Hogtown ribbing
PETA’s Try Vegan campaign ventures outside the U.S. for the first time. This billboard is a short distance from the recently closed Quality Meat Packers slaughterhouse. According to PETA, every vegan spares 100 animals a year from slaughter.
Shell game
Environmentalists are condemning the gas and oil giant for polluting the minds of young kids with a new advertising strategy – a co-promotion with Lego that involves putting the Shell logo on a special set of toys. Greenpeace responded with its own counter-campaign: miniature Lego people holding “small but furious protests against Lego bosses’ dirty partnership with Shell.”
A first for Medpot
Toronto’s first therapeutic medpot clinic opened at 121 Danforth last week. According to Ryan Yermus, founder of Medical Marijuana Clinics of Canada, it’s “the first of many” he plans to open across the country to push the therapeutic properties of cannabis. While the federal government continues to try to restrict access to medpot, Health Canada has acknowledged weed’s efficacy in treating a range of ailments.
More buzz on bee-killing pesticides
The pesticides thought to be behind the collapse of the honey bee population may be decimating butterflies, birds and amphibians, too.
That’s according to the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides, which reviewed 800 scientific papers on neonicotinoids. The findings prompted the Sierra Club to call on Health Canada to ban the pesticides outright, but the feds refused despite having concluded last September that their use is “unsustainable because they kill bees.”
24
Number of Blue Flag-certified beaches in Canada – eight of which are in Toronto.
97%
Proportion of Globe and Mail workers who have voted to go on strike. Protesting writers at the newspaper withheld their bylines from print and online stories Monday, June 30. A major point of contention in contract talks is a management proposal that would force reporters to write advertorial copy.
