Ontario’s education ministry is tweaking daycare regulations amid outrage that an earlier proposal would have wiped out 2,000 desperately needed infant and toddler spaces in Toronto and sent parent fees through the roof.
The new regulations, posted Monday and set to take effect in Sept. 2017, will allow daycares to maintain existing infant, toddler and pre-school age groups and staff-child ratios.
But centres that require more flexibility will have the option of applying to field-test two new age groups: One for children from birth to age 2 and another for those between the ages of 2 and 5. A third “family” age group would allow smaller centres to care for up to 15 children of different ages.
Currently, babies under age 18 months and toddlers to age 2 ½ must be cared for in separate rooms.
The new option, which would allow centres to use existing space to accommodate the changes, would be treated as a pilot project. Participating daycares would be required to work closely with the ministry to evaluate program viability and quality, government officials said.
In a break from its giant neighbour to the east, Mississauga council has suspended all operation of ride-sharing services such as UberX.
The only way ride-sharing companies can now legally operate in Mississauga is if they effectively follow the same regulations governing traditional taxis, after Wednesday's unanimous vote.
But Mayor Bonnie Crombie left the door open, ever so slightly. In a 10-2 vote, council decided that if Uber and other ride-sharing services suspend operations immediately, a committee will be struck to look at a possible ride-sharing pilot project.
“I think it will make the industry very pleased,” said Crombie, of the compromise, that leaves open the possibility of Uber to operate under different rules in the future.
“We think we have struck the right balance. We've listened very closely.”
In May 2015, York Regional Police charged an Uber driver with sexual assault. After news of the crime broke, ever-quotable Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti (Ward 7, York West) advised women on the appropriate reaction: stop using Uber. “Women in Toronto have got to be warned, and I’m warning the City of Toronto’s women,” he said. In a similar vein, Councillor Jim Karygiannis (Ward 39, Scarborough-Agincourt) announced last year that he “wouldn’t feel safe if [his] daughter or wife were to get in an Uber cab.”
Nonetheless, private ride-sharing services were legalized by the City of Toronto last week. The decision wasn’t easy for City Council: though it’s clear that Toronto’s taxi services aren’t enough, contention surrounds Uber, quantified by the dozens of taxi and Uber enthusiasts who showed up to the Council vote.
Forgotten amid an imbroglio of complaints over regulation and pricing were the concerns raised by Mammoliti and Karygiannis, no matter the implicit condescension: that hopping into a car with an Uber driver puts women at risk. Moreover—and perhaps unsurprisingly—female voices were ignored or, even worse, mocked during the majority of Toronto’s Uber vs. taxi debate.
Women’s safety, it seems, has warranted political focus only when city councillors need fodder for their greater anti-Uber campaigns.
For some people, arguments like Mammoliti’s and Karygiannis’s are convincing enough. But many women, including me, already know the dangers of navigating a big city. For years, we have taken care of ourselves—and continue to do so in the age of Uber.
People are connected to various social networks (the web of social relationships in which we are embedded), and researchers have convincingly - if not uncontroversially - argued that the behaviour of persons in our networks can affect our own in various ways. The idea is that a behaviour can spread as people pick up unconscious social signals that it's normal.
But if more people are cycling because their friends are cycling, why aren't more Black people cycling? Don't they have friends, too? Yes, but it's a well-studied fact that social networks are often less racially and ethnically diverse than we think.
Typically, when scholars study the racial homogeneity of social networks, their aim is to learn whether and how they work to disadvantage minorities by providing whites with privileged access to valuable resources such as jobs. If, for example, what matters most in getting a job is not what you know but who you know, and whites have historically dominated the most sought-after jobs, then it's easy to see why homogeneous networks might be troubling.
But racially homogenous networks can also serve as conduits for the racially differentiated spread of healthy behaviours, and one of these is cycling.
This point finds some support when we look at the neighbourhoods where cycling rates are highest. In Toronto, the areas with the highest number of utilitarian cyclists (including Parkdale, Little Portugal and nearby 'hoods) tend to be in the west end.
Although these neighbourhoods aren't among the city's whitest, they're not the Blackest either.
It was enough to make us forget, sort of, his own scrapes with the law. Like, for example, the insubor-di-nation charge stemming from an unauthorized back-ground check he conducted on a Star reporter working on a story about his big brother, Billy, also a cop, and Billy’s alleged involvement in the shakedown of bar owners in the Entertainment District. Before that there was a dis-cipline charge over Mike’s efforts to help an ex-con car salesman with ties to organized crime get back his licence to sell luxury cars. McCormack was cleared of that one.
During the Rob Ford years, McCormack hid in plain sight. After copping a lucrative four-year contract for his members, you barely heard from him, not even amid those rumblings of rank-and-file cops running interference for Ford during the crack scandal. And making sure the former mayor got home all right all those wasted nights he spent wandering around town.
Now deep into his second term as union head, the guy who couldn’t get enough of the blood-and-guts brand of policing when he wore the uniform has quite possibly become the city’s biggest dick – and he doesn’t even wear a badge. (Directors of the police union are not technically cops. They’re required to turn in their badges.)
Nowadays, McCormack is still walking around with a chip on his shoulder, spending most of his time defending rogue cops – the type he once was. Who could forget his not-so-veiled threat after Constable James Forcillo was convicted of attempted murder in the shooting death of Sammy Yatim earlier this year that the verdict would cause cops to think twice about their duty to protect the public?
We probably should have seen it coming.
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