By André Bovee-Begun

Fire trucks converge on the North Block of the Ontario legislature to put out a rooftop blaze on Monday. Photo by JL1967 from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

If you Google “Fire Queen’s Park” right now, odds are good you’ll get hits about an actual fire. In a city where knee-jerk abuse of politicians is the norm, that’s sort of neat. For an eerie moment last Sunday while flames shot from the top of the Ontario Legislature, it looked like history was repeating itself—it had been almost precisely a century since a tinsmith mending the roof there had sprayed sparks in the wrong direction and started a blaze that consumed the building’s west wing and decimated its hundred-thousand-book library. In the year 2009, though, humanity has humbled fire, and the blaze was snuffed out almost before we could take a picture to remember it by.
Speaking of the past coming back to surprise us, some bandits who made off with a brass utility cover near Eastwood Road and Coxwell exposed a forgotten coal chute that now sits ready to swallow the legs of careless passers-by. Seriously, it looks big enough to eat Sparkle the lousy pianist superdog and seems like it’d be easy to stumble into, especially in the dark. Since the brass lid went missing a while ago, locals have been covering it with plywood, pegboard, and other totally safe things to walk on, but the Star reports they are confident the City will fix it soon, now that the chute’s hit the fan.
Sick Kids hospital needs to come up with a solution to a $12.8 million hole in its budget, and it’s hardly alone. It’s among sixty-one hospitals in the province for whom treating patients has meant spending more money than it takes in from the government and from donations. Public hospitals like these are legally obligated to keep their budget balanced, which in the past has meant either getting the extra money one way or another, or making deep cuts. Baycrest and Bridgepoint hospitals are reporting massive budget deficits.
If things are turning a bit grim for hospitals, they’re starting to look desperate at the food bank. As a charitably supported social relief organization, the Daily Bread Food Bank is being hit on two fronts by the recession, with donors closing their pocketbooks while more people—20% more, to be exact—find themselves turning to the food bank for help. A spot of good news is that, while the Daily Bread is nowhere near meeting its five-hundred-thousand-dollar cash target, they’re now getting enough food to meet the goals of their Thanksgiving drive, if donations keeps up at this rate.