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Newsstand: December 22, 2010
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
You asked for it, you got it—Wednesday! Today, a cop is busted in a G20 beating, Rob Ford surprises no one by continuing to talk subways, and yes, we will use the 2010 budget surplus to fund the 2011 budget, thanks very much.
Almost six months after Adam Nobody was swarmed and beaten by police on videotape at a G20 protest, the Special Investigations Unit has charged a Toronto police officer with assault with a weapon. The SIU announced the charges yesterday against Constable Babak Andalib-Goortani, after he was identified by a single officer from among the dozen or more who were present at the scene. The case became a lightning rod for criticism of police actions at the summit following the original SIU decision not to lay charges in spite of the video evidence, and comments from police chief Bill Blair (later retracted) suggesting that Nobody had attacked police and the video had been tampered with. Constable Andalib-Goortani’s goateed visage became famous after the Star published several photos of him busy with his baton at Queen’s Park and publicly shamed the SIU into acknowledging that maybe it wasn’t as impossible as they originally thought to identify the officers involved.
Rob Ford is willing to forgo other transit projects in favour of extending the Sheppard subway line to Scarborough Town Centre. In an interview with the Globe yesterday, Ford repeated that Toronto needed subways, subways, and more subways and that if people couldn’t get there underground then dammit they weren’t going to get there at all. Well. we’re paraphrasing, but when questioned on transit in his home hood of Etobicoke, Ford did say “They have transit…people get to the slots, they get to Woodbine racetrack, people get to Humber College. There are buses that run up there.” Or so he hears, anyway. Metrolinx CEO Bruce McCuaig told the Star that talk of prioritizing the Sheppard line may be premature, given that subways are usually considered when peak ridership per hour in one direction hits fifteen thousand, while the Sheppard line is expected to reach only three thousand by 2031.
Budget-wise, Mayor Ford plans to use the one-time 2010 budget surplus to give him room some breathing room in 2011. The expected $300 million surplus, along with a reserve fund established from previous surpluses, will give the new administration a total of about $375 million in play money, leaving us with a shortfall of only $286 million or so. In conversation with the Globe, the penny-wise mayor also referred to an auditor’s report due in January, which he said would be “earthshaking.” Hopefully they’re going to reveal that the Miller administration was keeping captured aliens in the basement at City Hall, but probably not.
An expensive home under construction near Yonge and the 401 burned down early Tuesday morning in a blaze that fire officials say may have been related to heaters on the property. Puzzling quote of the day, from an unidentified neighbour: “I thought it was the winter solstice, but I opened my blinds and it wasn’t.” So…what exactly do you think the winter solstice is?