By André Bovee-Begun

If you’re all good commuters, we’re sure you’ll shrug off the news that the increased TTC fines quietly approved last January will come into effect this Monday. Alongside whopping increases for smoking or making fraudulent passes (duh), people will now start getting fined for hogging priority seats. Though the fines are set by TTC’s by-laws, the money collected doesn’t just go down the tubes—all the funds go to the city itself, not its cash-strapped transit commission.
George Smitherman is backing out of the 2010 mayoral race? Maybe? The deputy premier never officially declared himself a candidate (you can’t do that until the campaign period starts in January), but he’s now supposedly getting cold feet. The Globe airs the view that Smitherman’s alleged second thoughts were, perhaps, spurred by the eHealth scandal in which he is (definitely) heavily implicated. If it turns out to be true, then John Tory is currently facing a pretty clear field for the 2010 municipal election.
The health ministry has decided that Jim Hearst did not die because the city strike hamstrung Toronto’s Emergency Medical Service. No, it seems EMS did a perfectly good job hamstringing itself. Miscommunication and an apparently poor understanding of the rules led to the Toronto man’s death of a heart attack, after a thirty-eight-minute wait for paramedics to show up. Five EMS workers have been handed ten to seventeen days’ unpaid suspension and remedial education as a result.
After eating at a Scarborough restaurant, between eighteen and thirty-seven people got sick, including one elderly man who died from salmonella poisoning. Health officials have not confirmed that the deceased man was the victim of contaminated food from the eatery, but the eighteen confirmed cases have been traced to the Ruby Chinese Restaurant in Scarborough, which has been shut down and will remain so until Toronto Public Health is satisfied. The restaurant passed a health inspection on September 29—nine days after health officials now believe the salmonella outbreak began. It failed a second inspection this Wednesday, when health officials had already identified it as the source of the food poisonings.
We’re not saying a terrorist can end up looking good when all is said and done, but damn does Zakaria Amara come off as a little shit in the Star‘s rundown of the Toronto 18 “ringleader,” who confessed to heading up the bombing plot thwarted in 2006. Extra points go to Thomas Walkom for emphasizing the fact that seven out of the original eighteen had their charges dropped but still went through media hell.
And remember how Ryerson wanted to rescue Maple Leaf Gardens from the mothballs and turn it into a nifty, if a little weird, triple-decker arena/supermarket hybrid? They would also like twenty million dollars in federal money to make that happen. Rye’s president Sheldon Levy is “for sure excited” about the deal. Worth it? Not? Well, the puck’s on Ottawa ice, now.