The South Bayview Bulldog

Four new GO Transit stations will be built in the city’s west end as part of the SmartTrack plan, a critical part of Mayor Tory’s election campaign. .The planned number of SmartTrack station has been slashed and added to over the months with these GO stops on the Barrie and Kitchener lines intended to support SmartTrack. An additional two new stations in the city’s east end will also be announced tomorrow, bringing the total number of new GO stations to six. The new stations on the Kitchener line will be located in Liberty Village and at St. Clair Avenue and Keele Street while the new stations on the Barrie line will be located at Bloor Street and Lansdowne Avenue, and Spadina Avenue and Front Street.

Gas company personnel worked quickly to cap off a ruptured line at a home under demolition on Manor Road Tuesday. The small building at 391 Manor one door east of Boyton Road was the scene. The scare lasted only a few minutes before the leak was closed.

The Ontario Liberal government will scrap its plan to create an Ontario Retirement Pension Plan (ORPP) the CBC has been told by Finance Minister Charles Sousa. As telegraphed by the premier many weeks ago, a deal to enrich the Canada Pension Plan would be the key to scrapping the ORPP. Agreement on the CPP deal was reached at a meeting of finance ministers over the weekend culminating with the announcement Monday evening. CPP increase by 8 provinces but is that enough? 

International Yoga Day makes its appearance on the calendar for the first time ever with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi joining a crowd of 30,000 schoolchildren and other residents of the northern city of Chandigarh for a mass session. Before starting, Modi urged people to make yoga a part of their lives, saying the practice — which began in ancient India — doesn’t differentiate between the rich and poor, and is accessible to all.

There is a meeting sponsored by the Leaside Property Owners Association (LPOA) tonight at 7 p.m. in the William Lea Room to discuss traffic in Leaside.  It is the first of several public meetings organized by the LPOA as it seeks long-term solutions and action.

Mississauga faces possible closure of its harmless bingo games in quirky Ontario because they aren’t run by the government. A single complaint against the penny-ante entertainment at eleven community centres threatens to shut down the games. This is Ontario after all, where it’s perfectly fine for hooked roulette addicts to flush away their earnings every week but immoral for seniors to pay a buck or two for bingo. Uh-huh. CBC

Eight of Canada’s finance ministers reached an agreement in principle Monday to increase the Canada Pension Plan but Quebec and Manitoba did not sign on to the deal. Approval requires the consent of seven provinces representing at least two-thirds of the population. It may be enough — just barely But the potential hard feeling in the holdouts is a factor as well. The scheme, if it goes ahead, would go into effect in 2019 and increase contributions for a typical worker earning about $55,00 by $7 a month and employers would match those contributions (the hated payroll tax). The plan would be phased in over seven years until 2025 and it means when people retire their maximum annual benefits would increase by about one-third to $17,478. Nothing is stated but the Ontario government has said that its gestating Ontario Pension Plan would remain unborn if agreement were reached on CPP changes. And then there is Phillip Cross in the Financial Post who says that for the feds all of the unsustainable gap between the pensions of public servants and most everyone else. In fact, says Cross, some critics maintain that the push to expand the CPP is driven by an unspoken need to prop up public-sector pension plans a little longer. However, doing so will only delay the inevitable overhaul of both the benefits and the funding of public-sector pensions.

Toronto Hydro says power has now been restored to all but possibly a dozen customers in East York after a falling tree struck power lines in on Gamble Avenue near Pape Avenue. At the height of the outage, some 3,400 Toronto Hydro customers were without power in an area bound by O’Conner Drive and Danforth Avenue north-south and between Broadview and Greenwood avenues east-west.

There was plenty of bad manners to go around in Vaughan this Spring when a man punched a woman driver in the face for honking at him because, apparently, he was taking too long to cross the street. York Regional police said a woman was driving on Cordoba Drive at about 1 p.m. on May 31, 2016 when she stopped at a red light on Bathurst Street. Police said an unidentified man between 60 and 70 years was crossing the intersection. When the light turned green and he was still walking, the woman honked at him  Cops say the man then walked up to the driver’s side window and punched her in the face. She is said by police to have been uninjured. .

Sharon Rein met her sister Sharon Dennis at Fredericton airport Sunday when Rein, the older at 58, flew in from South Africa where both women were born. Dennis. who is 56, was put up for adoption by her parents in 1960 because they felt they could not care for a third child. Dennis moved to Canada in 1994. It was only a death-bed confession by their mother that a child had been put up for adoption that led to the reunion. It was Rein who heard the secret from her mother and then went on to use social media to locate her sister. It worked, and the two spoke for the first time by phone earlier this year.  CBC

UD: Rescue (Elevator) – Leaside Park Dr @ Overlea Boulevard, East York (3 Trucks)

— Toronto Fire South (@tofireS) June 20, 2016