Newsstand: September 7, 2009

Happy Labour Day! With doors closed at libraries, the LCBO, and most everywhere else, might we suggest you pop in to a "designated tourist area" and celebrate the workforce by visiting a part of it whose shift rotation will roll right over this national holiday.

Speaking of people who have to keep working, Toronto's garbage workers will never go on strike again if Councillor Michael Walker has his way. Walker wants a range of civic services, including trash collecting, ambulance driving, and the operation of city-run daycares, to be declared essential services. This would remove their workers' right to strike, but also cut Toronto's control over their salaries—instead, their compensation would be set by an arbitrator, and this has Mayor Miller and other critics spooked by the chance that Toronto could be stuck on the line for much higher pay than it would like. While that's not exactly nice to say to the workers (and on this, of all days), at least Miller isn't pushing to privatize all their jobs.

Stories about security annoyances when travelling to the U.S. or abroad are nothing special, but now it seems that a record number of border guards are resorting to force and even drawing handguns (though never firing them), a new report by the federal border security agency says. Over the last two years, eight hundred guards at Canada's border crossings have been issued and trained to use 9 mm Beretta pistols, and the Canada Border Services Agency plans to have all 4,800 of them carrying a gun by 2016. Just think how we'll look back and laugh at 2003, when border guards were handed pepper spray and batons for the first time.

Luckily, the paranoia level isn't rising for all modes of travel: Although that same border services report named Pearson International the country's "riskiest" airport with five incidents last year, the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority has reminded its front-line officers that they can't make you take your shoes off (unless you're flying to the U.S., then they can make you do basically whatever).

Did we just say "paranoia"? Well, then it's as good a time as any to air the demands of some Sheppard East residents. "If we have to, we will do the Tiananmen Square thing," to get the TTC to scrap the Light Rail Transit line planned for their neighbourhood and instead build an extension of the five-stop Sheppard subway line, which was the original plan kiboshed three years ago by the city. Jokes and sound bites aside, even TTC Chair Adam Giambrone (although "noticeably annoyed" over the perennial issue) admitted that getting an LRT instead of a train line is largely a cost-saving measure. About three thousand people are expected to use the light rail daily, well under the fifteen thousand that might help the commission justify a subway—but some plucky urban theorists (okay, City Councillor Karen Stintz) have been quick to contend that building a train line will encourage higher density neighborhoods and grow a larger base of commuters. The TTC's line? "Money solves everything."