By Nicholas Hune-Brown | Photography by Lee Towndrow

On a bright morning in August, Judi Lloyd drove through Twin Pines with the air of a visiting dignitary. The preternaturally cheerful 57-year-old real estate broker was on her way to list a home. The Mississauga trailer park is located just off Dundas, one of the city’s main arteries. Like all of Lloyd’s visits to the park, the trip quickly turned into a mixture of socializing and networking as she waved to and chatted with residents from the driver’s seat of her black Ford Escape. She gestured at the mobiles we passed, noting the histories and special features of each. “You wouldn’t even know that’s a trailer,” she said, pointing at a 48-by-24-foot mobile on a spacious, pie-shaped lot. “If someone dropped you in there and you didn’t see the outside, I swear you’d think it was a little bungalow.”

The home Lloyd was putting on the market that day was a beige “double-wide,” mobile-home lingo for a model that’s the size of two typical trailers. Inside, Stephen Plume—a transport truck driver in a black baseball cap with a “Got beer?” slogan—good-naturedly signed and initialled a stack of papers while Lloyd kept up a steady patter. “This is one of the widest master bedrooms in all of Twin Pines,” she said authoritatively. She was going to list the home for $139,900. When the papers had been completed to her satisfaction, Lloyd went out to the front lawn and drove a “For Sale” sign into the ground with a few quick jabs of her pink-toenail-polished foot. “See you on Facebook!” she yelled as she rolled down the leafy street.

Lloyd didn’t set out to become the “Trailer Park Queen,” as her colleagues call her. A decade ago, when she was still relatively new to the business, she sold her first mobile home in Twin Pines. Then she sold another. Then, somehow, she sold 83 more. Now she’s the community’s patron broker, the agent responsible for the majority of the transactions in Twin Pines, and the woman you need to speak to if you want to live in the GTA’s last big mobile community.

The reasons to abandon the overcrowded, overpriced, not-so-livable city are beginning to outnumber the reasons to stay. More and more of us are tempted by the 905 and beyond. Screw Jane Jacobs. We’re outta here
By Philip Preville | Photography by Stephanie Noritz

Brian Porter and Carrie Low thought they’d hatched the perfect plan to avoid the eight-lane gridlock they faced every week on their drive to the family cottage in the Kawarthas. Porter, a soft-spoken 41-year-old Toronto firefighter, would arrange his work schedule to be home on Friday. He’d pack the car at noon and pick up his daughters, Lily and Amelia, from daycare shortly after lunch. Then, rather than head from their home in the Beach to pick up Low downtown, he’d drive to a strategic pit stop in Oshawa. Low, a slim 41-year-old redhead, works as a lawyer with RBC in the financial district, her days and nights packed, respectively, with meetings and paperwork. Her role in the escape plan was to get off work early and catch the GO train to Oshawa Station. Often, she’d end up working a pressure-packed day until 5 p.m. anyway, leaving Porter and the girls waiting at the station for hours. In the end they never gained that much time—it could still be a challenge to get to the cottage before nightfall. But at least they’d avoided the worst hours on the DVP and the 401.

Porter and Low’s weekend escape strategy was symptomatic of their over-engineered city lives. To juggle all their needs and obligations—two careers, mortgage payments, bills, kid drop-offs and pickups, groceries, meals—they had built a life that resembled a Rube Goldberg machine, and any misstep threatened to collapse the entire contraption. Grandparents were often called in to shuttle the kids to lessons and play dates and birthday parties. “My mother-in-law would phone me at work and ask, ‘Where is Amelia’s dance outfit?’ and my stress level would go through the roof, ” recalls Low. “I’d say, ‘Why are you calling me at work for this? It’s in the house somewhere. Don’t ask me, ask Brian.’ ”

Porter’s more flexible hours allowed him to handle most of the household duties (he typically works seven 24-hour shifts every four weeks), while Low would often leave the house at 7 a.m. and return 12 hours later. When Porter was on shift Low would pick up the slack, but the moment he returned she’d play catch-up at work. They didn’t realize, at first, that the routine was taking a toll on their marriage. “Sometimes I’d come home from a shift and she’d hand me the baton and head out the door,” Porter recalls. “I’d barely be able to stand up, but I’d feed the girls and send them off on their day. Carrie and I were like two ships passing in the night.” You might even say they were behaving like an already-divorced couple sharing care of the kids. “If we kept it up, I could not be sure that we would still care about one another five or 10 years down the road,” says Low.

The problem, they decided, was not each other or their careers or their kids, but the city itself—a surprising diagnosis given that they had both grown up in Toronto, happily, in the Beach. They bought their 1,600-square-foot detached home on Benlamond because they wanted to raise their family there, too. “The Beach tends to keep people,” says Porter. “I can walk along Queen East any day of the week and meet friends from high school who run businesses on that street.” But living in the city required too many contortions. They decided to divorce it.

They spent months searching for a new home, pushing the outer boundaries of the GTA as they went. Low was adamant: “I didn’t want a suburban house.” In the end they moved as far away from Toronto as they possibly could for a couple whose livelihoods still depended upon the city: Cobourg, the Lake Ontario town with its own lovely beach and boardwalk, just this side of Prince Edward County. The only thing separating the gigantic walkout basement of their new, 2,700-square-foot detached house from the Lake Ontario waterfront is a municipal park. And the cottage run is a one-hour scenic drive along quiet secondary highways.

What’s a good ol' BBQ without burgers? (Image: Neil T)

Last Friday, Jonathan Goldsbie tweeted, “When we reach the ‘1500 Royal York’ bus stop, the bus driver announces ‘Stop for Rob Ford.’ Half the passengers on the crowded bus disembark.” And so began an evening of dispatches from Ford Fest, a late summer gathering in the backyard of Doug and Rob Ford’s mother. The event attracted the mayor’s supporters, critics and people who were just there for the beer and food. Undeterred—or perhaps fuelled—by the hamburgers, Toronto’s city hall observers expressed their amazement with the Fords’ vast backyard and the treasures within. We’ve rounded up some of our favourite tweets and broken them down into categories—because here’s another case where the reporting on Twitter outdid the old-timey fare (except for maybe this piece)—after the jump.

1. Backyard tweets
• @marcusbgee: “It’s kind of an Asianish theme in the vast Ford back yard, which is around the same size as Idaho.”
• @robsalerno: “Just found this statue of a money with huge balls at #fordfest.”

2. Evening plans tweets
• @cityslikr: “Confession. Just trying to drink enough in order to have to use the port-a-loos so I can say I peed in the mayor’s backyard. #FordFest”

3. City hall blame game tweets
• @misterdevans: “You do realize this whole #Fordfest Fiasco is David Miller’s fault. Lazy bastard.”

4. ‘Ford lives in a porcelain museum’ tweets
• @PokerToronto: “Who handles @TOMayorFord on facebook? You made a GREAT choice leading off #FordFest album with this pic: http://yfrog.com/nv4me4j #topoli”

5. Gently Bent (a band featuring Councillor Gary Crawford on the drums) tweets
• @cityslikr “Gently Bent sings We’re On A Highway To Hell. This one kind of writes itself. #FordFest”
• @cityslikr “As Gently Bent plays Cinnamon Girl in bg, Cllr Ford poses for pics and his daughter [sic] do cheerleader moves in the spotlight. #FordFest”
• @JoshMatlow: “Wrote songs, accompanied by guitar, about the Fords, city hall, to tunes of 70s/80s TV theme songs. Hoping to perform @ next year’s FordFest.”

6. Real news tweets
• @ddale8: “Actual news: Ford guarantees any tax increase won’t be higher than 2.5 per cent.”

7. Falling in the pool tweets
• @ddale8: “My biggest life nightmare is being the Star reporter who falls into the Ford pool, which is a thing I’d do. Walking very carefully.”

8. Jonathan Goldsbie–related tweets
• @goldsbie: “They’re out of hot banana peppers, yet still have a cauldron of relish. The situation is repeated at the adjacent table. twitpic.com/6f3h1e”
• @cllrainslie: “@goldsbie + me enjoying the good times in FordFest 2011 Beer + burgers help cross political divides twitpic.com/6ffcqo”

Same time next year, everyone?

(Image: Ontario Chamber of Commerce)

This weekend, all of Toronto (well, most of Etobicoke, at least) will be checking out the cul-de-sac at the Ford family compound to see who arrives to have beer and hot dogs at the second annual Ford Fest. Last year’s party fell during mayor Rob Ford’s election campaign; this year, however, promises more partying for partying’s sake and less rallying around the small-c conservative flagpole. Earlier this week, rumour had it that Ontario Tory leader Tim Hudak wasn’t on the guest list, but Toronto Star reporter David Rider confirmed that Hudak will indeed be attending the festivities. Now that Ford has met with Dalton McGuinty and, this afternoon, NDP leader Andrea Horwath, that leaves just Hudak for Ford to corner by the kiddie pool and shake down ask for some subway money.

• Thousands to party with the Fords [Toronto Sun]

By Monika Warzecha

The Buyers: Erica Smith, a 34-year-old real estate agent with Condo Chicks, and her fiancé, Marc Puddy, a 37-year-old insurance executive.

The Story: Smith and Puddy started looking for a place together after they got engaged in November. Torn between the large lots of the suburbs and their love of downtown, the couple looked at houses in Etobicoke and Port Credit as well as condos in the core. “Condos are getting smaller and smaller. It’s hard to find one that feels like a home,” Smith says. They needed room for their dog and a home office, as well as two parking spots. They set an upper limit of $1 million­­—preferably less if they opted for the burbs—and started their search.

(Images: Couple by John Cullen; homes by Rachel Wine)

Not a Tim Hortons (Image: Anthony Easton)

We suspect that “fact-checking the Fords” will be a growth industry for city hall watchers, especially after Ed Keenan’s piece in the The Grid giving a rundown of five examples in just one week. But this one, uncovered by the (library union–backed) advocates at OurPublicLibrary and picked up by the Toronto Star is kind of a howler: Doug Ford was quoted on the radio as saying “We have more libraries per person than any other city in the world. I’ve got more libraries in my area than I have Tim Hortons.” That statement is getting the drubbing it deserves on Twitter (look for the hashtag #booksnotdonutsforford), and the facts are pretty clear.

From the Star:

According to library union president Maureen O’Reilly, Etobicoke has 13 library branches and 39 Tim Hortons. Three library branches are in areas Ford represents, Ward 2, Etobicoke North, while the Tim Hortons website shows seven of their shops in the ward.

Ford didn’t respond to a request for comment…

Asked to comment, the library provided some comparisons. Toronto has one library for every 28,120 citizens, fewer than Hamilton (one branch per 21,629); Ottawa (27,527); and Vancouver (27,976). But Toronto does better than Mississauga (40,555); Montreal (36,833) and Calgary (61,346).

This is what’s kind of maddening about these kinds of statements. Civilization isn’t collapsing in Montreal or Calgary (though the latter’s mayor, Naheed Nenshi, has been pushing for more money for Calgary’s library) so there’s a reasonable argument to be made that yes, maybe Toronto could survive with fewer libraries. If there’s an over-served part of Toronto’s library system, let’s have that debate—and hell, let’s talk about stuff like evolving reading technology and whether fewer libraries could deliver the same services more effectively. But comparing libraries to the number of Tim Hortons franchises is meaningless, and making stuff up like “we have more libraries per person than any other city in the world” is just silly.

• Reality Check [OutPublicLibrary]
• Doughnuts vs books? In Ford’s Etobicoke, it’s 3-1 [Toronto Star]
• Top five Ford truthiness fact checks of the week [The Grid]

By Robert Hough | Photography by Eamon Mac Mahon

Combat Hospital’s 185,000-square-foot set, on the site of a former bottle factory, is one of the largest in Canada. (Image: Eamon Mac Mahon)

Over the 10 years of Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan, our film and television industry has, on more than one occasion, recreated that country for the purpose of entertainment. Mostly, these efforts have occurred on Canadian soil, no small feat given that Afghanistan is an anarchic, war-ravaged nation where summer temperatures can reach 50 degrees Celsius, and Canada is a country known for its cold-weather sports and niceness. Ingenuity, it seems, is key. When a production team attempted to build an Afghani village for the CBC series The Border, they did so in a gravel pit in Caledon, a popular film location that, owing to the magic of the lens, has also served as a tropical jungle (Amazon) and the high Arctic (Lives of the Saints). The Maritime producer Barrie Dunn, for his soon-to-be-released film Afghan Luke, used the British Columbia interior, specifically a small town near Kamloops called Cache Creek.

Now there’s Combat Hospital, an hour-long drama modelled on the Kandahar Multinational Medical Unit Role 3, a hospital that serviced soldiers wounded in the Afghanistan conflict until it was decommissioned last year. (The original facility was intended to be temporary; it has now been replaced, depressingly enough, with a permanent structure.) The idea for Combat Hospital, which debuts June 21, started with the Toronto-based writer and director Jinder Oujla-Chalmers, whose previous credits include a TV biopic of former Alberta premier Ralph Klein and episodes of the fat-fighting reality show X-Weighted. She took her idea—a MASH reprise set in Afghanistan—to Global, where the head of programming, Christine Shipton, was immediately besotted. Sienna Films, a production company perhaps best known in Canada for the 1999 film New Waterford Girl, agreed to develop the series.

Thus began the mad scramble that characterizes the launch of any television project. Sienna had to find funding partners and, depending on their location, decide where to recreate the Kandahar base. At one point, the producers considered working with a French company, which would have meant shooting the series in Morocco. Though the dust of north Africa easily doubles as the dust of central Asia, shooting there would have meant flying in cast and crew over seven months, enough time to shoot the first season. Too complicated. Instead, Sienna signed on a U.K.-based production team called Artists Studio as a partner and assembled a writing team that included Oujla-Chalmers and the venerable screenwriter Daniel Petrie Jr., who worked on Beverly Hills Cop and The Big Easy. As buzz about the show intensified, both ABC and the Sony Corporation invested in the project. Sienna eventually decided to build its set in Toronto, where it would require considerable trickery to imitate the look and feel of Kandahar.

The company had just nine weeks before shooting began, and required the help of 40 carpenters, 20 painters, 15 set dressers, one set decorator and an assortment of other trades to carry out the necessary welding, wiring and plumbing. The result, one of the largest sets ever built for a Canadian show, is a 185,000-square-foot replica of a military hospital. It exists in an Etobicoke factory that, in a previous life, was used to make Crown Royal bottles.

I visited on a brilliant morning in early May, driving north along a homely stretch of Kipling Avenue sided by grey single-storey office buildings. A publicist led me through a succession of gypsum board hallways toward the back of the factory. We then pushed through a pair of doors and stepped into the sun-bleached back lot. High above was an immense sign reading, “Welcome to Kandahar Airfield,” which looked blithely out of place against the cloudless Toronto sky.

The perimeter of the camp was defined on two sides by the bottle factory, which, in the show, represented the sides of old airplane hangars. The other two sides of the camp were the sand-filled safety barriers that surround any military encampment. Stacks of battered old shipping containers, purchased from a container dealer out by the airport, formed a second line of defence. There were the requisite plywood army barracks, a volleyball net, showers and, off in one corner, a forest-green medical evacuation helicopter, which had been purchased from an American collector of military vehicles. In the opposite corner was an imitation Afghani village used for scenes in which the doctors leave the compound, an ill-advised endeavour that, in the military, is referred to as going “outside the wire.” It all looked remarkably real, albeit in the way that movie sets tend to look real: you had to mentally subtract the cameras and lights strewn all over the set, and forget that the day’s extras, all 75 of whom were wearing army fatigues or Afghani robes, were standing around drinking bottled water while waiting for their cues.

The show follows the exploits of a civilian neurosurgeon with a questionable moral fabric, played by Luke Mably; the camp’s chief of nursing, played by Arnold Pinnock; and a pair of naively determined trauma surgeons, played by Michelle Borth and Terry Chen, whose arrival kick-starts the series. Deborah Kara Unger portrays an Australian psychiatrist, while Elias Koteas is cast as the hospital’s commanding officer, a hardened yet warm-hearted surgeon. There is also a whole roster of supporting characters, a “large world” being a recent hallmark of quality television—think of The Sopranos and its mob families, or the sheer volume of office drones employed by Sterling Cooper in Mad Men.

When the warm weather hits, the car-obsessed and their vintage toys come out to play, top down, engines gurgling, exhaust pipes fuming. But who are they and where do they come from? By Jacob Richler | Photography by Naomi Harris

Austin’s Powers

Mark Doust
Purchasing Manager, Etobicoke

To behold Mark Doust’s 1953 Austin-Healey 100/4 is a revelation: the car is gorgeous, curvy and lithe, pinched around the waist like a wasp, and streamlined for speed, right down to the collapsible windscreen that slides forward at its base to reduce resistance. “You can never drive like that, of course—it just directs the bugs to your teeth,” Doust says, laughing heartily.

The list of pleasures associated with owning and driving vintage cars may be long, but not one of them has anything to do with practicality. For Doust, the obsession is in his blood. He was introduced to vintage performance cars as a child, when he was dragged from racetrack to racetrack by his father, George, who was an early partner in Toronto’s premier British car dealership, Grand Touring Automobiles.

“My father is 88 and he’s still working on cars at his farm,” Doust says. And with two other Healeys, a Riley and a rare racing Fiat in his collection, all of which he drives regularly and fast, Doust shows every indication of being headed for a similar future.

The Mastercard Centre for Hockey Excellence is eating city dollars

Hockey seems to be the topic of the day. First, the Vancouver Canucks get thumped by the Boston Bruins in game six of the Stanley Cup Finals last night. Then, early this afternoon, city council’s economic development committee put forward a request for Rob Ford to write a letter to the NHL commissioner expressing the city’s interest in a second NHL team (it seems the request was summarily shut down). And last but not least, news broke that the city is embroiled in a financial snafu concerning a four-pad ice hockey rink in Etobicoke.

We turn to the Toronto Sun for the latter story:

The latest boondoggle to hit the City Hall radar concerns the $43.4-million Lakeshore Lions Arena, better known as the Mastercard Centre for Hockey Excellence.

The operators of the nearly two-year-old, four-pad complex on Kipling Ave. took on so much debt to build the centre, they are no longer able to cover their debt servicing costs and poised to default on their loans.

According to a report to the council executive committee, at last count city hall had given the Lakeshore Lions $35.5 million in capital loan guarantees, making for a total debt of $43.4 million for the entire project. So, basically, the city guaranteed a loan for a bunch of investors who, apparently, had a hard time keeping to a budget and now can’t meet the loan payments. And while the Toronto Sun puts the blame on the old David Miller regime, they also note that every councillor save for Mike Del Grande—including the now mayor—voted for this deal.

We can’t help but notice that the city is also in for an expensive, multi-storey four-pad ice rink slated for the Lower Donlands as part of Waterfront Toronto’s redevelopment of the area. This deal is even sketchier than the Etobicoke one, as the city doesn’t have the money for the full project. But, hey, at least the arena-funding mess in Toronto isn’t doing the same thing to council that the arena-funding mess in Quebec City is doing to the Parti Quebecois.

• City poised to take over arena’s $40 million debt [Toronto Star]
• Rink Stink [Toronto Sun]
• Toronto taxpayers on hook as Lakeshore arena runs out of cash [Globe and Mail]

(Images: Ice rink—Emily Walker; dollar sign—Adria Richards)

We attended last night's garbage debate

Newbie councillor Josh Matlow has spent the last six months very carefully straddling council’s middle, taking a calculated stance on issues from taxes to the TTC to garbage privatization. Last night, in an attempt to provide some clarity for the voters in his ward—and perhaps his own thoughts—he invited fellow councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong and left-wing economist (they exist!) Hugh MacKenzie to debate the pros and cons of the latter. Adding to the evening’s star power, Steve Paikin agreed to moderate the debate—in part because he lives in the area and in part because it seems he’s constitutionally required to preside over any such forum he happens to attend. Unfortunately, the turnout was poor and the drama was low. But we did learn a few things—five of them actually. More after the jump.

1. Privatization: it’s really not that big of a deal
According to Minnan-Wong, the brand of privatization at issue is an incremental step building on the already-privatized experience of Etobicoke. Moreover, he suggested that garbage collection itself isn’t that important—apparently, he doesn’t see it as an essential service along the lines of the police, the fire department and, um, the TTC.

2. Privatization: actually, it’s the worst thing ever
On the other hand, McKenzie argued that privatization has gone wrong before (see: the old city of York, which brought its private garbage collection back into the city’s hands and saved money doing so). He also pointed out that contracting outsourcing poses a bunch of problems for the city after the deal is signed: namely, the city will no longer have a direct line to management when something goes wrong.

3. CUPE still knows how to get the crowds out
During the inevitable question-and-answer period, it became clear that the city workers’ union was overrepresented in the room. Later, Matlow told The Informer: “I’m still not sure how much these views actually represented my ward.”

4. Some people care about process
This seriously cheers us up: a number of the questioners were deeply concerned about not just the goal of privatization, but the process the city is using to get there. One woman asked about the case of Geoff Rathbone, the city manager who has now landed a plum job in a private waste-hauling firm. Some asked whether council would be able to oversee the contract after it approves the privatization plan (currently: no).

5. Matlow is still on the fence
After the evening wrapped up, Matlow admitted he still hadn’t heard anything that convinced him to actually take a position. He told The Informer he thinks the contract should come back to council for approval instead of going to the bid committee, which is just about the only wrench the opposition can throw into the mayor’s plan. It’ll be interesting to see next week if Matlow brings any other councillors from the middle with him.

Five fallen Liberal incumbents

After the dissolution of Canada’s 40th Parliament, the GTA was a Liberal playing field, Fortress Toronto the most secure of all Liberal strongholds. With the Liberals holding 20 of Toronto’s 22 seats—and no credible expectation that the party would lose many, if any, of its MPs in the 4-1-6—the idea that they could do any worse than they had under Stéphane Dion (who, by the way, won his seat in Montreal) was inconceivable. Of course, everybody knows how that turned out. The stranglehold was broken in emphatic fashion as ridings that held long-standing Liberal incumbents dumped them like a bad college romance. We look at a number of key Liberal losses and explore how the GTA changed from solid red to a bluish-orange hue.

1. Etobicoke-Lakeshore: Iggy goes down
Michael Ignatieff both led his party to a historic defeat and lost his own seat—a seat that had been vacated for him back in 2006 and had been Liberal since the 1993 victory. The combination of a strong-ish NDP challenger and a Conservative candidate endorsed by Rob Ford proved more than sufficient to unseat the party leader. That this wasn’t the worst news of the night is a sign of just how bad things are looking for the now leaderless Liberals.

2. Parkdale-High Park: Left-leaning Kennedy didn’t lean left enough
This was one of those ridings where the Conservatives had no chance of winning, so the forces of the left were free to vote to their hearts’ content. The result: a drubbing for one of the leftmost members of the Liberal caucus, as Peggy Nash beat Gerard Kennedy by a double-digit margin. This defeat was a genuine surprise—most observers assumed that the NDP wave would spare Kennedy. Whoops.

3. Eglinton-Lawrence: Volpe’s reign comes to an abrupt end
A Liberal MP even some Liberals won’t be sad to see gone, Joe Volpe went down to his Conservative counterpart, paving the way (maybe?) for Rocco Rossi’s run for the riding at the provincial level in October. How did Volpe, the incumbent for more than two decades, lose? Well, it probably didn’t help that the local Green Party candidate accused his campaign of shenanigans.

4. York Centre: Dryden can’t come through in the clutch
Oh, Ken Dryden. Former goalie; former Liberal leadership aspirant; and now former MP. Here, a split vote gave the Conservative candidate the slightest of leads over the combined Liberal-NDP effort, a telling example of the larger trend across the region as Liberals and NDP-ers waged a pitched battle for second place.

5. Davenport: Voters like Cash better than Silva
As in Volpe’s case, a long-time—but not particularly beloved—Liberal incumbent was turfed in favour of a newcomer. Here, Mario Silva went down to musician and NDP rookie Andrew Cash. This one wasn’t even close, which suggests that the riding wasn’t impressed with Silva’s distance-learning PhD from the National University of Ireland. On the plus side, Silva can actually go to Galway now, if he likes.

• Liberals crushed in GTA [Toronto Star]
• Oliver beats out Volpe in battle of the Joes [Toronto Star]
• Battleground Ontario: Tories penetrate last Grit defences in Fortress Toronto [The Canadian Press]
• NDP wave takes Parkdale-High Park [Globe and Mail]

(Images: Kennedy, morecoffeeplease; Volpe, ycanada_news; Dryden, watchmojo; Silva, MarioSilva.ca)

(Image: Danielle Scott)

Not long ago, it seemed as though brew and gastropubs were on the rise in Toronto, but a couple of recent closures are giving us pause. While My Place’s failure might be attributed to its west end location and size, many are shocked to hear that downtown brew pub Duggan’s Brewery has also shut its doors.

Rumours of the closure started on Tuesday morning, when a lease-termination notice for “non-payment of rent” was found on the pub’s boarded-up front doors. Over on the forum at The Bar Towel, an Ontario craft beer website, news of a possible reopening was mentioned. The Toronto Star’s beer writer Josh Rubin confirmed over Twitter that owner Mike Duggan was hoping to reopen later in the week, and was forced to shut down “because [the] landlord made a mistake.” However, last night sommelier Ben Shillow (Oliver and Bonacini) let the news slip of Duggan’s permanent closure, followed shortly by Duggan’s official announcement this afternoon.

While the loss of the brew pub is sad news for the city’s beer scene, fans of Duggan’s popular No. 9 can rest assured that the award-winning India Pale Ale will still be brewed at Etobicoke’s Cool Brewing Co. and carried at bars, restaurants and the LCBO. One more note of hope comes from Graham Duncan, a sales rep with Duggan’s Brewery, who noted that some “very good news regarding a second beer” will be released in the very near future. Still, it feels like the end of a brief era.

• Duggan’s Brewery Closure Confirmed To Be Permanent [Canadian Beer News]
• Duggan’s Brewery – Downtown Location – Officially Closed [Great Canadian Beer Blog]

The snoozer: Ontario’s budget goes over like a light breeze

Perhaps the first thing to say about yesterday’s Ontario budget is that it perfectly embodies the government of Dalton McGuinty: no surprises, nothing terribly showy, just a hope that incremental progress in certain areas and doubling down on the two biggies for any province (health care and education) will win the Liberals re-election. The problem for us is that there’s nothing here for cities. We set out to write a blog post about what’s in the budget for Toronto, but really and truly, there’s bupkis—unless you count a little bit of an eff-you to Etobicoke. From the Globe and Mail:

Of a handful of Toronto-specific announcements in the budget, the biggest of all is a cut: canceling construction on the $181-million Toronto West Courthouse slated for the old Westwood Theatre lands in Mayor Rob Ford’s backyard of Etobicoke.

The site was city land purchased by the province on the promise a criminal court would go up within five years.

“We want our land back,” said Peter Milczyn, Councillor for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, where the courthouse sits idle at the intersection of Bloor and Dundas Streets. “It’s disappointing. This was to be the catalyst towards redeveloping these lands and creating a healthy mixed-use area. If the deal’s off, we should get it back and move on with other plans.”

It’s hard to imagine the vanilla McGuinty government doing something out of spite, but this is all of course happening in the context of Mayor Ford’s threat to turn out “Ford Nation” if he didn’t get what he wanted from Queen’s Park. The budget is so boring we’re tempted to read this as the beginning of a throwdown, just to get our pulse up.

• Not much for Toronto in Ontario budget [Globe and Mail]
• City relieved province left money untouched [Toronto Sun]
• Ontario budget highlights [Toronto Star]