Morning Brew: April 22nd, 2008

Photo: "Staples" by bitefight, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.

Your Toronto morning news roundup for Tuesday April 22nd, 2008:

Happy Earth Day, Ontario - no pesticides for you!

Both free parking and the inability to legitimately pay for parking continue despite the city's $10million effort to curb a growing problem with their automated ticket dispensing machines. Long story short - the Toronto Parking Authority screwed up, then they screwed up again, and now they continue to deny that they've screwed up. It's no surprise though - they often screw up.

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair says nuh-uh (not verbatim) to arming TTC Special Constables with tasers. If our national law enforcement agency can't train officers to properly use them, I don't think we should be putting them into the hands of transit security guards.

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Toronto's summer party Caribana got an injection of cash from the province. This news comes about a month after the festival took on a corporate sponsor who has tagged their name on it. This year it'll be "Scotiabank Caribana" but what I find most interesting are plans for the future - Caribana organizers hope to do collaborations with the Luminato and Salsa on St.Clair festivals. Could be interesting.

Hockey fans in Montreal are imbeciles and don't know how celebrate victory. One might argue that Toronto fans are just as bad, but in order to test the theory, we'd have to win a playoff series to set up the experiment (which, unfortunately, requires making it to the playoffs).

Toronto taxi drivers want a price hike for their services, due to rising gas costs. And anyone getting $0.35/km in mileage pay to drive their own car for work purposes should consider sitting down with the boss to negotiate a new deal.