news
Newsstand: July 11, 2012
Welcome to Wednesday, the stuff that dreams are made of. In the news: city roadways experience geeselock; OneCity is sinking; the internet is too slow for parking miscreants; big pay at Toronto Hydro; and EI rules are going to be the worst in big cities.
In what could only be an act of revenge for shorelines like this, a gaggle of geese ground the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway to a halt around 5 p.m. yesterday. There were some bird casualties, but with police on the scene, the remaining animals were able to waddle their way to safety. Just picture all the honking.
Is OneCity turning into NoneCity? The expansive transit plan that TTC Chair Karen Stintz (Ward 16, Eglinton-Lawrence) and TTC Vice-Chair Glenn De Baeremaeker (Ward 38, Scarborough Centre) recently began floating will not receive the glittery showcase at council they had hoped for. Rather than discussing the merits of the plan, or the “controversial” idea of raising taxes to pay for transit, councillor Stintz will be asking for a staff report on a “transit network” and on tying transit expansion into the City’s Official Plan. It seems that council has finally tired of transit debates. That’s probably because it’s summer and they’re all riding their bikes to work instead of taking the TTC like they usually do.
In what seems like a poorly veiled attempt at teaching parking offenders how long “just a minute” actually is, the City’s online parking ticket payment system is making some drivers sit and wait a long while for their transactions to go through. Others are apparently unable to pay their ticket online at all. For the sake of some drivers, let’s hope that the patience required to deal with this spotty system doesn’t surpass the patience required to find a parking spot that is not in the middle of a bike lane.
The big paycheques at Toronto Hydro have fallen under the scrutinous eye of councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby (Ward 4, Etobicoke Centre). Apparently the 18 per cent jump in earnings between 2009 and 2011 (from $679,071 to $851,983) for president and CEO Anthony Haines seems especially unreasonable to the councillor. The utility’s board is less concerned with the amount of compensation the senior staff are paid, noting how well these administrators do their job and the great deal of revenue they bring in for the City. Of course, as councillor Lindsay Luby points out, Toronto Hydro has a monopoly. How hard can it be to sell electrical power if you’re the only one selling in?
When the Employment Insurance rules change, probably sometime early next year, and people are forced to take jobs that are outside of their field/local area/level of training, those positions running Toronto Hydro are not the types of work people will be forced to take. A University of Toronto policy brief says that these upcoming changes to EI will have the strongest impacts in big cities. The bittersweet reason that city dwellers will find themselves more likely to be forced into a job they don’t want is that there are just more jobs in cities. How conflicting.