27 Comments February 11, 2015 at 5:17 pm

Extra, Extra: Rob Ford (Regrettably) Speaks, Toronto Disrupts, and a Gentle Reminder to Shovel

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

In City Hall news, the quotably terrible councillor for Ward 2 was in vintage form today. Discussing a motion about suicide prevention doors for the TTC, the former mayor who-shall-not-be-named said that while suicide is tragic, people will do it anyway and the debate was just a waste of time. He then characterized emergency rental motel rooms for homeless people—rooms that feature bunk beds and mould on the walls—as luxury accommodations. The councillor was then kicked out of chambers for suggesting that a civil servant intentionally hid money in a motion relating to an Ontario delegation to Expo 2015 in Milan. The councillor refused to acknowledge or apologize that he impugned the staffer’s character, and huffed off wearing a look of defiant belligerence; it was a typical day at City Hall.

It’s sometimes easy to talk hyperbolically about tech startup momentum and disruption and all, but in Toronto’s case, the hype is increasingly true. The Globe reports that, of the 21 Canadian tech companies have attracted $784,000,000 of capital investments over the past year and a half, nine are based in Toronto and the Kitchener-Waterloo area. As Mike McDerment, the CEO of Freshbooks maker 2ndsite Inc., put it: “The money is shameless—it’ll just go wherever. It wants the opportunities. I don’t see why Toronto can’t beat Silicon Valley.” Okay, we’ll take it.
Resident Decent Human (and Metro Morning host) Matt Galloway was interviewed by Canadian Running magazine about his resolution to run every day in 2015, and mentioned how it can be difficult to run through unshoveled patches of sidewalk. So, a friendly reminder: Shovel your sidewalks, people. Your neighbours will thank you, and so will Matt Galloway. (And in case you missed it, we recently wrote about winter snow maintenance, and resources people who have difficulty shoveling their own walks can turn to.)