news
Newsstand: May 17, 2010
Illustration by Clayton Hanmer/Torontoist.
Caller ID is an extra five bucks, but Rogers will rat out your affair for free! A Toronto woman is suing Rogers Wireless after the carrier sent her husband her personal cell phone bill, showing multiple lengthy calls to another man she’d been secretly seeing. Gabriella Nagy called the affair a “mistake,” but alleged that Rogers had invaded her privacy and ruined her life. She is seeking $600,000. In a tangled nest of legal sentences, Rogers denied any responsibility for the affair itself, which is vaguely reassuring.
Who knew Toronto owned a crazy Dutch machine capable of turbo-planting More Tulips Than You Can Handle? The contraption, when driven over regular, grassy lawns, can plant up to ten thousand bulbs in an hour, leading to landmark achievements in mega-gardening like this hundred-metre-long, multicoloured ribbon of tulips. For comparison, in the time you’ll spend reading this post, you could have planted at least 334 tulips, if you were truly as fancy and Dutch as this machine is.
Premier Dalton McGuinty shrugged off reports that he was trying to parachute in a loyal supporter to replace André Marin, the Ontario ombudsman with a well-earned reputation for criticizing the provincial government and a goddamn beautiful first name. Marin was responsible for damaging reports on Ontario’s funding cap for the cancer drug Avastin, and scamming in the Ontario Lottery Corporation, among many more acts that have made him not the Ontario Liberals’ favourite person.
Stephen Harper’s strong opposition to funding safe abortions in developing countries may have solidified Canadians’ support for them. According to a new poll, only thirty percent of respondents agree with excluding abortions from foreign aid, down from forty-eight percent just two months ago. Ninety-nine percent of the world’s 350,000 deaths from childbirth-related problems each year occur in developing countries.
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research are producing a documentary on St. Michael’s Hospital’s Creative Works Studio, an art/therapy workshop made up of and largely supported by mental health patients. Artwork sales make up half of the funding for the centre, which has been in operation for the past twelve years and has doubtlessly saved more than one life.
Speaking of which, if you missed this story about Robert Munsch’s struggles with bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and cocaine abuse, read it right now. Then curl back up with The Paper Bag Princess or Love You Forever until everything seems okay again.
And finally, a family of four in the Beaches and a pair of retirees in Brighton were left without a home and on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars by an architect and contractors building “green” homes under poor provincial regulation. As of now, the Beaches family is in litigation with a builder who left their house sixty percent complete and put a $139,000 lien on it, and the elderly couple are reportedly working ninety-eight hours a week in their meagre cafe to pay off the extra four hundred thousand dollars their house cost them.