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Newsstand: April 12, 2010
lllustration by Clayton Hanmer/Torontoist.
As the old saying goes, death comes in threes. So Torontoist half-expected to be live-tweeting the early eulogy of TTC union president Bob Kinnear at the first of three riders-vs.-workers town-hall meetings on Sunday. But it seems the moral outrage unleashed earlier this year by fatigued fare collectors and caffeine-deprived drivers is no longer aimed at the frontline workers themselves. Concerned TTC users, who joined forces at Downsview Secondary School, instead had more gears to grind about management issues such as scheduling, fare systems, and where exactly our transit fees are going. Going with the customer service theme, a much less austere Kinnear will host two more town halls, slated for Sunday in Scarborough and May 2 at Ryerson University.
And what’s a newsday without some more mayoral mishaps? Late on Friday night, George Smitherman announced his campaign manager Jeff Bangs has called it quits, stating that he needs to focus more on his family and business. Cue the scandal and speculation and subsequent denial of said speculation (internal dissent this time!). With all the sticks and stones being thrown around, and another eight months to go until the votes are finally cast, we’re going to need a breather soon too.
Many Toronto families just got a little bigger, as the Toronto Humane Society’s adoption blitz managed to find homes for all the cats, rats, and dogs that could have faced euthanasia if not taken in by today’s deadline. The facility is set to close today for several weeks, but there is one last obstacle keeping the Ontario Society for the Prevention of the Cruelty to Animals from officially locking the doors. Bandit may be an outlaw, but the OSPCA is refusing to leave any pet behind.
It takes a certain kind of courage for a woman to walk around Jarvis and Carlton streets alone at five in the morning—you know, the kind that lets that woman fight off two grown men who tried to force her into their van. Police are looking for two men and a silver sedan caught on security cameras for doing just that to a twenty-nine-year-old woman on Sunday morning.
It’s common knowledge that lightning never strikes the same place twice, but we never said anything about house fires. In a stroke of either terrible luck or terrible negligence—the Office of the Fire Marshal doesn’t know which yet—firefighters extinguished two separate fires at the same Scarborough house in the span of six hours yesterday. The second blaze, much larger than the initial stovetop sparks, occurred while a young man slept in the basement.
And, unfortunately, the biggest international news this weekend was the tragic plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, as well as the country’s deputy foreign minister, national security advisor, two presidential candidates, several other members of parliament, and the heads of Poland’s national bank and military forces. Though it happened thousands of miles away over Russia, the reverberations of the loss of ninety-six of Poland’s top military, political, and religious leaders couldn’t be ignored in Toronto. Reverend Pawel Ratajczak announced a week of mourning at a special service at St. Casimir’s Roman Catholic Church attended by Toronto’s own Polish community.