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Newsstand: August 16, 2011
It's Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday. Gotta get down on Tuesday! In the news: top union boss is getting out of Dodge ahead of contract talks; glass keeps falling, glass keeps falling, down, down, down; deer shot by police makes people feel weird about life; and Scarborough hates sidewalks.
The president of one of the city’s largest unions of public workers, CUPE local 79, has announced that she will not be seeking re-election after 11 years on the job. Ann Dembinski’s term will officially end on December 31, the same day contracts between the City and both her union and CUPE local 416 expire. So that should be a good day. Dembinski has been through a lot while helming the union, including the big long strike in 2009, but she said in an interview that dealing with the current mayor was “truly one of the lowlights of my career.” With the City’s top labour negotiator jumping ship last week, and pressure from the mayor to cut back, this round of contract talks is shaping up to be pretty [polite word].
Even more glass fell from a condo building at Bay and Grenville, but this time someone was hurt. A woman had to get stitches in her wrist after shards of glass fell from a shattered balcony on the 31st floor of the tower. Now the owners of the tower have to build guards to protect the sidewalk below that side of the building after they already built guards on the other side, where glass fell from a few weeks ago. And as if that wasn’t enough, the City is ordering the developers bring in an engineer to check out the problem and submit a report. That’s good. That’s useful. Maybe passersby can use copies of the report to shield themselves in the event of even more glass attacks.
People are getting weird about a deer that was shot by police on Saturday morning. The majestic and noble creature was hit by a car in the High Park area, and local residents coddled it while emergency services staff and police searched the city for an emergency vet to save the animal. Toronto Zoo vets were in surgery. Wildlife experts were unavailable. Animal refuge groups were sleeping, we guess. And so, the deer was dragged behind some bushes and shot twice in the chest. Oh, sorry, excuse us. We mean, the dear was “dispatched” by police. In any event, it’s dead and people are mad.
Some other people, Scarborough people this time, are mad too. They’re mad because the City will soon be installing sidewalks where there weren’t sidewalks before. Homeowners say they don’t need the sidewalks, what they need is the pansies they planted in the sidewalk’s stead. The City says, “We don’t care.”