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Newsstand: February 15, 2011
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
Tuesday has come, and with it, the news. The Price is wrong for elephants at the Toronto Zoo; pot pizzeria put away; Auditor General report unveils fraud and misappropriation of funds at City Hall, but don’t tell anyone; and work-as-you-go private schools may be coming to town.
A good indication your consulting job won’t be much fun: it was “prompted by a cluster of elephant deaths.” The Toronto Zoo is deciding whether they should send their pachyderms packing or spend millions updating their habitat. Councillor Shelley Carroll (Ward 33, Don Valley East) wants the elephants moved to a sanctuary in California, and she presented council with a fifteen-hundred-name petition urging the elephants be removed. But one important signature was missing from that list, one voice that rises above (despite its reliance on a teeny microphone): Bob Barker’s. Game show host/animal rights activist Barker says Canada is just no place for elephants. It’s too cold, for one, and zoo habitats are woefully small. Besides, who needs to see elephants at the zoo when you can spend your summer vacation inside watching Price is Right re-runs?
Those looking to streamline their pot smoking and subsequent munchies with a trip to Pizza Gigi will have to look elsewhere. The pizza shop was shut down on Monday after a police raid turned up over a million dollars’ worth of marijuana and other controlled substances. Best hashtag of the bust goes to #WasThatReallyOreganoOnMyPizza. So long and thanks for the memory loss, Pizza Gigi.
A pair of reports from the City’s Auditor General, Jeffrey Griffiths, reveal that City Hall employees are no better than the rest of us. Among the transgressions, employees have been caught faking sick time, falsifying overtime slips, making and posting “inappropriate videos” with city equipment during work hours, and using letterhead to solicit Festivus donations to the Human Fund donations to a fake Christmas charity. But before you, City worker, step up to report malfeasance, you should know the reports also reveal insufficient protection for whistle-blowers.
More from the Auditor General files, the green edition. Among the issues in his report, Griffiths points to the City’s landfill monitoring fund, which is supposed to be an agent for environmental protection, being almost completely drained to prepare an old landfill site for a Pan Am Games aquatic centre. He also suggests more scrutiny of the twenty-one million dollars in grant money administered by the Toronto Environmental Office, including not handing out 90% of the grant money upfront. Sounds pretty reasonable.
It’s an ongoing lotto-rama-work-drama in Scarborough as some Bell Canada employees get some money and some have to wait. The original group of nineteen Lotto Max winners got a portion of the fifty million dollar prize while the court decides what to do about eleven other people who are claiming a piece of the payout.
Some Toronto educators want to bring the work-to-attend private school model to this city. After running such a school—called a Cristo Rey school—in Detroit, the president of St. Michael’s College School wants to try it here. Students would work one day a week to earn tuition and have four long days of schooling.