Laird Dr developer buys Hazelton Lanes

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First Capital Realty Inc., the developer of the old railway land on Laird Drive, is buying the Yorkville shopping complex Hazelton Lanes. As the linked Globe and Mail story recounts, Hazelton is the site of many upscale businesses such as a Whole Foods grocery store. It is however a potentially risky venture. While enormously chic, Hazelton Lanes has had chronic difficulty attracting and holding a lot of regular visitors. The grocery store has helped. It went in at the same time as the charming curving hallways of the Lanes were straightened, frankly, to make it easier to find one’s way. The Laird Drive site, known as Leaside Village, is set to open in 2012.

IKEA Recalls BUSA Children’s Folding Tent

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From Child Mode: The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada, today announced a voluntary recall of approximately 58,000 of IKEA’s BUSA children’s folding tents due to laceration and puncture hazards. The tent is dangerous as the steel wire frame of the tent can break, producing sharp wire ends that can protrude through the tent fabric, posing a laceration or puncture hazard. So far three incidents and one injury have been reported. This recall involves the BUSA cube-shaped children’s folding tent with model number 90192009. The brand name BUSA and IKEA and the model number are printed on a sewn-in label attached to an interior seam in the tent. The tent frame is made of flat steel wire and the tent material is pale green polyester fabric with turquoise, pink and white trim. The tent’s dimensions are: L 28 1/4, W 28 1/4, H 28 1/4.
The tent was sold exclusively at: IKEA stores nationwide from August 2011 through September 2011 for about $8. It is recommended that you take the tent away from children and return it to their nearest IKEA store for a full refund.

How to get results for your candidate

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Polls for Ontario’s 40th General Election are open today between 9 am and 9 pm. As soon as polls close, you will be able to check the status of things in your own riding by going to the official government election site, www.elections.on.ca., where it will be possible to isolate and follow results for the candidates you wish to know about. For the rest, you won’t be able to escape the election coverage on radio and television. Now get out there and vote. Please!.

Toronto’s gotcha parking ticket strategy

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We’ve written before about the “gotcha” nature of traffic ticketing in this City. Tickets are not issued to police parking but to raise taxes. So long-standing and entrenched is the gotcha state of mind at City Hall that many people there may not even realize what they are doing. The City has been in a desperate state for money for years. Bureaucrats and their subordinates condone any pretext for issuing a ticket no matter how much of an abuse it represents to the spirit of the law. Take the case of this car parked on Roxborough Avenue West whose driver accidentally put one wheel up on the edge of the sidewalk while parking. The offence, as any good traffic enforcement officer knows, is “parking on the boulevard”. $55 please. Stunning. Motorists may rightly resent this type of gotcha money grab.

Now here is the glass-is-half-full news

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From the glass is half full department, it may be true that Mayor Ford has been talking on his cellphone while driving again. Silly man. But, the good news is that his worship was still in Toronto while he did it. This can be contrasted with the previous chief magistrate of our town who frequently used his cellphone in Paris, London, Rome, Tokyo, Sydney and other interesting places. When he was in Toronto he was packing to leave. Secondly, those who worry that the sliding fortunes of Research in Motion might lead to the disappearance of their beloved Blackberry, fear not. There is talk of a takeover today and what this means is that the massive user-base of the hand computer will always be a force for survival of the Blackberry. Remember the Apple computer. Finally, we judge it to be good news that “unions” have joined the demonstrations in New York aimed at (take your choice). The thing about unions is that they’re made up of usually honest, hard-working bread-winners who, unlike the rest of the demonstrators, are rather cool to the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat. And that’s good.