Condoms are yucky

Safe park sex could get riskier today.

Toronto’s newest daily is reporting that Mayor Mel Lastman wants people roughing it in the bush to be treated as criminals.

While the mayor says he can’t stop park sex, he’s looking for another deterrent to go along with the indecency charges proving so popular with the force this summer. He wants to get rubbers and dirty needles out of the city’s parks.

“It should be a criminal offence to dispose of a used condom in a city park where curious children can pick them up,” Lastman is quoted as saying in the National Post earlier this week. “A three-year-old, a four-year-old…. What do they know from a condom? They think it’s a balloon. I don’t want them touching it.”

Several attempts to reach the mayor for further comment were unsuccessful.

The Post quotes Lastman as saying that the city’s beefed-up force cannot prevent the type of random violence that has dominated the city’s news this summer. Nor can it prevent park sex altogether.

“There are some things you just can’t stop no matter what you try to do.”

Lastman was talking about how to spend the $2-million given to the police this summer to target high crime zones.

Downtown City Councillor Kyle Rae spearheaded the community action policing initiative that resulted in the new money. He told a reluctant Lastman in April that the city needed to boost its police budget by $2-million so that officers could round up drug dealers, prostitutes and pimps this summer.

At the time, Lastman didn’t support adding money to the city budget, but then changed his mind after a number of violent incidents.

Rae’s summertime plan to pay overtime for a beefed up police presence was approved by council earlier this month.

But on the eve of the plan’s implementation, Rae won’t talk about whether or not his program is getting away from his intended aim. He’s still too busy kicking about Xtra’s “trashy” coverage of the Bijou raids.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” he told this reporter. “It’s not you. I’m sick and tired of Xtra being a piece of shit.

“I’m tired of me trying to tell you what’s happening and getting it spun in a different way. I don’t feel I get fair treatment.”

Rae didn’t think he was getting fair treatment when fellow Downtown Councillor Olivia Chow was appointed to the police services board either, complaining to The Toronto Star this spring that he wanted the job for himself.

“I feel as though I don’t get a fair shake,” he says.