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Newsstand: November 23, 2011
Wipe away those tears, because Wednesday's here. In the news today: Police move in to dismantle Occupy Toronto, the head of the City's environment committee has an interesting take on climate change, Pickering joins Toronto in banning shark fins, and Toronto's condos are on the rise.
In case you’ve missed it, police moved in to St. James Park to remove Occupy Toronto tents earlier this morning, but that’s not stopping some protesters from staying barricaded in the park just like we all figured they would. Torontoist is live blogging the removal, or you can also check out the Twitter hashtag #OccupyToronto, where you can play the “Does This Tweet Sound Prophetic?” drinking game, if you’re a morning drinking type.
Councillor Norm Kelly (Ward 40, Scarborough-Agincourt) raised eyebrows yesterday when he claimed global warming will expand Toronto’s tree canopy, a thought apparently shared by absolutely nobody on Twitter. Kelly also claimed a warmer climate might usher in a new age of cold-blooded reptile overlords, or at least give an evolutionary advantage to the mayor and his brother. The comments might seem like an odd thing to come from the head of the City’s environment committee, but Toronto’s PR isn’t that great right now, so could whoever leaked the information about the Earl Beatty school ball ban to Saturday Night Live just keep their mouth shut for this one?
With so many City services facing cuts, the Toronto Star would like to know why leaf-clearing services offered only to homes in parts of Etobicoke and Scarborough—at an annual cost of $500,000—aren’t on the table, and why they weren’t even included in KPMG’s service review. For anyone interested, the answer is that, in this economy, very few people can afford to pay yard workers to rake and bag their leaves every week, even Etobicoke residents.
To all those who claimed Toronto’s shark fin ban would be ineffective because people would still be able to purchase the fins from surrounding municipalities: Pickering has now done its part to shut your asses up.
As far as Great Lakes cities go, Toronto is doing pretty well. Or so says former Chicago mayor Richard Daley, a man whose time as leader of that city is longer than the lifespan of most cats. Daley praised Toronto’s ability to reinvent itself and warned that a crucial element to our success will be keeping Lake Ontario clean, shortly before being informed his trip to Harbourfront had to be cancelled.
Toronto might see condo buildings as high as 100 storeys in the near future, according to an architect who clearly never played Jenga when he was a kid. Higher buildings may be necessary in the increasingly urban world where more and more people are moving downtown, but residential skyscrapers will pose problems as well, such as the potential awkwardness of being trapped next to the the weirdo from down the hall for a 95-floor elevator ride.