Newsstand: March 1, 2012

Forget about the lousy Smarch weather and enjoy a hot cup of news: Rob Ford talks up subways to developers, talks down the vehicle registration tax that he may need to pay for them; a newer, bigger TTC board; the mayor is good at a thing; a new subway station for Vaughan; and does the CUPE president still have a job?

By Sarah-Joyce Battersby • Illustration by Brian McLachlan

Maybe forgetting there are glass doors on his office, Mayor Rob Ford hosted a bevy of developers for a private meeting about his Sheppard subway plans. He then emerged from the meeting, after the developers had left through a side door to avoid reporters, and announced that developers love subways, so there. What the mayor didn’t mention was that he’s been floating some pretty wild ideas for how to fund the subway, including the parking levies, road tolls, and even a new and improved more expensive vehicle registration tax. You know, to replace the one he abolished.

Amidst all the brouhaha over the subway versus light-rail plans, the mayor and TTC Chair Karen Stintz managed to come to an agreement on the make up of the TTC board. RoFo wanted to stack the board with business people instead of elected politicians (and presumably rule over them in a Donald Trump-like manner, because, hey, why not), but he compromised with Stintz, agreeing to add two members to make the board an 11-person affair made up of five citizens (and potential business people) and six councillors. And an elected councillor will still hold the chair position. As for which current board members will get the boot, that won’t be decided for months. By then, who knows what fun hijinks we’ll be distracted by at City Hall. Exciting times.

Hey look, here’s one job the mayor’s really good at: advertising the City’s fraud and waste hotline. According to a report submitted to the audit committee on Wednesday, calls to the hotline were up 44 per cent in 2011. And the auditor-general says they’ve been getting a lot of calls from the mayor’s office. By which he presumably means calls redirected from the mayor’s office and not just the mayor himself calling up the hotline, breathing heavily, and saying “gravy. Gravy. Gravy!”

Not quite as astute a branding expert as Toronto’s mayor, the mayor of Vaughan is happy that the new TTC stop in his town will be called Vaughan Metropolitan Centre. There was talk of naming the new stop on the extended Spadina subway line simply Vaughan Centre. But no, says Vaughan. And although Norm Kelly (Ward 40, Scarborough-Agincourt) opposed the Vaughan-approved name just to stick it to Vaughan, the vote passed. So all aboard for Vaughan Metropolitan Centre: the subway station above Toronto, the subway station in Vaughan.

And CUPE local 416 president Mark Ferguson may or may not have quit his job last night.

Correction, March 1, 9:23AM: Above, “distracted” was spelled incorrectly, and has now been fixed.