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Newsstand: September 28, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Ripped from the headlines on this fine Tuesday: a poll that doesn’t have Rob Ford on top, Smitherman and Ford both crunch numbers, all the smut’s gone to Whitby, and nudists make people cry in Barrie. Oh, and watch out for that fake taxi.
Now this is the kind of headline that we like to rip: there’s a poll that doesn’t show Rob Ford as a shoo-in for mayor. An Ipsos-Reid survey of four hundred voters indicates that while Ford is still on top among the big five, if the race were whittled down to just Ford and Smitherman, George would take him. But, truthfully: talk is cheap. Polls are cheap. Vote on October 25.
Speaking of the municipal election, Rob Ford has come out with his detailed financial plan to stop that gravy train (to our disappointment, his plan involved nary a cheese curd). In addition to cutting city council in half, Ford is also going to just stop replacing people when they retire. And he’s going to save $1.7 billion in “efficiencies” and another $6 million in “indirect costs.” Oh, and when he stops coming up with vague words to explain where he’s going to trim fat, he’s going to start asking Torontonian citizens to do it for him in a campaign called “Save Toronto.” Even the Globe and Mail, far less prone to sarcasm than we are, sounds ready to rip off the mask of journalistic neutrality and mock him. Because—well, have you seen the YouTube video?
Smitherman’s economic plan also involves job-slashing: he plans to save $61 million by cutting 1,300 jobs. He also plans to sell off the city’s share in EnWave, sell unused land, and secure $100 million from the province. Smitherman served up his economic plan over lunch, and his talking points were written on the back of the place mats. Now that’s efficiency.
Tired of all the financial talk in Toronto’s election? Sounds like you should move to Whitby, where the rhetoric in the race for mayor is all about smut. Someone maybe starred in a cheap porn flick (or maybe didn’t). And someone else is stealing campaign signs. And someone else invoked Hitler on YouTube. Yeah, we don’t really follow any of it either, but it sounds spicy. Or boring. Or spicily boring.
More nudity! A nudist camp near Bracebridge keeps spilling over into public and upsetting residents, a Barrie court heard yesterday. One young woman tearfully described a traumatic incident serving naked men in a car at the A&W drive-through. The best part of the article? When the woman describes “private parts flopping back and forth” and the Crown asks “and where was this moving back and forth happening?” As far as dialogue goes, that’s gold.
Watch out for a fake cabbie on the streets of Toronto. Police have caught him twice, but were unable to press charges because apparently pretending to be a cab is not actually breaking the law. It’s just the sinister stuff you do after you’ve coaxed a stranger into your car that the police are allowed to tackle.