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Extra, Extra: TTC Tracks, Park Volunteer Smackdown, and Taking Slow News Days Too Far
Every weekday’s end, we collect just about everything you ought to care about or ought not miss.
- As Toronto mulls over an expert panel’s recommendations for a shiny new Ontario Place, plans are well underway for redeveloping another part of the watefront: Queen’s Quay. It will look very pretty when it’s done, but getting there will inevitably be ugly. One part of that process: TTC track realignment, commencing on July 29 and lasting until the spring of 2013. In the goofy-but-endearing category of public relations, the TTC has made a short little video to explain more.
- Let’s pretend you are a very good, civic-minded resident of Toronto, and that you care a great deal about your local park—that you care so much, in fact, that you put in countless hours maintaining the park, for free, just because it matters to you. Now imagine that the City parks department tells you thanks but no thanks.
- Every January, the mayor of Toronto holds a New Year’s Levee, in which he or she greets residents in a show of good spirits to start the new year. Hundreds of people stream through, and the mayor gamely grips and grins as they pass by, the exchanges of necessity no more than perfunctory. Because we live in a free and generally peacable city, no background checks are conducted on the residents who make their way to City Hall for this ceremony. Needless to say, at some point, someone we wished had stayed home makes an appearance. This past year, that someone was a man named John Latvis, a neo-Nazi. Because, perhaps, it is summer and slow-news season, media outlets have decided this is a thing that warrants attention. It isn’t. Whatever his faults, there is no reason to think the mayor sought out or relished the company of a neo-Nazi, or knew anything about Latvis’ political views when he shook hands with him. Everyone, please resume looking at cute kitten pictures or reading about Olympic doping scandals.
- Today, Hudson’s Bay Company announced that it would be closing most Zellers stores (besides the ones that are being converted to Target locations). If that has you feeling nostalgic, here’s a quick history of how Walter Zeller began his retail empire.
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