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Newsstand: May 31, 2011
Illustration by Sasha Plotnikova/Torontoist.
It’s the last day of May, and we say, bye, May! Thanks for nothing (except thanks for the super tall monster flowers around town). In the news: Toronto cops may have to cut down while out-of-town forces brought in for G20 got paid up, a new news channel comes to town, and so does the humidity.
Ever wonder how so many of those cops lining the streets during the G20 were able to don kind of smug smiles or disinterested faraway looks while being ridiculed and taunted for hours? We suspect the thousands of dollars per day some out-of-town officers were billing might have something to do with it. It turns out many of the officers brought in from other police forces across the country were charging at time-and-a-half or double-time because they had been called in to work on their holidays. Officers from Ottawa were particularly dedicated, working “37 hours straight” (including travel time, which may or may not mean they got paid to sleep and play that car game where one cop says a band name and the next cop has to name a band that starts with the last letter of that name).
Sure, being a cop sure does sound like good work, if you can get it. At a meeting on Monday to discuss the preliminary police budget, the Toronto Police Services Board asked chief Bill Blair to look into reducing the force of The Force and cut down on staff. Michael Thompson (Ward 37, Scarborough Centre) called the current employment level “arbitrarily arrived” and asked the chief to examine the impact of cutting 500 uniformed officers and 300 civilian employees to help alleviate the City’s looming budget crunch.
Finally our wild nightly cries for another 24-hour TV news channel have been answered! The information gods at Rogers Broadcasting will launch CityNews Channel in the fall, focusing on local news and competing directly with CP24. It’s a kind of confusing deal for anyone who still associates CTV-owned CP24 and its charmingly schlocky graphics and studios at Queen and John with the glory days of CityPulse on Citytv. Whatever emerges from the swamp of consolidated media ownership, we just hope the new station plays vintage newscasts overnight, like CP24 used to do.
Get out your sun hat and change your weather complainin’ gauge to “too hot,” because it’s gonna be a scorcher. A potentially record-breaking high of 32 degrees is being forecasted for today, with a possible humidex of 40 degrees.
And the Toronto Community Foundation hopes the Pan Am games don’t just make us all mad by clogging up traffic for a while. The foundation is holding public brainstorming sessions on how the city can cash in on the “social capital” of holding a major sporting event here, like shaming the rest of us into exercising after we see all those athletes strutting around town.