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Newsstand: November 8, 2010
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
Happy Monday! Unless you overpaid for a cab this weekend. Also in the news, G20 numbers and G20 faces, army reservists remember, Rob Ford wants a helicopter, and scientists can turn skin into blood.
To those who took a cab this weekend: sorry. It seems Toronto cab fares are the highest in the country, and are even higher than most cities around the world, including New York, Paris, and L.A. Since the HST kicked in, it costs thirteen dollars to travel just 5 km, and that’s (ridiculously) assuming there’s no traffic. Taxi rates were scheduled for a review this fall, but it was pushed back into early 2011 thanks to the municipal election. Outgoing city councillor and chair of the municipal Licensing and Standards Committee, Howard Moscoe (Ward 15, Eglinton-Lawrence), says the problem is too many cabs on the road. So finding a cab is rarely a problem, just the part when you have to pay for it.
Even more itemized G20 bills came out over the weekend. The Canadian Press obtained a report showing that costs for the summit were mounting before the meetings even began. This after last week’s news of police lacking badges and warrants, Bill Blair spending $125 million for policing in the city, and an almost $700 million dollar total security tab, as revealed in a fresh round of departmental spending records from The Feds. As the deluge of numbers and nit-picking continues (five-thousand-dollar sherpa dinners! Eleven thousand dollars for plates!), remember some people got caught up in all this policing: social media strategists who just live in the area, and wives visiting their TTC-driving husbands, oh, and some protestors too.
Workers at the Delta Chelsea Hotel reached a tentative agreement on Sunday, ending a dispute over wages, workloads, benefits, and job security. The news comes just as nine hundred workers at Hamilton’s U.S. Steel plant learned they are being locked out. This is the first labour dispute in twenty years at the plant formerly known as Stelco.
And speaking of labour negotiations, the first one for Rob Ford’s City Hall is coming up, and it’s a doozy. Speculation has already begun around next month’s negotiations between City Hall and the Toronto Police Union. Our mayor-elect is perceived as being pretty “police friendly,” what with his campaign promises to hire one hundred new officers and his previous demands that the cops get a helicopter they didn’t even ask for. We’ll keep a close eye on this one for you.
Army reserve regiments held Remembrance Day ceremonies around the city this weekend. Many of the Toronto area’s 2,400 reservists can’t take time from their day jobs to partake in ceremonies on Thursday. Recently, Etobicoke North MP Kirsty Duncan put forth a private member’s bill to make Remembrance Day a statutory holiday in Ontario, as it is in most other provinces and territories. Part-time soldiers make about a quarter of Canada’s deployment overseas, and have played an important role in recent conflicts like Afghanistan. And they will likely continue to do so, with Defence Minister Peter McKay confirming that Canada is considering extending troop deployment in Afghanistan past the 2011 deadline originally set by the government.
Speaking of the important role of universities in our society, researchers at McMaster University have figured out a way to make blood out of human skin. The discovery could mean that patients wouldn’t have to wait for blood donor matches to get a bone marrow transplant, and people suffering from blood conditions, like leukemia, could be treated with blood transfusions made from their own skin. Using a potion of proteins, the scientists found that skin cells would convert to blood cells in less than a month. And genetic mutations present in the blood, like cancer cells, were not present in the skin cells or the freshly made blood. Nice work, science.