Morning Brew: Bob Barker will pay to move our elephants, expect a green Christmas in Toronto, a look at the city's forensic artists, chatting with Gary Wright, and TTC fares compared to other cities
Bob Barker will pay for Toronto's elephants to come on down to California. The retired game show host will apparently pay out of pocket to move the three remaining African elephants to their new sanctuary in March or April either by Boeing C-17 aircraft or by truck, and the whole thing will cost around $200,000.
With his impending March retirement, The Grid talks with the city's chief planner, Gary Wright, about his highest achievement (Yonge-Dundas Square), Doug Ford's Ferris Wheel idea (Wright says he thinks "council made the right decision by saying, 'Hold on, this needs to be investigated further.'") and his favourite Toronto building (he doesn't have one, but he does love City Hall).
If you're dreaming of a White Christmas, you can quit it because we're not getting one. According to Environment Canada, expect colder temperatures and sunny skies on the weekend with some rain beforehand. Of course, Mother Nature does have a way of proving meteorologists wrong from time to time though another Snowmageddon seems unlikely.
There's an art to bringing the city's dead to life. Not in some Beetlejuice way, but in the manner that forensic artists do by creating sketches and models that approximate how a dead person may have looked in life. With just information on the person's age, height, and weight, a forensic artist can construct a sketch or a sculpture of the person, a process that usually takes a few months.
In case you missed it, according to an analysis by a guest contributor that we published on the weekend, the TTC is the most expensive transit system in North America. Is this a matter of poor fiscal management or a lack of governmental funding?
IN BRIEF:
Photo by yedman in the blogTO Flickr pool
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