News: April 2007 Archives

Exhibition Place has presented many new technologies since it was established in 1904, but a new pilot project outside the Automotive Building is using 40-year-old technology to lessen Toronto's energy impact: LED streetlights.

Say you work in government, and a famous environmentalist attacks the environmental plan you've put together, calling it a sham. Do you defend it on the merits? Well, if you're Environment Minister John Baird, no—instead you attack Al Gore with a "you weren't any better" retort. Because Al Gore was Vice President, seven years ago, of a different country! Also, he has a big house and is now kind of fat!

This week we'd like to congratulate the -ist network's Mother Hen, Gothamist's Jen Chung, who found herself a recipient of Wired Magazine's Wired Rave Award. If that doesn't sound terribly exciting, keep in mind another recipient was J.K. Rowling. Yep, that's right, the -ist network and Harry Potter now have something in common. Go us.

Remember Jean Chrétien? We haven't heard much about the former prime minister in some time (dude's been off the map ever since Paul Martin forced him off it). Well, Mizalaina of the Toronto LiveJournal community spotted Chrétien earlier today in downtown Toronto, and has one hell of a story to go along with it:

The Tories unveiled their plan to fight climate change, which broadly speaking involves polluters paying, although not very soon or very much. Cue predictable environmentalist outrage, and Environment Minister John Baird pointing out that the Liberals didn’t even have a fake plan. Buzz Hargrove is pleased, though.

First major solar farm project in Ontario approved. The 40-megawatt farm in Sarnia will generate .02 percent of Ontario's energy needs, which is...well, a start, if nothing else. Now how about some investment in nanosolar technology, Ontario? And rocket-packs? Can we have environmentally friendly rocket-packs?

A group of airport taxi drivers were ejected from the Toronto council chambers yesterday after a dispute regarding the council's plan to ban taxis that are not registered in Toronto from picking up fares downtown.

Starting September 1, the Hamilton television station known as CH will be rebranded as E! Entertainment Television. E! is an American entertainment and lifestyle cable broadcaster best known for its wildly successful E! True Hollywood Story series.

City budget passes: 7.9 billion smackers for the year. Noteworthy: city councillors decided that keeping their free golf passes was extremely important. I don't think most of Rob Ford's proposed budget cuts are anything but hamfisted, but come on, City Council—pay for your own goddamned golf game, willya?

So you wake up, make a cup of coffee, go outside to grab the newspaper in your PJs and suddenly notice that your regular copy of The Globe and Mail has been replaced with a more different copy of The Globe and Mail. One with ugly black divider bars scattered across the front page and at least a couple inches lost from the broadsheet. You notice an alarming increase of sans serif fonts. Is life ever the same after a redesign?

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs.

Toronto is apparently "about to go broke." Wait, what?

Ontario plans to ban incandescent light bulbs by 2012 to promote the use of CFLs. Good ban, Ontario.

City Hall ups the road repair budget this year to $230 million, and at the same time admits that it's not even close to being enough to reduce the backlog of required repairs. There ought to be a word that auto-defines as "the debilitating effects of when Toronto doesn't get enough federal and municipal funding," so we could all just say it and save ourselves some breath. Like, "klunge" could be shorthand for that phrase, so when another story like this shows up next week (as we all know it will), we could just say "massive klunge." And we would nod knowingly.

Torontoist Flickr Pool member snapparker has posted this shot of the aftermath of Tuesday morning's three-alarm fire at the corner of Baldwin and Spadina, right where Kensington Market meets Chinatown. The conflagration started in a rooming house above stores at 368 Spadina Ave. Flames quickly spread to neighbouring businesses. In all, over 100 firefighters and 30 trucks were called in to battle the blaze.

Toronto student Soohyun Park took top prize at the CanSpell Cup nashional spelling bee. Her corect spelling of 'hypobulia' trumped 'cerumen' and 'moiety'.

Idiot ex-Green candidate complains that party refuses to support him just because he wrote how he thought the 9/11 attacks were "beautiful." The best part is that Kevin Potvin claims that this is proof that the Greens don't know how to handle a scandal. uh, they punted your butt off the party in about a day, jackass.

Spring is when we get busy here in the Ist-A-Verse. Very busy. But, after staying bundled-up indoors all winter, it's nice for us to be out, about, and collecting things to write about for you. Here's a glimpse at what's been keeping your favorite citybloggers busily away from home and out of bed.

June Callwood, the journalist and social activist dubbed by the CBC as "Canada's Conscience," succumbed to cancer this morning at 82.

The fine for street racing is now $10,000. There goes my weekend.

Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84. However, that is only the perception of those of us who remain stuck in time and narrative space, and what has really happened is that he has traveled into an alternative universe to relive his own life. And so it goes.

City council says up to 2,500 tonnes of dog poop are deposited in park trash bins every year. This is problematic since our garbage dumps in Michigan refuse to take it. So where should we put our growing heap of canine feces? Councillor Pam McConnell (Ward 28, Toronto Centre-Rosedale) thinks the city should provide green bins in parks, while Councillor Paula Fletcher (Ward 30, Toronto-Danforth) doesn't think it's a big deal for dog owners to carry the waste home and flush/compost it. What are your thoughts on this crap?

Doctors urged to use tape measure to see if medical advice is necessary due to excess abdominal fat. I'm all for anti-obesity measures, but surely this is counterproductive? Did we really need another reason to dislike going to the doctor for a checkup?

We don't know about where you are, but it seems like spring can't decide whether or not to happen. Some days are warm, some days are cold, and sometimes you aren't sure which. Baseball may have started up (and soccer/football winding down) but it still seems cold out there. Unless it's not. Anyway, onto the -ists.

One of two winning lotto tickets in Wednesday's $38.7 million Lotto 6/49 jackpot has been turned in by twenty carpenters. That means there is one more winning ticket worth $19.7 million out there, people! It is time for the wacky Dave Barry-esque hijinks and capers to commence! I call dibs on conning an old lady out of her wheelchair by wearing an obviously fake moustache and pretending to be Ringo Starr. (Also amusing: the article noting that the carpenters all plan to continue working, as if winning less than a million dollars is cause to quit one's job and live idyllically on a desert island somewhere.)

It features our busiest subway station, it's got one of the most trafficked intersections in Toronto, and it's the psychological split between uptown and downtown. Despite such importance and notoriety, Yonge and Bloor has remained inexplicably dingy and architecturally bland.

“You can try to take away my coffees and my creams. Go ahead. I’m still here. I’m still going to get re-elected." Councillors Giorgio Mammoliti and Paul Ainslie scrapped it out yesterday in city hall over free coffee. The delicious roasted bean elixir is offered free to city councillors and costs taxpayers $20,000 per year.

City considers indexed fees for garbage pickup. This is barely news, really, because we all knew increased garbage fees were coming sooner or later, and we all know they're ultimately necessary (even if some of us don't much like that). But it's nice (or chagrin-causing, depending on your point of view) to see it finally coming about.

In yet another show of contempt for the residents of Toronto, Transportation Services and "Clean and Beautiful City" staff have opted to put the models of the City’s proposed street furniture on display to the public for one day only; they will be visible in the City Hall rotunda from 8:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. tomorrow, Wednesday, April 4. This is a project that will determine the look and feel of all of Toronto streets from this September through August 31, 2027 — and you're being given an eleven-and-a-half-hour window to glimpse the possible outcomes.

Residential property taxes have skyrocketed this year, almost twice the rate of inflation. To lessen the blow, the city is considering a plan to set "pay-as-you-throw" fees for household waste pickup that would be integrated into your water bill. A standard-size garbage bin would cost $4 per month for weekly pickup, but the fee would increase with a special larger bin. There would be no penalty for additional recycling and compost pickup.

We here at Torontoist are always fans of new campaigns to boost our fair city's reputation, but the problem is that most of these campaigns are, shall we say, kind of pathetic. No, actually -- not "kind of." They're just pathetic. Almost universally they cast Toronto as a handy convenient replacement for some other city you'd like to go to. "Toronto! It's almost like Paris, and you don't have to spend money on a transoceanic flight!" "A trip to Toronto is like a trip to New York, but on a Buffalo budget!" "Toronto: the Sydney of the northern hemisphere, with less ocean!" And of course we were quite disparaging regarding the city's most recent attempt in this area.

respect her if we get it. In other news, Jim Cuddy won the Juno for best adult alternative album, which means he did the best job of taking actual alternative music, dropping it to quarter-speed and setting it to acoustic guitar.