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Newsstand: September 1, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Wednesday, September 1—why isn’t this a holiday? Weather remains hot, hot, hot, Moscoe leaves council, and there’s a new bee in town.
Climate change is working out just dandy in Toronto! The third day of temperatures above thirty-two degrees means that we’re not just hot and sweaty anymore, we’re enjoying an official, government-sanctioned heat wave. In fact, yesterday’s high of 33.6 degrees broke a record set way back in 1973. Keep your new fall outfits handy though, things are expected to cool down considerably for the long weekend.
City councillor Howard Moscoe (Ward 15, Eglinton-Lawrence) has announced that he won’t be running for re-election in October. Former TTC chair Moscoe has been a fixture at City Hall for thirty-one years, and is known for his outspokenness and quotability. The Globe reports that Moscoe will throw himself a 71st birthday party before his departure but it will be self-funded, so presumably he’ll avoid the fate of Kyle Rae who spent taxpayer bucks on his own farewell and had Rob Ford come down on him like a ton of, well, Rob Ford.
Mayoral candidates, who must be getting heartily sick of each other by now, got together last night to debate environmental issues. Key takeaways were that Rossi and Pantalone know nature because they’re Italian and that all the candidates are in favour of the environment, except Rob Ford who’d like to see it be cheaper.
Toronto has been selected to host the first gay tourism conference, where travel industry experts and conference aficionados will gather to discuss how to better market the Great Gay North. Canada is already an attractive destination for gay, lesbian, and transgendered travellers, with same-sex marriage legal since 2005 and the Toronto Pride festival one of the largest in the world, but the conference will look to cash in further on the estimated seventy-billion-dollar market.
A York University researcher has discovered a new species of bee that calls downtown Toronto home. Biologist Jason Gibbs says it looks pretty much like other bees of its type (called “sweat bees” because they’re attracted to perspiration) but its DNA is different. That’s the great thing about being a bee researcher—you can walk out the front door in Toronto and discover a new species. That would never happen if you were researching gorillas.
The estimated cost of the revitalization of the Fort York museum in time for the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 has been bumped up from $18.9 million to $23 million. Still, the $4 million overage is a bargain compared to the actual War of 1812, which is estimated to have cost around $1.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.