Disgruntled Star Editor Takes Constructive Revenge
Live Green Toronto's Bright Idea
Vandalist: Ripple Effect
Toronto Will Host 2015 Pan American Games
Historicist: Life in Wartime
Another day, another mayoral debate, and Torontoist was liveblogging it from University of Toronto's Hart House (See the Star's non-liveblogging take, as well). Kevin Clark crashed the debate, Pitfield wants to drop the voting age to 16, and all of the candidates debating agreed that landed immigrants should be allowed to vote in municipal elections.
Porter Airlines had an uneventful first day of business. According to various reports, the flights had lots of room available, and around 30 protesters showed up on the first day.
Locally, a demolition company was fined $200,000 for failing to inspect the roof prior to taking down the Uptown theatre. The oversight killed one man and injured 17 others. Individual lawsuits are still pending. Elsewhere, Enron CEO Jeff Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in prison. [For the curious, check out this incredible archive of all of the 200,000 e-mails back and forth between Enron executives recently released to the public—Ed.]
The Fraser Institute has released their annual rating of hospital wait-times (between referral and treatment) in Canada, and Ontario is the best in the list, with an average of 14.9 weeks. The national average was 17.8 weeks.
Harley Walker, 72, is missing and may have met with foul play after meeting with David K. Reid, 46, of Mississauga, in an online chatroom. The Toronto Police Homicide Squad is currently working with the OPP to find the suspect.
Toronto's World's Fair bid for Expo 2015 is in danger of falling apart, with the provincial government unwilling to be on the hook for any cost overruns. With Ontario low on cash reserves, they're currently offering to help negotiations with the federal government instead.
A Dove commercial on YouTube titled "Dove Evolution" has been making the rounds. The spot was created by Toronto ad firm Ogilvy & Mather.
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Fun game of the day: entering swear words into the Enron Explorer!
The World's Fair bid can't die soon enough, complete waste of money, worst thing that could happen would be actually winning the thing. Seriously ask anyone who's home city hosted a large international event (Olympics, World's Fair, etc.) in the last 30 years if it was money well spent or if there was any lasting benefit, Calgarians will lie and say it was the best thing they ever did, anyone else will shake their head and maybe weep a little bit.
Look, Chester, if we don't get the World's Fair, we're not going to get the worldwide recognition and first-class reputation that is the universally-acknowledged reward of such previous fairholders as Nagoya, Japan (2005) or Ghent, Belgium (1913). (You can barely throw a stone in any metropolis on the planet without hitting someone who came down with Nagoyamania last year!)
Can Toronto afford to be left in the dustbin of history, outshone by Knoxville, Tennessee (1982) and Spokane, Washington (1974)? We have our puny "CN Tower", but do we have the glorious Sunsphere, or the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center (San Antonio, 1986)? Of course we do not.
Seriously, Chester, think about it. Do you want to be the generation that doomed Toronto to obscurity forevermore? The future belongs to Knoxville, as bright and sunny as a Sunsphere... and it can belong to us, if only we dare to dream.
I suspect I will end up very, very sorry I treated this as a serious discussion. However, here goes.
We shouldn't have the World's Fair. World's Fairs lead to travel, travel (all travel) involves greenhouse gas emissions, and World's Fairs simply do not have enough of an advantage over the world wide web to justify that travel.
Don't get me wrong. People should travel. Travel to see the art, nature, all the things you love. The World Wide Web won't make up for real life. But going to a World's Fair means visiting a city full of pavilions representing nations and containing such displays as governments can fit into a container and ship to display in a pavilion. Does the difference between that and the experience available on the web now justify moving literally millions of people by air? The TEDCO estimates suggested we would get three million car visitors, and seven million visitors coming by air. I honestly think that we can do a lot better for that much carbon.
Give the lovers of Impressionist Art scholarships to live in Paris and visit the bars where the Impressionists painted, yes. Give anyone who wants (and meets reasonable qualifications) support to go to India, live with the people, and get to know and understand the country, by all means. That kind of travel makes sense. But assembling pavilions and artifacts, and then bringing millions of people to see them just strikes me as something the Web does well enough that a world's fair no longer justifies the environmental disruption. I think the day of the World's Fair as we used to know it has come and gone.
I kinda like the racoon for Porter Air.
Makes sense for Toronto but maybe not Ottawa.
How about an Anti-World's Fair instead? Pavillions could highlight all the problems plaguing the world today, from global to local.