The numbers must be alarming for the government. Support for the Liberal Party plummeted from 64 per cent to 46 per cent in the past four months. It’s the most precipitous drop in recent memory.
The Progressive Conservatives have an interim leader but their support increased six points. The Green Party has one MLA and its support leapt 13 points. The NDP remains hamstrung without its leader in the legislature but managed to maintain its numbers.
[. . .]
Consider the plebiscite on democratic renewal which many Islanders hoped would reform our antiquated electoral process. The plebiscite concluded Monday, Nov. 7. The premier immediately discounted the result endorsing proportional representation because the turnout was low. As the storm of protest gained momentum, Premier MacLauchlan promised a “binding referendum” to be held in conjunction with the next provincial election. It would offer the electorate a choice between the plebiscite winner (Mixed Member Proportional Representation) and an as-yet-to-be-determined option.
Islanders were outraged. The flood of letters and opinion articles opposing the decision was unprecedented. It was obvious that many Islanders wanted the government to honour the plebiscite result.
A democratic vote was being ignored.
Now, note the dates of the CRA polling period which began Nov. 7 - when the plebiscite concluded - and wrapped up Nov. 29 as the government was fumbling the issue in the legislature. The full fury of Islanders was being felt as polling took place.
A building in a residential area in Charlottetown went from being a skate sharpening shop to a laundromat to the first home of a Hells Angels club in the province.
The Hells Angels are the biggest motorcycle gang in country with 36 chapters across Canada.
P.E.I. has had an outlaw motorcycle gang presence since 2012 called the Bacchus Motorcycle Club. They have chapters in Alberton and Alliston.
There hasn’t been a Hells Angels presence, other than the occasional visit, until now.
The Charlottetown Polices Services recently became aware that a building on Fitzroy Street was purchased and turned into a clubhouse.
The new chapter in Charlottetown is considered to be a “hangaround club”. Becoming a hangaround member is the first step to becoming a Hells Angels. The next step is to become a prospect and then a full-patch member.
A project to stabilize the Leard’s grist mill in Coleman is scheduled to commence this month.
The Prince Edward Island Potato Museum has awarded a contract to PD Construction of North Rustico to do the work.
Museum president, Bill MacKendrick, said the company will run I-beams beneath the second floor of the 128-year-old mill and then use air bags to raise the structure. The lower level will be rebuilt before the structure is put down onto 22 new concrete piers.
“It will be a complete stabilization,” said Carter Jeffery, an Island draftsman who rallied support to save the mill from collapse.
Just one more heavy rainfall, like the one that further compromised support piers two years ago, would have been enough to push the mill over the brink, he said.
Rising sea levels, storm surges and coastal erosion threaten its very existence; an estimated 300 football fields of land have already fallen into the sea.
In Canada, Lennox Island is a place where you can see the effects of climate change happening right now — and it's a community preparing for a changing world.
Scientists agree that the world's climate has warmed over the past 120 years and that the warming is a result of human activities. The effects of this change in climate include melting ice caps, rising sea levels, drought in some parts of the world and extreme storms in other areas.
Looking west from the shores of Lennox Island sits the shining waters of Malpeque Bay. Locals say they used to play baseball where boats now float.
Gilbert Sark, 37, has skipped rocks on Lennox Island's beaches since he was a little kid. Today he's the comprehensive community planner for the island.
A generation ago, Sark says, Lennox Island measured 1,300 acres. Now it is down to 1,100. "We lose Lennox, we lose a lot," he says.
"Honestly, I worry about Lennox Island not being here … In my son's and my daughter's generation, maybe my grandkids' generation, there may be no Lennox Island. It will be eroding away if something is not done."
He was a dreamer and his store was the dream.
After dinner at home, served at precisely 6 p.m. by his wife, after the dishes were cleared, Edwin Mirvish would sit at the table writing slogans — “Honest Ed’s is for the birds, cheap, cheap, cheap” — and as he pushed down on the pen with a new idea it would carve itself into the dining room tabletop.
Forty clowns playing trombones, roller derbies, dance contests, free turkeys for free publicity. People had to line up for those turkeys and the queue snaked through the store, across three floors of tchotchkes, kitchenwares, clothing, boots, toys. Buy low, sell cheap, but to thousands of people.
On weekends the streets around Bloor and Bathurst were choked with so much traffic that drivers would get out of their cars and into fistfights.
The neighbours complained. The store was too brash, too bright, too noisy.
Honest Ed was pulling in $14 million a year — in 1968.
“My father didn’t want to be dependent on one fancy client, he’d rather make a little bit of money from each sale,” said his son David Mirvish, in an interview with the Star ahead of the store’s closing on Dec. 31.
There’s a quintessential jumble of Toronto shacks on the southeast corner of Church and Dundas Sts. Cheaply built, like so much of Toronto, the jumble is ugly to unsympathetic eyes. Though awaiting a hearing at the Ontario Municipal Board over design details, the buildings will eventually make way for a proposed residential development. Yet, this quotidian corner has housed more Toronto life than seems possible in one place.
A visit to the deep wells of civic memory stored in the old city directories on the second floor of the Toronto Reference Library, randomly selecting volumes about a decade apart from 1915 until 1993, revealed that life. Here’s just a sliver of it.
Part of the redevelopment parcel includes an unpaved parking lot along Church, and buildings on both the north and south side of it bear ghost traces of the structures that once abutted them, addresses numbered 215 to 221. In 1915, Ebenezer Chesney’s cigar shop, the Porter Plumbing Supply Company and various apartment dwellers were here.
In 1925, Porter was still a going concern but the cigar shop was vacant, Hawley Auto Supply had moved in next door, and Samuel Barrett had started selling date products. By 1936, Seto Kwan had set up his tailoring business in Ebenezer’s old place, and Tire Chains & Accessories had opened next door along with the Collins Printing Company next to it. Porter was still in the plumbing business.
In 1947, Kwan had become a “Designing Tailor” and Church Cleaners and the Lewis Fur Company had moved into the block, while Porter Plumbing had evolved into Good Specialties Plumbing and Heating. By 1958, Master Brothers Business Machines was in operation here alongside M & R Enterprises Clothing and Novelties. In 1968, the Club Coffee Company was operating where Kwan once sewed, and next to it Athens Photo Studio had opened and Art Electric Construction had slipped in here too.
The Christmas of 1936 was a black one for Toronto. On December 26, newspapers reported on the holiday slaughter: three people killed, at least six people injured by hit-and-run drivers, and more than one hundred separate traffic collisions. In the years that followed, politicians, police officials, and concerned citizens promoted annual December public safety campaigns in the hopes of making Toronto’s streets safer over the holidays.
Books dedicated to the history of the automobile in Canada often describe Canadians’ “love affair” with the automobile in the early 20th century. Toronto newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s, however, reveal that the new vehicles were not universally embraced. Articles express widespread public anxiety about the growing number of traffic collisions on city streets and highways; many Toronto newspapers featured regular photo arrays of smashed vehicles in and around the city.
In his 2008 book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter D. Norton notes that American cities were similarly preoccupied with traffic deaths at this time. “Even in the United States there is little evidence in cities in the 1920s of a ‘love affair’ with the automobile,” Norton writes. “With the sudden arrival of the automobile came a new kind of mass death. Most of the dead were city people. Most the car’s urban victims were pedestrians, and most of the pedestrian victims were children and youths. Early observers rarely blamed the pedestrians who strolled into the roadway wherever they chose, or the parents who let their children play in the street. Instead, most city people blamed the automobile.”
By the 1930s, Norton writes, American perceptions of street use were changing, thanks in large part to dedicated lobbying by motor interests. City streets were no longer considered public space where pedestrians and pre-motor vehicles enjoyed the clear right of way. Automobiles, previously seen as a dangerous interloper on city streets, were increasingly seen as the primary road users, and pedestrians, for the first time, were expected to take some share of responsibility for their own street safety.
Former councillor Doug Ford broke council rules when he tried to help two clients of his family’s business in their dealings with the city, Toronto’s integrity commissioner says.
But in a report headed to city council next week, integrity commissioner Valerie Jepson recommends that Mr. Ford receive no penalty because her office can only issue reprimands or dock a politician’s pay, and he is no longer a councillor.
Ms. Jepson concludes that Mr. Ford violated council’s code of conduct rule against accepting gifts when he attended a Rogers Cup tennis event and dinner, along with his mother, at the invitation of Apollo Health & Beauty, a customer of Deco Labels and Tags Ltd.
Her report also finds that Mr. Ford violated code of conduct rules against the “improper use of influence” during his term by making inquiries and arranging meetings with city officials on behalf of Apollo and another Deco client, U.S. printing giant RR Donnelley and Sons, which was seeking to do business with the city.
The allegations were published in Globe and Mail investigations in 2014 – stories that prompted ethics watchdog Democracy Watch and others to file complaints to the integrity commissioner, who polices the conduct of councillors.
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