news
Newsstand: June 10, 2011
Illustration by Sasha Plotnikova/Torontoist.
It’s Friday, and that means the weekend is almost upon us. Unless you work weekends, in which case… live vicariously? In today’s news: the police get their new contracts, a potential breakthrough in a G20 case, and Toronto’s ash trees are dying out.
The City’s budget committee has ordered departments to cut their budgets by 10 per cent in 2012, but that hasn’t stopped the police services board from ratifying a controversial new police contract that will boost salaries by approximately 11.2 per cent over the next four years. Under the new contracts, Toronto police will be paid almost as much as the Ontario Provincial Police, but if they can start making more arrests like this, we’ll call it even.
Among those enjoying the pay hike is Glenn Weddell, the officer who, according to Toronto Star allegations, attacked Dorian Barton during the mess that was the G20 last year. Barton’s case had been opened several times, but hampered by police unwilling to admit the G20 weekend was anything but a giant picnic in Queen’s Park. But technology is coming through where the code of silence would not, as the badge number in a photograph of the alleged officer has been identified by zooming in on it. When asked about it, police said, “What’s a badge number? I didn’t see no badge number.”
We’ll ignore the easy, obvious jokes that could be made after two city councillors walked out of a zoo board meeting in anger yesterday to prevent councillor Raymond Cho (Ward 42, Scarborough-Rouge River) from going on an all-expenses-paid junket to California to visit an elephant sanctuary. Seems the councillors don’t want their fellow politicians being wooed.
Speaking of which, a group of corporations is trying to reverse the brain drain that led many Toronto professionals to go abroad in search of more lucrative work in the 1990s by wooing 100 expatriates this weekend in hopes of having them return to the city. According to the group, Toronto’s main attraction is the lifestyle, which should come as a surprise to anyone who’s spent the last few years working in Europe. The falling U.S. dollar has also led fewer Canadians to head south of the border in search of greener pastures.
Bad news for Toronto’s ash trees: about 90 per cent of them will die in the next six years thanks to the emerald ash borer, an Asian insect first seen in the city in 2007. The evil tree munchers invasive insects are expected to decimate most of Toronto’s approximately 860,000 ash trees as they spread across North America, at which point the City plans to replace the dead trees with a different species. Then what are you going to do, ash borers? Yeah, that’s what we thought.