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Newsstand: August 22, 2011
Yesterday, brought to you by rain: washing away our sorrow, taking away our pain. Today: brighter skies, peppier Madonna songs, and a mixed bag of news items. This fine Monday: People west of the city sift through rubble after a tornado, the land transfer tax may stick around, savages are trashing the art bikes, and some pedestrian streets may stay that way.
A monsoon-like storm that swept through Toronto yesterday left hundreds of houses without power, toppled trees and briefly had some streets underwater. Hydro crews were working overnight to reconnect about 600 households still without electricity by end-of-day Sunday. While definitely the biggest downpour we’ve seen in a while, the storm seems minor when compared with the devastation in Goderich, Ontario. The Lake Huron town, three hours west of Toronto, was hit by a tornado yesterday afternoon, blowing the tops off houses, historic buildings, and even a salt mine, leaving one person dead and much of the 7,500-person town in a state of emergency.
Remember that time we were going to stop the gravy train by cutting city revenue, and how that all made perfect sense? Turns out it may not be so easy. In what may become the Ford administration’s latest broken promise (remember “no layoffs,” “no service cuts” and so on?), budget chief Mike Del Grande is advising that the city keep the land transfer tax until the end of 2012 at least. Cutting the tax was one of Ford’s main campaign promises—made well before the tax brought in much more than the $200 million the city was expecting from it last year and helped Ford balance his books. This year, the city thinks it could make $220.5 million from the land transfer tax, a tidy sum that would fully cover all of Toronto’s library and public health expenses. Reality can be an amazing thing sometimes.
As Dante would say, “(There’s) a bunch of savages in this town.” While those neon, spray-painted art bikes that have been popping up around town are seen as a positive addition to some, not everyone’s getting into the spirit. NOW Magazine reports that the Good Bike project’s public works of art—damaged bicycles painted in bright colours and locked in prominent spots around the city—are being damaged faster that its paint-can-wielding team can repair them. Damage includes stolen or bent wheels, bent frames, and even flowers taken from the original specimen’s basket. But while the artists behind the project are none too pleased with the destruction, there are a few forms of Good Bike vandalism they’ve come to appreciate, including graffiti written on one at College and Robert and a poem left beside the original bike outside OCAD.
In the tug-of-war for public space that is simmering these days in Toronto, any progress away from naming rights and toward places for people is good news. So word that Ryerson and the University of Toronto may be able to keep their pedestrian-only streets beyond a one-year trial period seems like super-great news right now! The schools each blocked off a section of roadway—part of Gould Street at Ryerson and a section of Willcocks Street at U of T—about a year ago and are looking to keep them closed indefinitely. City staff appears to be onside, but just wait until word trickles to the top of this latest front in the War on the Car.