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Newsstand: April 12, 2011
Illustration by Sasha Plotnikova/Torontoist.
You’ve made it through Monday, but can you survive a day of city council meetings and a federal leadership debate? Guess we’ll find out tomorrow. Also on tap today, boulevard vegetables good, park meat bad; RoFo targets cultural boards and Waterfront Toronto; and still waiting for our G20 legacy gifts.
City council is meeting today, and it wouldn’t be a council meeting without a controversial proposal to change the established order, now would it? This time it’s cultural boards that are under the executive committee’s microscope of myopia. The committee has recommended that boards for cultural groups including the Toronto Public Library, the Zoo, and Yonge-Dundas Square reduce in size and hand some of the hiring duties over to the City. A line of opposing councillors and cultural board members is already forming.
Presuming they get their way on cultural boards, RoFo and Co. have settled on which public agency to pick on next: Waterfront Toronto. The mayor and some of his closest cronies all made time to angrily splash about in the pages of the Post over the pace of development, the price of professionals, and the possibility of independently developing portions of city-owned waterfront land parcels on the water’s edge. Since the agency manages the redevelopment of the area on behalf of all three levels of government, the City will have to get creative if they want to muck it all up. In that case, Rob Ford’s empty seat on the board (he’s missed every board meeting) sounds like a really good start.
Though if the waterfront revitalization goes awry, you can take comfort in your boulevard vegetable garden. A mostly city-wide bylaw banning soft landscaping on the city-owned dirt allotments between the sidewalk and the street is being lifted. But go easy on the diesel-infused spinach.
Might want to also take it easy on any meat you find lying around on city-owned property.
On the day of the English-language leaders’ debate (shameless plug: tune in tonight for our liveblog of the festivities), the Tories are fending off allegations over inappropriate G20/G8 spending. In what will surely be a boon to Conservative Party efforts to win favour in Liberal-locked Toronto, an unreleased draft of a report by the auditor general says the Harper government misled parliament to secure millions of dollars for sprucing up areas in and around and nowhere near Hunstville, the G8 summit site. John Baird called the $45.7 million Legacy Infrastructure Fund a gift to the region. Presumably our gift is still in the mail.
Now that we’re reminiscing about the G20, remember that guy who was pulled over with a loaded crossbow right before the summit? Turns out he just wanted to talk. With a crossbow. In not entirely implausible testimony, Gary McCullough of Haliburton said he was just in town to get his car repaired and get his hands on some booklets outlining G20 leaders’ main discussion points and maybe jot down a world leader or two’s email address. That’s all. Car repairs are quicker in the city, he says. And country folk need loaded crossbows to ward off bears and vandalizing neighbours, duh. Case closed.