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The comprehensive index of every blog post, magazine story and restaurant review that appears on Torontolife.com
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Tuesday’s launch of RIM’s PlayBook tablet failed to generate the hordes of tech-hungry, frothing-at-the-mouth geeks that are de rigueur at Apple events (see: 2, iPad). Tech critics, it seems, echoed consumers’ blasé reaction by sending out a resounding “meh.” The general consensus seems be that this tablet is solid, but not sensational. Here, a roundup of some of the key reactions to the BlackBerry maker’s newest contraption.
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In this election campaign, some things are a lot easier for the Conservatives than for the Liberals—not the least of which being that they don’t have to worry about surrounding Harper with previous Tory prime ministers for campaign help. Brian Mulroney is still thought to be radioactive, and Joe Clark was last seen urging people to vote Liberal. The Grits have no doubt been debating whether to let Michael Ignatieff stand on his own or be surrounded by former Liberal champions. This week’s news suggests they’ve decided on the latter. Hot on the heels of a Paul Martin appearance in B.C., the Liberals will be bringing out the p’tit gars de Shawinigan himself, Jean Chrétien.
There’s some actual news in this report from Sun scribe Brian Lilley: beyond simply providing moral support, Michael Ignatieff actually worked with the U.S. military to help minimize civilian deaths during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that Ignatieff, one of the most prominent voices in the U.S. at the time, lent his support in other ways, but for the record, the Sun reports:
One of the top officials in Air Command cited Ignatieff’s work in helping the military ready comprehensive plans to mitigate collateral damage while preparing for the invasion.
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Awards season may be over, but the (soon to come) warm weather marks another cause for celebration: music festival season. Canada hosts its fair share of festivals—Osheaga in Montreal, the one-off but decidedly epic Pemberton Festival in B.C.—but we care most about Toronto’s own North by Northeast, which just announced a second wave of bands for its 17th edition, taking place at various locations around the city from June 13 to 19.
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Elections are crazy times for many reasons, but one of our favourite parts of any big election is the onslaught of thousands of amateur video producers armed with little more than a laptop and a YouTube account. How is Canada’s latest election measuring up on this score? Here are some examples we’ve found that don’t involve works copyrighted by Yoko Ono.
Rob Ford’s plan to privatize garbage collection everywhere west of Yonge Street contains one little detail that is driving his opponents crazy: city council won’t get the final say on which firm gets the contract. Instead, the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee is asking council to delegate that decision to the Bid Committee. Predictably, the idea of voting themselves out of work isn’t sitting well with Ford’s opposition, and yet another the-very-fabric-of-our-democracy-is-at-stake slapfight is brewing.
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Imagine, imagine, we can imagine (Image: Jon Curnow)
Finally, transit infrastructure has made it into the federal election news cycle. NDP leader Jack Layton was in Quebec today, where he told an audience that he supports federal funding for high-speed rail along the Quebec City-Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-Windsor corridor. Ontario and Quebec have had this on their wish lists for some time. The Liberals have put it in their platform, Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest both support it, and now an ascendant NDP is getting behind it as well. Apparently the only one who isn’t a fan is Stephen Harper.
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The land occupied by the Hearn Generating station, right, has potential as an NFL stadium site (Image: Scott Snider, from the Toronto Life Flickr pool)
Just what do Rob Ford and his brother Doug want to do with the city’s shoreline? There’s been a lot of speculation about this since the pair started lobbing spitballs at Waterfront Toronto, the development body charged with sprucing up the derelict portlands. Last week, Doug shone some light on his plans when he told the Globe’s Marcus Gee that he dreamed of erecting, among other things, an NFL football stadium (and a monorail!).
As others have pointed out, there’s a bunch of problems with this idea. For starters, the plot of land Ford suggested as the site of the new stadium is the Hearn power station, currently owned by the Ontario government. But more fundamentally, NFL stadiums have a terrible track record in cities. How terrible? If the current NFL lockout lasts through to fall, leaving U.S. football stadiums sitting empty for months, some cities might actually be better off. NFL home games are such money-losers that the city of Oakland, having financed the stadium’s upkeep, would be better off if the Raiders didn’t even play.
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Today is launch day for the much-ballyhooed Sun News Network. The road to this point has been long one. From bringing on Kory Teneycke to quasi-firing him to bringing him back again to applying for CRTC favours and being denied and losing some on-air talent along the way, the network has struggled the get itself up and running. But with a federal election underway, the network needed to get on the air in the next two weeks if it wanted to cash in on the heightened attention. Just one problem: Sun News is going to be missed in about half the homes in this country.
Toronto’s infamous gridlock (Image: Michael Gil)
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities has a problem: it’s all about cities, but cities are off the electoral radar. Considering that 80 per cent of Canadians live in urban areas, it seems a bit odd that “city” issues are seen as less of a campaign-winner than catering to the very old or the merely old. The FCM isn’t standing idly by, though. According to the Globe and Mail, the organization is attempting to put cities on the agenda by addressing a problem most voters deal with on a daily basis—gridlock.
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Gerard Kennedy and Peggy Nash are slugging it out in Parkdale-High Park (Images: John Michael McGrath)
Like so many ridings in the 416, Parkdale-High Park is hosting a showdown between the Liberals and the NDP while the Tories and the Greens duke it out for third place. What’s odd about this district, however, is that it might actually change hands on May 2—and both of the viable candidates have “re-elect” signs (the NDP put orange tape over the “re-” without being forced to the way the Liberals were elsewhere). Liberal incumbent Gerard Kennedy took Parkdale-High Park from the NDP’s Peggy Nash in 2008 by 3,000 votes, and Nash is back for a rematch. Like in Trinity-Spadina—the one other downtown riding that may swing—this is a fight between the left and the really left. The knives aren’t out, but the fight is interesting nonetheless, especially with the NDP’s numbers on the rise across the country. Here, we talk to Kennedy and Nash about what’s at stake for Parkdale-High Park.
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One of the elephants at the Toronto Zoo (Image: Day Trips Canada, day-trips.ca)
Former Price is Right host and noted animal rights activist Bob Barker has a new bevy of beauties on his mind: the elephants at the Toronto Zoo. The Toronto Star reports that the 88-year-old celeb is in town this week to encourage officials to shut down the zoo’s elephant enclosure and let the three surviving elephants live out their lives at a northern California sanctuary. The zoo currently houses three female African elephants—Thika, Toka and Iringa—and has taken nothing off the table in its discussions of what to do with them in the coming years.
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An opinion piece with an opening like that is destined to raise a few eyebrows—and some blood pressure outside of the 416—but the Toronto Star went there. The paper isn’t just being obnoxious, though. It presents an argument by a trio of University of Toronto academics, who say that all cities have been ignored during the election campaign so far. T.O.’s specialness is beside the point.
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City hall by night (Image: James Burry, from the Toronto Life Flickr pool)
The City of Toronto has a lot of committees, so it may be tempting to cheer when a small-government mayor like Rob Ford announces he’s going to do get rid of a slew of them. The problem is that he’s not shutting down some committee that spends a massive amount of money—he’s shutting down the free ones. According to the Toronto Star, city workers are recommending that council disband committees that have no budget and are full of volunteers. Suspiciously enough, the committees that staffers say we should axe are the ones that don’t jive with Ford’s agenda—the ones that are meant to give a formal voice to pedestrians, cyclists, Aboriginals and people working to help drug addicts. In other words, the polar opposites of the denizens of Ford Nation.
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Charlie Sheen poses with a fan (Image: justaufo)
Finding intern postings on-line is nothing new, but this particular opportunity certainly is: Charlie Sheen’s personal social media intern. Two Canadians are still in the running for the position, which Sheen initially announced on Twitter, stressing that the successful candidate would be #winning and have #tigerblood. Of the 82,000 applicants, apparently only 50 have these Sheen-friendly qualities, and among them are Sepy Bazzazi from Vancouver and Phil Pallen, formerly of Belleville.
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