Morning Brew: October 17th, 2008

Photo: "Waiting for its master..." by {Psychic Noise}, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.

What's happening in the GTA:

City Hall employees may soon see two new hires put in place to monitor their excessive personal webbernet use during work hours, in an effort to curb what may amount to $3million in annual lost productivity. Take away their Facecrack, but please don't take away their blogTO. ;)

Toronto residents can expect a 9% increase on water bills in 2009 and similar raises in subsequent years. The city's aging water treatment, delivery, and sewage infrastructure is in desperate need of funds for update and repair, and since there's little money coming from the province or the feds, we'll be paying. Will Torontonians give up that second daily shower, and adopt cottage toilet rules (yellow = mellow, brown = down)? Doubtful.

While water goes up, fuel costs are going down. For the first time since February, gas prices in Toronto have settled down to below one dollar per litre. While we do pay slightly less than the national average, we're still paying significantly more than our neighbours to the south (see graph below).

Toronto Police to TTC: sorry, no more special constables for you! Run an efficient and safe transit system, not a police force of your own.

Epcor to Ontario: sorry, no more massive wind powered electricity project for you! Excessive provincial and municipal red-tape-beurocratic-roadblocking was too much to handle, so they're pulling the plug on a major greener tech project.

Chart from torontogasprices.com.