TO tales

A couple of interesting stories from Toronto have penetrated the wilds of Niagara in the past week...

Toronto City Council, which surprised even itself by voting to ban plastic grocery bags a few months ago, has abruptly reversed itself.  The ban, which was due to come into force at the start of 2013, is now delayed indefinitely.

That's good, although the council has acted for entirely the wrong reasons, mainly the fact that it was afraid of lawsuits.  In truth, there are plenty of good reasons to question the ban.  It's usually justified on the entirely unprovable grounds that these flimsy little things will take eons to rot in landfills.  What's more,  the pro-ban crowd totally ignore the fact that most people reuse the bags for kitchen waste, so if they're banned, sales of plastic bags specifically for kitchen waste will soar, offsetting any supposed benefit.

And how about this?  Cotton shopping bags, much loved by the green types, take far more energy and water     to produce than plastic bags do.  You have to re-use the cotton bags about 135 times before they become more planet-friendly than the loathed plastics.  Does anyone seriously think they last that long?

And while we're on the subject of garbage,  lovably hirsute entrepreneur Donald Trump has got himself into a fight over a hotel/condo tower bearing his name in Toronto.  The Donald lent his name to the building,  which has actually been built by a company with the rather forbidding name Talon International, to assist with the marketing.  In line with common practice, Talon then sought buyers for individual units in order to finance construction, with much of the actual payment deferred.  With visions of sugarplums (and Donald's famous barnet) dancing in their heads, a sizeable group of the greedy and the naive, together with a good number of offshore investors, took the bait.

Now Talon is looking to the investors to cough up the rest of the cash and take full ownership of the units.  But guess what, the Toronto economy isn't what it was.  Property values are falling, and banks are under orders from the government to be more miserly with mortgage lending.  As a result, a lot of the buyers can't get hold of the money, so they've called on m'learned friends to help them weasel out -- oh, and to claim a few mil' from Talon on the grounds that they were mis-sold the investment in the first place.

Remember a couple of posts ago when I said the arrival of payroll lender Wonga.com in Canada was an unintended consequence of the government's attempts to rein in the property market?  This looks like another one, albeit at the other end of the income scale.  If the original legal agreements are watertight, as Talon swears they are, then the investors must be hoping to get their money back by embarrassing Donald Trump.  Lots of luck with that.

UPDATE, 5 December: The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) has declined to come to the aid of the reluctant investors, who must now come up with the balance of their investment by September 13 or walk away, thereby losing whatever they have already put in.  One disgruntled gent has compared his situation to the fiscal cliff, which may be just a slight exaggeration.