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Newsstand: January 10, 2011
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
Hello, Blue Monday! It’s budget day at City Hall, and everyone’s speculating on what Ford’s got in store, Transit City supporters are keeping the pressure on, Toronto racks up homicides, and if you think you’ve gone on an epic beer run, you really haven’t.
Whispers (or, you know, headlines) are circulating about Rob Ford’s much-anticipated budget proposal—referred to by the Globe and Mail as his “maiden budget,” which we thought was rather a nice little flourish—to be ponied up at 9 a.m. this morning. Torontoist will, of course, be there for Ford’s big unveil, so keep your browsers aimed where they are. In the meantime, the Globe is fairly optimistic about the whole thing, saying that in lieu of adding new taxes or making major service cuts, it is expected that Ford will crest a surplus left behind by David Miller and ride it to balanced-budget glory. (Cut us some slack: some of us don’t understand numbers, so we have to come up with awesome metaphors instead, and we maintain that Rob Ford surfing is awesome, k? Don’t tell us otherwise.)
The Toronto Star, on the other hand, forgot their rose-coloured glasses at home in their look ahead to Budget Ford: they’re expecting that Mayor Ro-Fo (new nickname: yay or nay?) is going light on the fat trimming now with plans for a big hack away in 2012. For now, the only major cuts being rumoured are to underused off-peak TTC routes. The National Post is rather philosophically asking: what doth major mean?
In anticipation of today’s budget, about one hundred people rallied outside City Hall yesterday in support of the plan formerly known as Transit City. Framing the plan as more a city-building exercise than simply a transit proposal, councillors who spoke said that they had received over ten thousand emails from concerned citizens who support Transit City. Not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe they should have hit the reply button and told those many thousands of people about this rally they were having. It’s only a party if you send invitations, guys. Actually, no, it’s only a party if the Raging Grannies come, so points for that.
Only ten days into the new year, and Toronto’s homocide count has already crept up to three: twenty-year-old Annesair Balkaran has been charged with first degree murder in the death of her fifty-nine-year-old mother, Zaniffa Balkaran, Friday morning. For 2011 maybe Toronto should resolve to try to keep the murder count in check.
In weird news that must be significant to someone: a kilometre-long convoy of forty vehicles is slowly but surely hauling its way from Hamilton to Toronto accompanying six giant beer fermentation tanks, each capable of holding the equivalent of 1.4 million bottles of beer. Creeping along back streets because the kegs won’t fit under highway overpasses, the caravan left Hamilton Friday night and is expected to arrive in Toronto Tuesday evening. But hey, what’s wrong with taking the back streets? You can keep tabs on the pilgrim’s beer’s progress on Twitter.