news
Newsstand: September 22, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Welcome to Wednesday, welcome to fall! In the news: Rob and Gino Giorgio kiss and make up, another damn mayoral debate, and the police are unironically asking taxpayers for free parking.
The GTA welcomed in the first day of fall with a bang and a boom as severe weather woke up our dogs last night, and just as importantly knocked down a dozen hydro poles on a road in Brampton. However, power outages were limited to a few areas, and on the plus side, Environment Canada is expecting a warm autumn for us.
Tired of hearing about Rob Ford yet? Cause if you are it’s gonna be a long month for you. Anyway, mayoral race dropout and visionary Giorgio Mammoliti, once famously called “Gino boy” by The Man Who Would Be Mayor, has thrown his support behind his erstwhile foe. The Ford team is speaking to current and future councillors to build a Coalition of the Willing—or at least the opportunistic—on council in the event that he becomes mayor, so that he doesn’t spend four years hurling invective about gravy trains to an empty room. No word on whether Mammoliti is potentially in line for a deputy mayor job, or “l’il buddy” as it would be known in a Ford administration.
Also electionally speaking, the usual suspects got together again last night for another stirring CP24 debate, in which the same words were spoken in a slightly different order and they were then live-blogged with enthusiastic bile and snark by Torontoist’s own C. Bird.
Another G20 inquiry is being planned, this one specifically to look into the so-called “secret law” that was misrepresented by police as a means of keeping protestors away from the security fence. Former Ontario chief justice Roy McMurtry will helm the inquiry into why a 1939 law designed to keep Nazis out of our reservoirs was reinterpreted to prevent balaclava enthusiasts from stealing Obama’s canapes.
The Toronto police union wants the taxpayers to pay for an appeal into a Canada Revenue Agency ruling that would eliminate free parking for the private vehicles of police officers. The CRA said free parking is a taxable benefit, and wants to the cops to pony up retroactively to 2007. Rob Ford, who doesn’t like freebies but does like cops, told the Sun that although he had complained to the CRA about numerous other things like David Miller getting into the zoo for free, he hadn’t raised this one.