news
Newsstand: October 1, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Friday, October 1 and time to start playing Christmas carols in the malls. In the news, shots fired at school, lotto winners emerging from woodwork, and will Lightbox kill Yorkville?
Time to break out the back to school Kevlar. Things got a little Blackboard Jungle at Central Technical School on Harbord Street yesterday when a shot fired in a stairwell led to a three-hour lockdown and a search of the campus by the Emergency Task Force. Police have questioned three “persons of interest” but so far haven’t identified a shooter or a motive.
Following news that a GTA convenience store employee and his children may have inconveniently stolen a $12.5 million dollar lottery win back in 2003, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation has has fielded dozens of calls from people claiming to be the real winners. OLGC says they’ve had more than eighty calls from would-be millionaires, of which twenty have been considered plausible enough to pass along for further investigation. If you think that the ticket was yours, or that you can convince somebody it was, give them a call.
Incoming Governor General David Johnston is defining his new Brand Canada at his installation ceremony today, which will be called “The Smart and Caring Nation: A Call To Service.” Which is nice and all, but can we still be sexy like when Michaelle Jean was G-G?
The Globe reports that the opening of the new Bell Lightbox this year sucked some TIFF spending away from traditional Yorkville celebri-haunts. Credit card purchases at bars and restaurants were up 9.2% over last year’s festival season, while Yorkville venues saw a 5% decrease in credit card receipts. Seems the Entertainment District is finally coming into its own—where else can you enjoy film, ballet, and opera before finishing off with a nightcap and drunken brawl with some gel-headed Mississaugans?
Presto, we’re going to be using tokens forever! Following a note from their mothers provincial transportation minister Kathleen Wynne warning them not to move forward with an open payment system that would potentially compete with the provincially supported Presto card. TTC commissioners have deferred a decision on an open payment vendor until the new post-election commission sits in December. Gutsy move, guys.
Oh yeah, we didn’t forget about the election. George Smitherman raised some eyebrows yesterday when he showed up for an installment of the ongoing perma-debate yesterday, but was confronted by protesters and left shortly thereafter. Smithermans’ camp says he never planned to debate in the first place, as he had another event in Etobicoke, while opponents claim he was fleeing discussion of his provincial record with eHealth. Third possibility is that he just couldn’t stand to spend another two hours with Rossi, Ford, and Pantalone.