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Newsstand: July 14, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Happy Bastille Day! In today’s news, G20 investigations are not shaping up well, hogweed invades Hogtown, and Rob Ford has his football coaching skills questioned.
It’s official: Hogtown has poisonous hogweed. The giant plant, which is extremely toxic if eaten and can cause blindess if it gets in your eyes, has been found in the Don Valley. While this isn’t expected to be as bad as the Triffid outbreak of 1997, during which thousands of Torontonians were enslaved and eaten, if you come across a giant hogweed please avoid tasting it. Oh, and there’s a picture of one in the Sun here, although it may actually be cow parsnip.
The Toronto Police Services Board civilian review panel that will investigate alleged police misbehaviour during the G20 summit may be more smoke than fire. Former members of the TPSB have told the Globe that while the panel may be well-intentioned, the TPSB doesn’t have jurisdiction over the full panorama of agencies that participated in the security fiasco operation and they may have difficulty in securing cooperation from provincial and federal officials. That won’t happen though, right? In a barely related story, a bid by the Liberals to form a parliamentary committee to look at the same thing died on the table when the conservative chair of the public safety and national security committee “talked out the clock” at the meeting, ensuring the motion didn’t come to a vote.
And the Globe makes a link-by-link comparison between the G20 fence and the one being built for the Toronto Indy, and finds the latter stronger and cheaper. We can only thank our lucky stars that the Black Bloc people didn’t have Formula One cars or our world leaders might have been in trouble.
This story won’t apply to Torontoist readers, who are all as green as seasick leprechauns, but for those of you who don’t carry Gaia’s Pal Eco-Happy Hemp’n’Hogweed Shopping Sacks™, read on. Apparently some retailers in the city have bumped up their fee for old-timey plastic bags from five cents to six, and are blaming it on the HST. However, government sources say that such a claim is misleading, since the HST applies only to the overall purchase, not to the price of individual bags. Keep in mind before you make a stink and hold up the line at your local smoke store that while you may have the moral high ground, retailers can legally charge whatever they want for bags and they don’t have to give you your penny back.
The Star is reporting that Rob Ford (mayoral candidate and councillor for Ward 2, Etobicoke North) was asked to stop coaching football for the Toronto District School Board after he allegedly manhandled a student back in 2001. Apart from being nine years old, the story is not surprisingly a confusion of allegations, counter-allegations, denials, and “no comments,” so you can take it for what it’s worth.
