news
Newsstand: October 14, 2011
It's been so long since we've had one of those great ominous Fridays, we were starting to forget the feeling. Here's the news: Mammoliti protests the city getting more massage parlours, shark fins are one step closer to a city-wide ban, and a Toronto real estate firm avoids being the big, bad wolf at the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Everybody likes a happy ending, right? Well, almost everybody. A number of city staff met with 25 owners of massage parlours yesterday to discuss the possibility of issuing more licences for parlours in Toronto. Angered by the fact that none of the parlours’ employees were invited he wasn’t invited to the meeting, Giorgio Mammoliti (Ward 7, York West) condemned the plan, claiming it will turn the municipal government into one giant pimp daddy. Because we all know what goes on at those massage parlours. Wink wink. Nevertheless, city staff say increasing the number of licences would make millions for the city, and if the trade-off is happier single men and increased tissue volume in local landfills, so be it.
Never has it been so obvious that the film Jaws has dropped off the public radar. Following in the footsteps of several cities in the GTA, Toronto’s licensing and standards committee has voted to ban the sale and use of shark fins, which are often taken from endangered shark species and used to make shark fin soup. The ban won’t be definite until it’s brought to city council. In the meantime, critics are speaking out against a Toronto-specific ban, claiming shark fin fans could simply go to another city for their fix, which begs the question: does anybody like shark fin soup that much?
The Canadian government has done some jiggery pokery with the rules to allow for the construction of a pedestrian tunnel to the Toronto Island airport, a move at once hailed as disastrous by Recreational Submarine Users of Lake Ontario (RSULO) and glorious by Impatient Airport Travelers Tired of the Island Airport Ferries (IATTIAF). The tunnel will be paid for through private donations and an airport improvement fee, the latter of which assumes that forcing people to truck their own bags across Lake Ontario constitutes an improvement.
We don’t often get to write about the Occupy Wall Street protests going on in New York City, it being all the way over there and all. But we can’t pass up a nice local connection. The Torontonian-owned Brookfield Office Properties has backed off kicking protesters out of the park that has been serving as the protest’s base of operations, which Brookfield happens to own. Brookfield had wanted police help in removing the protesters so that the park could be cleaned, which just about all of the park’s tenants viewed as an attempt to bring the protest down. The situation looked like it was going to get ugly, but Brookfield backed off for the time being after a whole whack of people helped clean the park on their own. Talk about happy endings.