September 8, 2015 at 4:00 pm

news

Extra, Extra: Olympic Questions, Absentee Students, and Another Company Colonizes MaRS

By David Hains

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

Photo by Ernie Kwong Photography from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

With one week to go before the deadline to express an interest in hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics, there are still more questions than answers for Toronto prospects. At a press conference this morning, Kathleen Wynne said, “There are a lot of questions that haven’t been answered and it’s a very short time period so Mayor Tory and I will continue to try and get those questions answered as we move towards some of those dates.” For his part, John Tory responded in his John Tory-est way, saying, “I continue to be very involved in a very intensive collection of both information and opinions.”

While the first day of school most classrooms filled with excited and anxious students, one Toronto school was half-empty. Half of Thorncliffe Park Public School’s 700 students were absent from the first day of school as part of a protest against Ontario’s new sex ed curriculum. Protesting parents insist their children will not return to class until the curriculum is changed. Parents really do have a knack of making the first day of school more awkward than it needs to be.
The Provincial government announced that consumer and medical goods conglomerate Johnson & Johnson will occupy a floor of MaRS. Billed as one of the world’s largest “urban innovation hubs,” the office building at University and College has been the source of much frustration and controversy at Queen’s Park, as many office spaces have went unfilled. The Province is offering $19.4 million to lure JLABS, a J&J biotech incubator. The government hopes all MaRS units will be rented by spring 2016.
From today’s edition of 12:36, Toronto’s new lunchtime tabloid newsletter: Students who paid to move into a new privately-owned downtown dorm are starting the school year in suburbia. The dilapidated Primrose Hotel at Jarvis and Carlton is being transformed into the $1300-a-month Parkside Student Residence—but work isn’t finished yet, so hundreds of fresh-faced youngsters who’d hoped to move in over the weekend were relocated to other accommodations, including the Edward Village Hotel at Sheppard East and Highway 404, which itself is undergoing renovations. “The elevator doors get stuck closed, you can’t use the ice because it’s ‘dirty,’ and there is a hole in my wall where someone punched it,” says @nicoleraitak, who offered photographic evidence. Another exile is nonplussed by the inconvenient shuttle bus schedule. (Want more 12:36? Subscribe to it now.)