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Newsstand: January 5, 2011
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
It’s Wednesday, you’ve probably heard of it? Today, Rob Ford changes his mind on new cops, fairy tale lotto win predictably ending in tears and recrimination, and GTA MPs make it to the show.
Mayor Rob Ford is abandoning his oft-repeated campaign pledge to hire more police officers this year, mainly because police Chief Bill Blair doesn’t want them. What Blair does want, as we learned earlier this week, is a 3% budget hike (not including wage increases to be negotiated this year) at a time when City departments are being asked to trim fat. In the meantime, John Sewell points out in the Star that the average cop only answers one call every two shifts and makes one arrest every six weeks, and wonders if the gravy train is still stopping at police headquarters.
The Toronto Police Services Board is looking to appoint a new chair, in spite of the fact that that a citizen member of the seven-person board has yet to be selected. The last member and three city council members are all chosen by the mayor, potentially giving him more influence over the election of the chair, but Rob Ford’s people say that no choice is imminent. Most likely scenario is that Alok Mukherjee will continue in the role for the time being. Is it just us, or does the Sun sound like they’re being sarcastic when they describe the board as “one appointee short of a full complement”?
The group of Bell call centre employees that won $50 million in last Friday’s Lotomax is being denied the fruits of their purchase as new claimants have come forward, apparently people who were either one-time participants in the pool or were out of the office and didn’t pony up for this particular draw. The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation says no one gets paid out until all disputes are resolved, and the Globe quotes an unnamed employee as saying that the stroke of good luck and subsequent disputes have the “potential to tear the whole office apart.” To put it into perspective, remember how pissed you were when somone took your yogurt out of the office fridge? Well, multiply that by about a million.
The T-dot is representin’ in the Harper cabinet with the addition of former newscaster Peter Kent and former top cop Julian Fantino to the inner sanctum. Kent will be the new minister of the the environment, while rookie MP Fantino gains the pleasingly symmetrical title of junior minister of seniors. Speculation is that the PM wants to raise the profile of his GTA MPs to encourage a Ford-addled Toronto citizenry to vote Conservative in the next federal election.
Fans of U.S. public radio will be happy to hear that CBC Radio One will begin airing Ira Glass’s “This American Life” beginning January 9. Each week the show chooses a theme and uses the lives of specific individuals to illustrate them, and is one of the most popular radio podcasts around. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you bike-riding, NPR-listening, liberal elitists.
We originally referred to the NPR show “An American Life.” Of course, its name is “This American Life” and we have corrected the body of the article to reflect that.