news
Weekend Newsstand: November 27, 2010
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
Hello Toronto, here’s the news for this weekend: Rob Ford creates an unpaid arts gig, Circa owner has more plans for the city, Sun newspapers come alive, and Blair versus Hitchens.
For all you Torontoist readers who just can’t get enough of the Sun newspapers, the CRTC has answered your prayers and granted Sun TV News a Category 2 broadcast license. Quebecor’s new twenty-four-hour “hard news, straight talk” specialty channel will emulate the right-wing editorial policies of the Sun newspaper chain and will hopefully spawn a Canuck Colbert/Stewart combo to help curate the funniest bits for easy digestion. Quebecor was pushing for a Category 1 license that would have forced cable and satellite companies to carry it, but now Sun TV News will have to bully negotiate with distributors like Rogers and Telus for carriage.
Speaking of emulating American models, Rob Ford created a new special arts and culture adviser and appointed Jeff Melanson of the National Ballet School to the (unpaid) job. Melanson has the admirable goal of engaging the entire city—not just the downtown elites—in Toronto’s arts scene. And though Ford has already announced that Toronto’s arts budget for 2011 will remain stable, he and Melanson champion private sector investment in arts and culture with less reliance on government funding.
On that note, the federal government announced $32 million in new arts and culture funding on Friday. Heritage Minister James Moore made the announcement at the aforementioned National Ballet School, a beneficiary of a large portion of the funds. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens squared off in Friday night’s Munk Debate about religion being a force for good in the world. Going into the evening, most of the crowd—and we assume the protesters outside yelling “war criminal” at Blair—was on Team Hitchens, with only 22% of the audience supporting the motion. Blair pointed to the charitable work done in the name of God, while Hitchens countered with female empowerment as the cure for poverty. Blair pulled the “practicing faith leads to compassion and obligation” card, but Hitchens hit back with his need to maintain intellectual freedom and not believe in miracles. When it was all done, Hitchens came out ahead, but Blair—protesters be damned—had gained ten percentage points in the exit poll.
“There had never been anything like it,” and maybe that’s one of the reasons Circa went under. Club owner Peter Gatien dreamed of letting Torontonians feel like the sophisticated, big city party goers he had wooed in New York—before getting kicked out of the U.S. on tax evasion charges. But being a convicted criminal made it tough to get good loans, and Gatien and his investors were buried by interest payments despite regularly packing the club to capacity. Gatien is working off his Circa-induced hangover by scrounging up half a million dollars to make a documentary movie about himself. And he has more plans for Toronto: he thinks the city could use a bunch more boutique hotels. Fair warning: do not sit on the dentist’s chair in the hotel lobby.
Federal Liberals trotted out their big guns in the Vaughan by-election, unleashing Justin Trudeau’s ridiculous mustache to give Conservative candidate Julian Fantino a Charter smack-down. Canada has Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, to thank for his son’s mustache. Oh, and the Charter of Rights of Freedoms. The younger Trudeau released a YouTube video on Thursday where he impersonates the former police officer and questions Fantino’s dedication to rights and freedoms after the ex-police chief wrote in his biography: “In Canada, we overplay personal rights and entitlements to the detriment of greater good.”
And, breaking news, Ontario civil servants dick around on the internet sometimes when they’re supposed to be working.