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Newsstand: November 12, 2010
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
It’s Friday, so eat some sustainable fish and know that our former councillors are going to be OK, and fake TTC tokens are back and better than ever.
Yes, there’s life after City Hall even if it doesn’t come with a free buffet. The Star made some inquiries into what departing city councillors plan to do with all that free time, and got a diverse set of responses. York students may be seeing Howard Moscoe at campus keggers next year—the seventy-one-year-old says that he’s had a few job offers, but has also applied to law school at Osgoode Hall. Joe Pantalone has a slightly melancholy blurb where he says that although he hasn’t received any offers just yet, people tell him that something will turn up soon. Adam Giambrone is Indiana Jonseing for an archaeological dig in Sudan and won’t decide what comes next until the new year, and neither Kyle Rae nor Sandra Bussin could be reached for comment.
Smartcards, anyone? CBC News has found that counterfeit TTC tokens are back in circulation, three years after the old tokens were discontinued because they were too easy to copy. The fakes look and weigh the pretty much the same as real tokens, but have a different composition and won’t work if put into the turnstile slot at subway stations. TTC spokesperson Brad Ross estimates about two thousand counterfeit tokens are used every day, costing the TTC hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. If you’ve got some suspect tokens, you should take them down to an advanced metallurgical lab to get them analyzed, or alternatively just not buy them from the guy in the trench coat who stands out front of the donut shop.
Where you’ll be using your tokens, real or fake, remains up in the air. Peter Kuitenbrower in the National Post says that it would tough for Rob Ford to derail Transit City as he promised, noting that $137 million has already been spent and that 150 people are working on the project full-time. He also notes that killing the Miller transit legacy wouldn’t save the city anything anyway, since all the money thus far committed comes from the province or the feds. However, if a Fordist City Hall insisted on replacing the planned light rails links with subways as promised, the most likely scenario is that everything would grind to a halt for a few years and you might want to get used to the bus. Also, get your kids used to the bus, and possibly their kids too.
A former prominent Toronto lawyer specializing in corporate finance has been accused of giving insider trading tips to an old frat buddy. The Ontario Securities Commission says that between 2004 and 2007 Mitchell Finkelstein passed on proprietary information from his former job at Davies Ward Phillips and Vineberg to help friends and family make as much as $2 million in trading profits. Geez, you miss one class at law school.
This article originally joked that “U of T students may be seeing Howard Moscoe at campus keggers next year” because the outgoing councillor “applied to law school at Osgoode Hall”; in fact, as pointed out by commenter mw18, Osgoode Hall is on York campus, not U of T.