news
Newsstand: October 13, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Breaking News Wednesday (imagine teletype sound here)! Eco-fees get shelved, Ford gets served, and Suzuki gets schooled.
At least six former members of Rocco Rossi’s campaign team have succumbed to Smithermania and are now working for the former provincial health minister. The organizers who’ve crossed the street include former campaign manager Sachin Aggarwal, who abandoned ship in August after advising the low-polling Rossi to quit the race and support Smitherman in a bid to push back the Rob Ford tide. Rossi himself is unmoved, noting that most of the people involved left his campaign some time ago. In related news, Rossi is expected to announce today that he is trapped in a mine and will be rescued via escape capsule.
The Ontario government has announced it will abandon the “eco-fees” program that enraged taxpayers earlier this year. The fees were intended to cover the cost of recycling hazardous materials, but the program was poorly sold to the public and encompassed a puzzling array of fees that were inconsistently applied by retailers. Instead, the McGuinty government will throw eight million dollars at Ontario municipalities (about twenty thousand dollars each) and tell them to figure it out.
In other enviro-news, the Peel District School Board has announced that a new secondary school to be opened next year in Brampton will be named after famed scientist, environmentalist, and Canadian icon David Suzuki. A group representing climate change deniers responded with a press release saying that the school probably isn’t real and is a naturally occurring phenomenon anyway.
As we told you yesterday, rotund rapscallion Rob Ford is back in the news for reasons non-mayoral. Ford has been formally served with a six-million-dollar lawsuit for saying that the sole-sourced deal to extend the Boardwalk Restaurant lease is a prime example of city hall corruption and “stinks to high heaven.” Last month, restaurant owner George Foulidis asked Ford to retract his comments or be sued, but the oft-apologizing councillor declined. As of yesterday, Ford had not responded but his campaign team said he stood by his libel allegations.
More than one hundred Tamils in Thailand who were allegedly planning to sail to Canada illegally to claim refugee status have been arrested by Thai police with the help of information provided by Canadian authorities. A spokesman for Canadian Tamil Congress said that Canada would be “(negating) its international obligations” if the migrants were returned to Sri Lanka, in spite of the the fact that those arrested have never been anywhere near Canada.