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Newsstand: July 20, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
It’s Tuesday and Conrad Black may be coming home, eco-fees are (temporarily) history, and we’ll soon have Netflix North.
Menace 2 society set to hit the streets of the T-dot? After twenty-eight months of relatively hard time in a Florida prison, press baron Conrad Black has been granted bail. Terms of the bail haven’t been set, but the decision means that he’ll be on the streets, and possibly back in Toronto, at least until a court rules on an appeal for his fraud conviction. It’s not known whether a chastened Black will choose to work with at-risk kids to keep them out of the newspaper business, or whether the possibly buff and heavily tattooed magnate will embark on a mission of terrible vengeance against those who wronged him.
Move over Rogers, Canadian couch potatoes will soon have more options for their video fix when US video rental giant Netflix comes to Canada. The company announced that it will be heading north with its popular video service, which allows unlimited streaming of movies and TV programs for a monthly fee. Details have yet to be released, but it is expected to be available sometime in the fall, and will not include the DVD rental service with which Netflix made its name. If this is really important to you—and there’s no judgment here—you can sign up on their site for an email letting you know when the the service will go live.
The provincial government has decided to scrap, at least temporarily, the “eco-fees” program implemented at the beginning of the month. The fees were intended to subsidize the recycling of certain types of consumer products, but became controversial when retailers didn’t know how to charge them, consumers didn’t want to pay them, and it wasn’t clear where the money was going. The agency responsible for the fees, Stewardship Ontario, has promised to make the fees more “accurate and transparent,” (i.e. less complicated, although just as interesting as a Dan Brown novel). The move came after retailer Canadian Tire announced yesterday that they would no longer be charging the fees.
Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan will be looking to impose a two-year wage freeze on public sector employees. With a twenty billion dollar deficit looming this year, the province is looking for a million-or-so provincial workers to jump on the austerity bandwagon when the plan is formally announced at a meeting today with union leaders and management representatives. Provincial NDP leader Andrea Horvath wins the Nostradamus award for suggesting that the idea will see some pushback from the unions.
If you waited in line to get an H1N1 shot last year, you didn’t waste your time. A study by the Ontario Agency of Health Protection and Promotion says that the vaccination program may have prevented a million cases of the virus in Ontario, and as many as fifty deaths. The study was published in the journal Vaccine, which makes sense.
This article originally, mistakenly said that Ontario’s budget deficit was twenty million dollars; in fact, it’s twenty billion.