A federal government report says that the majority of firearms seized at US border crossings are legally held down there, and are being smuggled in simply so that their owners don't feel emasculated in a foreign country. Hide, Rex, hide! Summer students working for the City may be prowling around your neighbourhood looking for unlicensed pets, and if they find any you could be looking at a fine. Two Toronto police officers charged with......

Photo of Chris Turner at the Greater World Earthship community in New Mexico by Ashley Bristowe. It's been impossible to ignore the issue of climate change. Al Gore bounced back to relevancy with An Inconvenient Truth, and even NHL players have gotten into the act by teaming with David Suzuki to put global warming in the penalty box. With Earth Day coming up on Tuesday, Torontoist sat down with Globe and Mail sustainability columnist......

TTC does end-run around Toronto Preservation Board. The TTC wants the right to redesign 63 of its 69 stations. Heh. We have 69 TTC stations. Never noticed that before. Heh. Ontario budget released. The budget contains small business tax cuts (not as large as Jim Flaherty would like) and small amounts of additional spending on infrastructure in public service (not as much as Howard Hampton would like). In short, it is the classic Liberal budget......

Gas prices in Toronto are at $1.09 or more a litre today, reflecting all-time record oil prices of over US$108 per barrel. For all our driving readers, it might cheer you up to consider that it's still cheaper to fill up your car with gas than say, orange juice or Diet Pepsi. By the way, if you do decide to go with orange juice, remember that the pulp-free kind is less likely to gum up......

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......

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. Stumped? We'll give you a hint. It's the average Torontonian's carbon footprint! According to Zerofootprint, a not-for-profit environmental organization, the average Torontonian's carbon footprint sits at 8.6 tonnes per year—more than a fully-grown African elephant! Zerofootprint teamed up with the City of Toronto to......

City service fees to increase? Toronto's recreation department wants to increase user fees by 21 percent this year and a total of 81 percent over seven years. Because you know who doesn't pay their fair share? Poor people! Barack Obama, John McCain surging in polls as New Hampshire primaries take place. In related news, Obama and McCain both won the small villages of Dixville Notch and Hart's Location, both of which had their complete......

Happy New Year! Thousands of GTA-ians jammed Nathan Phillips Square to watch CIty TV's tiny perfect anchorman Gord Martineau host his 75th New Year's bash. Thousands more did not. Toronto also rang in the new year with another snowstorm, which is expected to continue all day and inflict up to 10 cm of inconvenience on the city. Stupid climate change. Today the GST drops by a penny to 5%, meaning that the shwarma you......

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. The Toronto Climate Campaign spearheaded the Global Day of Action on Climate Change that took place in Dundas Square......

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......

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. The subprime mortgage crisis, which began late last year but really picked up steam in the last few months,......

A new poll shows that the majority of Canadians will call the cops on you if your party is too loud. Thus proving once and for all that we are a nation of killjoys. GO buses will run over the holidays. So, no sense worrying about a strike interfering with your vacation, commuters! (Your job, on the other hand, may well be screwed.) Stephen Harper's latest excuse for not doing enough to combat climate......

Every weekday morning, bright and early, we feature a photo (or two) from a photographer in the Torontoist Flickr Pool. It's our way of giving the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention that they deserve. On the pavement, thinking about the government. & pro-Kyoto demonstration BY THE INDECISIVE MOMENT......

The Harper government will introduce legislation to protect consumers more effectively from dangerous products, in part by holding importers more accountable for the goods they bring in. Christmas isn't going to be the same without the traditional lead-laden toys and minor brain damage. Facebook is suing a Toronto porn company for allegedly trying to hack their databases and steal info about members. Istra Holdings, trade name SlickCash, is being accused of making multiple attempts......

After refusing to allow environmentalists into the official Canadian delegation at the Bali Climate Change Conference, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has raised some hackles by bringing businesspeople, including oil company executives, into the group. Wow, he's not even pretending to care anymore. In other Bali news, a proposal to eliminate tariffs on "green" technologies was shot down at the conference on the weekend, the victim of bickering between developed and developing nations. The human......

Provincial Education Minister Kathleen Wynne has tabled a bill that would ban trans fatty foods from Ontario schools. Trans fats and young people have been a hot public safety issue since 2005's infamous "Summer of the Muffin." Conservative MP James Moore yesterday angrily rejected allegations from NDP MP Irene Mathyssen that he had been viewing a picture of a "scantily clad woman" on his laptop while in the House. Although Mathyssen later apologized after......

A Milton woman went on a rampage with a samurai sword on Sunday, injuring her boyfriend and an off-duty firefighter, smashing windows at a gas station and hacking at a parked car. While Torontoist doesn't condone senseless irrational violence, you've got to give her points for style. After a firestorm of criticism, the City has put the brakes on their controversial plan to sell land in Yorkville to McDonalds. The problem is that since there's......

Today is the first day of the Bali United Nations Climate Change Conference, which will continue until December 14. The purpose of the conference, which is being attended by over 20,000 delegates and observers from 180 countries, is to set out the framework of negotiations for the next phase of the Kyoto Protocol when it ends in 2012. There are several events taking place this week in Toronto to mark the occasion. The first......

Honest Ed's turkey giveaway successful like always. Which, Torontoist supposes, is not technically "news," but considering the rest of today's actual news, we felt it appropriate to lead off with a softball. Canada to encourage "constructive" emissions agreement at the Bali climate change summit. Since this is John Baird we're talking about here, expect "constructive" to mean something along the lines of "voluntary," or perhaps "nonexistent." 16-year-old gunned down in doorway of his home.......

Dalton McGuinty's throne speech will focus on poverty and climate change. They were going to focus on Desperate Housewives, but the writer's strike got in the way. If you wanted to know more about the phony bomb scare last night at the ROM, Torontoist has the goods right here. Buy all our playsets and toys! Opposition rebels against Tory climate change proposals. Harper says that the Commonwealth's climate change plan would have meant a doubling......

Some Canadian cattle will now be allowed into the United States following a 4-year ban in the wake of several cases of "mad cow" disease. American Homeland Security regulations will still require that any bovines wishing to cross the border carry a valid passport. The latest UN report on climate change says that global disaster is a safe bet if we don't change our carbon-emitting ways by 2012. It's all good for Canadians though, as......

We love the television advertising campaigns the WWF comes up with, and their latest is no exception. The ad does provoke some important questions, however, about the ability (or lack thereof) of individual action to create adequate change without government intervention. The first panel at yesterday's GreenTOpia launch dealt with this extensively. Keith Stewart (coincidentally, a campaigner with WWF) explained that even though he's taken extensive personal action (he has solar panels on his house,......

Photo by afiler. "What are you doing tonight?" asked a friend of ours Monday afternoon. "Well," we said, "we're going to an event called 'Caribou Country: Our Shield Against Global Warming.'" "You lost me at Caribou," our friend replied. We're told that environmental issues are at the top of everyone's mind, but anecdotal evidence suggests that that attention may be narrowly focused. This new environmentalism, it seems, is all about carbon: emissions, taxes, and......

A 13-year-old boy at St. Mary's Catholic Secondary School in Toronto was arrested after he was found to be carrying an illegal 200,000 volt stun gun in his backpack.The Star quotes school board chair Oliver Carroll as saying that "everyone was shocked." Presumably Carroll was not speaking literally. The Toronto International Film Festival opened yesterday, and as always, will showcase some of the most creative minds and promising newcomers in the movie industry. More......

Dalton McGuinty will pledge to plant fifty million trees to help fight climate change. Now, some might say that this is a somewhat lackluster pledge, what with the small print of promising to print all the trees over thirteen years. But what they didn't mention is that the trees are actually sentient and will come to your home to politely discuss with you the merits of public transit, and help you compost and reduce your......

Flush with the success of their campaign to publicly insult women and minorities, the Ontario government has taken the bold step of verbally abusing the entire City of Toronto. Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty yesterday indicated he wasn't inclined to share any of the billions of dollars that the province sucks out of Toronto each year, blaming the looming fiscal crisis on the City's failure to use its shiny new tax powers, and by implication......

All of the controversy last week over city council's non-decision regarding new taxes overshadowed another story with equal (if not more) importance. Just as a one-vote margin of defeat for a mayor is rare, so too is a unanimous vote for anything other than ceremonial or housekeeping motions. And yet, that's exactly how Toronto's climate change plan came to be adopted last Monday night, without a single dissenting voice. Given the importance of dealing......

Now that you're informed about the unhappy and scary state of the earth, it's time to do something about it. The next ArtJam will not only showcase the usual fusion of art and music, but will be a fundraiser for WTF, or the Weather Task Force. Come out to Rancho Relaxo on Friday, June 29 at 8 p.m. and pay $7 cover to help out this environmental alliance—after all, WTF organizes a bunch of......

Would road tolls on the Gardiner and DVP discourage car use and help prevent climate change? How about banning leaf blowers and gas mowers? Toronto City Council discusses the city's long term environmental plan. "Il Fornello launches Ontario-only menu." This means that you can only eat there if you're from Ontario. Or that they only serve Ontario-themed dishes (Sarnia Sausages, Presqu'ile Parmigiana?). Actually, it means that eight of Il Fornello's nine locations will be......

Jordan Manners will be laid to rest today. His mother is calling out for an inquest so that her 15-year-old son did not "die in vain." If it prevents another shooting in this city, we're all for it. Another Canadian killed in Afghanistan. A NATO helicopter crashed with five American crewmembers, and two members of the military, including one British and the one Canadian. A Taliban spokesperson took responsibility for shooting down the helicopter and......