By André Bovee-Begun

Maple Leaf Gardens may yet be filled with the crash and clatter of rival hockey teams going head to head, if Ryerson and Loblaws reach a hyped deal. The arena was bought in 2004 by the grocery magnate, who reckoned on turning it into a “flagship” grocery store but soon found themselves in too much of an economic bind to follow through with those fresh ideas in a timely manner. Enter the up-and-coming downtown university, who has been eyeing the Gardens as a setting for their men’s hockey team for some time, now. The notion being chattered about would put the hockey rink back to regular use as a student centre and Ryerson Rams home ice, while a Loblaws grocery store might open as close as right upstairs. At this very moment, word on the deal amounts to no more, and no less, than an email sent out by Loblaw senior VP, corporate affairs, directly to Toronto media outlets. Generally, though, that sort of thing is referred to as a “public announcement.”
Now some bad news: it looks like Toronto won’t be able to fix the Finch sinkhole for the next month or more. The cavernous…cavern of road damage was caused by July’s heavy rainstorms and is big enough to devour—in the Star’s very specific analysis—”nine Chevy Impalas.” Was the Toronto daily paid off by an ailing auto industry for some subterranean product placement, or is the classic sedan just particularly gravity-prone? Either way, the repairs will require extensive sewer construction and leave Toronto in the hole for $650 thousand.
Did that Impala-eating story scare your poor car, you readers who drive? Well then make sure it doesn’t hear about the new parking-free condo in the heart of downtown. Well, almost parking-free: Tribute Communities, the developer behind the proposed forty-two-storey condo, plans to offer an in-house, Zipcars-style service with nine shared cars tenants can rent on those occasions they need four wheels and a tank of explosives underneath them (actually, there’s no word yet on whether the tentative housing tower will use hybrid or electric cars in its mini-fleet, but given Tribute’s obvious penchant for PR on the project, signs point shakily to “maybe”). Also, there’s supposed to be 315-plus bike parking spots. Sound good, in principle? If you answered “yes,” you’re probably not on Toronto’s zoning board, who say the deliberately carless digs…don’t have enough room for cars. Hm. Whatever your reaction, don’t get too excited yet. The building hasn’t even broken ground, and before it does its developer will have to knock down the Royal Canadian Military Institute, a historic building (it’s the one near University and Dundas with the cannon in front) that’s stood since 1907.
Stop thinking so much, dammit—there’s swine flu coming! Ottawa just released its priority list for H1N1 vaccinations, which gives roughly seven million Canadians a better shot at the early rounds of immunization. Regardless of the talk of who’s a “priority” recipient, the country has ordered fifty million units, which should, theoretically, be enough for everyone. Well, maybe Ottawa has different plans for members of Canada’s native communities.
Okay, the massive number of diesel-burning trains—between 268 and 464 of them every day—that the provincial agency Metrolinx would push through Toronto neighborhoods over the next twenty-five years will cause health problems, but likely won’t raise childhood leukemia illness rates, says Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health David McKeown, withdrawing his earlier statements about the smoke-spewing railroad proposal. Dr. McKeown “has also acknowledged that [Metrolinx] did not underestimate air quality impacts or health risks in our study. This confirms the scientific strength and rigour of our Environmental Project Report analysis and results,” crowed a press release quoting Robert Prichard, Metrolinx’s president and CEO. What Prichard, formerly the allegedly evil corporate-sponsorship mastermind of U of T, left out of his media statement was that Metrolinx’s Environmental Project Report predicts “acute health effects such as respiratory irritation at every location assessed, including 44 residential areas, 37 schools, 40 child-care centres and four long-term care centres.” Nonetheless, Torontoist would have to agree with Prichard that not adding to the leukemia risks of nearby Torontonians is a good thing. Metrolinx, by the way, has promised to look into electrifying its rail network sometime in the next fifteen years.
And Ontario’s possibly soft-on-porn Premier Dalton McGuinty is against a PC parliamentarian’s proposal to make schools equip their computers with porn-blocking Internet filters to save the children from porn. On the Internet. McGuinty says that filtering net access is a decision for the schools to make themselves, and that the province can’t legitimately force them to adopt such measures, though many schools already use web filters anyway. Gerry Martiniuk, who tabled the bill, told CBC that the automated filtering would make up for a “shortage of manpower” at Ontario’s schools, where staff are allegedly too busy to keep kids from peeping into the Internet’s titillating nethers.
And, speaking of vanishing racks, are you among the St. Clair West residents who want your city to put back the post-and-ring bike stands you lost because of transit construction (in an area that includes City Councillor and TTC Vice-Chair Joe Mihevc’s ward)? That sucks; have you tried waiting forever?

CORRECTION: SEPTEMBER 17, 2009 This article originally said that fixing the Finch Avenue West sinkhole would cost the city $615 million; thankfully, the number is about one thousand times less than that: it will cost $650 thousand.