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(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.
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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.
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(Image: Derek Shapton)
Come winter, al fresco activities tend to go into the deep freeze. Heads down, we scurry along grey streets, grimacing as frigid puddles breach the fragile barriers of supposedly waterproof boots. It can be hard to stay positive, let alone active, which is why we love the Colonel Sam Smith Ice Trail. It’s a 250-metre, figure-eight-shaped skating path in south Etobicoke, and it’s putting real smiles on pale February faces. Read the rest of this entry »
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The CBC is reporting that Doug Ford, the mayor’s brother and occasional stand-in when reporters can’t get a quote from the mayor’s office, is not going to run for Tim Hudak’s provincial Tories as he had previously mused he might. According the CBC, the Fords have their work cut out for them at city hall, and Doug is sticking around to help his brother fight the good fight.
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According to Inside Toronto, a movement is growing in Etobicoke to rename Woodford Park after late musician and Etobicoke resident Jeff Healey. Former bandmate and childhood friend Rob Quail is the organizing force behind the proposal. He feels that renaming Woodford to commemorate his friend will allow Healey’s memory to live on in the same community where the musician grew up and spent his adult life raising a family. Part of this movement includes fundraising—with a possible benefit concert—that will go toward installing equipment for the visually impaired, since Healey himself was blind.
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Rob Ford won the 2010 election with 47 per cent of the vote, and has since entered a nice stretch of political honeymoon, where he’s eliminated the Vehicle Registration Tax, blown up Transit City and frozen the city’s property taxes. So how do people like him? According to a new poll [PDF] from Forum Research, pretty well: 60 per cent of respondents told the pollster they approved of his job so far.
Stephen Harper (Image: WEF)
Yesterday, Conservative MPs streamed out of Ottawa and across the country to tout the spending they’d done under the Canadian Economic Action! Plan (or CEA!P, in Kady O’Malley’s preferred abbreviation). As announcement after announcement was made, we couldn’t help but notice a not-so-curious hole in their plans: there were no events in Toronto proper. According to lists compiled by both CBC’s O’Malley and Sun Media reporter David Akin, there are a few announcements from the GTA—Mississauga, Newmarket, Milton—but bupkis for the 416.
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Doug Ford (Image: toronto.ca)
Rumours are abounding that the mayor’s brother, Doug Ford, is being courted by the provincial Tories under Tim Hudak—and Ford isn’t ruling it out. According to the Toronto Star, his only response when asked about the rumours was “Never say never.”
From the Star’s report:
Sources say Ford seriously considered the idea during a Florida getaway before Christmas but came to the conclusion he wanted to stay and help his brother bring fiscal accountability to city hall.
He is seen as a huge asset to the mayor, who has avoided the media spotlight while his big brother steps forward to push their smaller-government, do-more-with-less agenda.
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We've been expecting you, privatization: the smell of the garbage strike still lingers (Image: Alfred Ng, from the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)
The last time the Toronto Sun ran a cover story based on an exclusive from the mayor’s office, it was that Rob and Doug Ford were dreaming the impossible dream of bringing an NFL team to Toronto—an idea that not even the Sun’s sports columnist took seriously. But sometimes there’s more important news to break, and this morning it was the Sun that reported that the mayor’s office is moving early to privatize garbage collection in the city.
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Middle-class life isn’t what it used to be. Thanks to a heated real estate market, a strong dollar, new taxes and stagnating incomes, Toronto has become, improbably, one of the world’s most expensive cities. Is it worth it?
(Illustration by Julien Pacaud; skyline photo by Brian Summers)
Today, an average Saturday, I spent the following: $6 on a round-trip TTC ride; about $17 on groceries from the Wychwood Barns farmers’ market (organic Crispin apples, an olive boule and free-range eggs); $34 on two bottles of wine (one decent, one plonk); almost $20 on the recent Superchunk CD and $11 on toiletries. Lunch was cheap and simple: a peanut butter sandwich, an apple and a few spoonfuls of raspberry yogurt. Dinner was free: homemade rice-and-bean burritos at a friend’s house. On the way home from that modest dinner party, waiting forever for the Dufferin bus, I almost splurged on a cab, but it seemed wasteful. Then I got home and booked a flight to New York on Porter for a friend’s 40th birthday: another $326. There’s also what I spend on my mortgage, property taxes, insurance, utilities, cellphone, Internet, YMCA membership, charitable donations and credit card debt. All of that adds up to roughly $65 a day. So, as a childless, home-owning, not-terribly-extravagant-but-not-entirely-miserly-either Torontonian, this one day at the tail end of 2010 cost me—not counting the airfare, which, for argument’s sake, I’m setting aside as an exceptional expense—about $153.
That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s about $20 more than what I make every day, after taxes. And it leaves nothing, obviously, for home repairs, clothing, vet bills, investments, medical expenses, birthday presents, savings, recreational drugs, holidays or the kid that Liz, my fiancée, and I have been talking about having this year but which, if things continue in this fashion, we’ll have to postpone having until we get jobs that net us more than $50,000 each a year. Read the rest of this entry »
We can’t imagine why Karen Stintz, who’s got work up to her eyeballs with the restructuring of the TTC under Rob Ford’s Transportation City plan, wants to pick another fight. But some councillors are able to multi-task better than us, we suppose. Stintz’s new project is to crack down on cyclists who ride their bikes on sidewalks. She’s requesting ideas on a new approach from police and civic staff.
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ADDRESS: 100 North Drive
NEIGHBOURHOOD: Edenbridge–Humber Valley
AGENT: Angela Lynn Jones, Re/Max Professionals Inc.
PRICE: $2,175,000
THE PLACE: Set on a truly massive 100-by-300-foot lot, this Edenbridge property combines a sleek, ’70s design with 21st-century amenities. The sloped ceilings, open layout and one-of-a-kind windows allow for unusual (but beautiful) natural light.
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Toronto was pretty excited about winning the competition to host the 2015 Pan American Games, and why not? It wasn’t the Olympics, sure, but that just means one less hemisphere for a hypothetical mayor to hypothetically embarrass our city in. The problem with early jubilation is that reality usually rains on the parade. One of the it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren’t-serious issues was whether Hamilton would get its act together in time to build a new stadium for the games—something that was brewing for months and settled only last week. Now it looks like problems with the Games have moved down the QEW to Toronto itself, with Rob Ford and city council being handed a new, surprise bill for land cleanup in Scarborough. Guess what? It’s more than expected.
(Images: Jeremy Laing by Thomas Kletecka/Collective Edit; high heel courtesy of Alexander McQueen; bow tie courtesy of Band of Outsiders; jeans courtesy of Nudie Jeans Co.; zip-up courtesy of Puma; kids’ boot courtesy of Geox; )
For Straight-from-SoHo Fashion
Crowds huddled in Ossington’s doorways are a familiar sight, but nothing compares to the sidewalk jams that form when Jonathan and Olivia owner Jackie O’Brien holds her biannual sales (starting on Boxing Day and again in June or July). Cool kids, designers, ad execs and artsy-leaning scions flock here for deconstructed hipster wear from Manhattan, Sweden and the U.K., by the likes of Alexander Wang, Rag and Bone, Band of Outsiders, Engineered Garments, and Wings and Horns. All up to 50 per cent off. E-mail info@jonathanandolivia.com to get on the list.
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Toronto retail veteran Elsa Reia was hosting sample sales long before they were in vogue, which explains her all-star roster of designer brands: apparel, accessories and footwear from Alexander McQueen, Rick Owens, Dries Van Noten, Miu Miu, Martin Margiela, Lanvin, Isabel Marant and more. The blowout runs over two days in April and October. Expect a variety of sizes and inventory, from recent and past seasons, marked down by 70 per cent or more. E-mail info@reiastudio.com to sign up.
The place: Sneaky Dee’s. The people: Degrassi’s Raymond Ablack and Skins’ Camille Cresencia-Mills. The subject: post-millennial TV teenagedom
Metaphorical miles away from the tony Upper East Side of Gossip Girl and the palatial hills of 90210, two TV shows are giving viewers a realistic, OMFG-free rendering of adolescent angst. Degrassi (the next generation) has been a teen staple since 2001 and was instrumental in launching the stateside careers of Vampire Diaries hottie Nina Dobrev and rap superstar Drake. Skins, the raunchy BBC series about a group of hard-partying, troubled friends in Bristol, England, quickly scored cult status after its 2007 debut. It was only a matter of time before it headed this way: the North American remake premieres this month. Both shows have won critical and popular acclaim by focusing on what’s really up with high schoolers today. And both shows are known for using young writers, and for casting untested, age-appropriate actors (instead of hard-to-believe 25-year-olds). Ryerson undergrad Raymond Ablack has been portraying Degrassi’s steadfast student body president, Sav, for four seasons. Camille Cresencia-Mills, a senior at the Etobicoke School for the Arts, recently snagged the part of the trumpet-playing prodigy Daisy—Skins’ moral conscience—after attending an open casting call. We got the onscreen goodie-goodies together for a plate of Sneaky Dee’s legendary nachos and listened in.
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