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Newsstand: May 6, 2010
Illustration by Clayton Hanmer/Torontoist.
So, what’s the latest on campaign manager Bruce Davis’s plans to “unleash” the pent-up ball of rage that is George Smitherman? Yesterday, as we noted, there was the mayoral front-runner’s dramatic scolding of the TTC for considering leasing a new building (using money…money!) because its current headquarters, built in 1956, is three times too small and requires thirty million dollars of repairs and upgrades.
Which was a start. But you do not get to be called Furious George without proven, deep reserves of fury, so at yesterday’s six-candidate debate, Smitherman tore into councillor Rob Ford (Ward 2, Etobicoke North) for opposing an AIDS prevention program on the grounds that the only decent way to prevent AIDS is to not be a gay man. But okay, Ford is famous for gaffes, and when he let slip that “if you are not doing needles and you are not gay, you wouldn’t get AIDS probably,” maybe he really meant, “I have a Rob Ford football foundation. I’m caring.” Likewise, his speculation that women who contracted HIV were probably “sleeping with bisexual men” was possibly just his modest way of saying that “Rob Ford’s character is about—it’s about integrity.” Later, when cornered by reporters looking for a direct response to Smitherman’s attack, Ford integritably remembered an appointment in Scarborough and walked out on their questions.
The Globe‘s “G20 protestor watchlist” sounds like a shadowy file compiled by government spooks and quasi-legal wiretaps, but, in fact, it’s a run-down of the biggest organizations planning to demonstrate at next month’s G20 summit. Topping their list is the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, who plan to march from Allan Gardens to the downtown core. The Council of Canadians will take to Trinity Bellwoods park, where a large list of speakers, including Maude Barlow and Naomi Klein, will advocate for a broad portfolio of social justice issues.
West End residents who say the TTC should cut the 501 Queen streetcar route in half aren’t likely to get their wish. The TTC just published a report that recommends keeping the unified route in order to save about $825,000 per year. Riders say the Long Branch streetcar route, currently North America’s longest, leaves them waiting up to forty-five minutes because of congestion and vehicle bunching along the nearly twenty-five kilometre transit corridor.
And a police chase on foot near York University left a young man dead of a heart attack. Police had tried to pull over a vehicle near the North end of the school’s campus late last night, when two men jumped out and ran away from the officers. While fleeing, one of the men went into cardiac arrest, and died in hospital shortly. The provincial Special Investigations Unit is looking into the incident to see whether police may have played a direct role in the death.
And some Ontario high school students will be able to “major” in sports or the non-profit sector this fall. The Specialist High Skills Major program, which will expand to five-hundred-and-thirty schools this year, is adding the packages of career-oriented courses. Education minister Leona Dombrowsky says the program aims to prepare students to enter the workforce upon graduation, but the provincial Opposition has suggested that it’s an attempt to “water [the curriculum] down in ways that will encourage higher graduation rates.” Last year, seventy-nine percent of students graduated from high school within five years, a figure the Liberals have pledged to raise to eighty-five by next year.