Newsstand: April 24, 2015

If it snows again today, let's all move to Miami. In the news: a lying police officer, budgetary finagling, and finally a couple breaks for students on financial assistance.

By Tannara Yelland • Illustration by Matthew Daley

A Superior Court judge has said a Peel police officer “misled” a justice of the peace in order to get a search warrant and then “lied” on the stand as part of an investigation and trial for a marijuana grow-op. It’s uncommonly plain-spoken language for another legal official, and highlights, according to the Toronto Star, that police misconduct is still often very hard to discover by outsiders. Charges and a public hearing are the only way to hold officers to account for this kind of behaviour, and those can take months or years if they ever happen.

The Ontario government says it won’t “slash and burn” its way to a balanced budget in 2017-18, but the Liberal government also doesn’t seem interested in finding its way to balanced books by increasing revenue: the only new tax on the books in this year’s recently released budget is a single penny-per-beer-bottle tax. The budget contains “no major spending cuts,” according to CTV, and instead plans to work toward the red “through a combination of targeted savings and a dependence on a steady economic growth.” What the party plans to do in the event of unsteady economic growth is unclear.

This year’s budget brought some good news for students looking for government assistance as they continue their education: OSAP-eligible students will no longer have to claim their cars as assets and part-time work won’t be deducted from their assistance eligibility. However, the maximum debt load one student can hold will now be pegged to inflation, meaning it will go up over time.