News: February 2008 Archives

Here's a riddle: What walks throughout Canada, weighs more than a Brit, but less than an American, and can help stop global warming? No, it's not Sasquatch. It's not Kyoto.

Photo by sevennine from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Far be it from us to conflate professional sports with Bill Shakespeare—but the Toronto Maple Leafs’ actions before, during and after Tuesday's NHL trade deadline recall Macbeth’s famous words: full of sound and fury, yet ultimately signifying nothing. Charges of heresy will be duly acknowledged.

You may have noticed the sharp rise in coffee cups littering our streets, which can only mean one thing: it’s Roll Up The Rim time at Tim Hortons once again. When Torontoist was young and starry-eyed, we used to dream of unrolling our cup and finding that we had won a car or a boat or some awesome camping gear. (What ever happened to that prize anyway? It was always the best one.) After years of winning nothing but the occasional muffin and coffee, we can’t help but feel rage every time we roll up that annoyingly pompous “Please Try Again.”

City councillor Rob Ford has at times been accused of making a career out of saying tremendously stupid things, but we here at Torontoist fully back his latest proposal to automatically name all new streets in Toronto after dead soldiers, even if the dead soldiers aren't from Toronto.

Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman has caused a furor with his comment that he'd be willing to test-drive an adult diaper to see if being left in soiled diapers for hours on end is really all that bad. Critics say he isn't taking the issue of sub-standard care in nursing homes seriously, which seems a bit harsh, since there can't be too many politicians who'd be willing to spend a day crouched in their own excrement on behalf of their constituents. Brings a tear to the eye, it does.

The final lineup for the benefit concert for the O'Keefe family has been announced. Organized by Andrew Copland—John O'Keefe's close friend and the Duke of Gloucester's head bartender—the concert aims both to honour John O'Keefe, who was killed walking home from the bar a month and a half ago, and to raise money for an education fund for John's son, Iain.

Say hello to a "prudent" budget. Stéphane Dion criticized the bill for being ineffectual, but of course not so ineffectual that the Liberals would vote against it and force an election. (Elsewhere, Thomas Walkom points out that the budget includes a new system of income tax shelter that will, and I am sure you are surprised by this, primarily benefit wealthy Canadians.)

Photo of Owen Pallett by Heidi Slimane from his MySpace.

Vintage postcard of the Toronto General Hospital (1913) from Mars Discovery District.

Phase Two of the much-blogged Obay campaign is hitting the streets, having been "unveiled" in a press conference at Centennial College this morning. Linda Franklin, President & CEO of Colleges Ontario—the advocate for the province's 24 colleges of applied arts and technology—was there to divulge details of the "top secret" campaign. Shocker: it has to do with parental mind control.

No Country For Old Men cleans up at the Oscars. The Coen Brothers finally got some big-time recognition with nods for best picture, best directing, best adapted screenplay, and best husband of Frances McDormand. In other news, a bunch of Canadians got nominated for stuff and didn't win any of it. (There! We could totally write entertainment news for any major Canadian newspaper now!)

Raising banners, flags, and fists, a polyglot crowd descended on the U.S. Consulate with a deafeningly simple point: “Kosovo Je Srbije”—Kosovo is Serbia.

If you're reading this and it's between the hours of 7-9:30pm EST, do yourself a favour and tune into Hockey Night in Canada. You might be witnessing the end of an era in Toronto sports.

Keri and Charity are two residents who lost everything on Wednesday morning. By that afternoon, a Facebook group (called Ker-ity) had already been set up with the sole purpose of helping them replace what was lost. Torontoist was alerted to the efforts by Erin Dermo, Managing Director of The Ten Spot (less than a block away from the blaze), who has been approaching local businesses to see if they can donate anything that might help. So far, aside from The Ten Spot’s own contributions, nearby businesses like Heel Boy (yes, they donated shoes), The Bier Markt, and Brazen Hussy have all been very generous with much-needed items and gift certificates. The coordinators of the drive (including Dermo and yoga instructor Caren Cooper of Jivita Yoga) are accepting clothing, shoes, and gift certificates at Essensuals Salon (678 Queen Street West). They're also asking for people who have any household items to offer to hang onto them until a storage space or apartment can be found. Don't have any stuff to give? Hey, money always helps—they're accepting Paypal donations at donations@kerity.ca and they'll also be opening a TD Canada Trust account in the next day or so. Check the Facebook group for further details.

The highly-respected British science journal Nature has called the Harper government's record on science and the environment "dismal." The PM was unavailable for comment yesterday, as he was in an emergency cabinet meeting called after Wednesday night's lunar eclipse to determine why the moon had disappeared.

Since fake pharmaceutical ads for a drug called "Obay" starting appearing across Ontario (and elsewhere) last week, everyone from street artist Frank Shepard Fairey (aka OBEY) to Scientologists to comedian Maggie Cassella has been fingered as the culprit behind them.

Fire at Queen and Bathurst. Adios to Duke's, the Suspect Video outlet, and a bunch of other cool places. Check out Torontoist's coverage of the fire here and here and here––Queen West will be closed until next week.

Today's blaze was not only devastating to the residents of Queen Street West who now find themselves homeless, but also to the business owners who served the community. Duke's Cycle—second home to many of the city's bicycle couriers—has been run by the same family in the same location since 1914. The owners of National Sound, which operated in the area for forty years and at that location since 1988, don't have fire insurance. Clothing design shop Preloved lost their entire one-of-a-kind spring collection. Suspect Video was the essential destination for fans of obscure and hard-to-find films. Some of the destroyed historic brick and timber buildings were built as far back as the 1860s, and were only recently granted heritage protection.

Photo by aardvark from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

In the most important news story of the day, two people have been arrested in the mysterious case of Huckleberry, the dog who vanished from outside a Yonge Street bakery and was returned after his owner offered a $15,000 reward. Police haven't said whether they believe Huckleberry was in on the caper.

TTC "U-pass" close to passing for students, possibly also hotel workers. If the scheme passes, the TTC will suddenly be crowded once again, rendering all those recent fleet upgrades essentially moot. Hooray for public transit!

Today we celebrate Ontario's first ever Family Day. Banks and government offices are closed, but many malls and stores are open for last-minute Family Day shopping.

At first we assumed it was Scientology. After all, who else has the money to produce and purchase space for such glossy anti-pharmaceutical ads, which have been popping up all over transit shelters and buses in Ontario and Montreal? Google wasn't much help, and their Blog Search just pointed us to other people as perplexed as we were. And poor spellers with domination fantasies.

TTC promises more buses, new routes, candy. Okay, they're not promising candy, but over the next year there will be gradual extra service along all of the TTC's major routes to lessen the impact of crowding. In 2009: possibly we get candy.

It's been a little over a month since John O'Keefe was killed outside the Brass Rail, walking to the subway from the Duke of Gloucester. While the makeshift memorial outside the Rail is gone now, the man it was for is far from forgotten––by friends, family, or city.

Today is a Valentine's Day that Kathleen Wynne will never forget. The Miss G___ Project is encouraging Ontario residents to contact the current Minister of Education today and politely demand that a Women's and Gender Studies (WGS) program be added to the Ontario Secondary School curriculum.

"The Better Way Gets Better," yesterday's TTC press release proclaimed, teasing the media for today's big announcement of service changes. And, really, it'd be hard to disagree.

Dalton McGuinty plans to form a committee to look for ways of replacing the daily recitation of the Lord's Prayer at Queen's Park, a practice which he says does not properly reflect Ontario's diversity. The Lord was unavailable for comment.

It's been the best of times, it's been the worst of times for the Toronto Maple Leafs; in fact, the past couple weeks have been nothing short of surreal. First, the best of times: wins against the high-flying Ottawa Senators and Montreal Canadiens, followed by a thoroughly unexpected Hockey Day in Canada victory over the league-leading Detroit Red Wings, have given the team a boost. Injured players are getting healthy. The return of the much-maligned Bryan McCabe has apparently galvanized the team's defensive corps, not to mention relegated Andy "The Cause" Wozniewski to the Toronto Marlies. Mats Sundin, meanwhile, who turns thirty-seven years old today, has fifty-eight points in fifty-seven games—not bad for a guy with a "career-threatening" injury (we'll never tire of using it against you, Steve Simmons!).

Barack Obama thumps Hillary Clinton in last night's primaries. Obama for the first time won the majority of Latino voters, the majority of women voters, and the majority of senior citizen voters, while broadening his support in the demographics he was already winning. On the bright side for Hillary, she did manage to win the vote of nearly 87 percent of the voters who thought she was more qualified to be President than Obama. On the Republican side, John McCain won all his primaries, then told us that Barack Obama is a young whippersnapper selling false hope, and that grownups know that despair is the only rational response to the world.

Photo by Joe Lee (London, via Londonist).

A three hour Blackberry outage affected millions of people across North America yesterday, leading to much wailing and handwringing over the temporary unavailability of a technology that didn't even exist ten years ago. Truly we are a nation of whiners.

Many of us were looking forward to welcoming the Buffalo Bills to Toronto. The eight games they'll play here over the next five years could've been the perfect complement to our existing football diet of live Argonauts games and televised NFL matches. Now that the details have been announced, more than a few of us have been priced out of attending. The majority of tickets average into the $350 per game range, and are only available if you ante up for all eight games at once. As Dave Perkins laments in The Star, the arrangements clearly lay the groundwork for Ted Rogers and Larry Tanenbaum to bring the NFL to Toronto full-time. Granted, there's the unlikely possibility that Bills owner Ralph Wilson is using the games as leverage to extort further concessions from the taxpayers of Buffalo, but he's not exactly denying the possibility of eventual relocation. This is simply the latest chapter in Toronto's long-running soap opera love affair with "big league" American football. A couple past episodes in this drama are indicative of how this pursuit has evolved from quiet self-confidence to the fervent desire to be validated as a "big league" city.

Extreme cold alert! Be forewarned that this extreme cold is not extreme in the sense of "it is totally radical like Doritos and Mountain Dew," but rather extreme in the sense of "it can kill you if you stay out in it too long." Environment Canada will discuss the prospects of the extreme cold's effect on totally shredding slopes with your snowboard later today.

If you passed the Church of Scientology’s Toronto chapter at Yonge & St. Mary on Sunday, you may have momentarily entertained a dark fantasy that Tom Cruise would emerge from the masked masses amid gales of manic laughter, igniting the dissenting throng with bolts of righteous lightning.

The Tory minority government is double-dog-daring the Opposition to force an election over their crime bill. Prediction: Stéphane Dion will grumble and pretend he doesn't care, Jack Layton will howl impotently, and the Bloc will negotiate another billion dollars for folk-dancing in Rimouski. Stephen Harper is truly the alpha Parliamentarian in this bunch.

It's snowing again! This gives Torontoist yet another opportunity to bust out a pretty picture of streets clogged with snow, and it gives the rest of Canada the opportunity to go, "Hey, how come those Toronto folks can't deal with a little snow ha ha ha don't they have plows?" Then we say, "No, we don't have enough plows, fuckers, because it turns out everybody else is entirely happy to suck money off us and not give us any of it back." Then they punch us, and we punch back, and it ends with black eyes and everybody drunk at the bar... no, wait, that was that wedding we went to last week! Never mind.

The last time we looked at accessible pedestrian signals (APS), those chirping and cuckooing crossing indicators for the visually-impaired, it was with some surprise at the city's claim that it simply couldn't afford to install APS at more than a handful of intersections each year. Instead of allocating enough money to improve availability of a fairly basic service to visually-impaired residents, the city instead looked for corporate sponsors to pick up some of the considerable slack, resulting in pedestrian signals "funded by IBM" and other organizations dotting the city, a virtual declaration that the city was abdicating its responsibilities.

The weather continues to suck in Toronto as today promises more snow, sleet, rain and just about every other damn unpleasant thing that can fall out of the sky short of a hail of radioactive meteorites. On the other hand, the central U.S. suffered a rash of tornadoes yesterday that killed at least 27 people, so suck it up and go shovel the walk of the old people down the street.

When your own mother calls you "foolish" and "an idiot," you know you're in serious trouble. However, if your name is Salman Hossain, it's likely that your mom's assessment of your intellectual abilities is the least of your concerns right now.

Kennedy Station will remain closed today, at least for the morning. So, if you live in Scarborough, enjoy those shuttle buses.

Two men who went on a Hollywood-worthy crime spree Saturday night and Sunday morning are being sought in a carjacking, shooting, three robberies, and a high-speed police chase. Descriptions of the suspects have now been released—if this is you, please turn yourself in.

In this occasional feature, two Torontoist staffers face off to debate an issue that is important to our city. We invite our readers to join in the debate in the comments section after the post.

Everyone's favourite appropriately-named party leader hasn't been having a great time over the past few months. Ever since John Tory's upsetting dual loss in October's provincial election, the vultures have been circling over him. Both established and grassroots party members have been calling for Tory's head, and they'll finally have a chance to oust him at the Progressive Conservative Party's General Meeting at the end of the month.

Good morning university and college students, and good news: you don't have to go to school today.