April 28, 2008
Hop On The Bus, Polar Bears Not Bad, More Government Waste
Ding, ding, grumble, grumble…the TTC is back on track for the Monday morning commute, ushering in a new era of mutual respect, trust and fellowship between riders and employees. Anyway, it turns out that while Torontoist was trapped at home all weekend drinking and shaking an impotent fist at Bob Kinnear's smug televised face, there was non-TTC news going on out there too.
U of T President David Naylor told The Globe And Mail that over the next few years, the university will cut the number of undergrads attending the downtown campus, which would be a blow to budding hipsters currently in high school. Naylor also said that U of T doesn't intend to retreat "holus-bolus" from undergraduate education. Holus-bolus is a terrible way to retreat from anything, really.
A committee studying polar bears in Canada said that the species was not in immediate danger of extinction, but was of "special concern." In the taxonomy of risk classification, "special concern" comes below "endangered" and "threatened," but above "brow slightly furrowed" and "just dandy."
Who's up for some cross-border shopping? The union representing Canada's border guards is getting testy as they approach a year without a contract, and some job action may be in the offing.
An audit says that Natural Resources Canada was allowing employees to run up wireless device bills at taxpayer expense with virtually no oversight, resulting in unnecessary costs of around of $500,000 per year. It gets lonely out in the woods, you know.
Photo by sniderscion from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
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So I guess we can always count on 2 things: Somewhere there will always be a disgruntled union looking for more cash from the public purse AND somewhere a government employee is wasting money with reckless abandon.
O Canada...
Just saw this strike summary. It's painfully funny but also bang-on:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IXpibN7Hug
U of T is so typical for blaming STUDENTS for the poor time they have at U of T. I'm graduating this year and I filled out that survey that Naylor was talking about. I don't think my poor time at U of T had anything to do with the number of undergrads at the school, but alot to do with lack of commuter space, student programs etc. And adding graduate spaces will only serve to alienate undergrads even further.
It should be noted, however, that the OneStop screens (according to Steve Munro) did not at all inform riders of the impending strike on Friday night. How surprising.
Grad students are the current shiny object being chased by government funding and thus by university administrators, whether or not it's a good idea for a given institution.