City
Morning Brew: Pro-Life Hero Plaque Removed from Nativity Scene, Bollywood Coming to Toronto, HST Fully Approved, Public Toilets Delayed, Miller in Copenhagen
Photo: "the.wall" by jonathancastellino, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
The City issued an order to the donors of a nativity scene in front of Old City Hall to remove the plaque that adorned it. Apparently it's not offensive to display scenes from the New Testament (thereby risking offending those of other religious beliefs), but it is inappropriate to label said scene in honour of a pro-life/anti-abortion advocate (thereby risking offending those with different moral and political foundations).
Bollywood is coming to Toronto in 2011. We've been selected as the host city for the first Bollywood Awards Gala to be held in North America. The awards ceremony travels the world and we will be joining the ranks of London, Johannesburg, Amsterdam, Dubai, Bangkok, and Macao - all previous host cities.
The controversial and much contested Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) was passed by the province and feds and will come into effect in July of 2010. Interestingly, Dalton McGuinty, and George Smitherman were absent for the vote, and Christine Elliott (spouse of federal finance Jim Flaherty) abstained (see below embedded CityNews video).
The roll-out of self-cleaning, pay-per-use, public toilets (part of Astral Media's street furniture contract with the City) will be delayed, and bureaucratic red tape and the summer municipal workers' strike are being blamed. It's been a while since we've blamed anything on the dreaded summer strike, but adding the ability to easily find a quick and legal place to piss at Queens Quay and Rees Street is now on the list.
And Mayor David Miller, who is the chair of the C40 group of world mayors aiming to curb climate change, is off to Copenhagen. The Globe and Mail has an interesting Q&A with Miller that reveals how mayors of urban areas worldwide are taking action to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions (and how mayors often speak like ideologues).
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That's all I keep hearing about....
funny enough..i DON'T hear how it's going to be good for the people..the working people who support businesses by purchasing goods & services...
maybe that's cuz it WON'T be.
Tell me how it will be good when your wage doesn't increase but now the cost of buying goods has gone up 8%.
the math just doesn't add up....
"while most of the savings, according to the TD Bank, get passed on to the consumer, the rest—$6.9 billion—goes to reducing the cost of investment. The C.D. Howe Institute has calculated sales tax reform will reduce Ontario’s marginal effective tax rate on capital by 11 percentage points. Its former president, Jack Mintz, in a new study for the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, estimates this will trigger more than $47 billion in new investment in the province over the next decade, and 591,000 new jobs."
From what i seen Gandalf could easily take on Mohammed.
I believe in pretty much nothing but i am not offended that we don't celebrate a large explosion of black hole, i am entertained by religion, after all it's still more than a year till the next harry potter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/nyregion/11toilet.html?_r=1&;ref=nyregion