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Toronto Life - The Wire

The comprehensive index of every blog post, magazine story and restaurant review that appears on Torontolife.com

All stories relating to policy

The Informer

Political Whoas

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Mission: Possible? Mammoliti’s crusade to cut funding for any Toronto group with a political message

Dare we say—Giorgio Mammoliti-inspired political art? (Image: Shaun Merritt)

While Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti’s guerilla tactics at Saturday’s Dyke March left us both scratching and shaking our head in disbelief, we’re even more incredulous over what has happened since. Mammoliti initially took issue with the inclusion of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in this year’s Pride Festival in Toronto, but now, alongside Councillor James Pasternak, he appears to be campaigning to restrict public funding for events or entities that have any political bent whatsoever. Earlier this week, the politician who once advocated for legal brothels on Toronto Island decreed that the city, essentially, shouldn’t be funding any kind of political messaging at all, playing the good ol’ taxpayer card.

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The Dish

Pantry Raid

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Queen’s Park takes a cue from Ottawa, demurs on fast-food calorie labels

We’ve mentioned from time to time the Canadian government’s curious efforts to keep us all eating plenty of salt. A weekend story from the Toronto Star details how it’s the kind of game that the provinces can get in on too. Specifically Ontario, which is trying to figure out how to deal with the oldest and most obese population it has ever seen. The province has pretty clearly ruled out even the blandest of regulations to help Ontarians control their weight.

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The Informer

Cityscape

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Ontario continues not to care about how Toronto looks

Soon the Pink Palace’s vista may not be so pretty (Image: Sam)

One of the sleepiest of sleepy controversies in this city surrounds (almost literally) the legislature at Queen’s Park. The issue at hand is the north-facing vista of the parliament buildings, and the problem is that the more condo towers are erected along Bloor Street, the more the Ontario legislature’s scenic backdrop looks cluttered and unsightly. Local activists—namely, the Ontario Capital Precinct Working Group (OCPWG)—have been trying to bring the matter to the province’s attention ever since the Ontario Municipal Board permitted another set of vista-sullying high-rises at 21 Avenue Road, but so far their efforts have yielded basically bupkis.

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The Informer

Election Whoas

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The Sun reminds voters that Michael Ignatieff supported the Iraq War—just like Stephen Harper did

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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The Informer

The New Normal

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Big TV wants the CRTC to force Netflix to act like a broadcaster

Because everyone needs another reason to hate Bell: the telecom giant and new owner of CTV Globemedia is among the legacy broadcasters that are lobbying the CRTC to start regulating Netflix Canada as if it were a broadcaster. That’s right, Big TV thinks Netflix should be forced to do the pricey things broadcasters have had to do for decades, like produce Canadian content.

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The Informer

War on Fun

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Pride Festival still in Mammoliti’s crosshairs despite city staff declining to call “Israeli Apartheid” hate speech

Protesters at Pride 2009 (Image: Neal Jennings)

One of the actions the city has undertaken in relation to the annual Pride Festival is to ask its staff to determine if the use of the words “Israeli Apartheid” constitutes hate speech. The term was at the centre of controversy last year when the group Queers United Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) was banned and then un-banned from the Pride Toronto Parade. Yesterday, the city staff concluded that, under criminal law and provincial human rights rules, QuAIA is not engaging in hate speech. Case closed? Hardly. Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti and others on council are now threatening to pull not only Pride Toronto’s grant, but also its city-provided police and cleanup crews, if QuAIA is allowed to march. “We don’t support hate groups, that’s our view. If they want to march in the parade, then we won’t fund them,” said councillor Doug Ford, according to the Post.

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The Informer

My Name Is Lucre

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With Bell backing down on Internet billing, it just might not become an election issue (but it probably should be)

The hordes of angry Internet users who were outraged about the CRTC’s decision on usage-based billing (UBB) chalked up a minor win yesterday. Bell announced a new pricing plan that would allow independent Internet service providers to buy wholesale access in large chunks without having to pass on the caps and overage charges Bell was insisting on. (The previous policy could have been summed up as “do what we say and thank us for the privilege.”) Many observers, however, say it’s not enough.

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The Dish

Bottoms Up

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Battle of the bulge: committee to debate ban on pop sales at city-owned facilities

(Image: Kate Ter Harr)

Toronto’s Government Management Committee is going to debate whether or not to allow the sales of obesity-abetting pop on city property. The policy was first proposed last year, under the David Miller administration, but we already know how the new mayor feels about the whole thing. Last year, according to The Globe, Rob Ford called the ban “the most ludicrous idea I’ve ever heard. If kids want a pop, they’ll cross the street, go to a plaza and buy a pop.”

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The Informer

Election Whoas

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What would budget proposals look like if Ottawa made sense? Two think tanks’ adventures in coherence

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) today released the Alternative Budget, its annual exercise in make-believe, where the left-wing group conjures up a budget that the government of the day—be it Liberal or Conservative—regularly ignores. This year’s alt-budget is, we’ll wager, likely headed for the same fate as all the previous ones, given what the details are: rolling back corporate tax cuts, establishing two new tax brackets for high-income earners, cancelling the F-35 fighter jets and imposing a national carbon tax and a new 28 per cent tax rate for the oil sands. “The money saved and generated could go into programs that would create new jobs, reduce income disparity, rebuild infrastructure, improve pension benefits and help the environment,” reports the Globe and Mail.

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The Informer

Streetcar Named Disaster

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CrackBerry crackdown: TTC throwing book at drivers using cellphones (but nobody’s sure what, exactly, is happening)

Nobody likes to see TTC operators breaking the law by using cellphones while they drive, but the headlines this morning suggest that the friendly local transit commission may be going too far in the other direction, cracking down on TTC operators for using their phones in ways that don’t break traffic laws. According to the Toronto Star, TTC union president Bob Kinnear claims that the commission is going to “ridiculous” lengths to keep drivers from using mobiles on the job—“including disciplining employees for making calls on their break.”

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The Informer

Ford Focus

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First poll since the election gives Rob Ford a 60 per cent approval rating—but people love his policies even more

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.

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The Informer

Ford Focus

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Rob Ford’s talking points discovered! Toronto’s slide towards political parties continues apace

Nice catch by OpenFile here: a copy of the talking points that the mayor’s office has been sending to all its allies on council. As Jonathan Goldsbie notes, these sorts of talking points aren’t new; David Miller passed around talking points to council as well. The difference here is that Miller’s talking points were (mostly) distributed to the whole council, while Ford’s talking points are only getting circulated to his allies. After the jump, a quick summary of the ways in which Rob Ford’s city budget is awesome, courtesy of Rob Ford.

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The Informer

The Feds

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Report: Tony Clement beats Stephen Harper on Twitter; most MPs are still pre-2002


Twitter awaits its time to shine on Parliament Hill (Image: scazon)

How do modern politics and social media mix? Not well, it seems. A new report by digital public affairs strategist and self-proclaimed “thought-leader” Mark Blevis looks at some of the main forms of social media and how they’re being used by politicians in Ottawa.  The verdict isn’t great: few MPs have so much as a Twitter account, and most who do mainly use it to spam their followers with press releases. One exception to this rule is Tony Clement, something that won’t be a surprise to his legion of 10,638 followers.

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The Informer

Mayor May Not

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Where are they now? Catching up with Toronto’s former mayoral candidates

As Rocco Rossi reminded us with his surprise announcement last week, the candidates of the 2010 mayoral race, who so preoccupied Toronto’s politics watchers for nearly a year, have moved on to other things. So what have the five former frontrunners been doing since election day? Here, a quick visit with each of them.

The Informer

My Name Is Lucre

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Measured against other countries, are Canadians getting hosed by their ISPs? Let’s compare

One of the biggest questions raised by this week’s usage-based billing fracas is whether Canadians are getting ripped off by their Internet service providers (ISPs). The problem is that comparing Internet service between countries raises all sorts of apples-to-oranges objections—regulations are different, infrastructure is different, markets are different. We’ve put together a chart with three factors (cost, speed, location) that should give an idea of what a dollar can get you in different countries around the world. The fairest comparison is between Canadian and American ISPs, but we’ve included several European countries to give a wider view, and a couple of Asian countries just to make ourselves cry. Oh, and Australia.

Our comparisons, after the jump.

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