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Newsstand: October 25, 2011
Tuesday is officially a waffles for dinner day now, ya heard? Before we get to the waffles though, some news: Rob Ford calls the cops on the CBC; private garbage collection bid approved by council; transphobic ad resurfaces; and sunsets, downtown urban elite style.
Mayor Rob Ford won some and lost some at Monday’s city council meeting. On the winning front, the mayor delivered on his campaign promise to privatize garbage collection. After much amending and debating, council voted 16-26 in favour of awarding the contract for trash collection in parts of the city to GFL Environmental East Corporation for the low low cost of $78.4 million over seven years. And now, in one sentence, here’s everything you need to know about a big issue that opposing councillors wanted much more information on before being forced to decide: the private pickup plan will save an estimated $11.2 million, cut 30 temporary jobs and shift 210 other workers, begin in August, use 30 fewer trucks, and not disrupt your collection schedule. Got all that?
On the losing front for the mayor, something that doesn’t have any impact at all on the city or how it’s governed or the well-being of its citizens and workers: Ford was forced to don a Hamilton Ti-Cats jersey as penance for betting that the Toronto Argonauts would win the season series. Take that, sucker!
You may wish you had never seen that transphobic ad from the Institute for Canadian Values that ran in the National Post and Toronto Sun during the provincial election. The Post sure wishes you had never seen it. They apologized for running the ad and plan to donate ad revenues to an LGBT rights group. The Sun? Not so much. So not so much that Sun’s TV-wing apparently aired a made-for-TV version of the offending advertisement.
As if you needed yet another reason to tune into CBC comedy hit This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Tuesday night’s episode will feature some sort of interaction between venerable interviewer Marg Delahunty and Rob Ford. The mayor felt a little “ambushed” when he was approached by the CBC cameras outside his house on Monday morning, so he did what any man who has received death threats would do: He ran back into his house and called the cops. As It Happens we’rea let you finish, but this sounds like the best CBC interview of Rob Ford of all time.
And, as if before settling into a relaxing evening of CBC programming, you don’t, for some reason, take two minutes out of every evening to observe the sunset and melt into a state of anoesis, you should at least do it today. Tonight marks one of two annual TorontoHenge sunsets, when the setting sun is perfectly aligned along the grid in the city’s downtown core. So take a moment and, weather permitting, think about how your life totally feels like a Weakerthans song.