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Newsstand: March 22, 2011
Illustration by Sasha Plotnikova/Torontoist.
Hot dog Tuesdays, everyone! No, wait, no hot dogs here, but we do have hot tubes of news on a bun of puns: City employees indirectly put on notice, executive committee wants to tinker with more boards, the perils of cycling, and the link between St. Patrick, Usher, and the premier.
A Q&A about how to convince City employees that they’re not all going to lose their jobs is one of those memos that probably means the opposite. Kind of like when your friends say, “You can come along, if you want.” That is not an invitation, it’s a warning. It says, “We don’t like you as much as you think we do.” And City employees, councillors, and union leaders are receiving city manager Joe Pennachetti’s dubious memo with the same nervous sweats friendship can so often invoke. The note comes ahead of multiple reviews of City services and agencies that aim to find savings going into the Year of the $785-Million (yes, that is a new, higher estimate) Budget Hole.
That budget deficit could go up another tick. The City has been ordered to pay some non-unionized employees their 2008 performance bonus. Council had decided to scrap the bonuses, effective immediately, but apparently that’s not really fair. Total cost for the repayment is between three and four million dollars.
Mayor Ford and the executive committee have endorsed reforms to allow council to meddle with tighten control over the City’s arms-length 119 agencies, like the TTC and Toronto Hydro. Ford and the gang got a taste for horning in with the TCHC scandal thing, and now the gang just can’t stop, won’t stop, and are suggesting that council pick the chairs of some boards, appoint accountants to others, and just generally poke around more. The police, library, BIAs, and many other boards would be spared this honour.
Riding a clean bike in dirty clothes is not a crime, says the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. A fifty-one year old Oji-Cree man was arrested near St. Clair and Caledonia Road one morning on his way to work, ostensibly because his bike looked too new, and his clothes too dishevelled, and a bike kind of like his had been reported stolen in Winnipeg. But the tribunal decided that it was racism, or racial-profiling as cops call it, that led to the arrest.
Maybe police should have thanked the man for contributing to our second-place ranking in the World Wildlife Fund’s list of greenest Canadian cities. Vancouver came in first. Like we care. We could be the greenest too if our winters were that mild, you know.
Dalton McGuinty has kind of staked a position on the Catholic school board’s continued reluctance to allow gay-straight alliances in schools. The premier said they are “making it perfectly clear” to all schools that discrimination based on sexuality (or anything) is unacceptable, but he’s leaving it up to boards to decide how to adhere to that policy. That’s not a clear answer, you say? So does the opposition.
Speaking of Catholics, Virgin Radio is taking some heat for putting “OMFG” on a billboard near a Catholic high school in the west end.
And in their long tradition of award-winning journalism, the Star uncovers this riveting piece of investigative work: St. Patrick’s Day is still awesome for students.