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Weekend Newsstand: October 10, 2015
Saturday! Long weekend! What a great feeling. In the news: a TTC passenger charged with assault, contract negotiations for city workers, health care crisis at Toronto's newest jail, and a stowaway opossum making a full recovery.
A 60-year-old man is facing a charge of assault with a weapon after allegedly calling a TTC bus driver a racial slur, “ranting and swearing” at him, and hitting him with a four-foot-long umbrella. The incident took place on Tuesday in Scarborough, and the man went to court on Thursday. One Reddit user, who claims to have been on the bus, alleged in a post that after the passenger called the driver a n—–, the driver followed him off the bus and punched him, but police haven’t confirmed that and have said no one else is facing charges.
Negotiations are set to begin between the city and three unions representing 28,000 city workers, and may well become tense. Mayor John Tory has proposed a two percent cut to city services across the board for the 2016 budget, while Deputy Mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong said on Friday that city workers’ wages and benefits “are some of the most generous around, and we believe there should be a recognition of that.” Minnan-Wong claimed each worker costs the city an average of $85,000; CUPE Local 79 President Tim Maguire partially disputed that, saying Minnan-Wong’s phrasing makes it sound like each city worker earns that much in salary, while “that’s far in excess of the average city worker. There’s wages, there’s benefits, there’s other costs.”
Toronto’s South Detention Centre, the new jail that’s now the second-largest in Canada, is facing a health care crisis that includes long wait times for inmates, improperly functioning equipment, unavailable doctors, and safety concerns for nurses. Inmates in Canada are entitled to the same health care other citizens, and on top of that the TSDC touted its state-of-the-art health facilities in the lead-up to its opening a year and a half ago.
The Virginia opossum found on a transport truck that had driven from Brampton to Calgary in September has been nursed back to health and flown back to Ontario. It is now at the Toronto Wildlife Centre until it makes a full recovery, at which time it will be released into the wild. The centre released a statement saying “wild animals should always be released back to their home territory as quickly as possible.”