Photo: untitled by mikepop2ca, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.

What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):

Public sentiment is varied but within my circle a lot of people are wondering why the city pretty much caved and gave the union everything they were asking for. Both Local 416 and Local 79 have voted to ratify their deals, but there's one vote left to make this all official - the vote by city council today. While there's very little chance that city council will reject the deal that they bargained for for 36 days, there are a fair number of councillors that don't like it. Heck, even one of our two national newspapers is calling for them to rise against. It should be an interesting day at city hall today.

The Star has the skinny on the city's plans for bringing workers back to duty, and a summary of when we can expect services to return. Don't hold your breath though... you'll have to live with your stinky residential garbage until Tuesday at the earliest. First garbage pickup will be unlimited (and no tags required for excess bags). Sounds like a photo op to me!

Happy civic holiday long weekend, everyone! Here's a gift for you, from your friendly gasoline companies - an overnight 4.4cent/L price hike at the pumps. Of course, the timing is merely a coincidence.

"Cellared in Canada" doesn't mean that the wine was produced here using native grapes grown in Canada. Some Ontario grape growers are at odds and are being forced to dump crops because much cheaper (and arguably, much tastier) grape juices are being imported from abroad and incorporated at high percentages into Ontario wines.

The Globe & Mail / Torontoist partnership that got everyone excited (including me) appears to be waning... or something. The Globe Toronto page hasn't syndicated editorial content from the Torontoist blog for more than two weeks now (since July 17th to be exact), which has local media observers wondering what's up.