsroom ombudspeople. Gawker doesn't care about all that.

What Gawker might care about, however, is its reputation as a street-smart media machine, and the present episode has so far not burnished that.

For starters, the drug dealers appear to have disappeared, taking the video – the big payoff – with them. Gawker editor John Cook on Thursday notified potential contributors to the crowd-funding campaign, called Crackstarter, that Gawker may no longer be able to deliver the goods.

"The last time we established contact with the people who are in possession of the video was this past Sunday, and we have not been able to reach them since," wrote Cook, who knows the video exists because he enterprisingly traveled to Canada to see it for himself. "… If you are considering contributing, you should be aware that our confidence that we can get a deal done has, on account of the foregoing, diminished since we came up with this idea."

The faith of thousands of Gawker readers who have collectively contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the effort is on the line. As of midday Friday, the Crackstarter had raised $163,000 toward its goal of $200,000, which is how much the drug dealers want for the video. More than 6,000 individuals had contributed. Gawker says that if it raises the $200,000 by the deadline, 11.59pm Monday, but is unable to obtain the video, "every penny" of the money will be given to "a Canadian non-profit that helps people suffering from addiction".

Many readers of Gawker may personally be gratified at having contributed to charity. But a lot more would probably rather see mayoral crack-smoking footage.

Next, for a media conglomerate such as Gawker, the money in question would seem to be rather – how to put this – small. If Gawker's editors deem the story worth $200,000 to break – as they patently must, for the only alternative is they take their readers for fools – couldn't they find it in their budget? David Karp farts $200,000. Jonah Peretti just pulled $200,000 out from behind this gentleman's ear. Nick Denton needs to pass the hat?

(Beyond what it says about Gawker, the episode points to the relative innocence of Canadian politics. In its first week, Crackstarter barely cracked $150,000. How fast do you think the internet could come up with $200,000 to buy a video of a mayor of a comparably sized US city – Rahm Emanuel, say – smoking crack cocaine? [Rahm Emanuel has never done that.] Faster than you can say "Sheldon Adelson is urinating on America's gift to the world its open democracy.")

Finally, the Crackstarter campaign looks hypocritical, because, as the site's own commenters have pointed out, Gawker has given the full Gawker treatment to well-heeled Kickstarter users. (Crackstarter uses Indiegogo.) In a post last month tagged "crowdfarcing", Sam Biddle of the Gawker subblog Valleywag made fun of actor Zach Braff's Kickstarter campaign to run his new movie.

"Kickstarter has the potential to make some very neat stuff happen for people of modest means who need a little boost for a good idea," Biddle wrote. "But for every lazy, exploitative, Give-This-Successful-Person-Cash-Just-Cause campaign, the startup loses credibility and gains a legion of rolled eyes."

Here's hoping the drug dealers start returning Cook's middleman's calls, and we get to see the evidence and judge for ourselves whether Toronto mayor Rob Ford smokes crack, an allegation he has called "ridiculous".

Or one big lucky day may be coming up for an unnamed Canadian charity.

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Mayor dismisses video purportedly showing him smoking the drug as 'nonsense' a day after firing longtime chief of staff

The embattled mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, was forced on Friday to repeat a denial of allegations that he uses crack cocaine and dismiss descriptions of a video purportedly showing him smoking the drug as "nonsense".

At a press conference, Ford refused to answer questions from a packed crowd of journalists. However, he was firm in stating that he does not use hard drugs or does not have any form of substance abuse problem. "I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict of crack cocaine," Ford said.

The alleged crack smoking video has not been released publicly but reports on the gossip website Gawker and in the Toronto Star claimed it was taken by men who said they had sold the drug to Ford. Journalists at the two organisations have written lengthy descriptions of a video they say they have watched, and Gawker has even launched an appeal to raise $200,000 to buy the video and publish it.

The Star reported that two journalists had watched a video that appeared to show Ford sitting in a chair, inhaling from what appears to be a glass crack pipe. Gawker and the Star said the video was shown to them by a drug dealer who was trying to sell it. The Star also reported that in the video Ford allegedly made a racist remark about high school football students he coached.

Ford said he could not comment on the video at all. "I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen or does not exist," he said. He attacked the media for running with the story. "It is very unfortunate that my colleagues and great people of this city have been exposed to the fact that I have been judged by the media without any evidence," he said. "This past week has not been an easy one. It has taken a great toll on my family and my friends and the great people of Toronto."

Ford has been embroiled in almost weekly controversies about his behaviour since he was elected in 2010. The Toronto Star reported earlier this year that he was asked to leave a gala fundraiser for wounded Canadian soldiers because he appeared to be intoxicated.

During his campaign for mayor, Ford vehemently denied a 1999 arrest for marijuana possession in Florida; he later acknowledged it was true, after confronted with evidence. He pleaded guilty to driving under the influence and failing to give a breath sample to police.

Yet the crack allegations have no doubt been the biggest scandal to hit Ford, creating headlines around the world and becoming the subject of endless jokes on late-night comedy shows. Earlier on Friday the executive committee of Toronto city council – which acts as sort of cabinet to the mayor – released a letter asking Ford to address the allegations "openly and transparently". That came a day after Canadian media reported that Ford's chief of staff, Mark Towhey, had been fired after telling the mayor to go to rehab. According to reports in the Toronto Sun, the National Post and CBC News, Towhey urged Ford to "go away, deal with this and then come back".

Perhaps not surprisingly, Ford has been enduring a roasting in the local press. The Toronto Sun ran its story on Towhey's concerns under a front-page splash headline that read simply: "Go to rehab".

Yet at the press conference, Ford appeared committed to remaining in his job. "It is business as usual at City Hall. This administration is turning the corner, and I will continue to do what the great people of the city elected me to do and that was to keep taxes low, to improve customer service and to reduce the size and costs of government and invest in infrastructure," he said.

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This revival of the 1974 adaptation of Mordecai Richler's novel proved a wonderful shop-window for the young Richard Dreyfuss

Just a year shy of its 40th anniversary, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz has been proudly spruced up and reissued; an act of reclamation, in some level, for a film that back in the early 70s, was one of the first Canadian features to make an international impact. Adapted from Mordecai Richler's 1959 novel set in a Jewish area of Montreal about a bustling young man furiously angling to get ahead – the missing link, if you will, between Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run and Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus – Duddy Kravitz is an affectionate picaresque detailing the push-pull impact of the new world on émigrés from old Europe. Clan loyalty contends with ruthless self-advancement; expediency with tenderness; ambition with gullibility.

The film also provided a tremendous showcase for a mid-20s Richard Dreyfuss, whose blazing, restless performance marked him out as a major talent. Dreyfuss wasn't exactly a newbie at the time – he'd already done American Graffiti – but this was his first proper lead and he nailed it, pure and simple. (The boiling charisma he exudes in every second of the film has the slightly unfortunate effect of sucking all the acting oxygen out of every scene: everyone else in the film seems pretty colourless in comparison.)

The opening scene sets the mood: Kravitz is part of a cadet marching band (the flag leading them out, incidentally is the Union Jack; the maple leaf wasn't adopted until 1965, six years after the film's setting) and spends his time tripping up his fellow cadets, blowing up condoms, until finally diving into the cab of a convenient truck to escape. Kravitz then proceeds to embark on a number of money-making schemes – from working as a waiter in a fancy resort to hiring a washed-up documentary-maker (played by, of all people, Denholm Elliot) to support a business filming weddings and barmitzvahs. In fact, the sequence in which an irate Elliot tackles his first barmitzvah as if he's Robert J Flaherty is arguably the funniest of the film – and the "artistic" documentary he produces is shown in its entirety.

What is perhaps most interesting, four decades on, is the extent to which Kravitz and his contemporaries are so mired in the complications of their ethnic identity. His older brother Lenny is drawn to the high Anglo world around them, to the extent he calls himself "anti-semitic"; Duddy, himself, resents the intellectual socialism of his rich uncle, deriding its essentially submissive nature. Duddy – or "Doody", as most of his contemporaries seem to call him – exemplifies the youthful ethnic energy that had revolutionised American cinema since Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate; Dreyfuss' Kravitz is a twitchier, sweatier, more Philistine version, but one equally capable of grabbing the imagination. Dreyfuss would go on to bigger things, but not all of them better.

Rating: 4/5

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People, especially Americans, are willing to pay money to find out if Toronto mayor Rob Ford used illegal drugs

So, it's come to this, has it? We're off, having progressed past the good old fashioned hyperventilating over the latest (boring) celebrity sex tape, past teen sexting and upskirt shots and straight on into the heart of darkness: the dirtiest of street drugs and the politicians who may or may not have been filmed ingesting them. Well, if we're going, we might as well have Conrad Black along for the ride. It's been that kind of a week up here in Canada.

The whole thing started last week when Gawker announced that it had seen a video in which Toronto mayor Rob Ford was filmed inhaling crack cocaine and uttering homophobic slurs about the leader of Canada's Liberal party. The story became an instant online hit, not least for the fact that Gawker had apparently refused to pay the video's owner the six-figure bounty he or she requested to hand it over and instead decided to crowdsource the payment. As of Tuesday evening, it's raised about $100,000 – half of its ultimate goal of $200,000.

That last bit is a clever bit of passing-the-buck by the Gawker crowd. In the end, as many have noted, the money will go to (apparently) a few drug dealers in Toronto, and nobody – including Gawker, probably – could really defend why they want the video that badly. Or seriously justify handing over that kind of cash to what are allegedly criminals. But if "the people" provide it? If "the people" demand it? Well, then …

The people are demanding it, it seems, even willing to put their own money on the line. And you can almost smell the schadenfreude. Rob Ford took power (that is, as much power as a Canadian mayor can really have) in Toronto a few years ago without winning any support in the city's urban core, and hasn't stopped embarrassing them since. He didn't show up to the pride parade. He's fat. He's been accused of sexual harassment. He hates public transit. And now this.

He's the festering blister on the latte-sipping fingers of Toronto's elite, rubbing them exactly the wrong way as they try to go about projecting an image of the city as world class. Ford used to be Homer Simpson, but he's now even lost that eye-rolling, rude humor. Now he's just Amanda Bynes, terrifying and confusing, sad and shameful.

Just listen to this testimonial:

"As a friend of mine said, he's like the embarrassing guest at a family Christmas party. We don't need an embarrassing mayor and he need not be an embarrassing mayor."

That's Black – the former newspaper baron, and a man recently released back to Canada after spending three years in US jail on for fraud obstruction of justice charges – speaking in an interview with the Toronto Star this week. Yes. Think of Conrad, Rob. Think of the embarrassment this is causing him.

Black's overall point was this: say something. "If I were accused of being a cocaine user and I wasn't, I wouldn't pretend that the issue wasn't out there," Black said, referring to the fact that, immediately following the allegations, Ford went underground, even canceling his radio show for the next week, presumably in the hopes the whole thing will blow over. Ford surfaced briefly Tuesday to make an announcement, but only gave a brief statement that the city's pending deal for a casino might be dead. He took no questions on the crack scandal.

If he's hoping for this to all go away, Ford's got another thing coming. He's wobbling on the edge of a new frontier, facing the convergence point where new media companies with terrific reach will pay for news, quasi-news and non-news, and old media will breathlessly report on the how there's someone out there willing to pay for all this news – the good stuff – so that when it is duly purchased and public, they can report on it and assure themselves that all along, they maintained the moral high ground.

Let's face it, he's also facing the scrutiny of not just the Canadian press, but Americans who can't wait to poke fun at their counterparts to the north and social media users around the world.

The question, then, is this: What happens next? What happens when we see the video? What happens if it's all true? Politically, perhaps that will be the end of the Rob Ford mayoralty. If so, it will be a victory of sorts for those that wanted him gone, but hardly an admirable one.

For the rest of us, after seeing the video, what will we do? We'll click 'share', we'll rofl, we'll offer snide remarks on Twitter, and emoji each other our amazement at the whole thing in endless combinations of cartoon faces. Then we'll move on, towards another new frontier, another new gawk. Another brief addiction of our own. Like I said: progress.

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The US gossip website Gawker is attempting to raise $200,000 in donations to buy a video alleged to show mayor of Toronto Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine

Gossip website Gawker is appealing to raise $200,000 in donations to buy a video alleged to show the mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, smoking crack cocaine. They call the scheme The Crackstarter. At time of writing, 3,073 people have donated a combined total of $73,346.

The page on crowdfunding site Indiegogo explains: "We are raising the money to purchase the video and publish it so the citizens of Toronto can watch a startlingly clear video of their mayor smoking crack."

The video has been put up for sale by a group of drug dealers who claim to be the mayor's suppliers. The group claim they plan to use the money to leave Toronto and "get set up in another city" because they are worried about reprisals from "powerful friends" of the mayor. The appeal describes them as "young kids who fear a possible frame-up from Toronto cops or worse".

Gawker's appeal is serious, but not without a sense of humour. Donors who give more than $150 to the cause will be sent Crackstarter memorabilia, including signed Canadian flags and a commemorative "limited-edition hand-drawn digital painting" of Ford smoking crack cocaine. The iPhone the footage was shot on is also up for grabs, to the first person to donate $10,000.

A lawyer acting on Ford's behalf has warned Gawker that posting the video will be "false and defamatory", and asked the website: "How can you indicate what the person is actually doing or smoking?" The people of Toronto may soon be able to judge for themselves.

In the spirit of The Crackstarter, here are a couple more causes we'd like to see a public whip-round for:

The "If Not Cameron, Who?" Fund

The YouTube video "David Cameron Acid House Sunrise 1988" shows a long-haired raver in dungarees with a striking resemblance to the prime minister. A Conservative spokesperson has "categorically" denied it's him. But a £200,000 bounty for the mystery raver to come forward would settle the matter once and for all. Plus, if it does turn out it really wasn't Cameron, we can put his look-alike to work as a convincing decoy. Worth every penny.

The Farage Immediate Retirement Fund

We ask Nigel Farage how much money we'd have to pay him to stop. He names his price. We all dig deep, make sacrifices where we must, and find the cash. Once he's agreed to leave us all alone, we convert it into specially marked Bulgarian lev that he can only spend in Bulgaria. Then, if we have any cash left over, we find a way to make the notes smell of bratwurst.

Which other crowdfunding causes would you contribute to?

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Prof James Hansen rebukes oil firms and Canadian government over stance on exploiting fossil fuel, which he says would make climate problem unsolvable

Major international oil companies are buying off governments, according to the world's most prominent climate scientist, Prof James Hansen. During a visit to London, he accused the Canadian government of acting as the industry's tar sands salesman and "holding a club" over the UK and European nations to accept its "dirty" oil.

"Oil from tar sands makes sense only for a small number of people who are making a lot of money from that product," he said in an interview with the Guardian. "It doesn't make sense for the rest of the people on the planet. We are getting close to the dangerous level of carbon in the atmosphere and if we add on to that unconventional fossil fuels, which have a tremendous amount of carbon, then the climate problem becomes unsolvable."

Hansen met ministers in the UK government, which the Guardian previously revealed has secretly supported Canada's position at the highest level.

Canada's natural resources minister, Joe Oliver, has also visited London to campaign against EU proposals to penalise oil from Alberta's tar sands as highly polluting. "Canada can offer energy security and economic stability to the world," he said. Oliver also publicly threatened a trade war via the World Trade Organisation if the EU action went ahead: "Canada will not hesitate to defend its interests."

The lobbying for and against tar sands has intensified on both sides of the Atlantic as the EU moves forward on its proposals, which Canada fears could set a global precedent, and Barack Barack Obama considers approving the Keystone XL pipeline to transport tar sands oil from Canada to the US gulf coast refineries and ports. Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper, was met by protesters when he visited New York last week to tell audiences that KXL "absolutely needs to go ahead".

Canada's tar sands are the third biggest oil reserve in the world, but separating the oil from the rock is energy intensive and causes three to four times more carbon emissions per barrel than conventional oil. Hansen argues that it would be "game over" for the climate if tar sands were fully exploited, given that existing conventional oil and gas is certain to be burned.

"To leave our children with a manageable situation, we need to leave the unconventional fuel in the ground," he said. Canada's ministers were "acting as salesmen for those people who will gain from the profits of that industry," he said. "But I don't think they are looking after the rights and wellbeing of the population as a whole.

"The thing we are facing overall is that the fossil fuel industry has so much money that they are buying off governments," Hansen said. "Our democracies are seriously handicapped by the money that is driving decisions in Washington and other capitals."

The EU aims to penalise oil sources with higher carbon footprints, as part of a drive to reduce the carbon emissions from transport called the fuel quality directive (FDQ). But Canada, supported by the UK, is fiercely opposed: "We are not saying they should not move to reduce emissions," said Oliver. "But the proposed implementation of the FQD is discriminatory to oil sands and not based on scientific facts." However, Europe's commissioner for climate action, Connie Hedegaard, said the FQD was "nothing more, nothing less" than accurate labelling and putting a fair price on pollution.

Hansen, who informed the US Congress of the danger of global warming in 1988, has caused controversy before by saying the "CEOs of fossil fuel companies should be tried for high crimes against humanity" and calling coal-fired power plants "factories of death". In April, he stepped down from his Nasa position after 46 years, in order to spend more time communicating the risks of climate change and to work on legal challenges to governments.

Hansen has started a science programme at Columbia University, the first task of which is to produce a report to support suits filed again the US federal government and several state governments. It is being pursued by the Our Children's Trust charity and is based on a trust principle recognised in US law.

"We maintain that the atmosphere and climate are held in trust by the present generations for the future generations and we do not have the right to destroy that asset," Hansen said. "Therefore the courts should require the government to give a plan as to how they are going to ensure that we still have that asset to pass on to the next generation."