City
Morning Brew: Suing the Media Using Taxpayer Money, Street Food Pilot Failures, Winchester Hotel Fire, Kids' Failing Grades, and Butter Yoda
Photo: "Canadian National Exhibition 2009" by Doctor Insomniac, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
Chocolate covered bacon, and what's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
This is kind of scary. The City of Toronto has decided to allow taxpayer money to be used to fund bureaucrat Geoff Rathbone's libel suit against a giant media company. The Toronto Star posted stories questioning the efficacy and legitimacy of public policy (specifically, the handling of the city's green bin program), and Rathbone (general manager of solid waste) claims that his good reputation is being damaged by false accusations. Sounds like highly debatable grounds to sue for libel, in which case he should be funding his own lawsuits, not tapping into our money!
Toronto's much maligned A La Cart street food pilot program is failing. Not much of a surprise there. After just three months, one of the 8 vendors is already closing shop indefinitely, and two others have relocated because the locations designated to them by the city have not proved to be great for business. Will the head of the program now use taxpayer money to sue the Toronto Sun (or me) for having a negative opinion?
Last night a two-alarm blaze at (Old) Cabbagetown's historic Winchester Hotel was extinguished quickly and the building saved from being razed. Damage appears to be confined to the roof, and the cause is still under investigation.
Gene Simmons is blaming the media for having blown the whistle on the secret show KISS planned to play in Oshawa. I'm not sure that it's the media's fault though... I mean, Oshawa won a highly publicized contest, and appeared to have been excluded from the tour list, right?
According to a report by The Education Quality and Accountability Office, Ontario school kids in grades 3 and 6 are still not performing to the provincial standard level in reading, writing, and mathematics. Although improvements in this area have been observed, some argue that the tests are being made easier.
And in addition to deep-fried Oreos and chocolate covered bacon (depicted above), the CNE also has a butter Yoda. It's been a few years since I attended the Canadian National Exhibition, but the opportunity to clog my arteries and drool over Star Wars characters made out of golden butter may get me there this year.
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Typical bureaucratic thinking.
Until recently, the cart would be removed on an evening, but now it's there 24 hours a day, daubed in blue tarpaulin - to the point that I figured maybe it'd been abandoned.
When the program first started, I managed to score some food on my way home from work, and considering it was probably made in the morning and had been kept warm all day, it was borderline inedible. So I presume the vendor's done her homework and knows how much food to have prepared each day to satisfy her volume of trade.
Yet the hot dog guys are there all evening.
Since the program stupidly states the owner has to almost always be present when open, he packs it in and goes home like everyone else does at 5pm. Ideally he could stay at home to make more food for a night shift, but given profits aren't high enough to pay someone else to do it after the exorbitant rental cost of the cart, there is really no way out of the hole to expand his business hours!
It's sad as their food is tasty and a good value and probably the most popular of all the carts in the program.
About 5 percent of the children make youtube comments look good. It was difficult to understand what they wrote. There was no understanding of grammar or the content, let alone spelling or penmanship which we ignored in all cases.
All the rest fall somewhere in the middle, but way below where IMHO they should be.
They were consistently horrible for the three times I marked the tests over three years.
Few understand the material completely, few used correct grammar, nearly nobody can spell correctly.
I agree that most of the blame falls on to the stupid regulations of no cooking on site. The city could have been a little hands off and encouraged a street food culture stuff like in Penang, Bangkok and elsewhere. Instead we get bland lukewarm noodles. Such a shame.
As to the libel suit - all levels of government should be barred from pursuing libel suits, as should all civil servants with regards to the performance of their duties. The city definitely shouldn't be funding this suit. Dalton needs to step in and order the city to shut up and compensate The Star - anything else is immoral and contrary to constitutional, representative democracy.
Parliament grants members immunity from libel suits for what is said during debates. A grander immunity should be provided to citizens with respect to the performance of the state. Otherwise, we're all in deep trouble for saying that Miller is a horse's ass who is incapable of governing and that Rob Ford is an angry drunk who embarrasses the city.
There must be other reasons - not hygene- why Torontians can't have more street meat options....Perhaps Restaurant Associations lobbying against it?