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Weekend Newsstand: October 24, 2015
It's over, but that Blue Jays season was really something, wasn't it? In the news: John Tory's first year in office, elementary school report cards amid labour action, and unions being paid.
John Tory was elected mayor just over a year ago, and the Star‘s Royson James has a status update on his performance. While Tory scored high on behaviour and the budget, James calls him to task for focusing more on maintenance than building a vision of Toronto “or a stab at creation of a futuristic city.” He also points to Tory’s abysmal work on policing—first embracing both Bill Blair and carding, then turning away from carding when public pressure ratcheted up, abandoning the new chief who had been hired more or less to continue Blair’s policies and stand in line with the mayor on carding. In the process, James writes, Tory alienated the city’s black community, both by defending carding and by throwing the city’s first black police chief under the bus.
Speaking of report cards, elementary school students may not receive theirs in early November, as was expected. The ongoing dispute between teachers and the Toronto District School Board has had teachers on a work-to-rule job action for months with no results. Now, Premier Kathleen Wynne has announced that if a deal isn’t reached by Nov. 1, or if job actions don’t cease after that while negotiations continue, teachers and support staff might see their paycheques docked.
In still other education and labour news, three unions that were on strike earlier this year have come under fire for being recompensed some of the costs of their strikes. The Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF) and Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association each received $1 million from the provincial government, while the French teachers’ union was paid $500,000. Paul Elliott, of OSSTF, told CBC that “when it comes to cost of bargaining it doesn’t matter whether it’s public or private, whether it’s local or central.”