We don’t know whether he did it or not, but we do know this much: three reporters say they have seen a cell-phone video that appears to show Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack.

After the news broke on Gawker Thursday evening, the Twitter reaction was immediate and explosive. The silence in local media, meanwhile, was deafening. No Toronto outlet other than the Star had seen—or, at any rate, would admit to having seen—the video in question, which was recorded, supposedly, by a man believed to have provided Ford with the crack he allegedly smoked.

After the Star‘s article went up, around midnight, it took until morning for much of the rest of the city—and the world—to catch up. And boy, have they.

Here’s what’s being said about Ford’s latest scandal.

Locally, various city councillors have begun to weigh in. Ford’s deputy mayor, Doug Holyday (Ward 3, Etobicoke Centre), had this to say, according to the Globe:

“I have not seen any indication of him using any substances like this, or anything else for that matter.”

Meanwhile, John Parker (Ward 26, Don Valley West), Ford’s deputy speaker, called on the mayor to address the allegations head on:

“We all hope that the inferences that are floating around are untrue and the only one who can set us straight on that is the Mayor.”

And the police are also aware of the situation. The same Globe article quotes TPS spokesperson Mark Pugash saying the following:

“…we are monitoring the situation closely.”

Whatever that means.

Ford isn’t the first big-city mayor to find himself in this position. In 1990, Marion Barry, who was then the mayor of Washington D.C., was videotaped smoking crack by the FBI. He was later convicted of drug possession.

In an interview with Washington Citypaper, Barry had this to say about the Ford case:

“Unless he was entrapped by the government, it’s not similar.”

It’s worth noting that although Barry lost the mayoral election following his arrest, he did win a city council seat after being released from prison. Then, in 1993, he was elected mayor again.

And that’s not the only international press the story has attracted. Spurred on by Gawker, lots of out-of-town outlets are starting to discover Mayor Ford.

The BBC has picked up the story on its website.

New York Magazine has something on one of its blogs.

NBC is running a wire story from Reuters, meaning Mayor Ford’s name could start appearing in lots of other places fairly soon.

And, naturally, there’s a Taiwanese animation of the story now making the rounds on YouTube:

Another thing to come out of this whole affair was a Twitterfight between a Gawker editor and a reporter at the Toronto Star. The main bone of contention was the fact that the Star is referring to its story on the crack video as an “exclusive,” despite the fact that Gawker had reported on the video hours earlier.

Granted, it was a pretty one-sided fight. Let’s take a look, shall we?

And finally, let’s not forget the several Indiegogo campaigns that have sprung up in an attempt to pay for the crack video’s release. The owners are reportedly asking for six figures. There’s one semi-legit one that was set up by the Vancouver Province, and then at least one other whose legitimacy we can’t vouch for.

And, in the past hour, Gawker has launched its own Indiegogo campaign. It probably stands the best chance of succeeding, but that’s not an endorsement of spending your money on this. We all want to see the video, but do we really want to pay off the guys who took it?

Given that Gawker has claimed that they have seen a video of Rob Ford smoking crack, and further that Toronto Star reporters have confirmed they saw what seems to be the video weeks ago, and their descriptions of it corroborate Gawker’s story, this is as good a time as any to discuss libel in Canada versus libel in the United States, because major American media and Canadian media organizations have just alleged that Rob Ford potentially smokes crack. (And let us be clear: Torontoist is not alleging this.)

Canada is a very friendly jurisdiction to libel plaintiffs. Defamation (which encompasses both libel, i.e. defamation with a permanent record, and slander, which is usually spoken-word defamation) is a strict liability tort, which means that all the plaintiff has to prove is that the defaming comment was made, and the defamer is then liable for the tort.

The defaming party, however, then has defenses against the tort. The most common defence against a defamation claim is that the statement is true: if you can prove the “defaming” statement is the truth, that is an absolute and total defence against a defamation claim.

The other important defence against defamation, in this journalistic context, is the “responsible communication on matters of public interest” defence. This defence was outlined by the Supreme Court in Grant v. Torstar Corp in 2009; essentially, it allows journalists (and other individuals who disseminate information, such as bloggers) to publish potentially defamatory information, even if it is untrue, on the basis that it is in the public interest for media outlets to be able to report the news, and sometimes that means getting something wrong in order to report the news in a timely fashion.

However, in order for this defence to apply, the party making the defamatory statement has to prove two things: first, that the matter about which the statement was made was one of public interest, and second, that the statement-maker acted responsibly and diligently to check the reliability of their sources and attempted to get the other side of the story.

So, how does this apply to the current situation? The answer for Gawker is “not at all, really” because they aren’t Canadian. They’re American, and defamation judgements made against Americans in foreign jurisdictions are not collectible in the United States. Rob Ford would have to bring his case against Gawker in American court, where in order to prove defamation you typically have to prove that the defaming party acted “maliciously”—for instance, that they knew it was false or recklessly disregarded whether it might be false. It is much harder to win a defamation lawsuit in the United States than in Canada.

(Some commenters on Twitter have suggested that Gawker published the story expressly because they wanted to entice Rob Ford into suing them, which would allow them to subpoena the video and therefore produce the video in the process. This is not technically incorrect, but that strategy would rely on (a) Ford electing to sue Gawker in the first place and (b) the tape-holder or any tape purchasers not destroying all copies of the video.)

Within Canada, Toronto Star also report that they have seen the tape, and their account corroborates Gawker’s description of it for the most part. (The Star’s description is in fact far more detailed.) Would Ford win if he sued the Star for libel over their story? Well, let’s go back to the responsible communication defence outlined above. Clearly, whether the mayor of Toronto is indulging in illegal drugs falls within the purview of “the public interest,” particularly after a wave of drug-related gang crime over the past year. And one would expect the Star to take reasonable steps to check the veracity of the video, as well as reach out to Rob Ford himself for comment. They did both: their story explicitly states that they sought comment from the mayor’s office, that they refused to pay for the tape (as the video-owners requested), that two reporters took notes on the tape independently of one another, that they saw this tape on May 3 (the inference being that they were making efforts to get more information and Gawker forced their hand by publishing first), and they give as much detail as possible about their sources and about the video itself (not just its content but how they viewed it, how it appeared, et cetera).

Of course, I write as someone who has not seen the tape himself. But on balance, even if the tape is a fabrication, a successful libel lawsuit seems unlikely at this point, because the tape exists, and it is responsible journalism to report on that fact.

WHERE: Maple Leaf Square

WHEN: Monday, May 13

WHAT: Thousands of fans gathered outside the Air Canada Centre Monday night to watch the Toronto Maple Leafs take on the Boston Bruins in game seven of Toronto’s first NHL playoff series in nearly a decade. The Leafs led for most of the game, only to watch a 4–1 advantage melt away in the final minutes of the third period. Not long afterward, an overtime goal by the Bruins put an end to hockey season in Toronto. Click through the image gallery for a look at how the die-hards handled the elation and the crash.

Liberal finance minister Charles Sousa, speaking about the 2013 budget.

Every policy proposal comes with unmentioned fingerprints—buried reports or past choices, or in some cases in Ontario, the legacy of Mike Harris. When you take a closer look at many particular policies, you find they are correctives to budgets of yesteryear.

Such is the case in the draft Liberal budget, with a series of proposed changes to Ontario Works. On the table are a series of adjustments to the benefit structure of Ontario Works that will increase overall benefits and bring it more closely in line with the Ontario Disability Support Program.

They’re the first changes of their kind since the early Harris government, and their impact on Toronto residents will be significant: an estimated 91,800 Ontario Works recipients live in the city.

The policy recommendations included in the draft budget aren’t particularly new—they were contained in a 2004 report by then-health minister Deb Matthews. That this is coming nine years later may reflect new premier Kathleen Wynne’s more left-leaning tendencies, and the fact that the minority Liberals will need to secure support for this budget from the NDP if it’s to pass, and they are to stay in power.

Among the policy changes announced today:

Ontario Works and ODSP recipients can now keep their first $200 of earned income each month, before the social assistance benefits they receive get scaled back. After that, recipients have benefits reduced at a rate of 50 cents for each dollar they earn.

Under the old policy, if a single adult earned $400 of income in a given month, the $606 maximum total they could receive from Ontario Works would be reduced by $200 (50 cents on each earned dollar); that recipient would wind up with $806 for the month. Under the new policy, the same individual would have their first $200 exempt, meaning they would only see their benefits reduced by $100, and take home $906 in that month. The cost of this change is projected to be $65 million a year.

Put another way, this change is an effective increase in Ontario Works funding for anyone on OW who earns a small amount of income, and creates an incentive for recipients to get a foothold in the workplace.

Ontario Works recipients who are self-employed will now have their earnings treated the same way as those who are not.

Currently people who are self-employed see every dollar they earn reduce their social assistance benefits by an equal amount—not 50 cents on the dollar, as described above, but a dollar-for-dollar reduction. This policy dates back to the early Harris years, when that government was concerned that self-employed residents wouldn’t be honest when they reported their earnings; they essentially legislated a prediction that these residents would only tell the government about half their income.

However, with the increase in freelance, casual, and contract work, this policy will finally be changed. Instead of treating self-employed residents with suspicion, they too will see their social assistance benefits reduced at a rate of 50 cents for every dollar earned.

The asset limits for individuals on Ontario Works will increase from $606 to $2,500 for individuals, and from $1,043 to $5,000 for couples.

One big problem with Ontario Works is that its restrictive structure makes it difficult for anyone to climb out of poverty while relying on its benefits. By limiting liquid assets (including cash, bank deposits, and RRSPs) to only $606 for single adults, Ontario Works guarantees its recipients live on a week-to-week budget and cannot save for larger expenditures (like a security deposit on an apartment). The increase is designed to give OW recipients more flexibility in saving and planning ahead.

The cost of this change is projected to be $11 million annually.

RCMP Chief Superintendent Gaétan Courchesne (left) and RCMP Assistant Commissioner James Malizia (right) at a press conference today.

At a press conference this afternoon RCMP officials announced that two men have been arrested and face charges in conjunction with an attack they were allegedly planning against a particular VIA rail route (though the RCMP would not confirm which one). Chiheb Esseghaier (30, Montreal) and Raed Jaser (35, Toronto) face multiple charges for “activities related to terrorism”—including “conspiring to carry out an attack against, and conspiring to murder persons unknown for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with a terrorist group”—and will appear at Old City Hall for a bail hearing tomorrow.

RCMP Assistant Commissioner James Malizia emphasized that there was no imminent threat to the public, and that the significance of today’s arrest lies in the support the suspects received “from Al Qaeda elements located in Iran.”

The investigation, dubbed Project SMOOTH, began in August 2012 and was led by the RCMP. Multiple other agencies participated in the investigation, including the FBI, the Toronto Police Service, York and Peel region services, and the OPP. Officials today declined to comment on whether further arrests were expected, or on the details of the planned attack, as their investigation is ongoing. They did say that the support Al Qaeda provided “was in the form of direction and guidance” (rather than material support like the provision of money). A search warrant for the men’s homes was being executed “as we speak,” explained Chief Superintendent Jennifer Strachan, so the RCMP was unable to say whether the suspects were in possession of explosive devices or other weapons. She was also not yet able to explain what exactly the suspects had done, saying only that they “took steps and conducted activities to initiate a terrorist attack.”

“There is no information to indicate that these attacks were state-sponsored,” Malizia added. All the RCMP officials speaking today made a point of saying that while the threat was real, officials were monitoring the situation closely: “I want to reassure our citizens that while the RCMP believed that these individuals had the capacity and intent to carry out these criminal acts, there was no imminent threat to the general public, rail employees, train passengers, or infrastructure.”

Our tour of the beer bottle recycling process started at a new Beer Store at Eglinton and Laird. The first stage happens in the back room, where clear bottles, coloured bottles, and proprietary bottles (meaning bottles designed for one particular brewer) are separated, placed in cases, and stacked on skids. When brewers arrive with new shipments of drinks, they carry away the skids of empties.

From there, the bottles go to one of two places: either a bottling plant, or to a third-party recycler who crushes them into small pellets called “cullet,” which are then sent to glass manufacturers to use in producing new bottles.

The brown bottle we all know and love is an industry-standard bottle, and many beer brands use it. These standard bottles are the ones that get sent to bottling plants. One-time use bottles, which include imports like Heineken and Corona, are unique in size and shape and can’t easily be reused, so they’re turned into cullet. Clear ones must be separated, because the smallest trace of coloured glass will contaminate a clear batch once it’s melted down.

Not only does the beer store recycle its bottles, it recycles packaging. “Anything we sell, we take it back and recycle it,” says Jeff Newton, President of Canada’s National Brewers, who was with us throughout the tour. Newton points out that the bottle return program is 100 per cent industry funded and diverts bottles from going in the trash. It’s a closed system, where any given bottle can go through the full cycle in under 120 days.

After the Beer Store, we pile into our cars and head off to the Molson Brewery near the airport. We’re made to wear safety glasses, toe caps, and ear plugs to counter the roaring sound of machinery. We start at the loading bay where the skids of empties are unloaded off trailers and put onto conveyer belts to be depalletized. A machine lifts them up to a second level and shifts off the cases one row at a time. Two workers stand by to make sure everything rolls along okay, but the machines do most of the work. “In the old days, when I was a youngster, we had to put them on the line by hand!” muses Bill Patterson, a veteran worker of the factory line.

The bottles roll down the line, clattering and clanging along the metal conveyor belts. Machines separate the broken ones and divert them down another line where they fall into a chute and are saved in a hopper.

The next stage on the line is cleaning. A humungous machine with a big rotating drum takes in 60 bottles at a time and washes them thoroughly with detergent, rinses them out, and removes the labels. The thousands of brown bottles file down the line to the filler stage. An electronic detector flashing like a strobe light scans each bottle looking for minute defects that could spell disaster later on. Rejects are spat onto a separate line and recycled. The good ones go through to the filling machine, which is like a whirling carousel that fills them, caps them, and spits them out into another scanner. Reject bottles are, again, spat down a separate line and dealt with in another factory process.

Next, the bottles are pasteurized. Molson does this by heating them up to 61C for ten minutes. This kills off any microbes that could make people sick, and increases the beer’s shelf life. The bottles come out of the pasteurization stage at around 28C.

The bottles, now filled with delicious beer, continue down the long steel conveyor belts to the labelling machine, which slaps on labels with astounding speed: first on the neck of each bottle, then on the body. The machine is sometimes blindingly fast, sometimes slow and steady. At top speed, it labels 1000 bottles a minute.

After that, the labelled bottles go down the line to be boxed—another job done by a machine in mesmerizing, rhythmic motions. When we were there, two-fours of Carling were being loaded in the blink of an eye, while another machine across from us continually unfolded the cases, glued the bottom flaps, and shot them onto a conveyor which fed them into the loading machine.

Everything in the plant happened with clockwork precision, and all with very few actual human beings involved. In another age, the place might have employed hundreds of people. Today, only 35 employees man the production line. The entire process, from start to finish, only takes two and a half hours.

As for the used aluminum cans that end up at the Molson plant, machines tear off the tops and crush them flat as pancakes. Molson sends them off to another company to process into sheets of aluminum, which are then turned into cans all over again.

The last stop on our tour was in Brampton, at the largest glass manufacturing company in the world, Owens-Illinois (OI). The factory is visible from Highway 410. It has a dirty, rusted exterior. A tall silo contains the raw materials used to make new bottles and is connected to the plant by catwalks high in the air. Down below, a worker drives a front-end loader through heaps of rejected bottles and cullet, dropping them into a bunker that can hold 1000 tonnes of glass. This may sound like a lot, but that’s only enough to last OI about a week. Railway spurs go into the facility so trains can drop off shipments of cullet from the U.S.

Inside the factory, 1000-square-foot furnaces powered by natural gas and electricity use 1500-degree heat to melt the cullet on the second floor. The molten glass drops down though a funnel and mechanical jaws chop it off at regular intervals. The glowing orange globs fall into machines on the first floor, which turn them into bottles by blowing compressed air into them. The glowing hot bottles shuttle down the line and are cooled, inspected, and, ultimately, shipped out. The plant runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, only stopping when it’s necessary to change the bottle moulds and during power outages.

OI uses 50 per cent recycled materials in its bottles, but wants to increase that number. “I think that every glass company out there would like to get their hands on more recycled glass, because it’s just much more energy efficient,” says Walter Dovigo, manufacturing manager at OI. “The demand is high, and we just can’t get enough of it at times because of the demand. We’re making 500,000 bottles on that one line. If every consumer in the GTA brought in a bottle every once in a while we’d have enough to keep ‘er going.”

“It helps divert a lot of material from landfills, but in the process of doing that, and in the process of recycling and reusing the glass as cullet to make new bottles, the greenhouse gas savings and the energy savings associated with that are also huge,” said John Zanini, OI’s vice president of sales. “So it’s not just a recycling program. It’s a greenhouse gas and an energy reduction program.”

For the sixth year in a row, gourmands and food activists banded together for the Brewer’s Plate, a fundraiser to promote local, seasonal, and sustainable foods. Twenty-three craft brewers and 29 local chefs flanked the Barbara Frum Atrium at the CBC building, offering unlimited platings and tastings to attendees who’d paid $125 each for admission. The proceeds went to Not Far From The Tree, an organization that harvests fruit from urban trees and distributes it to shelters and restaurants.

Early spring is often considered an unappetizing time of year for local produce. Many people have the misconception that not much is growing in Ontario. Chris Lowry founded Brewer’s Plate in part to challenge that notion, and also to celebrate local craft beer and encourage chefs to show off the bounty of Ontario’s edible gems.

According to Not Far From The Tree’s founder and director, Laura Reinsborough, there’s a disconnect between Torontonians and the environment. “So many people drive to the store to buy an apple from New Zealand and pass their neighbours’ edible trees along the way,” she said. Not Far From The Tree, founded in 2008, has grown from a small group of fruit pickers into a role model for urban harvesters in North America. Last year they gleaned over 12,000 pounds of fruit from Toronto trees and have even cooked up some interesting recipes, like sumac beer and black walnut ink.

With the money from Brewer’s Plate, Reinsborough said the organization plans on investing in cargo bikes, equipment, and staff. She also mentioned a possible partnership with Bellwoods Brewery, which is interested in using local fruit for a cherry beer this summer.

Not Far From The Tree and the Brewer’s Plate have a lot of friends around Ontario who support their work. Jamie Kennedy wasn’t on the bill this year, but was spotted walking around. Lynn Crawford of Ruby Watchco had a table in the front with her “breakfast of champions” (click the photo at the top of this post for all the details), and chef and activist Joshna Maharaj used some of NFFTT’s arsenal of preserves for her platings.

Chefs and brewers were paired together, which made for some beautiful culinary duets. A particularly potent duo were Black Oak’s Nut Ale and Chocosol’s Mexican drinking chocolate, served as a beer float. Frida’s bunuelos, a Mexican dessert from Oaxaca covered in guava marmalade and a dash of cinnamon, met Spearhead’s Moroccan Brown Ale, a dark and sweet beer that sings of figs, dates, and cinnamon.

The dishes were as diverse as the chefs, but the plates that captured that wintry taste of a Canadian April harvest stood out, especially Grapevine Catering’s creamy butternut squash risotto with roasted Brussels sprouts and goat cheese. Also notable was Chef Anne Sorrenti’s ciabatta crostini with Ontario onion and garlic confit and Monforte’s lemon sheep’s milk cheese.

Ninutik’s Richard Brault coupled sharp Ontario cheeses with maple syrup from Lanark County. He ladled the syrup onto snow and rolled the cheese in the resulting sweet, frozen streak to induce the most scrumptious one-bite bliss. The servings were unlimited, but even that couldn’t quell the desire to eat an infinite amount of maple-covered cheese.

As the saying goes, savour Ontario.

On Wednesday afternoon, plumes of grey smoke billowed into the air above High Park and wafted across the city. But this was no ordinary brush fire. It was a controlled burn, initiated by the City as part of the High Park oak savannah and restoration program, which has been in place since 2000. Two plots of land in the park were burned in methodical fashion, drawing in spectators from all around.

Burning off ground leaf litter helps control invasive species and restores the black oak savannah, an endangered ecosystem that has also been designated as an “area of natural and scientific interest” by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. About a third of High Park is black oak savannah, and less than one per cent of Canada’s original black oak savannah remains today. Agriculture, invasive species, and urban development have all contributed to its decline.

While a grass fire may seem destructive, it’s part of the natural order of things. In the wilderness, a grass fire can reduce a large swath of forest to cinders, but it always gives way to new growth. Causing our own fires is a necessary measure to restore this fading ecosystem and protect it from the invasive species that are keeping new black oak trees from replacing the old ones.

Jason Sickel, of Lands and Forest Consultants, was the burn boss for this year’s fire. He explained the science behind the prescribed burn, and what his crew’s approach would be.

“Oak savannahs are heavily reliant on fire to keep invasive species at bay,” he said. “The oak has evolved to incorporate fire into its success, down to its leaf structure where it doesn’t decompose as fast. It holds over to the spring. It curls in the heat. The bark is a lot hardier than a lot of other hardwoods. It has that superior taproot so that when fire does progress over a site and top-kills the shoots…all that energy gets compartmentalized in that taproot and it shoots up a new sprout that will far exceed what would have been there previously. You’ll have three to five feet of growth on top of what would have been there. No other hardwood species, or invasive species, can do the same, which is why fire is such an important process of maintaining and developing oak savannah.”

Before starting any fires, Sickel and his team took a number of things into consideration, including temperature, humidity, moisture in the ground cover, and wind speed. The burn team used those factors to calculate the fire’s rate of spread, and what type of fire they expected to see. Sickel was anticipating an R1 or R2 fire, meaning the flames would be from 30 centimetres to 1.5 metres tall, and maybe up to two metres in the areas with the thickest leaf litter. Conditions on the sunny Wednesday afternoon were perfect. “It’s a great day for a burn,” Sickel said.

Fred Bruin—who, like Sickel, works for Lands and Forest Consulting—was the ignition boss for this year’s burn. He drove an ATV with a flaming nozzle mounted on the back. As he slowly roved around the edge of the burn areas, it sputtered a mixture of diesel and gasoline that instantly set the ground aflame. After sweeping the perimeter, he covered the interior of the plot. The smoke was thick and the campfire smell was heavy in the air. “Did anyone bring marshmallows?” someone joked.

A suppression crew patrolled the area with water tanks on their backs and spray guns in their hands, ready to quench any stray fires. There were none, and the burn went off without a hitch.

Councillor Sarah Doucette (Ward 13 Parkdale-High Park) was in the park during the burn. She seemed pleased with the success of the restoration program. “Come back here in two weeks time and you’ll already see things growing,” she said—the field before her smouldered, covered with black and grey ashes

“It does enhance them and they do grow quite quickly,” she added. “It really does help us keep our black oak savannah, which is important for High Park. If this is what we have to do, then—oh heck, it’s a beautiful day out,” Doucette laughed. “A little bit smoky, but a beautiful day out!”

If there’s a safe place for a mayoralty in our post–City of Toronto Act era, it’s the executive committee. This is essentially a handpicked committee whose job is to help mould and massage a mayor’s agenda into fighting shape. Differences are ironed out, a unified front formed.

There should be no unpleasant surprises sprung on a mayor at executive committee meetings. Whipping a vote is unheard of. Unanimity on items isn’t an absolute necessity, but split decisions are a red flag. To paraphrase ol’ blue eyes, if a mayor can’t make it there, a mayor’s not going to make it anywhere (“anywhere,” in this case, being city council).

So, no. It should’ve come as no surprise that the executive committee pushed forward a “yes to casinos” motion on Tuesday. The surprise would have been if it hadn’t. It might be hyperbolic to suggest that Mayor Ford’s political future depended on a yes vote, but currently in Toronto we’re living in the age of hyperbole. Even Councillor David Shiner’s (Ward 24, Willowdale) motion to defer the casino item might be considered to have been a serious setback for the mayor.

A mayor doesn’t lose control of a key item at Executive Committee. Once that happens, all that’s left is the pomp and circumstance that comes with the chain of office. He’s no longer actually running anything around City Hall.

Which is why Mayor Ford’s staff was so in evidence in the committee room on Tuesday. It was a show of force, a display of firepower. The casino vote had to break in the mayor’s favour. Any sort of rebellion by the crew needed to be nipped in the bud.

The real surprise at Tuesday’s meeting wasn’t that Mayor Ford won the vote, meaning the casino debate will move on to city council next month; it was that he had to struggle at all to ensure that he won. This wasn’t just some regular monthly executive committee meeting where there were disagreements between members over a parks-and-environment item. It was a special meeting called by the mayor to deal with one item and one item only. Casinos.

Executive Committee Recommends Aggressive Casino Expansion

That only nine of the 13 members voted in the affirmative almost guarantees the item’s defeat at council. The mayor doesn’t even have the support of one of his staunchest allies, Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong (Ward 34, Don Valley East), who delivered perhaps the most heartfelt, genuine speech I’ve ever seen him give—one that, frankly, I didn’t think he was capable of.

“I don’t think casinos represent the values of the City of Toronto,” the councillor said. “I don’t believe gambling and all the things associated with it represent the values that I have, and I don’t think it represents the values of the constituents in my ward.”

Councillor Jaye Robinson (Ward 25, Don Valley West) spoke out against a downtown casino as forcefully as she did about Councillor Doug Ford’s ferris-wheel plans for the Port Lands. And, furthering his recent drift away from the Ford administration, Councillor Paul Ainslie (Ward 43, Scarborough East) said he didn’t like the numbers he was seeing—neither the hosting fees nor the job figures. The chair of the planning and growth management committee, Peter Milczyn (Ward 5, Etobicoke-Lakeshore), was the fourth vote against the mayor’s casino plans.

One of the main advantages of being the mayor and having an executive committee is that on important items there are 13 votes pretty much locked up going into a city council meeting. That means only ten more will be needed to push that item through. That’s 10 of the remaining 31 councillors, or less than one-third.

On the casino, Mayor Ford hasn’t given himself that head start. Even granting him the nine votes from the Executive Committee—and some of those are very, very, very conditional—plus brother Doug (Ward 2, Etobicoke North), Speaker Frances Nunziata (Ward 11, York South-Weston), and Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti (Ward 7, York West), he’s still looking for 10 votes. Throw in Councillor Mike Del Grande (Ward 39, Scarborough-Agincourt) because he sees only dollar signs and, let’s say, Councillor Michelle Berardinetti (Ward 35, Scarborough Southwest), who might go along to get along with the mayor. Plus Councillor Mark Grimes (Ward 6, Etobicoke-Lakeshore), well, just because.

This leaves seven votes to pull in, and we scraped the bottom of the Team-Ford-loyalty barrel to arrive at that number. If the mayor doesn’t pull something out of a hat to entice councillors over to his side, if he can’t build momentum in favour of a casino, his votes will evaporate. No councillor will want to be on the losing side of such a divisive issue.

Every way you look at this, the council casino vote seems DOA. To most politicians, near-certain defeat on a cherished item would be cause for concern. But as we all know by now, Mayor Ford is not most politicians.

None of this is about good governance or even rational political maneuvering. Losing council votes is a viable strategy if you’re looking to embrace a certain us-versus-them martyrdom. The mayor simply needs a wedge issue to take into next year’s campaign. He’s currently trotting some out to see how they fit. Transit. Island airport jet expansion. They have nice left-right, downtown-suburban dynamics.

The problem with casinos is that the votes won’t fall that way. There’s no ideological or geographic split on the issue. Tuesday’s vote at Executive Committee showed that. The outcome suggests this will just be another millstone for Mayor Ford to wear, further proof that he is unwilling or unable to lead this city.

Roger Ebert hosts a “Twitter Showdown” at TIFF 2010.

Roger Ebert died yesterday after a long struggle with cancer, breaking the hearts of admirers around the world who’d come to know him through his film journalism, and, in later years, through his unbelievably active Twitter account.

Like all of his writing, his tweets dealt mainly with film but often veered off into unexpected thematic territory. Since Ebert made an annual pilgrimage to the Toronto International Film Festival to check out each year’s slate of new movies, he sometimes turned his Twitter attention to the goings-on in our part of the world. (Which, to be fair, isn’t all that far away from his part of the world, Chicago.)

Here’s a look at a few of the times Ebert tried to sum up Toronto in 140 characters or less.

First of all, though, it has to be said that Ebert wasn’t exactly neglectful of Toronto in his long-form writing. If you go through the archived TIFF coverage on his website, you’ll find year after year of fond reports from Toronto’s festival-choked downtown streets. (Plus one not-so-fond report.)

A reader gets the sense that when Ebert came here he talked to locals, read local press, and tried to soak up the atmosphere—between movies, at any rate. Over the years he repeatedly enthused over TIFF’s inclusiveness. He loved the fact that ordinary people could attend screenings, even if they had to book vacations to do it. In a 2008 column, Ebert said he’d only missed the festival twice, ever.

But his tweets about Toronto aren’t, like his columns, bound by the necessity of conveying useful information to a filmgoing readership—and so, from a Torontonian perspective, some of them are especially charming. Here are a few we liked:

Roger Ebert hosts a “Twitter Showdown” at TIFF 2010.

• You’ve probably already heard that Roger Ebert died today. He was a cherished visitor to Toronto during each year’s film festival (the photo above was taken during a festival-related event in 2010), and he will doubtless be missed as much here as anywhere else.
• Yesterday we found out that Doug Ford will definitely run for a seat at Queen’s Park, provided Kathleen Wynne calls an election sometime soon. Over at The Grid, Edward Keenan points out the obvious (but in a more eloquent way than most of us could manage): “There are worse propositions for the City of Toronto than seeing the mayor’s older brother leave City Hall and take a seat on the Queen’s Park opposition backbench.”
• Meanwhile, in the mayor’s office, it appears Rob Ford has hired a football coach to act as his “director of operations and logistics.” And not just a football coach, but his high school football coach. Nobody will say what the job actually entails. On its face, this seems like an odd use of taxpayer money. Sometimes we wish we could teleport 2009 Rob Ford into the present so he could be furious at himself.
• Also, according to Toronto Life, C5, the restaurant on the top floor of the Royal Ontario Museum crystal, is closing, apparently at least in part because it was expensive and unpopular.

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Queen West’s “little sex shop that could,” Come As You Are, has avoided what looked to be imminent closure, thanks to the enthusiastic response they received to a public plea for customer support on Facebook, Twitter, and through media outlets across the city. The store raised approximately $55,000 (half from in-store sales, half through their website) since the beginning of its campaign, which included a one-day-only Use It or Lose It Sale and a surprise Tenga Easter Egg Hunt along Queen Street West with the participation of The Gladstone Hotel, Aslan Leather, Fuzz Wax Bar, The Drake Hotel, and Eyesore Video.

“We had a huge response from Toronto and across Canada, as customers we hadn’t heard from in years rallied to the cause,” CAYA worker/owner Sarah Forbes-Roberts told us. “We basically sold all our inventory off with no profit margin, so it was an extremely bold move. It means though we move in to our new fiscal year with money in our bank accounts and a balanced budget going forward. It was what we needed to do to save the business.”

What made the campaign so successful? The resounding support of customers old and new, many of whom were called to action via social media. “Customers were really upset that we were considering closing,” Forbes-Roberts noted. “Social media really helped get the word out and it was—ironically—the best social media campaign we’ve run. Customers can be fairly quiet on social media even though we make a point of using it extensively for everything we do. This time was very different. Folks came out of the woodwork to make it known they love the shop and the social good we do.”

“We’re still nervous, like all small business owners. We’re hoping for good summer traffic, and the good news is there are some new shops opening up around us, including White Squirrel Coffee in the old Peach Berserk space.”

With so much happening quickly, and such an intense focus on filling orders and moving inventory, CAYA’s business owners have yet to meet to decide on next steps. “We’re definitely considering all the options on the table. Many have spoken about us only existing online with no rent to pay, or little rent with a warehouse. However, we are fighting to keep the physical store open. Queen West has come out and said they want us to stay. It gives us an edge that other online competitors don’t have. Also, with the physical store we have a connection with neigbourhood and community that can’t be replicated online.”

Although the co-op risked a great deal by going public with their struggle, the results clearly have been worth it. “We really leave the experience with extremely warm feelings in our hearts,” said Forbes-Roberts. “Toronto saved us!”