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Newsstand: September 21, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
It’s a slow Tuesday in the GTA: Rob Ford gathers sufferers of like-minded thinking near and dear; Hazel McCallion says hotels are good for cities, not just for sons; and sucks to be G20 detainees released on bail with restrictions that keep them off Facebook.
City council candidates received a questionnaire last week designed to determine whether they suffer from uncontrollable bouts of loutishness and other symptoms of acute Ford-ishness have politics that might garner them an invitation to The Rob Ford Party, the means through which Ford plans to actually do anything if he is elected mayor. “If one or more of your policy preference aligns with Rob Ford’s, then we would like to hear back from you to schedule a meeting and discuss particularities,” the email reads.
Mississauga’s long-time mayor Hazel McCallion, who is the oldest person alive eighty-nine, defended her actions yesterday at a judicial inquiry into her involvement in a would-be hotel deal that would have benefited a company owned partly by her son. McCallion says that she only had Mississauga’s best interests in mind. Several news outlets wrote about it, but the Toronto Star wins the link for having the best photo of Mississauga’s fiery mayor.
The Star also reports on some unusual bail conditions for G20 detainees released to the custody of their parents. No cell phones! No Facebook! No unsupervised time with your boyfriend! It’s a whole new kind of nanny state.
A coroner’s inquest into the death of twenty-eight-year-old Byron Debassige is underway. Debassige was shot by police in a Toronto park in 2008 after threatening a grocery store owner with a knife over some lemons, a court heard yesterday. Debassige suffered from schizophrenia and alcoholism and was plugged into social services to help him cope with his illness.
And bedbugs are good for someone, at least, says the Toronto Sun. A Markham-based company owns the rights to a kind of condom for beds to protect against the notoriously hard-to-eliminate critters, and their sales are profiting in itchy times.
Finally, Quebecois band Karkwa has snapped up the Polaris Prize, marking the first time the five-year-old prize has gone to a Francophone group. Sorry to be a tease, but we’ll tell you more about it later.