news
Newsstand: April 13, 2010
lllustration by Clayton Hanmer/Torontoist.
As you may have heard, Adam Giambrone has announced that he won’t seek re-election to his current seat on City Council for Ward 18, Davenport. This means that, come November, he’ll no longer be chair of the TTC—a job mayoral hopeful George Smitherman had threatened to force him out of if elected. Giambrone revealed the decision in an interview late last night, after many weeks of uncertainty, and says that his departure from politics is only temporary, and that he believes he still has plenty of support. “I’m sure you could come up with a list of 20 or 30 [politicians] in the last couple decades that decided either by their own choice or because they lost an election or a leadership, to go off, do something else and then come back,” Giambrone told the Globe.
And some hope is returning for the Transit City LRT expansion. The regional transit authority Metrolinx is in new negotiations with Bombardier over trains to run on the light rail system. This is tentative at best and unsatisfactory to some, such as Mayor David Miller, who objects to the slowdown and the lack of Canadian-produced parts being used for Transit City. Metrolinx’s May 19 board meeting is expected to bring big news for the project, one way or another. The project’s future has been the subject of bitter debate since the province put a hold on four billion dollars in funding commitments. On the heels of that, the Ontario government is now announcing that there will be no deal on long-term TTC funding by the year’s end.
For the first time ever, the municipal government is preparing to inspect conditions in every single rental building in Toronto. The wave of quick checks will employ about one hundred inspectors to sweep through the city’s rental stock of around five thousand buildings, identifying those in greatest need of an in-depth audit. A smaller-scale effort last year found almost ten thousand problems, identifying an estimated one hundred million dollars in necessary repairs.
And on that note, Vince Brescia, president of the Federation of Rental-housing Providers of Ontario, is furious at the McGuinty government for preventing landlords from repairing aging buildings. Of course, in reality the situation is a little more complicated, in that it is fairly different from what Brescia describes. What the province did was prevent landlords from passing on costs to tenants when the new HST raises utility bills. The argued effect of removing that loophole is that, in a nice-car-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it kind of way, landlords “will have no option but to slash repairs and maintenance.”
If that caught your interest, the conflict between the province and Shoppers Drug Mart is developing along similar lines—the kind that tend to leave the rest of us stuck in the middle. The dispute, which has boiled over into duelling press release territory, is over changes to provincial rules on “professional allowances” for generic drugs. The CBC did a good job providing background on what those are. As for how it affects you, the province says it shaves $750 million in public health care costs, but Shoppers is rumbling about shortened hours, reduced services, and new fees at its stores province-wide. They’ve begun implementing those changes in London, where Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews’s riding is located.