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Newsstand: June 15, 2012
Friday, everybody’s favourite day of the week—unless you count Saturday or Sunday. In the news: the 10 Toronto streets that feel most like a hay fever sufferer’s head; Waterfront Toronto doesn’t have a token for the streetcar; an election, maybe; another election, maybe; and The King of Car Thieves 2.
The downtown streetcar elites are looking pretty smug right now. Of Toronto’s 10 most congested streets/intersections, only two are downtown and none have streetcar tracks. Sure, most of Toronto’s streets are neither downtown nor routes for streetcars, but this discovery will finally put to rest the discussion regarding streetcars clogging city roads, right? In what is probably a more useful approach to the city’s gridlock issues, Councillor David Shiner (Ward 24, Willowdale) suggests that road congestion could actually be better managed if the City’s transportation staff were to raise objections during the development approval process. According to Shiner, staff should be speaking up about the necessity of including public transit in development plans. The intersection of Bayview Avenue and Sheppard Avenue East tops the list for most congested traffic artery in Toronto. Yonge Street between Highway 401 and Sheppard Avenue sits at number two, and York Street between Front Street and the Gardner Expressway is the third most congested.
Rolling some of that very loose logic into another news story: in what might be an effort to increase the number of frustrated motorists along a stretch of Queens Quay east of Yonge Street, Waterfront Toronto is now considering public transit alternatives to streetcars. Developers involved in the Port Lands seem unhappy with this decision, but Waterfront Toronto president, John Campbell, says that the price of the streetcar line is now about triple the $90 million budgeted. The silver lining for the developers is that bumper-to-bumper traffic gives people plenty of time to stare out their car windows at advertisements for new condo buildings.
Premier Dalton McGuinty has started in on the political equivalent of making ghost sound while wiggling his outstretched fingers at Ontario. The Liberals are threatening an election in mid-July if the NDP or Progressive Conservatives do not back their provincial budget. While the NDP had initially consented to supporting the Liberal minority (an agreement that the press can’t seem to stop referring to as a marriage), there are now more than a few points of budgetary contention between the two parties.
In another piece of maybe-there-will-be-an-election news, July 10 has been set aside at the Supreme Court of Canada for a one-day hearing on whether or not a new election should be called in the riding of Etobicoke Centre. In the 2011 federal election, Conservative Ted Opitz beat the Liberal incumbent Borys Wrzesnewskyj by a mere 26 votes. On May 18, an Ontario Superior Court judge sided with Wrzesnewskyj that 79 of the votes cast should not have been counted.
Balwinder Dhaliwal, the man that the History Channel once called the “King of Car Thieves” has been arrested for, guess what, selling stolen cars. Dhaliwal was arrested along with his wife Kuljit, daughter Kiran, and sons Balkevin and Bikran. According to police, the Dhaliwal family fabricated files to give cars stolen in the GTA vehicle registration numbers assigned to cars brought over from New York state. The American cars, however, never actually existed.