Tag Archive for toronto

Toronto Women’s Bookstore to close

I feel like it’s the end of an era or something.

Australian Rules?

At the request of Mayor Rob Ford’s executive committee and council’s government management committee, city elections officials are now studying a proposal to switch to a ranked ballot system. Councillor Paul Ainslie, the government management chair and a Ford ally, said he plans to bring the proposal to the council floor in November.

[…]

The ranked ballot system typically works as follows. Instead of choosing a single candidate, as they do now, voters are free to rank candidates in the order they prefer them. (A “1” for their favourite, a “2” for their second favourite, “3” for their third.) If a candidate gets a majority of first-place votes — more than 50 per cent — the election is over.

But if no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes — say, if the most popular candidate has 35 per cent — the least popular candidate is eliminated, and the second-place votes of that candidate’s supporters are added to the totals of the candidates who remain. This process of elimination and addition, known as an instant runoff, continues until someone has a majority.

“Toronto votes: Ranked ballots for 2018? Toronto city council may vote on changing its election system”, The Toronto Star

Toronto Police: Kinda Douchecanoes

Toronto police say they are working to improve their relationship with the city’s transgender community, even as some transgender people say they’re being targeted by officers.

“The policy itself requires that interactions with transgender-transsexual people will take full account of their human rights,” said Alok Mukerjee, the chair of the Toronto Police Services Board. “And give them the same respectful treatment as anybody else.”

In turn, people in the transgender community say they’re still stigmatized and often mistaken for prostitutes.

The comments from both sides come in the midst of the city’s huge annual Pride celebrations, and just weeks after Ontario became the first jurisdiction in North America to protect the rights of transgender people.

Police began tracking the number of times officers search or detain people who identify themselves as transgender in 2010. That year, it happened 186 times. In 2011, that number rose to 244.

CBC.ca

My LJ-friend, Morgan Page, is quoted in the article.