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From The Star:

It's interesting how the Star chose to run a whole lot of stories like this in the lead up to Giambrone's run for mayor, and as soon as he dropped out all these stories stopped. When's the last time the paper ran a story about someone's bad experience with the TTC?

There are 12 wards covered by Toronto-East York council, and only six are rookies. In his first term Miller had Mike Feldman as one of this deputy mayors, and had Norm Kelly, Brian Ashton, and Mark Grimes on his exec.

From a report a couple weeks a go in the Star: “I was getting briefed yesterday,” Kouvalis said. “I was like … the Tower Renewal Program — what is that? We’re subsidizing (installation of low-flow) toilets ... Guys, you know that stuff’s gotta stop. The priority is the taxpayer, to stop the...

The Globe and Mail has Ford's full list of executive members. Not a single progressive or member from Toronto-East York Community Council.

Budget chief used to be sort of like this. The problem with their being elected independently, is that they and the mayor become rivals. You have a second powerful person, who is not at all beholden to the mayor like a deputy or vice mayor is. An independently elected TTC chair has their own...

TTC chair has to be confirmed by council. It'd be nice if councillors could get a firm commitment to at least the Eglinton Line before voting her in.

We also haven't seen Rossi or Thomson's yet.

Here's a long article from the Globe about these staged accidents, it seems they are quite common.

Ford is looking for a 2.5% cut in city spending. His line on the campaign trail was that getting a 2.5% cut from each department would be easy. The big problem with this is that about two thirds of spending is exempt from Ford's cut. About half of the money goes to mandatory and provincially...

As I've noted this is not just about manufacturing. The part of society that has seen an major erosion in wages over the last few years are workers without a university education. This is not only manufacturing, but retail and low end services sector as well. Also in this demographic group are...

The church moved out a couple years ago. There were three large United Churches in the Beaches, and Bellfair United merged with Kew as none of them were getting a lot of people. While it would be nice to preserve the church as an event space, there's not a lot of demand for such things in the...

Let me try another way of explaining it. When it comes to employment, the public sector and the private sector are in competition. Every worker has a choice between working in the public sector or the private sector. If the public sector pays higher wages they will attract all the best workers...

That public sector areas are also monopolies is also an argument for them to be unionized, as they also tend to be monopolies, or near monopolies, in the hiring sector as well. If you're a streetcar driver who's unhappy with the TTC you have very limited options. You could retrain for another...

It's pretty simple. Globalization has allowed the contracting out of manufacturing jobs. It has also caused the Walmartization of retail, and a sharp fall in pay and benefits in that sector. While this has lead to cheaper consumer good for everyone, it's had a sharply negative effect on parts of...

Looking at the news archives, it doesn't seem that there were any penalties for cancelling the Eglitnon West subway. The TTC reported that the wrap up costs were $41 million, but those were it's own costs. Maybe construction companies only started demanding high break-up fees after debacles like...

There are many, many avenues for people who have led responsible lives to end up very poor as seniors. Through politics I've heard from a lot of them. You have people who worked their entire lives for a company, only to have it go bankrupt and their pension dissapear. What about the thousands of...

None, but jobs like garbage collector and TTC driver match the demographics of your average manufacturing job and thus draw from the same pool of workers.

A candidate, or their spouse, can donate an unlimited amount of their own money to a campaign. Ford is a millionaire, so if he needs to he can afford to pay a few hundred thousand out of pocket. Though this doesn't set a good precedent. Where things get iffy is if at the same time Ford is...

Unfortunately most people who have poor parents will be poor themselves (and most peole with rich parents will be rich themselves). I'm not sure if social housing affects that much one way or the other.