June 5, 2012 at 6:21 pm

Extra, Extra: High Park Zoo and Ontario Place Face Their Futures

Every weekday’s end, Extra, Extra collects just about everything you ought to care about or ought not miss.

One last plea to support the High Park Zoo, courtesy of Toronto comic Pat Thornton. Tomorrow, city council will decide whether to waive its regular procedure and expedite the process of signing off on accepting donated funds to keep the zoo open (yes, there are procedures that govern such things). Upping the aw quotient in the public campaign: a number of new zoo babies, and crowdsourced zoo-baby namings. Welcome: to Tango (a llama); Kaboom and Jinx (wallabies); and Kit and Caboodle (lambs).

If you’re online this evening and have an interest in urban development, the provincial government is hosting a town hall on the revitalization of Ontario Place; you can pop in via their live stream to learn more.
When Occupy Toronto started up last year, many criticized it for being a foreign import that didn’t bear much on life here; things in Canada just weren’t so bad, went the argument. True, we are not Greece or Ireland, and our banking system didn’t fall prey to the same systematic problems American banks did, but some new research reveals that we shouldn’t be entirely sanguine. Income inequality in Canada right now is the worst it’s been since the Great Depression, says a new paper by a group of economic professors at the University of British Columbia.