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Newsstand: December 20, 2010
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
Shortest Monday of the year, same old regular-sized Newsstand: the winter solstice and lunar eclipse combine and put on a show, Toronto Sun won’t let go, top ten solutions for hunger and poverty, York U is closed down again, and if Don Cherry didn’t piss you off maybe the PM can.
Hunger and poverty are at a “crisis point” in Ontario, according to the Recession Relief Coalition, who conducted a Hunger Inquiry in November to investigate the growing need for food banks and social assistance in Ontario. Now the group is releasing a top ten list of recommendations for combating the root causes of the problem. Among the recommendations are: increasing wages, ensuring more access to safe and affordable housing, and to consider providing access to food a human right rather than a charitable act. A full report is due out in January.
Over the summer, the Toronto Sun got all worked up about federal funding going to a play called Homegrown because the play, which they call a sympathetic portrayal of one of the Toronto 18 suspects, was being funded by the same government that was targeted by Shareef Abdelhaleem. Well, it seems they want to relive those lazy hazy days of summer, so they’ve uncovered some pretty interesting emails between the SummerWorks festival and bureaucrats determined to fund it—namely the festival staff’s apparent inability to fill out forms on time, even after multiple personal reminders from the Department of Canadian Heritage. Never ones to let a story slip into oblivion, the indefatigable Sun also threw in an optional ending on the article. The arts! funding! scandal! piece has been online since Saturday at 12:38 p.m. and has yet to be commented on or corrected.
Diamond and Schmitt Architects’ plans for updating Robarts Library—one of the ugliest buildings on U of T’s campus—are well underway. The foreboding book abode, which was built at the height of the brutal Brutalist era in modern architecture, will get a new addition, more light, and a cosier atmosphere. We wish we could use more clever turns of phrase and puns to describe the proposal, but Chris Hume did a fine job of that in his article.
York University students have all the luck, and not just because their campus is the most brutal of them all. First, they got that sweet three-month-long break in 2008–2009; then last Monday a fire shut down the university’s heating systems, delaying exams for two days; and now a bomb threat on Sunday morning has pushed exams back to Wednesday.
Just as the fury over Don Cherry’s “pinko” comments is dying down, Prime Minister Harper is appearing on John Tory’s radio show on Monday afternoon. And if this preview is any indication, “some of those Toronto liberal elites” are bound to get fired up all over again.
And a rare scene will brighten Monday night/Tuesday morning (if the sky is clear enough): a lunar eclipse that, for the first time in more than three-hundred years, coincides with the winter solstice. The solstice marks the shortest day of the year, so from Wednesday onwards the days will get a little longer and your 5 p.m. streetcar ride will be a little less depressing. And to celebrate nature’s triumph over the gathering darkness, the moon will turn a joyful shade of blood red by the eclipse’s peak at 2:41 a.m. Tuesday morning. Environment Canada is calling for clouds to clear overnight, so city-dwellers may have a chance to see the celestial show.