news
Newsstand: October 22, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Friday: the Globe endorses Smitherman, but barely; Ford releases donor list, but Smitherman won’t; and there’s even some non-election news today, but it includes snow.
The Globe and Mail is very, very, very hesitantly endorsing George Smitherman. Smitherman, the paper’s editorial board writes, is “vague”; “has shown no inclination” to tackle police and fire services budgets; “has failed to articulate a vision or a strategy of his own”; is “an office-seeker with a taste for managing, but not for transformation”; and, with Ford, has an “unpersuasive and unsatisfactory” mayoral platform. Catch the George Smitherman enthusiasm!
Torontoist, meanwhile, will be endorsing a mayoral candidate for this election, and soon. Stay tuned. And also, come to our party on election night.
In other election news, Rob Ford has joined Joe Pantalone in releasing his list of donors. Among the more than two thousand people, as of October 12: Arthur Smitherman, who gave $120, and whose brother George won’t be revealing his list until after election day. Somewhat incredibly, Ford’s raised less money than Pantalone, though as the Star notes, there’s no limit on what a candidate can contribute to their own campaign.
There’ll be no more TTC special constables as of February 1, the Toronto Police Services board decided on Thursday. CP24 reports that it’s no small part because of “the lack of oversight over their conduct”—regular police still have the power on the TTC that they do above ground, but constables aren’t subject to things like the Police Services Act.
What more of the “Rob Ford is fat and that’s why we like him” Globe story that was published in the Saturday paper but got pulled offline? It “fell short of a number of standards we had,” Globe editor John Stackhouse said on Thursday night at a U of T talk. Who knew that online standards were higher than print?
And there’s snow on the ground north of Toronto right now. Cut that out, weather.