news
Newsstand: March 18, 2010
Illustration by Roxanne Ignatius/Torontoist.
Sarah Thomson leapt into her mayoral campaign with a pitch for a citywide subway system she hopes to build if elected. Calling for fifty-eight kilometres of new subway tunnels at a total cost of around eleven billion dollars, Thomson can’t be accused of thinking too small. To pay for it all, she proposed private-sector involvement, a five-dollar road toll on the Gardiner and the DVP, and shifting a staggering amount of provincial funding away from LRT projects. The last part would be a major stumbling block, since Queen’s Park would have to be heavily involved in approving any such redirection.
These subway visions come at a moment when the TTC is quietly scaling back service on many of its busy routes, despite high ridership. That situation has partly to do with bad estimates of how much ridership would drop after the January fare hikes. Instead of slowing after fare prices jumped by twenty-five cents, TTC ridership actually continued to grow. Unfortunately, they had already set their budget by the low-ball figures and will need to pull vehicles from service until at least September. Spacing has that story, as well as far more information about transit changes than your brain may be able to handle.
Was the headline “Drinking less common on the TTC, Giambrone says” crafted to make all the members of the TTC’s blue-ribbon customer-service panel face-palm at once? Just to be clear, Giambrone didn’t actually say those exact words when he credited the TTC’s Fitness for Duty policy for reducing incidents of intoxication on the job. A TTC bus driver identified as “Margaret Wilson” (reports are now questioning that name) was stopped by police and failed a breathalyzer test on March 12. According to 680News, her firing is all but certain, though others are not so fast to call it.
Councillor Rob Ford (Ward 2, Etobicoke North) made the most of the latest burst of outrage involving Adam Giambrone (Ward 18, Davenport). After routine disclosure documents showed that Giambrone had expensed three thousand dollars for cab rides last year, Ford announced he wants councillors’ office budgets slashed to twenty thousand dollars per year, down from $53,100. That’s bound to annoy some city councillors, only four of whom ran their offices for less than Ford’s proposed figure. Ford himself spent none of his office budget. Based on the most recent data available such a cut would affect forty city councillors, and eliminate around eight hundred thousand dollars in city spending, at a time when one hundred million is being laughed off as pocket change.
A U of T student who disappeared about eighteen months ago surfaced on Tuesday in a video apparently uploaded by a Somali terrorist group affiliated with al-Qaeda. Toronto-born Mohammed Elmi Ibrahim was one of at least six young men from the city believed to have been recruited by the insurgent group al-Shabaab. According to the video, Ibrahim was killed in fighting, but this has not been confirmed.
The Harper government is not proroguing the Internet just yet. Letters informing community groups that federal funding for their public internet access was being cut were an “honest mistake,” according to the Harper government. Industry Minister Tony Clement told reporters and members of his own party that senior government employees misinterpreted Conservative plans to switch the community groups over to a different funding program and instead assumed that their funding was being cut altogether.
And the public inquiry into Toronto’s forty-three-million-dollar computer leasing scandal may have actively blocked police from laying any charges, by making large swathes of evidence inadmissible in court. How can that possibly have happened? We’re so glad you asked. That’s the news, what are you gonna do about it?