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This installment of my "Retro T.O." column for The Grid was originally published on May 8, 2012. Shortly after becoming mayor of Toronto, Mel Lastman was asked if he worried about his wife Marilyn’s verbal snafus. “All the time,” he said. “But I find it cute and if people don’t like it, too bad.” The same could be said of Mel’s odd outbursts, yet few found it cute when Lastman uttered a death threat against CBC reporter (and current city councillor) Adam Vaughan in May 1999. Thanks to a police leak, it was an open secret among City Hall reporters that Marilyn Lastman was caught shoplifting a $155 pair of designer pants at the Promenade Mall Eaton’s on April 19, 1999. According to the police report no charges were laid “due to her age as well as no outstanding offences on her record.” Sources close to Marilyn believed the pressures of Mel’s job had resulted in depression and prescription drug use. The incident was kept quiet until the satirical magazine Frank published a ...

From 2012 to 2014 I contributed to The Grid . This article was originally published online on July 15, 2013. Given the ongoing debates over public transit in Scarborough, this piece will remain timely for a long time to come. You may also wish to read a piece I wrote for Torontoist several months later on the general history of public transit in Scarborough . Toronto Star , March 19, 1985. Click on image for larger version. Torontonians love arguing about the same proposed transit lines ad nauseum. Tuesday’s City Council debate—regarding which form the Scarborough RT‘s replacement will take—feels like a replay of past battles where a streetcar/LRT line was displaced in favour of a pricier, sexier option. Toronto Star , January 29, 1975. Among the priority studies recommended in January 1975—by a joint provincial/Metro Toronto task force on the region’s transportation needs for the next quarter-century—was a high-speed transit line linking the recently approved Kennedy s...

This post provides supplementary material for an article in The Grid regarding the time the army was called in to help Toronto cope with a major snowstorm in 1999 , which you should read before diving into the following text. Front page, Toronto Sun , January 15, 1999. Confession time: I’m drawing a blank as to what I did during the Snowmageddon of January 1999. I definitely experienced it—at the time I was living in Guelph, working at the campus paper. Given the regular dumpings Guelph received, the storm likely didn’t seem unusual. It was probably just another snowy day, albeit one with greater accumulation. My guess is that either I curled up with a pile of library books or headed over to the Ontarion office to work, surf the net, or play endless games of Civilization II . It was around this time that staff relations within the office settled into a permanent deep-freeze, sparked by deep disagreements about the cover of that week’s issue. The only story about the st...

Before reading this post, check out the related article on Torontoist . From the November 19, 1969 edition of the Enterprise (a community paper in Willowdale) comes this map of the proposed "Lastman Loop" commuter rail system. The accompanying article was titled "Lastman a-go-go," either as a nod to the times or a reference to GO Transit.