O.K. I get it. To cut costs on their Editorial Page, TheRecord grabs columns from the Toronto Star – its sister publication. But why are all of the columns that TheRecord uses – at least day late? I read the column by Martin Regg Cohn in today’s paper, on Saturday in TheStar. What cost savings is realized by running old columns? Does management think that if both papers ran the same column on the same day that TheRecord would somehow cannibalize sales of the Toronto Star in the Region? Running old columns continues to degrade the value of the paper. On second thought, I don’t get it.
And speaking of Martin Regg Cohn, his column today (well, Saturday actually…) talks about the Ontario Legislature’s first Black Caucus – featuring Kitchener Centres’s Laura Mae Lindo. He mentions that Lindo “spent much of her career before politics educating people on diversity”. He then let’s it slip, at the end of the article of course, that the “two Black MPPs in the Liberal caucus, Mitzie Hunter and Michael Coteau, have not been invited to join” the new Black Caucus. Yea, Lindo, about that diversity thing… Next!!!
Jeff Outhit used to write about transportation issues when there were enough issues about transportation in the Region to write about. That was before the $1.5 Billion ION train was up and semi-running. Now I guess he just writes about anything he can. Today, the title of his article is: “Waterloo Council takes heat over loss of cheap rents”. He interviews a couple of whiners complaining about the loss of “cheap rent” since a 3 storey building on Dietz Ave N is being torn down and replaced with an 11 storey building. He gets the standard “I’m just sick with worry…”, and “…demolition should be the last…” comments to fill out his nothing article. So, two quick notes. First, why does the building have cheap rents. Well, I can only assume that low rent is all the owner can demand since the apartment building is probably in bad shape and old. Secondly, people should understand that when you increase the supply of any good, it tends to lower the overall demand of that good and therefore and average price of that good. So more rental units (three storey to eleven storey) means overall cheaper rent. This is just basic economics. People are stupid. I blame our education system.