HOMELESS STUDY
• Homeless survey ‘decoys’ get $100 each [ Globe & Mail ]
• Using fake homeless people improves survey: city [ National Post ]
CITY WORKER PAY FREEZE
• Miller urges staff to accept pay freeze [ Toronto Star ]
• Miller in pay freeze hot seat [ National Post ]
• Miller wants to freeze non-union salaries [ Globe & Mail ]
• Miller calls for pay freeze for non-union city workers [ CBC.ca ]
• Miller clamps down [ Toronto Sun ]
OTHER NEWS
• City dwellers pollute less, study says [ Toronto Star ]
• Green votes with red tape [ Toronto Sun ]
• Earth Hour events in the GTA [ Toronto Star ]
• Ontario budgets $32.5-billion for new infrastructure [ Globe & Mail ]
• Vaughan’s mayor vows to fight on [ Toronto Star ]
• Tar-nation, what a thing to unhitch, leave on street [ Toronto Star ]
• Goodbye bunny suit, hello Elvis [ Toronto Star ]
• While the Mayor Twitters away, city staff find site restricted at work [ National Post ]
• Vaughan draws line on graffiti [ Toronto Star ]
• $8.7B budget set to clear hurdle [ Toronto Sun ]
One comment
Credit to the Globe and CityTV for being the ONLY, I repeat ONLY, media sources to point out that the paid-decoys idea is not some conspiracy at City Hall to waste taxpayer dough. These two sources were the only ones I could find that had the intelligence to note that the entire survey methodology for counting the homeless has been borrowed from New York, which established the gold standard in these sorts of surveys over the past decade:
https://hope2009.cuny.edu/statistics.aspx
http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/socwork/download/Shadow_Count_Registration_Packet_2009.pdf
I know it’s stunning for Toronto to actually take something that works in other cities and apply it locally, but they did the right thing for once. By missing this part of the story, and trumping up the “paid homeless” headlines instead, the media and Torontonians created an embarrassing ruckus on the international wire services when there was nary a peep about the use of paid decoys in NYC. Really, really lame.