news
Newsstand: September 24, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Hi, Friday! News, you asked? Ford could still lose, G20 monies explained, and your power rates aren’t going down anytime soon.
As we told you last night, the mayoral election is getting interesting, with the latest Angus Reid poll making Rob Ford look less insurmountable, and Sarah Thomson musing about dropping out of the race to support a candidate who could give the contentious councillor a run for his money. That said, Thomson is considering getting behind Rocco Rossi, who based on all polls appears the least likely of the major candidates to be able to beat Ford. George Smitherman, apparently recognizing that winning on his own merits is looking less and less likely, is offering to spearhead the emerging “Anybody but Ford” movement. Whoever wins, this will be a proud moment in our city’s history.
So now we know where all that G20 money went. Following a request from Liberal MP Dan McTeague, the government has released records detailing expenditures around the G8 and G20 summits in June. Among the items paid for by your tax money were $2.2 million in car rentals, $2.5 million for lunches at the Muskoka airport, and $14,000 for “bug jackets.” The bugs were not required to wear ties.
In news around G20 investigating, now the province’s third largest industry, a retired judge has been chosen to lead the Toronto Police Services probe. Former associate chief justice John Morden will helm the investigation into what the hell police were thinking around their summit tactics, although he’ll probably phrase it differently.
Hey you kids, don’t you know that internet’s expensive? The Ontario Energy Board has recently given utilities the right to make more profit from their customers. The additional profit comes as a result of a change in policy which allows the companies to recover construction costs before the electricity starts flowing rather than after, as in the past. Provincial Energy Minister Brad Duguid says the money is needed to upgrade the province’s power grid, while provincial NDP leader Andrea Horvath says it’s needed to fatten fat cats further.
Stephen Harper is playing up Canada’s good global citizenship as he makes a pitch to get a seat on the powerful and prestigious UN Security Council. It’s expected this bid will be taken more seriously than last year, when other members played a cruel prank and actually assigned the PM to the UN Security Guards Council, where he worked a graveyard shift at the front desk before being let in on the joke.
A rookie mayoral candidate in Ajax has apologized for comments during a recent debate comparing flying the Pride flag to flying a Nazi flag. Sherry Clymer said she did not intend to compare gays to Nazis (who are bad), although her religious views do put her in opposition to the “LGBT lifestyle.” In a nutshell, God doesn’t like gays, Clymer doesn’t like Nazis, nobody likes gay Nazis.