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Newsstand: February 9, 2010
Illustration by Roxanne Ignatius/Torontoist.
In a story that national affairs reporter Linda Diebel probably didn’t expect to write, Councillor Adam Giambrone (Ward 18, Davenport) has publicly apologized for having a messy, angry, and dysfunctional transit agency secret affair with Kristen Lucas, 20, while living with his longtime “political” partner, Sarah McQuarrie. Giambrone concealed both women’s existence from the other. Among the less personal details are Lucas’s claim that Giambrone let her in on the TTC fare hike early and that his campaign staff showed the Toronto Star an email, which they called “threatening,” that was allegedly a forgery being passed off as Lucas’s own work. Mostly, though, she makes a strong case that Giambrone can be pretty douchey to date and leans heavily on stale, insufficiently TTC-based pickup lines. Bet he’s glad the TTC decided against running these.
Sticking with the TTC, the rumoured work-to-rule campaign from yesterday is “reportedly” underway. That is, we’re not totally sure whether it is or not. But we think it might be. The campaign is the (reportedly) stillborn brainchild of a group of employees trying to get some job action started without the support of union boss Bob Kinnear. Meanwhile, John Cartwright, the president of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council, brought to the table one of the most sensible statements yet. “I worry this feeding frenzy on the TTC will end up lessening the pressure on politicians at all levels to seriously find resources on transit,” said Cartwright, in what was arguably as much an attempt to coax TTC management and union workers into working together as it was a shot fired at the unnamed politicians involved in municipal transit.
Noel Gallagher will be coming to Toronto to speak at the trial of the man who tackled him at the 2008 Virgin Festival. That man, Daniel Sullivan, admitted to decking Gallagher, but the trial has been held up so that Gallagher could give a victim-impact statement about the attack, which left him with broken ribs. Dose has a YouTube video the actual victim impact (just after 1:30).
Toronto, along with Vaughan, Mississauga, and Hamilton, has been cheated out of $1.5 million in loose change by the firm they hired to roll their parking-meter coins and drive them to the bank. Each of the four city’s governments only recently learned that they were not the only ones whose parking-meter revenue had large, unexplained shortfalls. Toronto is missing $320,000, while Hamilton is out about a million dollars in—and we want to emphasize this—small change.
And the Toronto District School Board may have slightly miscalculated in threatening to punish trustee Josh Matlow for breaking rank to speak publicly against the board’s decisions. TDSB Chair Bruce Davis argued that twenty-eight dollars per attendee is a fine price to pay for a professional development day if it results in better classrooms—and he may be right, but he’s also buried in the middle of the article. Up top, with supplied photo beside, is Matlow and his outrage at the expenditure of $350,000 for a one-day conference at the ACC.