There’s a $100 million surplus in Toronto’s budget, announced Mayor David Miller this morning, after he lured all the media into a room with the promise of something “important” in these waning days at the helm of City Council. And, once it became clear he was just going to detail the favourable condition municipal finances — rather than announce he was stepping down, or running for re-election after all, or distraught over the death of Corey Haim — the city groaned, then went on with its day. For those in the local media business, all the excitement they woke up with this morning was deflated on impact, and now they will have to find something else to focus on today. So, how about that nice weather? Continue Reading

Sarah Palin stormed into Canada Saturday, speaking to 1,200 people who paid between $150 and $200 each to fill the Palomino Room of the BMO Centre in Calgary, another coup for tinePublic — the somewhat mysterious company that has repeatedly brought the likes of Bill Clinton to Toronto, just by being persistent. Now questions are being raised about the decision of taxpayer-funded public utility Enmax to co-sponsor the event, although Palin did touch on the topics of clean and renewable energy, they guess? “The problem was that Palin clued into the audience’s unconditional agreement with her worldview pretty quickly,” surmised Colby Cosh of Maclean’s, “and grew impatient; as fast as she was speeding through the statistics and the chuck-on-the-shoulder good-for-yous for Canada, many of us probably would have preferred it ten times faster.” Alberta is just Alaska without the igloos, after all. A blogger who paid to be there deemed it “uneventful” — the sycophantic Senator Pamela Wallin appeared to ask a few questions, only to give the former Republican vice-presidential candidate more opportunities to cite “the common sense values” of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, of course, was never caught writing notes on his hand, something Wallin teased Palin about. Her response was a quotation from Isaiah 49:16: “Behold I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.” But, as Kevin Libin notes in the National Post, an act calling global warming “snake oil” wouldn’t likely play in any other Canadian city. Ann Coulter, however, has the guts to first visit London and Ottawa later this month — all the better to tell Calgarians how cowardly those Ontario towns are.

1. Adam Giambrone announces on February 1 that he’s running for mayor — with suddenly public longtime live-in partner Sarah McQuarrie playing Michelle to his Barack. She gets identified as his “wife” in the Toronto Star on February 2, then again on February 3, leading to a clarification on February 4, which sparked a scoop delivered to the Star by February 8 — text messages produced by 20-year-old City Hall office legover Kristen Lucas — an apology from the 32-year-old city councillor on February 9, followed by his withdrawal from the race on February 10. Giambrone and girlfriend flee to France for Valentine’s Day, then he returns to chair the TTC meeting February 18, when he distracts a media mob by appointing a luxury hotelier to help improve public transit’s public image.

2. Gordon Lightfoot is pronounced dead by Canwest News Service, a fact promptly tweeted by their national affairs correspondent David Akin, who passes the buck back to his employer — whose own mea culpas on the matter chalked it up to “a Twitter rumour.” The 71-year-old songwriter revels in the publicity, after learning about his death on the way home from the dentist, and it turns out 75-year-old Ronnie Hawkins was the one to sort of blame. So much scrutiny, yet it took a couple days for the source of the story to become clear: a call to Hawkins’ manager’s office in Minneapolis, from someone claiming to be Lightfoot’s grandson, was spread to colleagues by Hawkins’ wife — and then it surfaced on Twitter, giving social media experts room to crow about how the story “self-corrected.”

3. The XXI Olympic Winter Games luck out with the right combination of subplots to potentially transcend the style of coverage established by the CTV Television Network. Things don’t start out too promising when the Super Bowl’s transmission in Canada is turned into a four-hour infomercial for the events in Vancouver — bringing the hate for “I Believe,” CTV’s official theme song recorded by 15-year-old Nikki Yanofsky. Predictably, coverage of the CTV coverage is muzzled in their corporate newspaper, The Globe and Mail, as the company exploits all its cable real estate to wring every last advertiser buck for its $100 million multi-platform deal. As a result, assertively millennial MuchMusic is forced to air concerts with Loverboy, Trooper, Burton Cummings — and even Devo. Continue Reading

Last summer’s 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair passed with minimal effort to update its spirit for the present day, as attempted amidst much Generation X cynicism in 1994 and unmitigated disaster in 1999, but the event retains a stranglehold on the popular culture. Certainly, the recent leak of plans for the Earthship Summit and IMAGINE concert — scheduled for July 10 and 11 at Downsview Park — would not have been taken seriously if not for the participation of hippie nostalgia merchant Artie Kornfeld, whose most significant role in helping scheme the original Woodstock was getting Warner Bros. to professionally film it. Names like Foo Fighters, Nickelback and Lady Gaga have been “contacted” according to co-organizer David Kam — a Montreal artist concurrently speaking of closed circuit broadcasts in 200 theatres, video dispatches from the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and three all-star re-recordings of John Lennon’s “Imagine” — even though this level of ambition contradicts everything you ever hear about how the music industry now works. Are campground-worthy acts going to reroute planned tours and transcend contractual obligations just because a guy from Woodstock is involved and half the ticket price is being pledged for charities? That sounds like what they’re saying — even though the one-day July 2003 Molson Canadian Rocks for Toronto show held on the same site seemed to require all kinds of political wrangling via MP Dennis Mills and Senator Jerry Grafstein, and didn’t claim to be for any good cause except for drawing media attention to the SARS-scarred city — headliners the Rolling Stones and AC/DC were reportedly paid in full, and then some. Next month, we will supposedly find out whether this is for real. History, however, is not on their side. Continue Reading