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(Image: The Beer Store)
The Ontario beer chain owned by Labatt, Molson and Sleeman’s is completely revamping four GTA locations—College and Bathurst, Parliament and Winchester, Danforth and Greenwood and Hopedale Mall in Oakville—as part of a pilot program to test a new, more modern appeal.
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By Jan Wong | Photo Illustration by Bradley Reinhardt
(Photographs: Demonstrators by Aaron Vincent; Kathleen Wynne by CP Images)
The school year is coming to a close, and not a moment too soon. It’s been an ugly one. Queen’s Park forced new labour contracts onto Ontario’s teacher unions. Teachers fought back by scrubbing extracurriculars for the better part of the year. And many tax-paying parents are incensed that their kids got shafted in the bargain.
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Each area code in Toronto comes with its own set of stereotypes that—rightly or wrongly—circulate with remarkable persistence. When Toronto and the rest of the GTA each get a new area code next month (437 and 365, respectively), the trash-talk hierarchy will only get more baroque. As Maestro has revealed no plans for a “416/647/437/905/289/365 (T.O. Party Anthem),” we offer this handy primer on phone-based bigotry.
Sandra Pupatello was McGuinty’s pit bull for eight years before decamping to the private sector. Now she’s back, gunning for his seat, and fierce as ever
You’re trying to take over the Liberal party at a perilous time. The province has a $14.4-billion deficit and a scandal around every corner. What on earth is possessing you
to run?
Politics is in my DNA. There were a number of galvanizing factors, too: the threat that the Liberals might lose the next election, the fact that Ontarians are afraid of losing their jobs and that university grads can’t find work in their fields.
You were an MPP for 16 years. A year and a half ago, when the Liberals were polling badly, you left to work at PricewaterhouseCooper. Suddenly McGuinty quits and you’re back. Are people wrong to see you as an opportunist?
I wasn’t considering a run until party members started calling me. Plus, leading the province won’t be easy. We’re in for some
tough times.
You were McGuinty’s pit bull—“a scrapper,” as you’ve put it. Where does that moxie come from?
When I started as an MPP in 1995, there weren’t very many women. If you didn’t stand up for yourself they shoved you out of the way, and I couldn’t let that happen. I’m a daughter of Italian immigrants. I’m from Windsor, and people associate me with a tough city. I wear that like a badge of honour.
In your 20s, you were a cashier at A&P—
Damn straight. And I was good! My manager called me Speedy Gonzalez because I’d whip customers through. Later, when I was campaigning door to door, I knew lots of constituents from those days. I could usually recall their grocery lists, too.
The backroom politicking ahead of this month’s Liberal leadership convention is now feverishly underway, with rival candidates quietly meeting in restaurants, bars and each other’s homes, trying to establish alliances in the seven-way race. During the convention, the lowest-ranked candidate after each ballot must drop out, and usually throws his or her support behind a remaining hopeful, making this early, behind-the-scenes maneuvering all-important. That’s why would-be premier Glen Murray is unleashing his secret weapon: homemade lasagna, most recently deployed for a home meeting with rival hopeful Sandra Pupatello. It’s not quite as crazy it sounds: no less than British prime minister David Cameron has wooed politicians with a cheesy plate of pasta. However, Murray did acknowledge he may need another trick (or a nice carpaccio) to win the majority—he’s currently sitting in a distant fourth place. [Toronto Star]
(Images: Glen Murray and Sandra Pupatello, Facebook; lasagna, Randolph Croft)
A wine rack at a Portland, Oregon grocery store (Image: Rebecca Wilson)
On New Year’s Eve, the Ministry of Finance announced that, at long last, grocery stores will be able to sell liquor—but not in the freewheeling, wine-shelf-in-every-Metro manner that many Ontario drinkers wanted. Instead, the LCBO will be setting up about 10 “LCBO Express” locations across the province over the next 12 to 18 months. The shops will be staffed by LCBO employees and sell products from the normal LCBO roster. The liquor monopoly also has plans for five “VQA Destination Boutiques” inside existing LCBO locations that will focus on an expanded selection of Ontario VQA wines. It’s not clear, however, whether the Toronto area will see any such stores. A ministry spokesperson told The Dish that the LCBO Express and VQA Destination Boutiques would only be appearing in “areas with growing demand but a somewhat under-serviced market.” Under-serviced is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, but with over 70 LCBO locations in Toronto—plus dozens of Beer Stores, Wine Racks and other grandfathered winery stores—we’re not holding our breath.
I will not be buying champagne for my New Year’s celebration. You can’t beat French bubbly for ostentatious luxury, but for great value and taste, my money is on Ontario sparkling wine at half the price. Niagara and Prince Edward County share the same climate, limestone-based soils and grape varieties as the Champagne region of northern France, so the conditions are ideal for homegrown bubbly. What Ontario lacks are the old vineyards and multiple generations of winemaking experience. However, a crew of talented Canadian winemakers, including French-trained Jean-Pierre Colas of 13th Street and Frédéric Picard of Huff Estates, are now making non-vintage bruts and sparkling rosés using a classic French technique known as méthode champenoise. These bottles are on LCBO shelves now, along with a few longer-aged, vintage-dated bubblies. I tasted two dozen of them and was exceedingly impressed by their taut, mineral-driven elegance. Here, my picks for ringing in the New Year like a locavore.
(Image: George Pimentel)
During his nine years as premier, Dalton McGuinty displayed a magical ability to maintain the squeaky clean persona of Premier Dad—that smiling paternalist whose ramrod-straight affect evoked a grown-up Michael Cera in a suit—while all hell broke loose around him. The eHealth boondoggle may have cost David Caplan his cabinet post and spiked George Smitherman’s run for mayor, but it never stuck to McGuinty. The same goes for the ORNGE scandal, from which McGuinty walked away with hardly a scratch. Over the past few months, Energy Minister Chris Bentley has become the public face of the cancelled power plants fiasco, and Education Minister Laurel Broten has morphed into the teachers’ favourite super-villain. Of course, you don’t stay premier for three terms without knowing how to bob and weave, but McGuinty’s decision to lock up the legislature as he stepped down was the first time he’s taken a direct hit for his party rather than the other way around. The unions will eventually settle, the Liberals will elect a new leader, and life will go on. McGuinty’s lasting image as premier, however, will be marred by the ignominious way he went out.
(Image: Communitech Photos)
We’ve never really thought of Dalton McGuinty as a big-surprises kind of guy, but Premier Dad shocked the province last night by announcing his resignation as party leader—and the prorogation of the legislature. Today, most of Toronto is speculating about why McGuinty stepped down, and where, politically, the province goes from here. We rounded up the main threads of the discussion, including who might replace him, whether McGuinty has federal leadership aspirations and what Rob Ford thinks about it all.
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(Illustration: Jack Dylan)
Gamay is often known as the grape that makes lowly beaujolais nouveau, the gassy juice that’s sold only weeks after the grapes are picked. However, top-notch gamay can be silky, fruity and rich, yet light—the perfect red for late-summer evenings. The best ones in the world come from 10 cru villages strung out along the slopes of Beaujolais, where 99 per cent of the vineyards are devoted to gamay. The 2009 and 2010 vintages from these appellations are excellent, and the LCBO has released some great buys under $20 at Vintages. Here in Ontario, winemakers plant gamay because it ripens early and ought to be a winner in our short growing season. In a tasting of gamays from Beaujolais, Niagara and Prince Edward County, however, I found our local editions were thin and joyless by comparison, likely due to cooler temperatures. The trick to buying good Ontario gamay, then, is finding a hot vintage; luckily, 2010 was warm and long, and it’s on LCBO shelves now. Here are my favourites, from France to Niagara.
A sojourn to Northern Ontario used to mean grabbing a sleeping bag and a can of beans and roughing it in the woods, all in the name of character building. Today, high-end camps offer perks that sound like something out of a brochure for a four-star resort. Here, a glimpse at life as a modern-day camp kid.
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The woods are supposed to be romantic. Our collective national identity depends on it. Remember those youthful summers at camp, where we learned how to do the J-stroke (and how to make out)? Or the northern lights? Or those Coureur de Bois Heritage Moment commercials? For urbanites whose idea of roughing it is ordering rare venison at a restaurant or looking in the windows of Mountain Equipment Co-op, Mother Nature can be a hard sell. But glamour and camping don’t have to be mutually exclusive—there’s a host of products available to make the woods just a little bit friendlier. What follows is an urbanist’s guide to not roughing it in the bush. Read the rest of this entry »
(Image: Ian McKellar)
The Toronto Star recently took a close look at the competition for the GTA casino, squeezing details out of insiders at MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment and some of the other mega-companies hoping to secure the contract. And the competition is fierce—one source called a development gambling’s “biggest opportunity in the world right now,” while another, working for one of the big players, estimates his client will have shelled out $2 million by the end of the bidding process (apparently, lobbyists, polls and focus groups are expensive). Interestingly, MGM has reportedly suggested it would help pay for a long-overdue rebuild of Ontario Place if given the go-ahead to build a casino across the bridge at Exhibition Place, and Caesars has expressed interest in a similar plan. Still, before the cash-strapped province can avail itself of that cash, it has to convince Toronto city council of a couple of things: a) that a casino in the city is a good idea; and b) that it should go on the waterfront. And lately, the province has seemed less willing to insist upon either of those points. Read the entire story [Toronto Star] »
Despite the recent peak in interest (and consumption) of Ontario craft beers, one crucial component of those brews is seldom made locally: the hops. Now, a new craft beer competition put on by the Ontario Hop Growers’ Association will see Ontario brewers (and Brewmaster students) using regionally-grown hops in the hopes that it will encourage future partnerships between brewers and farmers. (While Ontario breweries aren’t necessarily opposed to the use of Ontario-grown hops, the crop was in short supply a few years back, forcing breweries to rely on imports from the U.S. and central Europe.) About 15 beers will face off next February in Niagara Falls to get things hopping (sorry). [The Great Ontario-Hopped Craft Beer Competition]
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