Stephan Marinoiu, the frustrated father of a 15 year-old autistic boy, began a hunger strike outside the Legislative Assembly of Ontario at Queen’s Park last Sunday, May 4. Six days later, he’s still hanging in there, and although he’s reportedly beginning to show signs of weight loss, he appears to be in good health. Marinoiu’s son Simon is one of an ever-growing number of children on the waiting list for a government program called......

Photo of Howard Moscoe at March's OCAP protest by Miles Storey. His forty-six friends include Adam Giambrone, Bob Rae, Adam Vaughan, David Miller, John Tory, Dalton McGuinty, and the Ottawa Citizen. His political views are "Left wing and a prayer." He's interested in "Friendship" and "Networking." His lone activity is "sculpting wooden birds." He cleans "council furniture with the Mayor's toupees at the start of council meetings." His favourite TV show is the Glenn......

Dubaimetro Naming Rights Turn your brand into a destination RTA offers Dubai Metro Naming Rights Welcome to the ultimate branding and marketing opportunity. With Dubai Metro Naming Rights, you can put your brand on a Dubai Metro station of your choice, or one of the two lines of the Dubai Metro Network. Dubai Metro Naming Rights offers you unmatched impact and visibility to take your brand to new levels of saliency and success. What's......

One year ago today, City Council's Executive Committee approved [PDF] the awarding of the street furniture contract—for the purposes of designing, building, owning, and maintaining bus shelters, garbage bins, ad pillars, and more for a period of twenty years in exchange for advertising rights—to Astral Media Outdoor, despite the fact that the company had absolutely no experience with "street furniture" and maintains dozens of illegal billboards in defiance of City Council.......

The idea of a TTC riders' union is nothing particularly new, but after what happened this weekend, it's quickly—and deservedly—picking up steam. Torontoist's last article about a possible riders' union was written by Roxanne Bielskis in November 2007. Our article was inspired by Erica Barnett on WorldChanging, who described the problems of Seattle's transit system and looked at the success of riders' unions (or their equivalents) in Los Angeles, Vancouver, Santa Clara, Atlanta, and......

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......

Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism is a series of lectures at the Revue Cinema that will look at films made during past and present American presidencies that reflect the culture and politics of their time. The lectures will run monthly from April until November, with the first lecture scheduled for April 26 at 10:30 a.m on the Kennedy era. The Manchurian Candidate, about a soldier brainwashed by......

The fear over bisphenol A is understandable. That something as innocuous as feeding infants from baby bottles could cause irreparable harm to their development is scary, and preemptive measures are worth taking if there is sound science to back it up. Concern over the danger of bisphenol A has picked up steam as researchers look at the effects of low concentrations, which had previously been assumed harmless. The decision by the Canadian government to......

Photo by Marc Lostracco. Last week, minimum wage was raised to $8.75 an hour in the first of three scheduled increases. According to the arguments provided in the media (and on Torontoist), an increased minimum wage is necessary to help people make ends meet, but could force businesses to cut jobs to accommodate the increased costs. From a numbers point of view, the raise was a necessary antidote to the minimum wage being frozen......

The above video—not safe for work unless you're using headphones—was shot by the late Peter Walker and is a clip from Min Sook Lee's documentary Hogtown: The Politics of Policing (winner of the best Canadian feature prize at Hot Docs 2005). Uploaded to YouTube fewer than three weeks ago, it's been passed around online over the last few days, since being linked to by Toronto Life's Philip Preville in a Friday blog post. The......

When we named councillor Rob Ford as one of 2007's Villains for his consistent insensitivity, political grandstanding, and outright idiocy (witness statements like, "I can't support bike lanes. Roads are built for buses, cars, and trucks. My heart bleeds when someone gets killed, but it's their own fault at the end of the day," and, "If you are not doing needles and you are not gay, you won't get AIDS probably"), we couldn't have......

Last week, undergraduate students at UTSC (University of Toronto Scarborough) rejected the U-Pass by a stunning margin, with full-time students voting against it 1674 to 622, and part-time students spurning it 53 to 16. Minus the abstentions and spoiled ballots, that worked out to 73% No for for full-timers and 77% No for part-timers. When last we wrote about the proposed offer—a compulsory $60-a-month transit pass for all students, with no potential to opt......

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......

Torontoist Environment Editor Chris Tindal is currently has been engaged in a federal by-election campaign, which concluded yesterday. 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. First of all, I'm very happy with our result. I've posted video of last night and written on my own blog about why. And that's all I'll say about that here. Yesterday morning......

"Stop the torture—end the war," read one colourful placard at Queen's Park. "End the siege of Gaza," read another. Voicing solid opposition against the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq, immense columns of demonstrators took over Queen's Park and Bloor Street on Saturday. "From Iraq to Palestine," they shouted, "occupation is a crime!" When the demonstration reached the heart of Yorkville, you could imagine the neighbourhood's original war resisters seized by the......

NDP charges Liberals "deceptive" over nuclear energy plans. Apparently the nuclear energy commitments the provincial government has made require almost four times the nuclear energy generation capability that their promised plant could deliver, unless the plant itself was four times larger than the Darlington plant. This is all part of the current clever government plan to get ahead of everybody else and be massively involved in the next energy crisis when the world runs out......

Photo by Jonathan Goldsbie. According to a December 2004 article in the Globe, Mike Harris is (or at least was at the time) the chairman of video advertising company Onestop; he got on board "in return for an equity stake" in the business. Presuming that he still has that stake (and why wouldn't he? he may be evil, but he's not stupid), Harris became a richer man two weeks ago, when the Toronto Transit......

Plagued by complaints, the City of Toronto has finally gotten around to ticketing some homeowners who don't clear the snow in front of their property. A city spokesperson said they prefer not to send out inspectors in the winter because it's so difficult to get around. Anxious to cement a reputation for self-serving indifference to the public interest, more than 99% of TTC workers have voted more to reject their most recent contract offer.......

Seriously? Photo by sevennine from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.......

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......

A demonstration at City Hall yesterday by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty forced the Speaker to halt proceedings after the protest spilled onto the chamber floor. The action by OCAP was called after the discovery of a homeless man frozen to death in a downtown stairwell February 27. A statement by OCAP called the death a "preventable tragedy." Members of the activist group handed out statements to councilors as others rebuked them for their......

Photo by jpghouse. The incentive to spend money is enormous: there’s always a bigger latte, a newer iPod, and a better apartment waiting around the corner. Saving money is laborious and—let’s face it—boring. Unfortunately, easy access to credit and rising property values have turned the West into a population of grasshoppers, just starting to get a taste of the financial winter coming. Although the new federal budget has underwhelmed, the government has provided an......

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. Running for office is an extremely rewarding experience, but it's not without sacrifice and set-backs. All of us are doing this because we honestly believe in the process and the ideas we bring to the table. We believe......

According to the Inside the CBC blog and the National Post, Toronto's favourite boyish-looking provocateur, Avi Lewis, is back on the airwaves with his newest show, Frontline: USA. The show promises to "strip away the spin and highlight real issues such as poverty, violence, race, health, and immigration" in America. Considering that Lewis is involved and that the show airs on Al Jazeera English, chances are that Frontline: USA won't be a Dobbsian exercise......

Photo by sevennine from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. In the 1996 Canadian movie Kissed, a young female mortician discovers the joys of necrophilia. That same year, David Cronenberg made Crash, wherein a group of omnisexual urbanites eroticize car accidents. In Léolo, a 12-year-old boy masturbates with a chunk of liver, later served to his family for dinner. This spring's Young People Fucking is, well, called Young People Fucking. Canadians have traditionally been somewhat blasé......

City councillor Rob Ford has at times been accused of making a career out of saying tremendously stupid things, but we here at Torontoist fully back his latest proposal to automatically name all new streets in Toronto after dead soldiers, even if the dead soldiers aren't from Toronto. If anything, we think Rob Ford doesn't go far enough. Sure, families of Canadian soldiers killed in action receive an immediate $250,000 death benefit plus an......

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......

Photo of Owen Pallett by Heidi Slimane from his MySpace. News of Owen Pallett's OHIP being revoked has been quickly met with a reaction: an open letter sent today to George Smitherman, the Minister of Health and Long-Term Care, from France Gélinas and Rosario Marchese, NDP MPPs who insist that Pallett is "an award winning artist who deserves our support" but who has instead been "unfairly treated." The letter takes issue both with the......

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. As you read this I'm somewhere in the Centre Block of the Parliament buildings in Ottawa, likely between the House of Commons visitors' gallery where I will have just finished watching question period and the Railroad Room where......

With insignificant funds and hopeless political support, sometimes it's the earnest fringe candidate campaigns in our by-elections that have the most charm. Toronto Centre aspirant (and political opponent of Campaign Confidential's Chris Tindal) Doug Plumb has been taping-up these breezy home-made slogans downtown, and while this sign may not even mention the party he's running for, there's a quaint spunk in comparing himself to a down-home dessert. Other flyers feature the rather unimaginative call......