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Weekend Newsstand: August 7, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
In weekend news: a TO hostel goes green, Rob Ford still isn’t making sense, and everyone beware the bug.
The environmentally conscious traveller will be able to stay at North America’s greenest hostel when visiting Toronto next month. The Planet Traveler hostel in Kensington Market is geothermally cooled and will reduce energy consumption by three quarters. To boot, the one-hundred-and-fourteen-bed hostel boasts solar panels on the roof, LED lighting, and copper coils around shower drains to preserve heat. Cost: dorms will run thirty dollars a night, and rooms seventy.
Not surprisingly, mayoral candidate Rob Ford is spewing out another flawed idea, this time claiming that installing closed circuit security cameras in the city will deter crime. Said Ford: “If we can’t catch them through police, we’ll catch them on camera.” Yet someone who actually knows a bit about the subject, the Canada Research Chair on Surveillance Studies at Queen’s, said Ford is “quite wrong.” Dr. David Murakami Wood said security cameras may make people feel safer, but won’t do much to curb criminal behaviour.
Speaking of those eyes in the sky, the cameras used during the G20 came down but they may not have seen the last of you. Toronto Police are hanging on to seventy-one of them after getting them for half price at $175,000. The government is footing the bill for the other half. Police may deploy the cameras in the future, so practice your best smile.
Been wondering about the Eglinton LRT and how it’s all supposed to come together? The ginormous ten-kilometre project, which should be up and running in about a decade, will run below Eglinton from Black Creek Drive to east of Laird and will have thirteen stations along the way. Those for the LRT say it’s rapid transit that will encourage city development, those against it say it’ll result in endless construction, congestion, and loss of business. The 4.6 billion dollar project got the go-ahead in June. Now you can go ahead and read what it’ll all mean to the bus system and the businesses.
They’re small, six-legged, and itching to get a taste of your blood. Bed bugs are spreading like wildfire across the city. In 2003, Toronto Public Health had forty-six reports, in 2008, after setting up a hotline, TPH got more than thirteen hundred calls. Still, the problem remains under-reported, often due to the stigma associated with the things, says the city’s chief medical officer of health. But the bloodsuckers are not just residing in social housing and dilapidated dwellings anymore, they’re in chic hotels and fancy condos, hospitals and libraries. Currently, TO is tying to get other levels of government in on solving the issue. Until then, try not to scratch.
Oh yeah, and the chick who faked cancer has been arrested and charged.
Happy Weekend!