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Weekend Newsstand: February 12, 2011
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
Welcome to your weekend. Sit down and stay awhile! Gay still not okay in Catholic schools, TTC chair Karen Stintz wonders why her viral marketing strategies aren’t working, wage freezes good and wage freezes not so good, and a lawyer wants criminal charges laid against G20 cops.
Despite what you may have heard, it’s still not okay to start a gay-straight alliance at an Ontario Catholic school. Xtra called all twenty-nine school boards in the province to ask if any of their schools had such clubs, and not one said yes. Instead, they said, the bishops ultimately dictate the curriculum, not the Ministry of Education, and the bishops continue to counsel that being gay isn’t really a thing so gay-straight alliance clubs aren’t necessary. The bishops do recommend, in their definitive guide on the evasion of gay rights, Pastoral Guidelines to Assist Students of Same-Sex Orientation, that gay students be protected from bullying, marginalization, and having gay sex.
Not content with just a one million dollar lawsuit, the lawyer for a G20 protester is also demanding a criminal investigation of the officers who allegedly shot his client with rubber bullets. Our very own Nick Kozak was on the scene at the east end detention centre when the incident went down. In her initial suit, Natalie Gray claimed she was shot in the chest and arm with rubber bullets from close range, and the police countered that those big holes and welts were sustained before or maybe after her arrest. Now Gray’s lawyer, Clayton Ruby, says he sent footage of the incident to Bill Blair and demanded the chief live up to his promises of transparency.
Councillors on the City’s budget committee have voted to use the extra cash leftover from their Tuesday decision to freeze council’s wages to fight the war on bed bugs. Good, ’cause we really, really hate those things. The wage freeze will save council just over one hundred thousand dollars, and eighty-seven thousand of that will go towards Public Health initiatives to fight the critters, with the remaining money going to student nutrition programs.
Speaking of freezing wages, Dalton McGuinty announced a freeze on minimum wage after seven years of annual increases. He says since Ontario’s minimum wage is the highest in the country at $10.25 (even though it’s not, Nunavut’s is at eleven dollars) there’s no need to increase it any more right now and burden slowly recovering post-recession businesses. We have faith that Mayor McCheese would say otherwise.
Oh, the poor TTC, always picked on, rarely hugged. TTC chair Karen Stintz wants to change all that by renewing her focus on cleanliness and customer service on our city’s transit, so she led some reporters on a trip through the system to show off how clean and servile it is. Stintz tried to lead by example, picking up left-over newspapers as she rode along. But Paul DaSilva, a TTC employee tasked with keeping Yonge-Bloor station clean, admits it’ll be an uphill battle overcoming the Better Way’s PR issues of late. “You’ll never see a picture of me on YouTube cleaning walls going viral.” He’s probably right. Also, Stintz doesn’t deem classic TV show On The Rocket a valuable customer service tactic. Instead, she’s opting to spend money on an ambassador program to reward good riders. TTC: the boringer way.