The second and final newsletter of this week
Back with a new season Monday
Being left as the only contestant in a final round of Jeopardy was the latest milestone in Mattea Roach’s road to 12 consecutive wins. Currently, the Halifax-born tutor is tied for the ninth-longest winning streak in the history of the show, although the $32,000 take from her first game paid off her University of Toronto student loan two years after graduation.
Promises engulfing a province
Free prescription birth control is the Ontario NDP’s latest promise amid Ipsos polling that has the party falling behind the Liberals—whose latest platform plank is a ban on handguns. But these promises are up against more than $10 billion in spending announcements from Ontario PCs, concurrent with licence plate sticker refunds.
The newspaper lobby applauds Ontario for exempting it from payments for collection and recycling. A recent amendment of provincial legislation was noted in a story from the Toronto Star. The overhaul of the Blue Box program to a producer responsibility model won’t apply to those companies whose primary recycled products aren’t packaging.
The paper trials of Quebec
Starting next May, store flyer packages will likely only be delivered to homes that request them in Montreal. The suburb of Mirabel led the way with the policy, and so Ottawa is looking into whether Canada Post can take over distributing local weeklies in Quebec. Meanwhile, the province’s primary anglo broadsheet newsroom brought on a new boss:
Steven Heighton dead at 60. The novelist, poet and musician from Kingston, Ontario, won the 2016 Governor General’s Literary Award for The Waking Comes Late, which was followed by a compilation of his decades of verse. Last year, Heighton revived his singer-songwriter side by releasing an album, The Devil’s Share.
Finally, no linking for Nickelback
Hearts on Fire: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music 2000–2005 is writer Michael Barclay’s second big volume along these lines: Have Not Been the Same had two co-authors when published in 2001. Subsequently, he wrote The Never-Ending Present about the Tragically Hip. But this time, sonic footnotes are more elaborate, minus one digression:
