Each week, we round up the latest news, views, and rumours from City Hall.
HEADLINES
Painfully predictable Pride snub
Despite the huge, self-inflicted controversy he generated last summer, Ford announced on Wednesday that he intends to skip the Pride Parade for the second year in a row.
He hasn’t ruled out attending another event during Pride week, but for the moment he’s keeping us in suspense. The fact that the mayor who finds time to meet one-on-one with several residents a week can’t commit to a single appearance during the ten-week Pride festival has raised some unfortunately familiar questions about our mayor. Is Ford homophobic? Is he playing to his “family values” base at the expense of queer residents? Should we even care whether he shows up to Pride?
One thing’s for sure, he’s not winning himself any friends in the queer community, and apparently that’s just fine with him.
BULLETINS
- It was reported that Las Vegas gaming giant MGM is lobbying City Hall for a shot at bringing a casino to Toronto, with its preferred location being Ontario Place
- On Wednesday Ford stood in front of a defaced garage north of St. Clair West and unveiled the city’s new graffiti-reporting apps, the Blackberry and Android versions of which are free, but on an iPhone will cost you $1.99
- A flurry of polls hit Toronto at the end of the week, one of which reported that recent council defeats haven’t sunk Ford’s popularity irrevocably, and his approval rating is up from 39 per cent in February to a respectable 47 per cent today
- The Association and Zoos and Aquariums yanked the Toronto’s Zoos accreditation on Wednesday, following council’s decision to send its three remaining elephants to the unaccredited PAWS sanctuary in California over keepers’ objections
#TOPOLI DOCS
After Councillor Michelle Berardinetti’s (Scarborough Southwest) efforts to find a safe home for the Toronto Zoo’s elephants inadvertently provoked the wrath of the AZA, she took to Twitter to defend her actions. Councillor Paul Ainslie (Scarborough East), a close Ford ally, tweeted back, accusing her (via hashtag) of “sticking her finger in the pie.” As you can see from their conversation, from there the debate devolved, ultimately ending in frowny emoticons.
MEETINGS, MOTIONS, AND MINUTES
Disaster relief at last? Councillors around the clamshell at City Hall have been tossing about St. Clair Ave.’s reputation like a political football of late, with Ford and his allies depicting it as some kind of Mad Max-type landscape rendered devoid of civilization by an invasion of streetcars, and local rep Councillor Joe Miehvc (St. Paul’s) countering that it’s some kind of paradise where stores never go bust and the streets are always traffic-free.
The truth is somewhere in between, but one area where there’s little argument is that there’s a bottleneck under the CP bridge near Keele, where the street narrows to two lanes thanks to the new streetcar right-of-way. So how about fixing it? That’s what Councillor Cesar Palacio, who represents the area, petitioned the public works committee to do on Wednesday, requesting them to look into widening the road beneath the bridge. The committee referred the issue to staff, who will report back next month.
COUNCILLOR OF THE WEEK
You can tell that Rob Ford isn’t the first stubborn person Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam (Toronto-Centre Rosedale) has tried to coax out to Pride. This week she did everything she could to make make the mayor comfortable enough to attend, even offering to host a reception for him and friendly Pride participants, giving him a graceful way out of the controversy he’s created should he choose to accept it.
CITY SOUND BITE
“Is that real lettuce?”
– A curious reporter inquires as to the veracity of a PETA activist’s leafy bikini.
Two women showed up at the mayor’s weekly weigh-in wearing the garments in an effort to convince him to go vegan. They were not successful.
NEXT WEEK’S AGENDA
Wednesday is shaping up to be a big day for Toronto’s transit future, as Metrolinx will unveil detailed plans for the LRT network council approved earlier this year.
On Friday, the budget committee will consider a small, but potentially messy item. City staff is asking for clarification on Josh Colle’s epic (and apparently hastily drafted) budget motion that, among other things, saved some city pools from closure. However, the money the motion allocated to do so is not sufficient to save all the pools, meaning the contentious 2012 budget process may have to be reopened to sort the whole mess out.
