History comes back to life
A scene from The Honouring, performed by Kaha:wi Dance Theatre as part of the Indigenous Arts Festival at Fort York, Saturday, June 22.
Cityscape
Ontario Square at 225 Queens Quay West, the waterfront’s latest park space, by the numbers:
500
Quaking aspen trees
53,000
Square feet of space
June 23 Official opening
Distinguishing features Stone pavers designed to look like ice flows
Architects Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates
Worth seeing
Nine Rivers City: Toronto’s Extraordinary Waterways, a large-scale outdoor photography exhibit on the GTA’s watercourses at Harbourfront Centre’s new Exhibition Common.
Stop Line 9
Protests outside Enbridge offices took place in 12 cities across the country Tuesday, June 25, as part of Idle No More’s Sovereignty Summer campaign. Dubbed Swamp Line 9, the actions, which included the occupation of an Enbridge construction site, are targeting the oil and gas giant’s efforts to ship Alberta tar sands crude through Ontario. Public consultations are scheduled for the fall, but First Nations groups say they were not consulted despite the fact that the pipeline passes through 18 indigenous communities. Environmentalists have sounded dire warnings about increased risk of accidents and water pollution along the route.
Animal crackers
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is calling on organizations across the country to ditch Shrine Circus’s planned visits this summer. More than 22,000 people have contacted venues scheduled to host the tiger act in particular. Hawthorn Corporation, which supplies animals to Shrine, has been cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for confining tigers in tiny transport cages.
Photo by PETA
Pan Am noise
1. View along Metrolinx’s Georgetown rail corridor on Dundas West toward Dupont.
2. Noise wall proposed by Metrolinx.
3. Green wall alternative and West Bend Linear Park alternative proposed by the community.
Media watch
The Toronto Sun’s Sue-Ann Levy is a terrible person and a terrible journalist. But we’ll still miss her at City Hall.
In a shuffle announced Sunday evening (June 23), the Sun sent her up the street to terrorize Queen’s Park and dispatched Mike Strobel to take her place on the RoFo beat.
Although her actual presence at City Hall was broken up by countless extended sojourns to Florida, there was something perversely comforting in the predictability of her outrage.
She was foaming, arrogant, Islamophobic and an atrocious crafter of puns. We sometimes wondered what she might think of gay people were she herself not gay.
She wasn’t particularly a fan of Rob Ford (having preferred Rocco Rossi for mayor) but took great pleasure in how much he enraged the “loony left.” If she disliked Ford, she loathed his enemies.
Toronto City Hall may benefit from having that much less spite contained within it. But as it turns out, the early online version of her successor’s debut column contained a homophobic crack about Kathleen Wynne.
$355,907.56
“Modest” court costs Conservative MPs are seeking against individual applicants in the election fraud case. The MPs’ legal bills are being covered by the Conservative party, which the Council of Canadians points out operates with generous subsidies in the form of tax credits from political contributions.
