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Weekend Newsstand: September 3, 2011
Another week come and gone, another air show to scare and ruin picnics. It's long-weekend Saturday, and you know what that means. News: Ford Nation dines together, guess who's not coming to parade, more buildings falling apart and spitting on the sidewalk below, and road closures. Oh, the road closures.
Rob Ford had a barbecue last night and everyone was there. Not everyone, but a lot of people. A lot of hungry people. And probably people that weren’t that hungry. And people who like the mayor a lot. And people who just went for the tweets. And people who go because that’s their job. Those people and the Fords ate food and drank beers, bought tickets to the Lingerie Football League, snickered at but politely applauded for the NDP MPP candidate who spoke (as did PC leader Tim Hudak and Liberal MPP Mike Colle), saw the mayor get emotional and suggest he might have to raise property taxes after all, and then there were fireworks. There. It’s like you were there too now, yeah?
A woman in her 30s was cut on the head by a piece of stucco-covered Styrofoam that fell from a construction site at a City-owned property. The building at Dundas and Victoria houses the Toronto Public Health offices. One witness said the chunk was about the size of a VHS cassette, which is not helpful at all because no one’s seen a VHS cassette in a decade. So let’s say it was about the size of four iPhones. The woman is expected to recover, but the nerves of pedestrians may take a bit longer after glass rained down all summer and now this piece of stuff.
Roads inside and outside and all around the city are going to be the worst this weekend as people drive for hours to capture the last gasps of sweet summer air and events in town close roads. So just give up trying to drive anywhere and maybe walk to the Italian Fiera festival in Little Italy or the Brazilian Day Canada Festival at Yonge-Dundas Square.
Another road-closing event this weekend comes courtesy of union workers and their supporters. The Labour Day parade will see about 25,000 people march down Queen Street West on Monday, but guess who won’t be in attendance? Though Mayor Ford “has taken part in countless parades since he took office last December” according to the Sun, he will not be marching in the Labour Day Parade (the theme of which is “Defend All Public Services”), mainly because he wasn’t invited. The president of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council says they decided not to invite the mayor because he fundamentally disrespects the working people of the city. And parades.