By André Bovee-Begun

If you were driving yesterday, or just happened to be walking near a car-traffic hotspot, you may have noticed small groups of dressed-up ladies holding placards bearing messages like “Police lurk here” along with an unfamiliar logo. The women were hired by the men’s website DailyXY (get it?) for an event the site called “Ticket-Free Tuesday,” a bid to drive up the site’s readership by helping motorist dodge fines, either by checking bad driving or simply avoiding police.
Speaking of the police, an officer assigned directly to a Toronto public school has arrested a student for the first time—and someone got the whole thing on video. Apparently, after being verbally harassed by a sixteen-year-old student at Northern Secondary School, the hall cop asked the student to identify himself. When the boy refused, he was put under arrest, and later slapped with a charge of assault with intent to resist arrest. See for yourself. School board trustee and City Council hopeful Josh Matlow said the student should have been more respectful and gone to the school office voluntarily.
“Boom! Gone!” shouted Councillor Adam Vaughan. “And this time we didn’t need an election.” Yup, the proposed Toronto Island tunnel is dead. The Toronto Port Authority had ignored David Miller’s indignant, mayorly objections and gone straight to the feds to request stimulus funding for a submarine, pedestrian tubewalk to Toronto Island, though critics charged it would be of little use to the public and primarily serve privately owned Porter Airlines. The thirty-eight million dollar project was finally sunk when TPA had to admit the tunnel couldn’t be “substantially completed” by the stimulus funds’ March 2011 deadline.
But deadlines can work against City Hall, too: for instance, it seems we won’t meet the amazingly ambitious target of diverting 70% of Toronto’s waste from landfills by next year. The three-year goal, set in 2007, was supposed to make our fairly green city the tree-saving, greenhouse-gas-reducing envy of Canada. We’re still on track to get there, says the mayor’s office (read their reports here for details), but it’ll take two extra years and one $115 million new waste processing plant to reach the magic number.
And a Toronto company, ESRI, wanted a roof garden to spruce up the drab high-rise terrace outside its downtown office space. The only obstacles were that they a) didn’t own the building, b) were bound by tight weight limits for the existing roof, and c) were legally required not to futz around with an inconveniently placed fringe of crucial little metal loop thingies used by window washers. Oh, and the only road by the building was a fire access route. No problem, right? Treehugger explains: “The entire roof was prefabricated and pregrown, then lifted up by a crane over two weekends, so that the fire routes were not blocked during working hours.” The prefab green space is divided up into garden “rooms” that mirror the interior floorplan, with the big-city offices looking out at their country cousins. And with that in mind, we’ll turn you loose, now. Happy Wednesday.