Morning Brew: Ford under fire over coaching duties, Ryerson mulls Empress Hotel site, a soccer match-fixing scandal, a subway quiz, and Jays' winning streak ends
Rob Ford is taking flack for skipping out on a meeting of his executive committee to coach a high school football game. The mayor left five hours before the end of the committee meeting and only had time to sit on one item, the revised Port Lands development plan. This morning the Globe and Mail says Ford also appears to have used city staff and their taxpayer-funded cellphones to run summer football teams he founded while in office.
The paper says the mayor's special assistant, Andrew Gillis, a former U of T Varsity Blues quarterback, helped the mayor coach the Don Bosco Eagles in Etobicoke recently. None of this is gravy, apparently.
The tense relationship between councillor Adam Vaughan and the mayor is the focus of a National Post story this morning. The story highlights the key issues where the pair have clashed, including on the story above. Vaughan is touted as a contender for the mayor's job at the next election.
The Star repots Ryerson University is in talks to buy the site of the former Empress Hotel on the south-east corner of Yonge and Gould. The vacant lot currently houses construction equipment for the school's Student Learning Centre under construction on the opposite corner. The former hotel burned in January last year.
A Toronto semi-professional soccer team could be in hot water after the CBC alleged several of its players were bribed to fix the outcome of a match in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. According to the story, members of the Toronto Croatia team were paid roughly $18,000 to effect the result of a 2009 match against Attak. No charges have been laid.
Think you can tell your Castle Frank from your Greenwood? A new Spacing quiz lets you test your TTC knowledge from close-up images of various locations on the network. See how well you do. Most of the pictures provide some visual clues to the location.
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Photo by Victor Shum in the blogTO Flickr pool.
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