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Newsstand: April 29, 2010
lllustration by Clayton Hanmer/Torontoist.
Ontario’s new Harmonized Sales Tax doesn’t take effect until July 1, but as of this Saturday, you will begin paying the thirteen percent tax for any taxable services you pay for now but will use after the tax is in effect. So, anyone planning to book a flight or hotel room, buy theatre tickets, or subscribe to a magazine they’ll receive after June 1 has the next two days to do it without incurring HST charges. Early birds will pay only the five percent GST.
Rob Ford wants Toronto to build new subways instead of streetcar and LRT tracks. Currently, however, Ford has even less of a plan to pay for them than fellow mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson, who wants a five-dollar toll on the DVP and Gardiner to cover subway construction. Dangling the prospect of an Eglinton subway line, Ford suggested selling air rights above new stations to recoup the estimated three-hundred million dollar (per kilometre) cost of digging and building of new subway lines.
As for the cost of digging up buried resentment, ask the the TTC’s blue-ribbon panel on customer service. They were at Yonge and Bloor station yesterday for a lunch hour meet-and-complain-to-me session with actual commuters, all of them indisputably engaged in transit use. We have to credit them for going straight to the source to gather information on rider concerns, and 680News, at least, seemed to think that disgruntled riders liked the personal touch. Panel members will be at Kennedy station today and Kipling station early next week.
The Toronto Humane Society has called on the Premier Dalton McGuinty to end Ontario’s pit bull ban. The group released statistics claiming that the ban has done little to reduce dog attacks. In 2004, there were 5,714 reported medical incidents involving dog bites. In the five years since the ban came into effect, that number has hovered between 5,350 and 5,500. Dog bite statistics do not record the breed of dogs involved. A provincial spokesperson responded that it will take time to see the full impact of anti-pit-bull legislation.
But be careful what you wish for. If we lift restrictions on relatively harmless creatures like pit bulls, we set ourselves on a slippery slope towards legalizing chickens. A midtown poultry farmer, by flouting the bylaw Toronto apparently has against raising the birds, has put the matter right up there with public transit and Israeli Apartheid protests as an election issue. The scorecard on that: Ford is anti-chicken. Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone is pro-chicken. Thomson is also pro-chicken. And Rocco Rossi was the lone candidate to say that this is not really all that important.
A movement opposing wind turbines, dismissed on last week by City Council, has now also been dismissed by Queen’s Park. Saying that their demand for more research into the health impact of wind power generation sites didn’t make sense, McGuinty refused to issue a moratorium on new turbines. McGuinty said that wind turbines have been used for decades without adverse health effects. Members of the Conservative opposition said the decision by McGuinty amounted to ignoring the concerns of the rural communities chosen for large wind turbine developments.
Toronto’s Tamil communities are among those forming a transnational government in exile. A 135-member assembly will be elected this Sunday by Tamils in Toronto, with related votes being held elsewhere in Canada and Europe. Several non-Tamil school board trustees will oversee polls in the GTA. Canadian residents are expected to have the largest share of representation with twenty-five members, fifteen from the GTA. The unrecognized elected body is set to seek a separate Tamil state, a goal that puts them at odds with other large Tamil organizations.
This article originally said that Ontario’s Harmonized Sales Tax took effect on June 1; in fact, it’s July 1. Additionally, this article mistakenly suggested that the “estimated three-hundred million dollar cost of digging and building of new subway lines” was for lines in their entirety—and not the cost per kilometre.