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Weekend Newsstand: October 9, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
It’s the weekend of gluttony and gratitude, and Torontoist plays “follow that thought pattern” in this edition of Newsstand: Rob Ford’s got more numbers but no more sense, hoarding paper on Wellesley and not hoarding flamingos in City Hall, and watch out for that plane on the highway.
Rob Ford has released his final financial thoughts, making the claim that in his first term as mayor he would drum up a $1.7 billion dollar surplus, and everyone else is all: “dream on, buddy.” Yeah, the newspapers said it like that. Ford plans to make $558 million in cuts to city expenditures alone, but he says it won’t happen at the expense of services. In fact, he’s going to hire one hundred new police officers. Among other things, Ford plans to scrap the fair wage policy, reduce expenses through attrition of the workforce, and sell off some of the city’s assets. Oh, and then there are those two million dollars in “efficiences” he keeps saying he’ll find. When pressed, Ford could not come up with a single example. (If you want something to be grateful for this weekend, be grateful that this isn’t a video of you.) The Toronto Board of Trade says that Ford’s plans for belt tightening are the right idea, but both the timeline and the expectation that services will not be cut is unrealistic.
Speaking of city services, the coroner’s inquest into the death of twenty-eight-year-old Byron Debassige delivered its findings yesterday. The fifteen recommendations put forth are designed to coordinate the delivery of mental health services, but, to the disappointment of Debassige’s family, none address police policies on weapon use or their training for dealing with the mentally ill. Debassige, brandishing a knife in a Toronto park after stealing lemons from a nearby grocer, was shot by police in 2008.
Speaking of mental health, hoarding may have played a significant role in the Wellesley Street fire at the end of September. There’s something a bit off about the way that the media’s treating this, turning the thoughts of someone who is obviously unwell into a punchline (we blame TLC). Stephen Vassilev kept boxes of paper crammed into the apartment at 200 Wellesley that caught fire when he was out on September 24, leading to the blaze that would ultimately put his 1,200 neighbours temporarily out of a home.
Speaking of the stuff one crams one’s spaces with, retiring Ward 15 city councillor Howard Moscoe has sold off the thirty flamingos that bedazzled his office. The flock has migrated to Toronto Community Social Planning Council chair John Campey, who is also, apparently, a flamingo collector. Moscoe plans to donate the five-hundred dollars scooped up in the transaction to the North York Community House, but he’s hanging onto one lone bird which sat in his Bay street window, keeping City Hall aesthetics up to the snuff of “a cheap strip club” (his words).
Speaking of birds: it’s a bird, it’s a plane! A single-engine plane made an emergency landing on Highway 407 in Markham at 10:30 last night. The pilot’s wife says he was out for a pleasure flight. Everybody’s fine.
Go forth, Torontoist readers. Eat turkey. Talk turkey. Have yourselves a lovely weekend.
This article originally mistakenly identified the highway where a plane made an emergency landing on Friday night as Highway 107—in fact, it was Highway 407.