Morning Brew: Pride funding safe, Toronto invited to bid on World Police and Fire Games, TCHC will sell 22 homes, and will you cheer for the Canucks?
Things got heated but looks like Pride Toronto will receive city funding after all. Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti had earlier threatened the festival's funding was contingent on the written guarantee that controversial activist group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid was barred from the event, but he later relented to a verbal agreement by Pride co-chair Francisco Alvarez ensuring the group's exclusion. City support helps with a quarter of the festival's budget.
I guess if we're not getting the Summer Olympics then we'll have every other huge sporting event to be had. Mayor Rob Ford and his executive committee are supporting Toronto's bid to host the World Police and Fire Games, touting it as a potential "financial windfall" for the city.The games brings together 12,000 international full-time and retired firefighters and police officers to compete against one another in over 50 events. Toronto has been invited to make its final bid presentation in New York this summer.
Based on a recommendation from TCHC lone ranger, Case Ootes, the city's executive committee approved the selling of 22 TCHC homes yesterday. The money from the home sales is expected to help lower the cost of repairs for the other TCHC buildings. The properties are worth $15.7 million. The estimated repair bill is $650-million. Ootes says "it's a start", whereas councillor Adam Vaughan says the decision is "fiscally ridiculous."
David Seymour makes the argument in the Post that Toronto's cab troubles â which mostly surround the two-tiered system by which driver's acquire plates â woes could be solved by the implementation of "a smart phone co-ordinated taxi network." Not all of his arguments work, but he's right about one thing, the technology for such a plan already exists. We wrote about it a couple months ago.
Photo by yedman in the blogTO Flickr pool.
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