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Newsstand: January 12, 2011
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
Excuse me, I’d like to return this Wednesday, I think it’s broken. Today, Toronto scheduled to be winter wonderland, there was going to be a TTC fare hike but then there wasn’t, and we’ll have fewer cops but a little more money in city coffers this year.
Clickety-clickety-clickety-clickety…the Newsstand Winter Storm Centre and Snow Catastrophe Early Warning Alert System is open! It snowed last night in Toronto and will probably snow a little more today, so be careful on the roads. Also, some flights out of Pearson have been cancelled, mostly to places in the U.S. where the climatological conditions are more legitimately troublesome.
Put that dime back in your pocket or spend it on job creation, lucky TTC rider. The city dug deep into the gravy boat at the last minute and came up with sixteen million dollars in new subsidies to avoid a threatened TTC fare hike next month. A further eight million dollars needed to make up the difference will come from as-yet unspecified “efficiencies” at the TTC. In case you’re thinking that there was never any chance of a fare increase, and it was all political theatre designed to make you feel warm and fuzzy about City Hall, well, it’s not. A spokesperson for mayor Rob Ford “dismissed suggestions that the threat of a fare increase, followed by relief, was engineered to make the mayor look good.” She also said that the mayor had fought off suggestions by evil City staffers to hold taxpayers by the feet and shake them upside-down until all the money fell out of their pockets. See here for a sense of the careful analysis that was put into the fare hike reversal.
That dime you save may be costing you elsewhere. The TTC also said yesterday that a plan to improve bus service around the city, scheduled for implementation this year, will not happen due to lack of funding. The Transit City Bus Plan would have increased the frequency of service along a number of routes, along with other significant service improvements between now and 2014. But it doesn’t matter, because what people want are subways. Which they’re also not getting.
One of the places where the city found a few bucks was in the police budget. Police Chief Bill Blair agreed to defer hiring of new officers and civilian staff this year and to cut contributions to a rainy day fund for a total savings of around nine million dollars. Blair had originally asked for a 26.7 million dollar budget hike but announced a change of heart following a ninety-minute meeting with Mayor Ford which we speculate included a series of football metaphors and a tearful plea to help put one in the win column for Coach.
Toronto emergency rooms are being overwhelmed with flu patients, with at least one hospital seeing double what they would in a normal year. If you want to avoid a misery of wheezing and fever hallucinations while at the same time not contributing to the imminent collapse of our health care infrastructure, go get a flu shot.