Former Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier lives on as a program in the 1982 Disney film Tron. Torontoist reader Brent created these "enhanced" bank notes. Contrary to popular belief, defacing currency is not illegal in Canada. For defaced currency from elsewhere in the world, check out the defaced presidents Flickr pool. Via Laughing Squid.......

Everyone's favourite appropriately-named party leader hasn't been having a great time over the past few months. Ever since John Tory's upsetting dual loss in October's provincial election, the vultures have been circling over him. Both established and grassroots party members have been calling for Tory's head, and they'll finally have a chance to oust him at the Progressive Conservative Party's General Meeting at the end of the month. The anti-Tory camp's main argument is, simply......

How will this space-age family's future lose its balance? Junior scares Father by having Teddy simulate a bear attack. Rover, happy to see his master after a long session at the vet, jumps onto the ladder. Mother relays the cost of the family's latest insurance bill. Father, overcome by a sudden burst of inspiration after reading an article about Jackson Pollock, tries to reach the yellow and blue paint cans. The Manufacturers Life Insurance......

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......

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Each Sunday, the editors of every site—from LAist to Londonist—choose their most interesting article, a list which is compiled into the network-wide feature Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse. SFist saw Christmas Day turn tragic after a Siberian tiger escaped from her pen at the San Francisco Zoo, killing a visitor and mauling two others.Phillyist counted down the top ten items on Philadelphia's New Year's wish......

The Auditor General's report notes that drivers who graduate from Ontario's volunteer driver's education program have a much higher accident rate than motorists who don't. Stay out of school, kids! Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said his government will restart the Chalk River nuclear power plant, in spite of a warning from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission that such a move poses an accident risk until needed safety equipment is installed. To minimize the......

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......

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......

As mentioned in last week's ad, the Canadian National Exhibition took a break during World War II. Once the war was over, the existing buildings were modernized to prepare for the Ex's return. "From acting as a depot through which passed thousands of young Canadians to the theatres of war," noted a Toronto Telegram editorial, "it now reverts to its role as the window through which the world may glimpse the peacetime strength and......

Upwards of 1,500 protesters from Montreal, Toronto, Quebec City, and Hamilton marched on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Monday to protest the arrival of U.S. President George W. Bush. Bush will meet today with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon in Montebello, Quebec on the two-year-old Security and Prosperity Partnership. The agenda is to include emergency planning for an avian-flu pandemic, the recall of Chinese-made toys, and border security. Demonstrators......

NASA is embarrassed after a Toronto man found an error in their climate reporting. The new data mean that the warmest year on record in the US was 1934, not 1998, and skeptics have seized on the story as proof that the whole "global warming" thing is a hoax. Upon hearing the news, the newly navigable passage through the Arctic Ocean immediately refroze. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is shuffling his cabinet. The move will......

Taking a page from David Miller's Big Book of Intergovernmental Panhandling, Dalton McGuinty is complaining that Ontario is going to need a hot cash injection from the Feds if we're going to get those manufacturing jobs back from Bangladesh. Q: What do you get when you have an NDP mayor, a Liberal Premier, and a Tory Prime Minister? A: If you pay taxes in Toronto, pretty much nothing! In related "news," New York Governor......

Who's up for a trip through time? While an H.G. Wells-style contraption or fourth dimension-smashing telephone box are not available in the consumer market, there are simpler methods of going back through time. All that's required are a date and the arcane knowledge of knowing how to load a microfilm reader. Toronto has a rich newspaper history, with no fewer than three dailies at a time battling for the city's readers. This series of......

Tony Blair resigns as British Prime Minister, and Gordon Brown takes over. For those not familiar with British politics, an analogy: remember when Jean Chretien stepped down and Paul Martin took over as Prime Minister, and everybody agreed that although it was clearly time to go, wow, was Paul Martin boring or what? It's like that, except pretend that Paul Martin was even more boring. Looks like the Hamilton Predators will not be in Ontario's......

Every weekday, we pick an 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! Do you ever feel that you spend your entire day getting shit upon? Even Great Britain's former Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill can't get no respect in this shot by Flickr pool contributor beemphoto.com. We love the indignant expression on 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......

Dethroned! Ed the Sock will no longer be serving as grand marshal of the Toronto Beaches Lions Club Easter Parade this weekend. After dozens of complaints that the bawdy sock was an inappropriate choice to host the children's parade, the Lions Club replaced Ed with the less-offensive Luba Goy and Craig Lauzon of CBC's Royal Canadian Air Farce. David Miller's 5 per cent city tax is hiking the price of your beer, your cigarettes, your......

It seems like, all across the network, folks were up to no good. Maybe it was all the green beer from last weekend... Gothamist spent the week writing about New Yorkers behaving badly: at the post office, at the Garden, and at the fertility clinic. Calvin Klein may not be misbehaving, but he's just a little dirty, and in a completely different way than some NYC kitchens. SFist had its share of misbehave-rs, too, like......

Nixon had Checkers, Clinton had Socks, and now Stephen Harper has Cheddar. Kind of strange to see the man with the cold dead stare snuggled up with a fuzzy friend, no? According to the official Prime Minister of Canada website, Harper has been fostering cats for years through the Ottawa Humane Society and recently adopted Cheddar the Cat into the family. Not a bad charity to be associated with for a politician frequently accused of......

If you're one of those people who doesn't hit the snooze button until five minutes before you actually have to leave for work, you might have caught an interesting announcement this morning on that venerable Canadian news/pap institution known as Canada AM: CTV News has chosen its top ten news stories of 2006. Yes, an "esteemed panel of Canadian journalists," which apparently is CTV's euphemism for their own senior staff, chose ten stories from throughout......

I hope everyone has built their ark – it could get wet. Meteorologists are saying a month’s worth of rain – up to 75 mm – could fall upon Toronto over the next 36 hours. If Mel were still here he’d call in the army. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is going to meet Chinese President Hu Jintao. Wait a minute – no he’s not. Hold on – it looks like the two will meet after......

It seems that Bob Rae is the Liberal candidate most likely to get Ontarians to vote for him. However, he is also the Liberal candidate most likely to get Ontarians to vote against him. Thus, Bob Rae is the Canadian version of Hillary Clinton. You heard it here first, people! New measures being taken to prevent lottery fraud. So now you can be sure when you throw your money away on a lottery ticket,......

Next month Toronto will be holding municipal elections, in which, statistically speaking, the vast majority of you reading these words will not bother to vote. So in honour of all 38 mayoral candidates, and to encourage you hipsters to get out and rock the vote, Torontoist offers a brief history of some of Toronto’s most interesting mayors. If your favourite is missing or misrepresented, please let us know. Most Disgruntled Mayor William Lyon Mackenzie (not......

Brown leaves outside and it's suddenly colder than a witch's tit. Hello, fall! But besides meaning a death to sun and happiness, the fall brings in the new season of independant theatre! Yay! Tarragon has just opened its season with Generous, a new play by Michael Healey. Generous is a strikingly different play from his more naturalistic works like The Drawer Boy and Rune Arlidge. Generous is actually four two-act plays with inter-twining plots and......

The opening gala for the XVI International AIDS Conference was held Sunday night at the Rogers Centre. Along with the abundance of entertainment, many sobering speeches were made about just how serious this pandemic is (45 million infected with HIV/AIDS worldwide) and what needs to be done to fight this battle. Keynote speeches were given by Bill & Melinda Gates, whose message -- in simplified terms -- was that women need to be empowered......

This week, the United Nations World Urban Forum is being held in Vancouver. The conference is a place where NGOs, urban designers and planners, as well as other special interest groups discuss the growing population of major cities, and how to deal with the problems that causes. A focus at Monday's meeting was the homeless. Despite current efforts, and international treaties on adequate housing policy, as a city grows, so do the number of......

This Saturday marks the third anniversary of the historic Ontario Court of Appeal verdict on same-sex/equal marriage. The ruling ordered the province to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples in Ontario immediately, as well as paved the way for equal marriage from coast to coast to coast to the American Border. To celebrate, Canadians For Equal Marriage is hosting an anniversary reception with some delicious wedding cake. This is taking place at the Toronto......

Mr. Speaker, can the Prime Minister please explain why the newly redesigned Government of Canada website very much resembles the Conservative Party of Canada website? Why does the new Government of Canada website also share press releases from the CPC site? And can the Prime Minister also explain why the colour blue - a very Conservative hue of blue - now appears on the publicly-funded site? And, finally, can the Prime Minister please admit......

Toronto is the next Dubai like Maurizio Bevilacqua is the next Prime Minister. But this little artist's rendition of the imagined amalgamation of the Toronto and Dubai skylines was cute enough to post. If any Canadian city is to enjoy Dubai-like prosperity though, with the glass hotels and such everywhere, it'd probably be Calgary. And that isn't too much of a stretch: by 2025, statistics say Canada will be a leading oil-producing country and......

It's 4/20 and you know what that means! No, not the birth of Toller Cranston, the anniversary of the first Pasteurization test, Pierre Trudeau's succession as Prime Minister or the first day of the Sun of Taurus. (OK, well, technically, also, yes, all of those things.) It's time to watch that More Or Les video again for the first time,'cause it's finally on YouTube. Only Book TV found it appropriate for Canadian airwaves, so you......