Newsstand: September 3, 2012

It is the final day of the Air Show—Labour Day’s obnoxious aftermarket muffler. In the news: cleaning up the Port Lands; Glenn De Baeremaeker wants unlimited cats; Anna Leibenko is back in Canada; TIFF ticket transactions begin; and 1,500 calories of love.

By Casey Irvin

There are still a lot of questions about what will happen in the Port Lands as proposals get revised, revisited, and replaced every couple of hours. Two things are for certain, though: the land there is pretty dirty and not everyone agrees on how the toxic soil should be cleaned. Waterfront Toronto hopes to use a multistage process, but the Toronto Port Lands Company thinks it would be better to use a process called bioremediation, which involves “fertilizing contaminated soil,” or, in lay terms, adding poo to dirty dirt.

Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker (Ward 38, Scarborough Centre) is leading the charge to change a bylaw limiting the number of household pets allowed in the city. As the law stands now, a household is allowed to have six pets, with a maximum of three dogs. This means that even if you only have one dog, and she has a litter of more than two puppies, your household is in contravention of the law (you already figured that out, though, because you can do math). De Baeremaeker thinks that the problem of animal hoarding can be addressed through other sections of the bylaw, saying, “It doesn’t matter how many they have. What matters is whether they’re taken care of.”

Anna Leibenko, the former Argos’ cheerleader who has been in a medically induced coma for over two weeks, is back in Canada. Leibenko fell three metres from a catamaran in Croatia, hitting her head on the way down. Family, friends, and others have helped raise more than $140,000 to pay for her medical expenses and the trip back to Canada, but there is still no solid picture of what her recovery could look like.

Single TIFF tickets went on sale yesterday to members of the public and, as you can imagine, there were lineups.

This is cheesy, but apparently poutine shops are the hottest new place to find love—at least, they are on the authority of a bunch of (probably drunk) 20-somethings hanging around a poutine shop in West Queen West. According to this hard-hitting piece of long-weekend journalism, it might be “the possibility of finding that special someone that has led to an explosion of specialty shops selling the concoction of fries, cheese curds and gravy.” Wrong. It’s probably the fries, cheese curds, and gravy.