By André Bovee-Begun

Torontonians, keep your fingers tightly crossed over the next few days, unless you’re using them to write letters to Canada’s Infrastructure Minister John Baird. He’ll be giving final approval or rejection to hundreds of civic works projects on the city’s list of applications for federal stimulus money. The projects for which Toronto hopes and is eligible to receive funds has been released, and its $600 million in proposals turns out to have something for just about everyone.
Various TTC improvements totaling $183 million are included in the full list, as are $91 million worth of bike lane additions and road work (which, with eight of the twenty worst roads in the province, we should probably hope gets the green light). Toronto also wants to spend $37 million to build a 68,000 square-foot arts and cultural centre in Regent Park. Less flashy but perhaps more urgent items on the list are the $40 million emergency repair of a broken-down sewer main and the replacement of lead pipes on almost two hundred stretches of the city’s water system. In the unlikely event of every eligible project being approved, the federal government would chip in about $206 million, with the city paying $387 million of its own money.
A Bloor Village resident’s “exercise in creative writing” had dog-walkers calling the police on him Wednesday. Mel Glickman, a retired architect from Montreal, leafletted High Park’s off-leash area with menus for a fictional restaurant with a questionable theme: among the highlights of the Dog Liver Café’s “Authentic Asian Canine Cuisine” were such howlers as Moo Goo Guy Pootch. The Star focuses on the threat perceived by dog owners still skittish after last year’s antifreeze poisoning incidents. Others objected to Asian caricatures they found implicit in the hundred-item menu.
CFRB 1010 radio has confirmed that it’s laying off twelve producers, newscasters, and radio hosts including Michael Coren and the news commentary team of Paul and Carol Mott. Station insiders spoke to the National Post about the “corporate feel” the AM station has acquired since being bought last year by the media corporation Astral Radio, who are currently in the midst of retooling the station. Of the laid-off personalities, Astral’s Toronto VP would say only that “these folks don’t necessarily play a role in the future.”
Though legally blind, a Scarborough weightlifter is setting his sights high. Stephen Jesso, who was born with one working eye but lost the use of it in a baseball accident at age 15, broke records in all categories of this year’s International Blind Sports Association’s weightlifting championships, and now hopes to become the first blind athlete to win a medal at the powerlifting world championships later this year.
And Facebook is still in a relationship with Canada, after Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddard confirmed that the social networking giant will no longer violate Canadian law after it finishes some proposed reforms of its privacy policies. As members of one of the world’s largest Facebook networks (but no longer the largest), nearly one in four Torontonians has reason to take a careful look at how their privacy rights will change over the next year. The changes, which include the rewording of various policies and giving users more control over how much of their personal data is shared with the developers of third-party applications, was prompted by a ruling earlier this year that Facebook’s handling of users’ personal data was in breach of Canadian privacy legislation.