Welcome back to the Inside Ontario blog, where every Monday we recap the top stories from around Ontario.
This week’s top stories: Ontario will host the 2011 International Indian Film Academy Awards; rumours are buzzing around Queen's Park that Dalton McGuinty is preparing to step down as premier; Greenpeace is concerned by the logging of the English River Forest near Sioux Lookout; a failed hearing of the Brazilian Senate on the Inco strike; and a lawsuit over real estate listings is thrown out of court.
In 2011, the Greater Toronto Area will become the first North American city to host the International Indian Film Academy Awards (IIFA). The IIFA travels to a different city every year to promote Indian cinema (past host cities include: London, Amsterdam, Dubai, and Singapore). IIFA events typically draw 500 people from the Indian film industry, about 40,000 visitors, and 350-million television viewers.
Some would like to use this opportunity to turn Toronto into “Bollywood West.” According to Statistics Canada, there are more than 570,000 East Indians living in Ontario.
Steve Paikin analyzed the rumours that Dalton McGuinty is planning to step down as Ontario premier before the 2011 provincial election. If McGuinty wins another majority government in 2011, he will be the first Ontario premier since Leslie Frost (premier from 1949 to 1961) to win three consecutive majorities. Some are now accusing former-premier Mike Harris of being the source these rumours.
A Greenpeace report claims that AbitibiBowater (the world’s largest newsprint manufacturer) over the past decade has clear-cut 80,000-hectarces of the English River Forest near Sioux Lookout.
The English River Forest once encompassed one million hectares, but today only 300,000 hectarces of the forest remains. Greenpeace believes the caribou of the English River Forest (which is the world’s most southern population) are endangered by this logging.
However, in an AbitibiBowater sustainability report, the company wrote, “100% of the woodlands under AbitibiBowater’s care [are] certified to internationally recognized sustainable forest management standards” (the report does not mention the English River Forest specifically).
This month, The Agenda interviewed the new Ontario Green Party leader Michael Schreiner. During the interview, Steve Paikin referenced a previous Agenda discussion on the proposed Northern Ontario Growth Plan and asked if Northern Ontarians should be allowed to harvest more natural resources if they think that is best for their communities.
Representative of Vale SA, the Brazilian mining giant that purchased Inco in 2006 for $13.3-billion, did not attend a Brazilian Senate hearing on the company’s treatment of striking Canadian workers. The hearing was attended by United Steelworkers Canadian national director Ken Neumann and NDP MPP for the Nickel Belt France Gelinas. Instead representatives of Brazil-based Vale met with Senator Paulo Paim the day before the senate hearing to discuss his concerns about the strike. The Vale Inco strike is approaching its fifth month.
The Ontario Superior Court has ruled that Toronto-realtor, Fraser Beach, did not have the right to repackage MLS real estate listings on his website. MLS (which stands for “Multiple Listing Service”) is a website owned by the Canadian Real Estate Association that is responsible for 90 per cent of Canada’s home sales. Beach’s membership to the MLS website was terminated after Beach downloaded a large quantity of listings in the hopes of selling those properties at a lower commission rate than offered by MLS. Beach brought the matter to court because he believes MLS violates Canadian competition laws.
This season, The Agenda hosted a debate on how the internet is changing our conception of pricing and ownership.
Next Monday the Inside Ontario blog will look back at the top Queen’s Park stories from 2009. What were your favourite stories from this year? Were the important issues in Ontario handled correctly in 2009?
The Ontario Legislature is now on a nine-week recess, but you can still view previous sessions of Question Period at the Question Period Archive on TVO’s Civics 101 microsite. And you can watch a 30-minute video digest of last week’s Question Period sessions at Queen’s Park This Week.
