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Newsstand: January 11, 2012
If you are not thinking about Alice the Camel and her two humps today, then maybe you just don't know that it's Wednesday. There. Now you do. Today: librarians are not going down without a fight, a rent increase that makes your rate bump sound like chump change, an alternative to the so-short-it's-silly ferry ride to Billy Bishop is on its way, bad news for BlackCreek, the future is dim at Toronto Hydro, and a Canadian soda featured in rap feud.
Librarian or teacher? Hard to tell, because Maureen O’Reilly, president of Toronto Public Library Workers Union Local 4948, is schooling the City. O’Reilly has sent a letter to all city councillors, on behalf of the 2,300 employees of the Toronto Public Library, highlighting the effects of the proposed budget cuts, and urging to City to do what they can to prevent them. She’s also taken the time to do the cuts-related math, a step that many believe was skipped in the whole “we must cut 10 per cent across the board, because, um, that’s a good number” stage of the budget planning. The cuts continue to be under discussion at City Hall, too, as councillors push to to block the City from cutting library hours and suggest that savings can be found in other ways, such as by cutting the budget on buying popular movies and magazines.
First it was bad news for the city’s jerk chicken lovers, and now it’s bad news for the city’s music fest lovers. Toronto’s BlackCreek Summer Music Festival has suspended operations after just one year due to financial issues. Seems they overspent last year as insufficient ticket sales resulted in suppliers, performers, technicians, and support staff being owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. It really seems that jailbird Garth Drabinsky, BlackCreek’s artistic director, just can’t catch a break. However, he does seem to be involved in plenty of things with creek in the name. For example, he’s currently incarcerated at the Beaver Creek minimum-security institution. He’s also been up a creek or two without a paddle, judging by some of his past mistakes.
Why yes, it is expensive to rent in Toronto. Especially if Porter Airlines is your landlord. The airline has hiked the rent for tenants in its hangars and office space in Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport by 30 to 300 per cent. Yikes. If “learn to fly an airplane over Toronto” is on your bucket list, you might have to tweak that, as with this rate hike comes the likely closure of the island’s two flight schools. Oh well. There’s always jumping out of a plane and parachuting down to earth. There, problem solved.
Before you start hating on Porter too hard, you should know something. The long-awaited pedestrian tunnel linking Toronto to the Billy Bishop island airport has reportedly reached its final design stages and construction is expected to start in February. Yeah, you’re back on the Porter bandwagon now, aren’t you? Let’s forget that silly rent issue ever happened and go back to enjoying a nice cookie. Mmmm. That’s nice.
Toronto Hydro is turning the lights out on more than 340 workers, as 20 per cent of the company’s workforce will have to be laid off. According to Toronto Hydro, they can’t keep employees on to work on upgrading the city’s power system since the Ontario Energy Board denied them the rate increase they needed in order to complete it. Between 700 to 1,000 contract workers have already been let go.
If ginger ale sales spike in the same way Twitter mentions have, Canada Dry can thank rapper Common and his ongoing feud with Toronto’s own Drake. Wait, so does that mean that Drake is the Champagne of all rappers, or does it not translate that way? Certainly, there are worse ginger ales out there. Come on, Common (say that out loud, that’s fun!) let’s aim for something a little more offensive. Surely there’s some gross, no-name brand you can use in a rhyme. Go ahead, try it…we’ll wait.