news
Newsstand: October 20, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
“Wednesday?” she said scornfully. “Is that the best you can do?” In the news: the final mayoral debate gets heated, feds say the G20 was a bargain, and McGuinty and your mom don’t want you smoking.
With Rossi and Thomson gone, Rob Ford and George Smitherman were able to focus on bashing each other at the final televised CP24 debate last night. Smitherman pointed out that of course Ford doesn’t need to spend his office budget because he’s got another job, and Ford in turn suggested that the former provincial health minister still had some “splainin” to do about eHealth. Smitherman showed himself not at all dismayed by his role as the “anybody-but-Ford” default by saying that a vote for Joe Pantalone was a vote for Rob Ford, while Joe in turn said that he’s the only candidate with a positive vision for the city and that he could totally still win. Ford and Smitherman remain in a dead heat for the mayoralty with only a few days until the election.
Government officials spoke with one voice before a Parliamentary committee, agreeing that the $1.3 billion spent on the G8 and G20 summits was necessary and worthwhile. Ward Elcock, head of security, says the $930 million budgeted for security probably won’t all be spent, which seems reasonable given that the summits ended almost four months ago and, absent a Terminator being sent from the future, should be secured by now. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff channelled his inner Ford and blustered that the summits were a “scandal” which produced no real results.
Even though Ontario already has some of the most stringent anti-smoking laws on the planet, the provincial government is looking at new ways of keeping us away from flaming nicotine. Proposed measures include banning smoking on patios, licensing tobacco retailers, mandating plain packaging for cigarettes, and increasing efforts to fight contraband smokes, which currently constitute about half of the market. If only it didn’t look so cool.
OpenFile spoke with Stephen Marche, whose now famous “Rob Ford is fat” column was pulled from the online edition of the Globe and Mail last weekend. Marche said he’d had no indication from editors prior to publication that there were any issues with the piece. Marche also had his column at the Globe taken away and will not be publishing the remaining articles in the series, “George Smitherman is So Gay” and “Joe Pantalone: Munchkin or Leprechaun?”
You wanna know who won our Toronto slogan contest? Newstand isn’t going to give it away, but you can check it out here.