Mayor David Miller unveiled a YouTube video asking Canadians to sign an online petition urging Ottawa to ban all handguns in Canada. While most handguns are already illegal, the gesture would serve a powerful symbolic purpose by pushing the blame for Toronto gun violence onto the feds. CBC News says that a highly publicized series of raids in 2005, which police said took a major gang out of commission, have resulted in almost no......

This evening, Toronto Culture and Fort York are unveiling a permanent public art installation under the Gardiner Expressway (off Fort York Boulevard, between Bathurst and Fleet Streets). In WATERTABLE, Toronto artists Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak use video and lights to create the effect of rippling water on the underside of the highway—a reminder that the Gardiner runs along what used to the original shoreline of Lake Ontario. Ever wonder why the the Toronto......

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.) Julian Fantino complains about "discount sentences." Apparently, the idea that experienced criminals......

If you're like most snow-hating Torontonians, your weekend plans are changing with the weather. Suddenly, the thought of spending Friday night in high heels and club lineups has all the appeal of an ice bath. Forget new outfits or dinner spots, you're looking for new releases instead. Should you also be looking for a way to broaden your horizons, impress your intimidatingly smart date, or celebrate the Chinese New Year and Canadian cinema, look......

Selected quotes from "Toronto's Type and Tile Heritage" by Edward Keenan, from the November 14th issue of Eye Weekly: Joe Clark: "The trick is trying to prevent the destruction of the subway system as we know it. What are these [TTC] commissioners doing, exactly? Through malign neglect, they are beginning a 35-year process of destruction. Because if they make over Pape station so that it doesn’t match any of the other stations, if they......

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. Getting furious at advertising may seem so early 2000's, but commercials this year have not only annoyed, but shown......

In an age of hipster irony and shirts to match, the Joy T-Shirt Project and its slogan, "Wear the World on Your Heart," seem impossibly sincere. But the "we're all connected" paradigm rings true: each shirt features the face of a real person—not Paris or Perez, but Sonya from Toronto or Sabry from Algeria, or one of over a hundred others in the online catalogue—hand-drawn and silk-screened over the wearer's heart. "It's more than just......

London's transit story of the week—if not the year—was Tuesday's re-opening of St. Pancras rail station after £800 million (that's $1.6 billion) of renovations. Not only does the station provide London with a new terminus for a high-speed 300km/h rail link to Paris and Brussels (with a planned stop at the 2012 Olympics site in east London along the way), but it also upgrades the city's regional and suburban rail connections and improves access......

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Once a week, the editors of each site—from LAist to Londonist—compile some of their most interesting posts into a brief blurb. It's Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse, and it appears, across the network, every Sunday. Londonist got the big scoop of the week with what may be the first images of notorious street artist Banksy in action. They also got on a runaway train without......

So, Molson Canada decided to do a "Twist and Score" promotion and offer the winner an iPhone. Cool, right? There's only one little problem. They said the phone would be available in January on the Rogers Wireless network, which Rogers is denying—they claim there was never a deal with Molson and they refuse to comment on whether Rogers will be the official carrier whenever the iPhone finally comes to Canada. Rogers spokeswoman Odette Coleman basically......

Last night, entertainment upstart CiRCA faced one of its toughest challenges yet: how can a club, especially one of its size, impress or even satisfy a massive crowd of rockers in Toronto? Well, Torontoist reader skeptical, it is our pleasure to report to you that it passed with flying colours. With the help of Paris-based electrorockersuperstars Justice, A.D/D. sold out not just one venue in Toronto, but two. Last night's show was originally scheduled for......

Repo! The Genetic Opera!––the upcoming musical about an organ donor program that goes horribly horribly wrong––is (surprise!) filming in Toronto. Though there are a bunch of other half-decent actors in the film, Repo! is most notable for its star: Paris Hilton. Sooooo...yeah. That's something. Anyway, the production is looking for about 200 unpaid extras (men and women between the ages of 25 and 60) to dress up all nice and pretend to be opera......

Finally, another excuse to write about La Blogothèque's Take-Away Shows. The last time we covered the France-based music filmmakers, they were psyching us up for the Arcade Fire's May concert with the best concert footage we've ever seen of the band. Before that, they won us over with The Hidden Cameras parading along boardwalks. Now they've given us Owen Pallett plucking away at two songs––"Your Light Is Spent" (above) and "Horsetail Feathers"––in Paris. If......

Torontonians aren’t that cold, even if we have to be given a reason before hugging a stranger. If you’re tired of handing over cash every time you simply want someone to gather you in a warm embrace, or you’ve collected so much money from selling hugs that you want to do some charity work, then luckily for you the Free Hugs Campaign has unofficially deemed September 10 International Free Hugs Day (one of many).......

Warren Kinsella has a diatribe in today’s Post (that’s National, not Midtown) about trashy celeb magazines. Their circulation is up, Time’s circulation is down, more people care about P. Diddy than national politics, yada yada yada. At the end he encourages us to "pick up quite a few more copies of The Economist and U.S. News and World Report. And the National Post, naturally." Right. So since Kinsella seems to consider the Post totally......

Last week, because we were completely distracted by Dock in a Box, we didn’t mention our sadness at the loss of both Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. We also couldn’t think of a Director bad enough to lament the continued existence of in the same breath. Thanks to a viewing of Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour 3, we have that man! We really think that Lars von Trier missed a trick in his recent satire......

The Toronto Star published a good article Sunday revealing that "the city's Waterfront Secretariat is now reviewing the recommendations and cost estimates of recent waterfront task forces on the fate of the Gardiner." Torontoist hears you asking, wasn't this the whole point of the Gardiner Report released last September? Now that the city has all but canned plans to tear down the elevated highway due to lack of funds, however, discussions are focussing on......

Apparently, we really really really wanna zig a zig, hah. The CBC reports today that the Spice Girls are coming to Toronto in January 2008. Toronto's Spice Girls fans (there are, apparently, some) "outvoted fans in Rio, Chicago, Paris, Baghdad and Alice Springs in an online contest to get the group to perform in the city." (This is why Baghdad is on that list, by the way.) 'Cause if there's anything this city is......

The city of Paris has recently been courting tourists from London, England with a new series of ads that look like this: What does a Paris tourism poster have to do with Toronto? Well, the C'est So Paris ads, with their posy compositions, saturated colours and irreverent humour, bears an uncanny resemblance to those T.O. Live With Culture posters from January, only these are actually good. The Parisian ads are witty, attention-grabbing and intelligible—everything the......

You want a greener city? Prepare to pay $4 million per year in taxes to plant and maintain trees. Alternatively, you could covertly plant them yourself with your own funds. We hear that chicks dig tree planters. Transit officials are testing the Presto card in Mississauga; a refillable swipe card that allows you to travel between Mississauga Transit, GO Trains and TTC while only paying for one fare. Eventually, the project will be extended......

Yahoo! just released a new entertainment blog/website-thing called omg!. The enthusiastic exclamation-pointed acronymic name—and pink-on-black elements of its colour scheme—should be familiar for anyone who's ever read Toronto-based celebrity/entertainment/queer blog !! omg blog !!. Now, Frank from omg blog is accusing Yahoo of ripping him off. The argument is not without merit: as Frank says in an entry posted this morning, !! omg blog !! has been around with its current graphic design since......

In this column in Saturday’s Globe, our girl Leah McLaren takes Paris, Lindsay, and Nicole to task for their crimes. No, silly! Not their DUI's—she's talking about their sartorial offences! Taking a page (or two, or three) from the Fug Girls’ book, Leah catalogues the celebs’ offences one by one. But her assessment is a bit confusing. For example, she claims that Jessica Simpson’s worst fashion infraction has been "popularizing Ugg boots in North......

The World Naked Bike Ride wants to make a point that there are many things more offensive than a bare bum. The indecent exposure is not to some guy's twig n' berries, but to our polluted environment. On Saturday, Toronto was among 70 cities around the world that took a spin au naturel as a celebration of cycling, a protest against car culture, a comment on pollution, or just to express some exhibitionist tendencies.......

“What’s going on this week in cinema, Torontoist?” you might be asking, as you normally would when faced with another Film Friday column. “Well,” we'll respond, “If you want to know what is hot, you only have to look at a couple of earlier posts this week.” We refer of course to our posts The Picture of Dorian's Gay (a great title for a post, if we don't say so ourselves) and DIY, Lo-Fi,......

If you were one of the many Arcade Fire fans not lucky enough to grab tickets to one of the band's Massey Hall shows on May 15 and 16, we can but offer two paltry consolation prizes. The first, above, is a brilliant video by La Blogotheque/Take Away Shows, of the band at their March 19 show in Paris. It is, far and away, the best concert footage that we've ever seen of the......

There's so much going on across the Ist-a-Verse that it's almost impossible to keep track these days. Fortunately, we do it so you don't have to! Londonist took a walk through Oliver Twist's London, thanks to a gorgeous map layer for Google Earth. They also caught up with modern-day fictional London, with the Fantastic Four and 28 Weeks Later. It was a week of insanity over at DCist. They started the week off with......

Each weekday morning, we pick a recent image from the Torontoist Flickr Pool and feature it here on the site. It's our way to give the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve! Henri Cartier-Bresson, meet moonwire. Moonwire's stunning black-and-white photo of a man rushing past Dundas Square is both excellent in its own right and a fantastic (if unintentional) take on Cartier-Bresson's famous "Behind the Gare St. Lazare, Paris." There are......

Final Fantasy alert! Over the past week, the always-lovely Good Hodgkins has twice graced us with new Owen Pallett tracks. First came a grand total of six tracks from Owen Pallett and rapper Cadence Weapons's CBC Radio session in mid-April. Pallett is featured on three of Cadence's tracks (check out "Sharks," in which Pallett incorporates some sweet Andrew Bird into the mix) and then has three of his own songs: "What Do You Think......

This week we'd like to congratulate the -ist network's Mother Hen, Gothamist's Jen Chung, who found herself a recipient of Wired Magazine's Wired Rave Award. If that doesn't sound terribly exciting, keep in mind another recipient was J.K. Rowling. Yep, that's right, the -ist network and Harry Potter now have something in common. Go us. Austinist has a chat with the ever-fashionable Golden Girl Rue McClanahan, and managed to catch some local fashionistas making......

From pristine wetland to industrial transportation hub and the confluence of major urban expressways, the Lower Don Lands area has gone through many changes throughout Toronto’s history. The mouth of the Don River is about to change again. Back in February, the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation announced a competition to redesign a 40-hectare area located at the mouth of the river and the entrance to the Port Lands (pictured right). The teams invited to......