Wild Toronto is a bi-weekly comic strip about the animals and plants that make a living in our city. Rosemary Mosco makes the comics, and would love to hear your suggestions (in the comments!) on wildlife to be profiled.......

For those who crave local food, the long winter of parsnip and rutabaga soup is coming to an end. The surest sign of spring is the sight of farmers pitching their market tents for the year ahead. You know what that means: you'll be able to add fresh local asparagus and radishes to that soup any day now. Toronto supports a handful of year-round markets including the old reliable St. Lawrence and a relative......

Photo by Marc Lostracco. In upcoming months, Toronto's summer temperatures will once again strain the power grid, and the demand for more power means more power generation—and consequently, more pollution. For Ontario customers wishing to utilize renewable energy sources, there are currently only two options: expensively retrofit your property to generate some of its own electricity, or sign up with Bullfrog Power. For many condo owners and apartment dwellers, neither of those options have......

Have you ever cycled along the Pickering and Ajax waterfronts? You should. It's one of the best recreational bike rides in the GTA with beautiful scenery and mostly-flat trails, but presents Toronto cyclists with a big problem: how to get there. Because the Waterfront Trail all but disappears through most of Scarborough, you're stuck with either riding the long, miserable route along Kingston Road and Lawrence Avenue to get to Pickering or driving your......

Following the unveiling of the EcoCab in Toronto last week Torontoist spotted the pedi-cab being presented to councillor Howard Moscoe outside City Hall yesterday. Moscoe, chairman of the Licensing and Standards Committee, turned down the offer of a ride around Nathan Phillips Square, but got a complete tour of the $13,000 vehicle's features as a small but curious crowd gathered. EcoCabs are expected to roll out on downtown streets Thursday.......

No, those aren't Tibetan prayer flags strung up at Yonge and Carlton—it's Toronto Hydro airing their dirty laundry for all to see, and if our own observations are any indicator, the windblown apparel is attracting a lot of mystified attention from pedestrians below. The stunt is a reminder that they're giving out free clotheslines at Costco, Wal-Mart, and Home Depot for two more weekends. The campaign is targeting clothes dryers because the average dryer......

It seems that some Toronto taggers are no longer content to scrawl their own names on blank concrete canvases around the city and are trying instead to make more of a cultural statement. Last year, references to composer Gustav Mahler popped up in several places around town. This year, a more cryptic stencil has appeared on the Humber Bay Arch Bridge, boldly proclaiming "ISBN 486-28495-6" for all to see and ponder. This International Standard......

Don't panic, but food prices are rising. Turns out that oil becoming an inelastic commodity, collapsing fish stocks, climate change affecting crop growth, and increased demand for food in China and India as they grow richer makes food more expensive! Who could have foreseen this happening? Oh, right, lots of people. Speaking of oil becoming an inelastic commodity, gas prices are going to skyrocket this summer and continue climbing for the foreseeable future. When......

In one of the more surreal moments from Streets are for People’s Tuesday visit to Queen’s Park, Rosario Marchese, the NDP MPP for Trinity-Spadina, donned Captain Planet–style superhero digs, made with a few go-get-’em words about public transit, and took flight into the Legislative Assembly’s inner chamber to save the known universe. Except he didn’t, but the cape is fact. Sort of.......

Hillary Clinton has won the Pennsylvania primary. The Clinton campaign remains alive after a ten-point win in the state, thus proving that a campaign currently in debt can win if it runs enough negative attacks and limps along to the next contest. This is also known as the "limping zombie" theory of electoral campaigning. The Tories are defending their election financing shenanigans. This marks the "what we did was perfectly okay" stage of the......

Sort of just in time for the now-averted TTC strike, Torontonians will finally have the opportunity to further indulge in a mode of transporation that was once reserved almost exclusively for camera-laden tourists and decadent—or at least, unhurried—commuters in pretty much every major city in the world. The incentive this time, however, is that it's free. Starting May 1, sore-legged saunterers will be able to hail a pedi-cab (also acceptable are "pedal-cab," "bugbug," or......

Several hundred environmentalist activists marched through downtown Toronto on Sunday on "Reclaim Earth Day." The exuberant parade called on the Harper government to implement an about-face on climate change policy and to implement the Kyoto Protocol. The march ended with a street festival on John Street at Queen organized by the anti-car/pro-bicycle group Streets are for People, which featured games, music, and the famous Petition Car (pictured above). The Petition Car will be delivered......

On the West bank of the Lower Don River, just South of Queen Street at the Eastern Street bridge, a shrunken cruise ship sits beneath a behemoth buoy. Is it waiting to be rescued, or for you to come aboard and join the party? Who knows. Advertised via fancy insert in The Globe and Mail's Saturday edition a few weeks ago, the 25-foot-long cruise ship is an installation by Québécois art collective BGL and......

The McGuinty provincial government last week announced an end to the clothesline bans that have been active in some Ontario communities. Now’s your chance to show off your unmentionables to the neighbourhood. If you don’t have a clothesline, you’re in luck: Toronto Hydro is giving away 75,000 clotheslines to Toronto residents over the next few weekends. Illustration by Kevin McBride.......

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......

Wild Toronto is a bi-weekly comic strip about the animals and plants that make a living in our city. Thanks to the Toronto Tree Tours for help with this week's comic.......

TTC strike: not today, but probably Monday. If it happens, Torontoist will let you know. If you were to get your ass kicked by a TTC Special Constable, would you prefer a gun, a taser, or the standard pepper spray? The TTC launches a $100,000 study to find out. The Toronto District School Board is set to make some controversial changes over the next few years. A report released yesterday threatens the closure of......

Sam Javanrouh—the man behind the venerable Daily Dose of Imagery, this city's most widely-read photoblog—has always had something of a knack for creating amazing stop-motion timelapse videos. Whether it's cars filling up an Edward and Bay parking lot or the downtown skyline (go to his archives under the heading "timelapse photography" to see more), his videos are hypnotic, beautiful, and fascinating—a chance to see the motions of the city in a new way. Javanrouh's......

Kleercut WARNING! Contains clearcut ancient forests www.kleercut.net When CBS Outdoor wrapped St. George station in vinyl ads promoting a certain brand of facial tissue, Greenpeace's Kleercut campaign decided to tackle the omnipresent sales pitch by generously sprinkling the premises with doses of perspective, reminding subway riders that the softness of Kimberly-Clark's products comes at the expense of unsustainably-harvested ancient forests, including the Boreal. To Kimberly-Clark, puppies may be adorable, but caribou, eagles, bears, and......

In the hierarchy of beloved Canadian animals, certainly near the top are the beaver, the caribou, and the polar bear. The Canada Goose is much more divisive in its ranking. Sure, having Canada in its name is a pretty slick move, but being an aggressive, overpopulating pooping machine is a strong deficit. Obviously, where the Canada Goose stands will become a contentious issue, soon to join famed debates as, "Is maple the best donut......

Alert the Commissioner—the Good Night Bandit has struck again! Some downtown residents awoke to a less unsightly landscape this morning, thanks to this anonymous do-gooder, who collected much of the detritus left behind after the disappearance of the trash-ridden snowbanks. As if to underscore the benevolent message left by this stealthy stranger, a used condom lay on the sidewalk directly below this sign. Litterbugs: sleep with one eye open, for the Good Night Bandit......

Waterfront Toronto considers corporate naming scheme. On the one hand, yes, it's a travesty. On the other hand, does anybody call the Skydome anything other than the Skydome, regardless of what Rogers wants us to call it? Feist sweeps the Junos, winning all five awards for which she was nominated. Feist wisely kept everything in perspective, explaining in her victory speech on Saturday (yes, the Junos, like all Canadian awards shows, stretch things out......

Wild Toronto is a bi-weekly comic strip about the animals and plants that make a living in our city. Rosemary Mosco makes the comics, and would love to hear your suggestions (in the comments!) on wildlife to be profiled.......

Ontario considers electronics recycling fee. The proposed fee, already in operation in other provinces, would get tacked on when you purchase electronic items and would pay for provincial electronics recycling centres. It's a simple, feasible solution to a problem we need to deal with, and we have evidence it already works, so six months from now it will likely be the focus of a maelstrom of public debate as people declare that an extra......

Photos by Miles Storey Whatever the critical analysis of Earth Hour last night—Toronto Hydro is reporting a 9% drop in power during the hour—its success seems assured by the large number of people who attended events and the awareness generated. Walking around downtown, there was a palpable buzz that Torontoist hasn't felt in the city since Nuit Blanche. In addition to the free concert in Nathan Phillips Square, there were successful gatherings all around......

Like it or not, Earth Hour has come (and gone)! And we're curious as to whether you participated. Officially, all you had to do was turn off all your lights, though you were welcome to have gone all-out and turned off everything that consumed electricity, like your computer (though at least according to our stats, not too many people went that far). And if you're kicking yourself for missing it, hey, there's always 8......

As Toronto joins countries around the world in turning out the lights tonight, we thought it was worthwhile to take a critical look at Earth Hour. And we're not the only ones. Even in its home country of Australia, a blogger on a newspaper website writes (via Metro) that instead of switching off the lights, "people should switch on their brains and realize that they are being played for suckers. And they should see......

Now that Spring is officially here, we can retrospectively name Winter 2007–2008 "The Winter of the Pothole." As the snow dunes melt, an ever-growing number of colossal crevices are appearing on the city streets and highways. City crews are working overtime to patch up the damage, but Toronto already spent $1.3 million of its $4 million annual pothole budget by early March. Yikes. So when are they going to deal with that crater in......

Wild Toronto is a bi-weekly comic strip about the animals and plants that make a living in our city. Rosemary Mosco makes the comics, and would love to hear your suggestions (in the comments!) on wildlife to be profiled.......

Torontoist Environment Editor Chris Tindal is currently engaged in a federal by-election campaign. This weekly column is an attempt to offer a behind the scenes glimpse into what it's like to be that mysterious Other: a politician. This is my last Campaign Confidential before E-day, yet I'm hesitant to pen any "final thoughts" knowing how much can happen in the final week of a campaign. It's been a bit of a strange campaign. On the......