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Newsstand: February 25, 2010
Illustration by Roxanne Ignatius/Torontoist.
Over at the Star, there’s an unusual piece up about the blurry ethics of mayoral candidates getting front-page publicity from magazines—especially from their own magazines. Sarah Thomson, who published Women’s Post magazine until quitting last month to run for mayor, used the magazine’s current issue to run a splashy cover story on herself, a fact Star blogger Chantal Braganza finds a bit dodgy. Braganza took a side-by-side look at Thomson’s self-promotional goodbye and Toronto Life‘s eye-catching George Smitherman story, and didn’t have much good to say about Thomson or her former publication: “One magazine decided to run a profile of a candidate it thought was an interesting character. The other used its pages as a political bullhorn for its own publisher.”
Thomson, meanwhile, is touting her outsider status as a positive, but electing someone inexperienced in Toronto politics would be too risky for the city right now, says candidate and noted insider Councillor Joe Pantalone (Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina). Pantalone, whom media and young NDPers alike enjoy calling Joey Pants, hasn’t said much yet about what benefits his experience might confer. He did say he would seek a hiring freeze and contract out the planting of one million trees in the city. Pantalone’s chances for election are looking brighter since Councillor Adam Giambrone (Ward 18, Davenport) exited the race, leaving Joe a natural choice for left-leaning voters.
The skirmish continues between the Miller and McGuinty governments over staffing and funding issues at the TTC. Miller previously said the province should share more of the burden of transit funding. He also called out the Liberal government for using the TTC to stick its nose into Toronto’s upcoming election, stopping just short of accusing Queen’s Park of interfering on behalf of former MPP Smitherman. Yikes.
Days after launching the TTC issue with a proposal that would classify transit as an essential service, MPP David Caplan denied that he too wants to run for mayor. The former Liberal cabinet member succeeded Smitherman as Ontario’s health minister and then resigned over the eHealth scandal, in which both he and his predecessor were involved. CTV also reports in that same article that the city’s budget chief Shelley Carroll will definitely not throw her hat in the ring. That said, she will have lots and lots of notes for whoever does win the race.
Utility companies should pay a “degradation” fee for cutting through city streets to do work on buried infrastructure, shortening the lifespan of sidewalks and roads, says Mayor Miller. Companies like Enbridge and Rogers make thousands of cuts per year. By paying an extra fee of twenty dollars per metre, on average, Miller says the companies will contribute four million dollars to offset the city’s costs replacing worn-out roads. An Enbridge spokesperson confirmed that the company would pass the costs on to consumers.
And a hefty report published by Harvard researchers says that, when it comes to broadband and 3G service, Canadians pay more and get much less than other countries, but we are still being told that we are a world leader in telecom networks. In levels of service the study ranks us alongside Poland, Hungary, and Mexico. Shockingly, Canadian telecoms say that the study, commissioned in the U.S. by the FCC, uses bad data. The study’s authors say their data was just fine. Meanwhile, in South Korea, some kid is watching YouTube on his smartphone in the goddamn subway, rolling his eyes.