news
Newsstand: February 5, 2011
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
My Saturday brings all the boys to the yard: Rob Ford wants to scrub those heritage Brick Works bricks clean, the TTC skips customer service but is counting on more riders, it was cold and there were protests, and Toronto gets real and gets patented when it comes to love.
With Rob Ford’s chief of staff Nick Kouvalis getting set to move on in the next couple of weeks, the Globe and Mail takes a moment to puzzle over the “enigma” that is his successor, Amir Remtulla. They also give a brief history of the role of chief of staff. Kouvalis and the mayor’s police advisor, Andrew Pask, have apparently been at one another’s throats lately, but that really doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Kouvalis’s departure, which was planned all along. Some question about the Kouvalis-Pask tension prompted this strangely hilarious stream-of-consciousness quote from Doug Ford in the National Post, in which he places Kouvalis in Florida, Windsor, and right by his side, spilling blood. You know, we almost like the Fords when they are short-circuiting.
Shifting to the other Ford, Mayor Rob, let’s talk about this heavy-handed attempt by his office to enforce the city by-law against graffiti by cracking down on the Evergreen Brick Works, where the graffiti that accumulated during the more than twenty years that the Brick Works was closed has been conscientiously preserved. Turns out, enforcing the by-law to remove the art won’t be so easy, since the Brick Works is covered by a heritage designation. The Evergreen general manager says that removing the graffiti from the bricks would cause severe damage to the masonry.
Alright, let’s play a game. You’re the TTC. Don’t cry! Stop crying! Why are you crying? You’re ruining the game. Here’s a tissue. Calm down. Okay, so imagine you’ve got this eleven million dollar hole to plug up, right? So first you decide that you’ll stuff it will 110 million dimes, so you bump up how much it costs to get on your mostly crappy really super great transit service. But then after a day of letting everyone get all sweaty and worked up, you scrap that plan. Then you decide that you’ll save seven million dollars by cutting a bunch of buses that ride around the city without too many people in them, but everyone kicks up a fuss, so you reduce that plan.
Wow, this game is really fun, right? Anyway, the point is, this is what you do to save money in the end: you were going to hire a bunch of new managers and re-train your bus drivers and stuff, but you decide to skip that. You also figure that you’re going to keep the four million riders you would have lost in that whole dime debacle, and a lot of them are going to get on transit spontaneously and shell out the ridiculously overpriced totally reasonable sum of three bucks because, let’s face it, even if transit passes are more economical, they seem pretty damn expensive. Okay, fine, you were right: that wasn’t much fun at all. Let’s never play that game again.
The Canadian winter is a harsh mistress. A man, thought to be in his late thirties or early forties, was found early yesterday morning in a field in Scarborough after spending an unknown number of hours in the -20 degree weather without a hat, gloves, or scarf. He was discovered nearly fully frozen around 8 a.m. by a local resident. The man, who has not been identified, is recovering in the hospital.
Sure, it was cold yesterday, but that didn’t stop Toronto’s Tamil community from marching outside the Sri Lankan consulate. The protest turned out about two hundred people.
Also rallying yesterday were internet users opposed to the proposed changes to internet usage billing, though it’s never a great sign when an article about a protest opens with the word “dozens.” Just one more sign of the disjunct between attending on Facebook and attending in real life. By the way, the CRTC announced yesterday that it would delay making those changes.
Hey, speaking of the disjunct between internet-life and real-life, in this season of cheap trinkets and other crap love, Torontonians have discovered the novelty of the real world and are eschewing partnering up online. We’ve become a veritable gazing-into-your-eyes-over-board-games kind of city, eh? If Harlequin has their way, we could also be home to the owners of a patent on kissing. Yes, you read that right.
We originally attributed the steam-of-consciousness quote about Kouvalis to Rob Ford. In fact, it was spoken by brother Doug.