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Newsstand: May 10, 2010
lllustration by Clayton Hanmer/Torontoist.
Good morning. We now bring you this report on the devastation wrought by Toronto’s angry, angry trees. Though once a primary component of battering rams and catapults, trees are usually peaceful, and are found all over Toronto. Saturday’s windstorm, gusting at up to eighty kilometres per hour, though, made us think about moving to the prairie. In the end, crazed trees shut down subway service between Islington and Kipling for most of the day, blocked off residential streets, knocked down a traffic light on Bloor Street, and took out power lines—leaving thousands without electricity and possibly cancelling a show at the Tarragon theatre, in a move that seems calculated to drive a wedge between the environmental and culture lobbies.
Metrolinx would prefer not to take Mayor David Miller up on his offer to loan the province one and a half billion dollars to help build Transit City. Miller is fighting hard against plans to delay and curtail construction of the LRT network, whose budget suddenly took a four billion dollar hit when Queen’s Park decided it could no longer afford funding it had promised. Despite Miller’s generous offer, Rob Prichard, CEO of Metrolinx, says that the whole point of the cut-down plan was to avoid borrowing more money.
The entire Design Review Panel of Waterfront Toronto has announced that they will resign in protest if the city goes ahead with plans to build a sports centre with a 440–car parking lot on waterfront land set aside for a mixed-use, sustainable neighbourhood. The twelve–member committee has had a rocky relationship with city officials and the mayor. “Miller just doesn’t get it. He has become an obstacle,” one member said. But the Star’s Christopher Hume, writing two columns in as many days on the issue, reserves much of his anger for the way Toronto’s civil service paralyzes urban planning, forcing that division to report to a chain of mid-level officials who (as Hume tells it) have neither interest nor competence in matters of planning.
Malawi and Ethiopia have become the first African countries besides South Africa to be invited to a G20 summit. As the host nation, Canada can exercise the option to invite a few extra G’s beyond the supposed limit of twenty. Stephen Harper chose the two African nations, Spain, Vietnam, and The Netherlands.
Overqualified, unemployed, desperate non-religious teachers are turning to fake Catholicism to land teaching jobs with Toronto District Catholic School Board. Ontario’s separate school boards have an exemption from Ontario’s Human Rights Code that allows them to hire only Catholics for jobs that deal directly with children. Establishing a Catholic identity is an elaborate process: from building a relationship with a priest who’ll vouch for you, to denying having done things like had premarital sex or supported gay marriage, to cramming for the job interview, breaking into the Church is tough. “I haven’t gone for my, um, what do you call it the bread thing yet…Communion. I’m nervous about it,” said one sneaky heathen. Adorable, yes, but we’re talking about putting innocent children under the authority of people with impure intentions, who are working hard to cover up their personal history of…no, wait, maybe I was thinking of something else.
Finally, three Canadian journalists were barred from the military trial of Toronto-born Omar Khadr for publishing the name of a U.S. interrogator whose identity was supposed to have been protected by the tribunal. Reporters from the Star, Globe, and Canwest News Service were expelled from the proceedings. The interrogator’s identity had been widely published in earlier interviews.