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Extra, Extra: LCBO Rip-offs, CBC Inquiry, and the World’s Best Transit Poetry
Every weekday’s end, we collect just about everything you ought to care about or ought not miss.
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- Ontario has a pretty tortured relationship with the LCBO. The government likes the revenue, and likes to trumpet that it purchases in bulk, something a privatized system could not. (In fact, we are one of the largest bulk purchasers of alcohol in the world.) But as it turns out, that bulk-buying doesn’t guarantee us the best prices—and sometimes that’s a direct result of LCBO policy. Toronto Life explains.
- Remember that time the CBC showed up at Rob Ford’s house, and then Rob Ford called 911, and then the CBC reported that Rob Ford called 911 dispatchers bitches? Fun times. Well, the CBC ombudsbman is going to investigate the outlet’s coverage of that story, in response to the “handful” of complaints the Mothercorp’s received over the controversy.
- Author Misha Glouberman, in a guest piece for the Grid, has some thoughts on the potential pedestrianization of Kensingston Market. One particularly interesting point: “There’s also a kind of class blindness in this. Some activists talk about cars and bikes as if cyclists and pedestrians are the oppressed underdogs. But in a lot of ways, the ability to get around the city by foot and bike represents something of a position of privilege. It means you live close to downtown, and you don’t have a crappy job that you have to commute to.”
- Another great think-piece, this one from David Michael Lamb at the CBC, on road tolls. His thesis: if someone like John Parker can say that a $2 fee to access a government-supported service is no big deal, then road tolls are a no-brainer the right should, on principle, be backing.
- And in this era of constant talk about roads and subways and pedestrians and how we get from A to B, something on the creative side: the world’s 10 best transit poems.
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