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Newsstand: December 10, 2010
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
It’s Friday, so remember that today is the first day of the end of your life! In the news: mayor says no thanks to raise, airport limo drivers get locked out, and baby gets born in SUV.
Why pay full retail price for your public servants? Thrift-mongering mayor Rob Ford has put his money where his foot often is and rejected a pay raise of almost $16,000 that had been recommended by a study last year. At yesterday’s executive meeting, Ford said that he didn’t want the increase of $15,835, which will be earmarked to buy five centimetres of subway.
The civic group led by John Tory has changed its name from Toronto City Summit Alliance to the Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance (the adjective “Greater” presumably referring to Toronto, not the Alliance). The change, intended to represent a broader regional focus and describe the group’s activities more specifically, was announced by Tory yesterday at a conference at the MaRS Centre. Tory said in his speech that the current divisive atmosphere in municipal politics was potentially harmful to the task of city building. Regretting any recent decisions, Mr. Tory?
A GTA woman gave birth to her baby in an SUV early Thursday morning. The woman and her husband were on the 403 en route to hospital when it became apparent that the vehicle was about to become high occupancy, and the pair pulled off the highway where the baby girl was born. EMS arrived shortly thereafter and all involved are fine. The McGuinty government now is looking at the mobile maternity ward as a means of lowering healthcare costs.
If you’re travelling out to Pearson this week, you might want to double-check your limo reservation. Around two hundred limo drivers representing eighty-eight cars have been locked out by McIntosh, Air Cab and Aaroport [sic] in an ongoing dispute over high overheads paid to the company for things like insurance, credit card transaction costs, and other fees. Drivers and their supporters have been picketing Zahavy Limousines, which owns all three companies, since the beginning of December. The drivers are represented by the Canadian Auto Workers union, which makes sense. CAW president Ken Lewenza expressed his outrage that the drivers, who are mostly “first-generation Canadians and workers of colour, are extremely exploited.” The exact colour or colours were not specified.
Okay, not strictly Toronto but he is our PM and you really should see the video of Stephen Harper playing keyboards and singing like a cross between an animatronic Neil Diamond and the kid in high school who couldn’t get into a band but always played at the talent show anyway. The PM rocked an Ottawa ballroom full of party faithful with a series of numbers ranging from “Sweet Caroline” to the the Guess Who’s “Share the Land.” In an unusual turn of events, opposition pols called on Harper not to quit his day job.