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Weekend Newsstand: January 8, 2011
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
Saturday is a privilege, not a right: the not-young building that blazed on Yonge has history, a daycare operator charged in the death of one of her charges, the cost of police is costly, and the city wants to serve up better customer service.
Remember that time that there was a big fire on Yonge Street? The Globe and Mail has done a bit of probing into the state of affairs at the historic building before the blaze, and it looks like the former site of the Empress Hotel has been on the decline for quite some time. The Globe‘s footwork turns up a bunch of bureaucratic back-and-forth over whether the building was ever fixable after the fall of one of its walls last April. Also turned up is very little about the building’s famously hard-to-reach owners, the Lalani family, who’ve been claiming to work the site towards a spruce up for the last several years. Meanwhile, police have released photos of a “person of interest” spotted approaching and leaving the building shortly before the fire. Do YOU recognize this person of unidentifiable gender in a hoodie and jeans?
A man accused of killing his infant son eighteen years ago is being cleared of wrongdoing. Because he pleaded guilty, Dinesh Kumar was charged with criminal negligence causing death rather than second degree murder, and he served ninety days in jail. Kumar says that his guilty plea didn’t come by way of guilt, but because he thought he had no hope of defence against the medical evidence being waged against him. Now, that same medical testimony that sent him to the slammer has gone stale: the scientific view of “shaken baby syndrome” has evolved, proving the evidence used to convict Kumar unreliable. Science happens fast. Or slow, depending on who you ask. Don’t the ’90s seem like just yesterday?
Meanwhile, not in the ’90s, daycare operator April Luckese has been re-arrested and charged with second degree murder, upgraded from aggravated assault, after a fourteen-month-old girl who had been in her care died in hospital Friday. Daycares run out of the home don’t require a license so long as the number of children under care is less than five not including the provider’s own kids, the Toronto Star reports. It’s unclear how many children Luckese was minding at “April’s Daycare” at the time of the child’s death.
Speaking of law and order, even as crime rates decline, spending on police has gone up across the country, rising by 41% per capita over the last decade, according to Statistics Canada. And with salaries that increase steadily at a rate much faster than inflation, police don’t come cheap. From the sounds of this Globe and Mail run-down on police and the cash that feeds them, forces across the country are a running a little gravy rail line all their own. Cities are increasingly being forced to choose between the “serve and protect” squad and other services.
And on the subject of city services, in the text of a speech by Joseph Pennachetti obtained by the National Post, the Toronto city manager gave a straight-up imperative to public servants that the city get efficient, and get service-oriented. Does anyone else bristle every time there’s talk of the city offering up “customer service”? We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again (right now): being a citizen and being a consumer are not the same thing at all. The city, apparently, disagrees, and has branded a new initiative for treating its “customers” right, with “Toronto at your service.” We’re a bit embarrassed for them.
After reading this brief history of the rise of Hazel McCallion, Mississauga’s was-and-is-and-ever-shall-be mayor, we think someone should make a biopic. The part where McCallion’s former jurisdiction of the town of “Streetsville” is wiped out of bureaucratic existence by the province? That’s narrative gold. Tears will be shed. We tried to drum up a picture of McCallion when she was young to see if Julianne Moore would, as we imagine, be right for the part, and we have concluded that the fierce McCallion has in fact always been old.
Oh, and in case you haven’t noticed, it’s mad snowing. Be careful on the roads out there, folks.