City
Morning Brew: March 9th, 2009
Photo: "Mayor Miller" by Brendan Lynch, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
Remember the dramatic raids on the infamous Comfort Zone last year? Now owners of the seedy club (go there on a Sunday morning for indisputable confirmation) are fighting back with an $11million harassment lawsuit against the City of Toronto and Councillor Adam Vaughan. The lawsuit claims that the club has been subjected to an unfair, targeted campaign of unlawful, excessive inspection, and intimidation.
GO Transit riders may be facing a small fare hike as soon as this coming Saturday. The fare increase is said to be in line with inflation, and is not so much that the general public is likely to call foul.
Toronto Police are warning the public about potentially unsafe chicken. In what may be the weirdest local case of theft-for-quick-blackmarket-sale I've heard of in a while, its believed that a truckload of chicken breasts was stolen, repackaged, and sold in the city. And there's no guarantee that the thieves followed proper food handling and refrigeration protocol.
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CAW and GM have reached a tentative deal that might save jobs. Making sacrifices that include wage and pension benefit freezes will keep labour costs from increasing, and keep GM breathing in the short term.
People are being urged to shop local. Retailers in the Beach are being hit hard by the recession and small businesses are dropping like flies. It's starting to resemble the section of Bathurst between Bloor & Dupont, an area of the city that one might expect to be doing better than it is, given its location.
Use of the city's food banks is also up since the economy has been tanking, and has Daily Bread concerned about their abilities to help all in need. Things are tougher for everyone, but please continue to give if you can.
And the Toronto Star has updated and improved its neighbourhood maps Google mashup. It was great in version 1.0 and it's even better in version 2.0.
Discussion
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Perhaps we need more reviews and Beaches nominations for the best of Toronto categories? ;)
Ass.
ACTUALLY I took my Dad to see the remaining members of Jefferson Airplane play a supremely intimate show at Comfort (cozo? phffft lol) - too bad the venue is so sketch.
Ticketmaster.ca is now selling Depeche Mode tickets to the show that will be happening at Molson Ampitheatre, only they are "Internet Pre-Sale" tickets. How that differs from normal tickets or TicketsNow tickets, I'll never know.
The presale password is "WRONG", for all the real fans out there.
How a propos. The password describes their business practice! ;)
WHAT A SURPRISE!!!!
This lawsuit is a joke.
Regardless of the "Qualities" that COZO has (good beats etc) its sketchy as hell and is pretty much regarded as a drug den with good music.
Regardless of how you may feel about the place, there have been other sort of nasty places, including Area 51 when it was open.
Just because some people don't like the place however, doesn't give them the right to target it with an obvious offensive to destroy it.
Why aren't TPS and Vaughan targeting the Waverly Hotel above it at the same time, or the Rex and a slew of other places that easily fall within the same sort of profile?
With bullets flying elsewhere in the Entertainment district, the concerted effort to eliminate the Comfort Zone, rather than just trying to get it to clean it's act up a bit seems silly, considering a number of the drugged out patrons were partying elsewhere in the same district hours earlier.
I dare you to find one club in Toronto that can say otherwise.
FYI, I haven't seen any stories in the news lately about shots being fired by rowdy patrons coming out of the Comfort Zone. That seems to only be happening in the King Street area of Entertainment District.
Regardless of what all the parties seem to be trying to do, I'm beginning to think that GM's days are over.
It would probably be smarter for the company to begin selling parts of it's distribution line off so that older companies, like Datsun, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, can make a comeback to the market.
Same goes for Ford. I didn't know they owned Volvo and Nissan.
With diversity comes a stronger economy.
Not sure what you're getting at. Pontiac and Oldsmobile (only the latter now defunct) are/were GM marketing units, not separate companies. Datsun never was part of GM (it is now Nissan). And Ford does not own Nissan (but does have a stake in Mazda).
We taxpayers should not be investing one dollar in this fiasco that has been years in the making and even at deaths door neither side can think beyond their own pocket.
I could care less about this nonsense. Get out and fill a frickin' pothole, get your staff working a full and productive day, yourself and council included.
This is just another in a series of one cent ideas.
I'm no economist, but doesn't a "free market economy" mean that businesses succeed and fail without interference from the government?