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Newsstand: August 17, 2012
Look at what yesterday did; it birthed a beautiful new baby Friday. In the news: time to start talking about winter weather; swimming Lake Ontario; a (possible) strike at the colleges; Ontario Liberals want to take teachers to school; and A Canadian Tale: Rob Ford Goes West.
Time to start getting excited about winter weather, with all its snow, cold, wind, and dismay. Apparently, this winter, while not quite as balmy as last year’s, is still expected to be milder than average. That is, according to the hotshots at AccuWeather. The dweebs over at Environment Canada and the Weather Network, on the other hand, are too much of a yawn to make such a prediction this far in advance. Come on nerds, live a little. Take a risk.
You think that you’re the star of your local pool? King of the front crawl? Queen of the backstroke? Well, that’s nice. Tonight, 14-year-old Annaleise Carr will start swimming across Lake Ontario. If successful, Carr will be the youngest person to ever complete the solo crossing. Oh, and she has raised over $30,000 for Camp Trillium, a camp for kids with cancer. Last time you went swimming, all you did was get a sunburn and water up your nose.
The faculty at Ontario’s colleges could be out on the picket line sometime soon. The Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which represents the college workers, has asked the Ontario Labour Relations Board for a strike vote on September 6, the first day of the fall term. Nothing gets students more jazzed-up about learning than the possibility of a strike, but maybe if a strike does come soon enough, frosh week will turn into frosh months.
Ontario’s high-school teachers are facing what seems like the opposite of a request to the province for a strike vote, as the provincial Liberals have unveiled legislation that would ban strikes and lockouts for the next two years and give the government a way to impose collective agreements on school boards and teachers. The Liberals would need to recall the legislature early and get the support of at least a few opposition members for the bill to pass before school starts. In what is almost certainly an unrelated bit of news, there are two upcoming by-elections scheduled for the first day of school that could potentially reflect whether or not there is a looming labour dispute between teachers and school boards.
In obligatory Rob Ford news (he’s such a character): our mayor is in Edmonton to mix business with pleasure the way that only he knows how. Hard at work, RoFo tried to just pop in on his Edmontonian counterpart, but Ford had neglected to call ahead or actually make sure that Mayor Stephen Mandel was in the city. Rob and his wife head for Calgary tomorrow—yet another one of Canada’s major cities whose mayor is currently away. While this all sounds very work-like, we must ask: where’s the pleasure? Oh, Ford let a local give him a drive to Edmonton’s City Hall, and he’s watching a bunch of football.
