All three parties in the Ontario legislature are backing a bill that will ban smoking in cars carrying anyone under the age of 16. You know, when Torontoist was young, we'd roll around seatbeltless in the back of flimsy subcompacts doing 150 on the highway while our parents drank beer and spewed out lungfuls of carcinogens, and we turned out okay. The provincial government has announced that two planned nuclear reactors will be built......

City councillor, unintentional humourist, and Torontoist favourite Councillor Rob Ford has grabbed himself some headlines again. He refuses to apologize for his comments on Wednesday, "the Oriental people, they're slowly taking over...they're hard, hard workers," because his sweeping generalization was intended as "a compliment." However, a spokesperson for the Canadian Council of Lazy Asians has said that the remarks were "deeply offensive." A devout Sikh man has lost his bid to overturn the law......

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset. No federal politician this year was a bigger embarrassment to Canadians than Environment Minister John Baird, and in a......

Canadian DMCA to be introduced to Parliament today? That's what a lot of sources are saying, and the bill will likely be an abomination, essentially outlawing, among other things, freeware hacks for the iPod, automatic intellectual property rights for research purposes, making copies for your own personal use, and the above image. Al Gore rips into John Baird at the Bali conference. So, with two of the most pressing legal issues of the new......

So, what’s scarier: a zombie infestation or the melting of the polar ice caps? This is an urgent and legitimate question! And later this week, Toronto cineastes can compare and contrast, for just as the After Dark Festival winds down, the Planet in Focus International Environmental Film & Video Festival springs up. Running from October 24 to 28, Planet in Focus is the most acclaimed film festival of its environmentally-minded ilk. This year, to......

Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize. And then Ann Coulter's head exploded. Dalton McGuinty proclaims "Family Day" stat holiday in February. This...wait, did he actually keep a promise this time? Wow. Ontario economy projected to only grow 1.8% in 2008. You know what we need to get our economy humming again? Mass production of a car that runs on dandelions. I am just saying. David Miller says the election shows that city residents are......

Ontario Conservative leader John "The Tory" Tory has promised that if elected a Conservative government would allocate $800 million to public transit in the province. Tory also confessed that it has been a long-time dream of his to one day ride on a streetcar, but that his chauffeur wasn't yet licensed to drive one. David Crombie has been named "community liaison official' in the sometimes violent land claim dispute between the First Nations and......

David Hughes, a senior geoscientist at Natural Resources Canada, is to energy security as David Suzuki is to the environment or Al Gore is to Global Warming. The fact that he has yet to receive the same level of attention is an unfortunate oversight, since our energy security (or lack thereof) is an increasingly urgent issue that we must learn more about and begin to address. Mr. Hughes' message regarding dwindling energy supplies is......

This was Toronto’s downtown at 10:30 a.m. yesterday, as seen from Lakeshore Boulevard near the Canadian Exhibition Grounds. Air Quality Ontario’s Air Quality Index measured a daytime high of 54, which put Toronto’s air well into the “Poor” category. The day before, the AQI hit 59. What to do? I ran errands on my bike yesterday, passing bumper-to-bumper car traffic everywhere I cycled. When I started cycling Toronto’s streets fifteen years ago, I didn’t......

The City of Toronto's Community Environment Days combine a number of different worthwhile initiatives into one event. They began last month and continue until the end of September, with each Ward getting their own day. There are four main stuff-related activities to do:Buy stuff like recycling bins, green bins, water efficiency kits, and rain barrels.Get free stuff, like leaf compost and rain gauges. (Actually, that's it for the free stuff. Go leaf compost!)Get rid of......

Gas prices in Ontario at a nine-month high. Given the immediately following news item, Torontoist can only say "well, shucks" and pull out its collective bike with thirty-plus seats. Arctic icecap melting even faster than expected. At its current rate of melting, the Arctic ocean will lack summer ice by 2020 rather than the previous prediction of 2050. In response to this latest news, John Baird said Al Gore was a big dumb fatty fat......

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! It's official: Justin Trudeau......

In a time when Al Gore is predicting that global warming is the coming of the apocalypse, people are looking for creative ways to maintain a sustainable ecosystem without giving up their consumerist lifestyles. Toronto’s first Green Living Show will inspire ways to do just that. The Green Living Show is this weekend, April 27-29, at the Direct Energy Centre at the Exhibition grounds. It boasts eco-fashion shows, organic cooking demonstrations, a wildflower garden, the......

Austinist gets arty with an interactive guide to SXSW, loved some local art galleries and a new art exhibit and lamented the possible loss of "Friday Night Lights" production to New Mexico. Bostonist was happy they finally found an Anna Nicole Smith connection to their fair city and that an Apple Store was opening up. They were less happy that new rules have been established limiting underage shows and that their Governor is spending a......

Al Gore brought his now famous slideshow to a sold-out crowd at the University of Toronto last night. Outside, a very Canadian phenomenon—the "friendly picket"—was taking place with signs that read "Welcome Al" and "Heed The Goracle." Inside, former Ontario premiere David Peterson introduced Gore as a "moralist, philosopher, thinker, teacher, doer, and rock star." "I love you Al," someone yelled from the upper seats of Convocation Hall once the first burst of applause had......

Toronto's overwhelming reception of Al Gore yesterday prompted David Miller to toughen his stance on climate change. Mayor Miller promised an aggressive change in policy on pollution, transit and construction, which will be formally proposed in late March. The Ontario government may have come up with a way around the new U.S.-Canada passport rules. A new super-secure driver's license is in talks, which would feature "laser engraving, holograms, currency-like print quality and other security measures......

Sometimes it feels like time is slipping away faster than ticket sales for tonight’s Al Gore talk at Con Hall. Catch time while you can! Hurry over to *new* gallery to bid on a selection of tick-tockalicious clocks created by 50 artists, such as It’s Almost Time by Lily Yung (above, left) or 4-D Comic by Donald Brackett (above, right). As a fundraiser for the Artists’ Health Centre Foundation, this first annual silent auction,......

We'd like to start this week's run-down by wishing a very happy birthday to parent blog Gothamist, which turned four on Friday. If it wasn't for them, the rest of us wouldn't be here. They celebrated their birthday by nabbing an interview with Entourage star Adrian Grenier, who misses NYC public transportation when he's working in LA. They also reported on NYU students protesting a band whose name is also known as a slur, the......

Almost 20 years ago, in 1988, over 300 scientists and policy-makers from 46 different countries and organizations came together to discuss the crisis of climate change in Toronto. It was called “The Toronto Conference,” and their final statement began with the following sentence: "Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment, whose ultimate consequence could be second only to a global nuclear war." In other words, they were a little concerned. At the......

He's making a list, and checking it twice. He's going to let us know who's been naughty or nice. That's right -- Al Gore is coming to town. If you have seen the Oscar-nominated documentary An Inconvenient Truth, then you are familiar with Gore's lecture on the dangers of climate change. The movie was directed by Davis Guggenheim, who wanted to bring Gore's lecture to a much larger audience. "Al Gore strips his presentations......

First off, two thoughts. One. Directly before writing this someone called us to let Torontoist know it was ‘National Break-Up Day’. We declined to break up largely because we hypothesised that it was a holiday invented because they’ve just released The Break-Up, the new film featuring a woman who Brad Pitt didn’t impregnate for whatever reason, and a man who looks like he never sleeps (that joke is stolen from Family Guy, but come on,......

Shanghaiist probably knows a little more about China than the Chicago Sun-Times. Giving them the benefit of the doubt on that one. The city does to have a music scene. Don't even front like they don't. They also have Dorito bananas and white guys shopping for wives. What they don't have is any more tolerance for jaywalkers. Bostonist sees Boston and Somerville each whip out their art and face off. A plagiarized novel is the......

The City decides to shelve their new dogs in parks policy. A lot of people are pissed off on both the pro-dog and no-dog sides. We've said it once and we'll say it again, come fall we think this'll be an election issue. Someone took their dislike of dogs a little too strongly and threw a nine-week old puppy out of a moving car. Fortunately it was rescued by a family passing by. The story's......

Torontoist thinks love letters are a little too schmaltzy and saccharine for our taste, give us a good breakup letter any day of the week. So we were thrilled when someone tipped us off to e-closure. These local boys solicited a bunch of breakup letters last summer and have added 48 different breakups on their site. They're always looking for more and will keep things anonymous if you're worried about any future partners finding......

Current TV, Al Gore's pet telly project, launched itself into the digital cable stratosphere yesterday, empowering disenfranchised youth viewers, and cutting off the Canadian diaspora from their nightly Peter Mansbridge fix. The channel that's taking over Newsworld's slot will be available in approximately twenty million households. But if your house isn't one of those lucky few, the San Francisco-based Current's website is a souped-up ZED for the audience-input generation. You can watch clips, upload......

Today's article in the Globe Review about David Macfarlane was probably intended to tell us new and exciting things about David Macfarlane. But TOist couldn't get past the giant picture of David Macfarlane and his city-issue bike post, a prop in his latest play. You see, for years we've lost sleep at night wondering about the validity of a rumour that we've not been able to confirm or disconfirm via snopes: Did NDP mustache Jack......