City
Morning Brew: August 26th, 2008
Photo: "Above City Hall" by jonathancastellino, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
Your Toronto morning news roundup for Tuesday August 26th, 2008:
Commuters looking to drive to subway stations and take the transit to work from there may lose their free parking privileges, as the TTC is thinking of cutting the parking perks from their Metropasses. I'm fairly confident you'll be able to find a follow-up post on this issue on the Metronauts blog today.
The listeriosis death toll has climbed to 12, and now you've got more to worry about than just pre-packaged deli meats: restaurants like McDonald's, Mr. Sub, Tim Hortons, and Boston Pizza have all had to remove items from their menus in response to the tainted meat crisis.
Still shopping around for a stable career with lots of perks? Well, with hundreds of police officers able to retire in the next few years, it might be time to visit your local police academy and start getting a bit more fit for a career in law enforcement.
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It may not be everything that we need, but the GTA is expected to receive $529 million from the provincial budget surplus to help fund our infrastructure needs. Granted, that money probably still won't cover our transit expansion goals — much less any other major projects — but it at least sounds like a good start.
A new study by Ekos shows that more and more Canadians are dropping their land lines and opting to solely use their mobile phones. An old study by me showed that none of my friends had land lines two years ago.
With all this talk about the TTC cutting parking perks, it might be easier just to take a cab to work. Especially if that cab releases no emissions like Louis Palmer's solar taxi, which is at the CNE in Toronto for a few days to promote the use of solar technology.
Drug abuse charges, crashed planes: it looks like the Barenaked Ladies are looking to stay in the news this summer, no matter what it takes. In all seriousness, thankfully nobody was seriously hurt when BNL singer Ed Robertson crashed his Cessna on Sunday.
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- Comin' up there this weekend, fortunately, I don't eat at these places, anyway.
As long as the coffee shop next to my hotel doesn't make or flavor their coffee or cookies with deli meat...I'm good
: - )
let's run the list:
-occasional shoot outs
-periodic tasering and/or gaffling of suspects
-repeated toeing of thin blue line
sounds stable to me.
A Pepperoni shortage for a pizza chain could be bad indeed.
An extra $30 a month? People have to pay around $139 a month instead of the usual $109? That's a ridiculous increase at a time when we are trying to encourage people to leave their cars and take public transit.
Parking to the folks who use the metropass isn't free - they are paying for it already with their metropass. The TTC is effectively cutting the benefits of the pass and increasing it's cost.
I'm not going to defend the more extreme actions of certain officers, or debate the morals of currently debated practises, but rather just remind folks that these guys and gals of increasingly broader backgrounds are performing a difficult and dangerous public service.
I'm sure for every jackass with a badge pulling the trigger a little too early, there's at least 3 suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from having to tend to grisly car crashes, and routine child abuse cases.
Fine, let's never stop questioning our appointed authorities, and watchdogging to ensure that they're above reproach -- But smearing them seems a little ill-thought out and knee jerk.
A union wage may look like a fine and stable career, especially up against a lot of other options currently out there today, but for our emergency services professionals, it's anything but.
I'd recommend sitting in for an overnight shift with a Paramedic crew downtown, having to patrol a neighbourhood full of people who loathe and distrust you on a daily basis, or sitting down for a cup of tea with the family of deceased firefighter Bob Leek, in order to see just how "stable" these careers are.
The job is one of erratic shift work, time away from families, stresses on the body and mind, and at times, having to step up to danger in the name of OUR public safety knowing that their personal safety is too often controlled by bullshit politics.
Can we consider that for a few minutes?
Having previously worked with EMS, police, and fire crews pretty heavily during my time managing programs with Toronto Parks & Rec, I will attest that working in emergency services is not a cushy job, and a thankless one at that.
I'll tip my hat to any police officer I meet; that doesn't mean I can't poke fun at them (or any other profession, like the politicians and lawyers, who are also easy targets) from time to time, tongue in cheek.
We're all city folk here busily running around with our heads burrowed in our own lives, and I think this place is a good way to try and open each other's eyes up a bit.
I find it hilarious, if not sad that we're all at our computers with the entire world at our fingertips, and more often than not we live on the same old sites exchanging narrow viewpoints and clashing for entertainment sake.
Don't worry though, it's all love here :)
And if you are even able to take a bus route to the lot, even if it only added 15 min per commute (so 30 min a day), that works out to 15 work days a year worth of extra commute time that you aren't getting paid for.
So either way, for someone making $35k, whether they now pay for the parking or take a bus straight from home, they've essentially still lost their entire vacation pay for the year.
Serotonin, that's a great viewpoint on the parking issue. As much as I hate to hijack this comment thread, I think you need to share that with the people discussing the same issue <a href="http://metronauts.ca/2008/08/26/no-free-parking-at-ttc-lots/";>here on the Metronauts blog</a>. The perspective you offer and the numbers you crunch are still absent from the discussion there.
Tell them I sent you.
individually, I think cops are mainly fine, positive and upstanding people. my problem is with the collective. my experiences and those of my peers - by peers I mean young black males - are not all sunshine and lollipops when it comes to the popo. and I'm not a criminal, never had a conviction and I've never been involved in any serious criminal activity.
but I've had run-ins with cops that could only be chalked up to racist dickhead syndrome.
ticked, I'd recommend being reborn as a black male from Toronto, standing in a parking lot after work and while you're talking to your fellow black male co-worker have a police car come in on the far side, drive past the white dudes you were just tossing a football to, pull up next to you and have the cop riding shotgun (pun intended) lean over and tell you to "Get a job!".
please note that this is the mildest negative interaction I've had with cops. there's a couple I still can't talk about. and they've all shaped and validated my experiences with them.
so yeah, fuck the police. with extra cherries on top.
2. Land lines. I'd rather drop my cellular. Much healthier.