news
Newsstand: June 3, 2010
lllustration by Clayton Hanmer/Torontoist.
Here’s the deal. There is a store, near Bay and Bloor, that sells a beverage containing the saturated fat equivalent of about fifty-seven strips of bacon. It is so delicious that to describe it here might crash the Internet. We won’t say what it is, so that those of you who are interested can have a chance to savor in blissful ignorance of its bacon footprint. But if you want to enjoy it untethered to dietary reality, act fast, because if its days aren’t numbered, its calories may soon be by a proposed law. But calories you don’t know about can’t hurt you, right? “[Calories], frankly, don’t tell the whole picture,” says Ron Reaman, of the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Assocation. The CRFA says its current voluntary program, in which restaurants publish “nutritional indicators” online, is sufficient.
While we’re introducing legislation, how about picking up employment equity laws abandoned over a decade ago? According to a new report based on the 2005 Census, a lot of people could really use them now. The study found that Ontario visible minority women earn 53.4 cents on the dollar compared to white men in the province, while recent immigrant men of any background earned sixty-three cents for every dollar earned by Canadian-born men.
If the neat quilt at the centre of a city-wide “hunt” is really “a copyright infringement” because of its four-panel interpretation of an Ethel Seath painting, then would linking to the Star‘s digital photo of it count as intellectual property theft under Canada’s proposed copyright law?
Porter airlines, the private turboprop airline that flies out from the Island Airport, has grounded its stock-market hopes for now, cancelling its planned $120 million initial public offering because of “extremely weak” demand from investors. Porter has lost $44.5 million since opening in 2006. And yet, by airline industry standards, they’re apparently not doing that badly. “I suspect Porter will be back,” said the savvy consultant quoted in the Globe, adding that he thinks November is likely to be the next chance Porter will have to go public.
Police have announced that sixty-seven new security cameras, in addition to Toronto’s eighteen existing emplacements, have been installed at twenty downtown intersections for the G20. After the summit, the cameras will be taken down from their present locations (a map of most is here), at which point, should it be deemed necessary, they can all be glued together into a Panopticam attached via revolving searchlight to the top of the CN Tower. Manned by Julian Fantino.
Meanwhile, Pride is celebrating five gay years of legal marriages in Canada by marrying ten couples on their July 4 parade. Five of the couples are from the United States, but considering that they have to come here to get hitched on Independence Day, they may not be waving the stars and stripes. In other parade-related news, this year’s Dyke March’s “honoured dyke” has declined the honour in protest of the Pride’s decision to ban the phrase “Israeli Apartheid” from this year’s parade. Jane Farrow is the second honouree to break with Pride over the ban, joining Alan Li, who turned down the invitation to be the parade’s grand marshal.