Random Access

The weather Sunday afternoon was a lot like the music being played inside Erindale United Church on Dundas Cres. Sunny and bright, with a nice crisp edge.
The Barry Elmes quintet, one of the best jazz groups in the land, was going through its paces as the sun poured in like butterscotch through the stained-glass windows behind the vaulted ceiling in the hall.
Elmes, in his laid back way, called it, "a pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon."
More like thrilling, I'd say.
What a pleasure it is to see musicians of this calibre, who've played together for 15 years, exercising their craft in our own backyard.
All five are nominated individually as the top players in the land on their various instruments at the National Jazz Awards next Monday night at the Old Mill Inn (www.nationaljazzawards.com).
When you put them together, you get a lot more than the sum of the parts, which are obviously pretty good.
Kevin Turcotte on trumpet and flugelhorn and the inestimable Mike Murley on saxes are a superb front line. It was tough to decide if they sounded better soloing or when they played the themes together.
Reg Schwager, long-time member of the George Shearing Trio (with Toronto bassist Neil Swainson) is a fluid guitarist who specializes in mercurial runs.
Steve Wallace, along with Dave Young, could be the co-dean of the Toronto School of Superb Bassists (which includes Mississaugans Kieran Overs and Pat Collins), if such a thing existed.
Wallace, once a member of the Oscar Peterson Trio, and Elmes have developed that almost telepathic relationship that long-lasting rhythm sections feature. You could call it Synchronized Swinging if you wanted.
Wallace's solos were brief but brilliant.
Elmes presided amiably over the whole affair, presenting little vignettes about his songs and their various inspirations.
Most interesting among them was the genesis of The New Shim Sham Shimmy. That was a shuffle rhythm that Dizzy Gillespie, with whom Elmes played for a while, used to scat and talk about all the time from his early days in Harlem.
Diz would talk about it and hum it in dressing rooms and airport lobbies and wonder why nobody had incorporated it into a song. Elmes made Dizzy repeat it into his tape recorder and then created the melody for the new shuffle, which the quintet played Sunday.
It was a nice touchstone from the modern descendants of bop to one of its founding fathers.
Best of all, the proceeds of the event went to a worthy local cause, the Peel Youth Village that serves homeless youth trying to turn their lives around.

Katy Hutchison walked into a jail cell in 2002 with a big box of facial tissues and a broken heart to finally meet the young man who had kicked her husband to death five years earlier.
"The first thing I thought was, 'He looks just like the boy next door,'" Hutchison told a rapt audience of students at Erindale Secondary School Friday. "He starts to sob. It was all I could do not to go over and give him a big hug."
That might seem like an unusual reaction from someone who had waited so long to confront the person who shattered her family life with four short kicks to her husband's head. Hutchison did indeed want to confront Ryan Aldridge, not to berate him, but to make him face the horrible consequences of his actions.
On New Year's Eve 1997, her husband Bob Mcintosh went down the road to a neighbour's place in Squamish B.C. to check on an out-of-control party at the house of a friend who was away on vacation. He never returned.
An angry young man named Ryan McMillan sucker-punched Mcintosh as he entered the crowded master bedroom of the house. He was knocked cold. Aldridge then delivered the fatal blows.
The presentation Hutchison has given to some 100,000 students across Canada is ostensibly about the problems associated with teens partying their brains out without any parental supervision.
But, more significantly, it's about forgiveness and personal responsibility.
Hutchison's story works because it's real. When the distraught mother tells her children what has happened to their father the next morning, her young son looks at her sadly and asks, "Can we have some Cheerios now?"
She realized then that, "I couldn't make our lives be about Bob's death."
Instead, she made their lives about trying to prevent more tragedies like Bob's.
Hutchison has come to know Ryan Aldridge very well. At the time of Bob's death he was a 19-year-old full of anger after years of being bullied as a child about his lisp, full of anger and guilt about his parent's divorce and full of alcohol that fueled the fury that caused him to kill a man he didn't even know, just because he tried to do the right thing.
"These kids suffered from a serious case of entitlement," Hutchison told the Erindale kids, many of whom have been to parties just like the fatal one she described. "We have to take a step back and look at what we have. We have all these resources, freedoms and access and with all we have, we have a nasty sense of entitlement to have more."
Some kids at the Squamish party felt they had a right to take over someone's home when they were away, party wildly and ultimately wreck the place and kill someone who got in the way of their pleasure.
On Hutchison's advice, Aldridge pleaded guilty to manslaughter and now helps her make the presentation to teens when she's in Vancouver, where he now lives in a half-way houses as he completes a five-year sentence.
A slide she shows near the end of Bob's Story shows Hutchison and Aldridge with their arms entwined, looking happy, very much like the mother and son that some Erindale students guessed they were.
No, they are widow and murderer.
One life was already wasted over a momentary act of utterly irresponsible stupidity. Hutchison wanted to make sure that another one wasn't.
"Anger is a tight, small, dead-end emotion that gets you nowhere," she told Erindale students. "Forgiveness will set you free."

The fat is in the fire and somebody's going to get burned.
The report handed down yesterday by the two auditors who reviewed the $15 million deficit of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board is being treated by most media as a rebuke to local trustees and administrators. It is.
But the analysis by William McLean and Pierre Filiatrault is also a surprisingly even-handed analysis that confirms much of what school boards have been saying for years about the inadequate funding model that is the bedrock of public education policy in this province.
It's also a troubling reminder that the adversarial system isn't just restricted to our courts.
The main fault that the investigators found with the board is that its underlying policy over the past few years, as Queen's Park slowly strangled its flexibility in spending and forced it to shift money from other areas to pay for special education, salaries and busing, was outright denial.
Hoping that things will miraculously return to what they used to be, not surprisingly, turns out to be really bad public policy.
As the report astutely points out, the board's biggest mistake came in 2002-03 when it reached a deal with teachers for raises of 6.5 per cent, which corrected an historical anomaly (Catholic board teachers were always behind their public counterparts). The board matched that raise for non-teaching staff, unlike its sister boards, thus creating many of its current fiscal woes.
"While we fully comprehend the board's motivation and reasoning for agreeing to such a collective agreement, we remain somewhat puzzled by the board's lack of action in subsequent budgetary exercises to address this issue," the report states.
Life went on as normal, with the expectation that the Titanic would make a course adjustment in future, thanks to the largesse of the provincial government. Some trustees must have been giddy with excitement at the election of the Liberals in 2005, believing the good old days were back.
Instead, Dufferin-Peel is going to get the reality therapy that other boards have already experienced. It will have to make a lot of the administrative staff cuts those boards have already suffered.
It will have to revisit some tough and unpopular decisions that it could not or would not make in the past: implementing alternate-day Junior Kindergarten to save busing costs and cancelling busing to regional programs at Holy Name of Mary and St. Sofia Eastern rite schools in Mississauga being two of the most challenging. That won't be popular with parents.
The report verifies many of the complaints Dufferin-Peel has made, on behalf of all other boards. There is credence in the boards' long-standing complaints that busing costs are underfunded, confirms the audit. Despite years of study and innumerable prototypes of new bus funding models, the problem persists, especially in high-growth areas such as Peel.
There's still no sign of the school closing regulations that would allow Dufferin-Peel to get on with the messy business of consolidation.
The salary gap, the difference between what Ontario pays for "average" provincial salaries and what Peel pays is killing local boards and the, "minister must move as quickly as government resources allow to narrow the gap," states the report.
Speaking of the minister — Gerard Kennedy, King of Edubabble and Glibness ("We don't want to micromanage from Queen's Park") — he says to Dufferin-Peel as he heads out the door to be the designated saviour of the Liberal Party of Canada: "Oh, by the way, can you have a plan in place to deal with all this stuff by Friday?"
Of course, he adds, he's not interfering in any way with the independence of local trustees to make their own decisions.
Which once again begs the question: who's running our schools?
We ostensibly elect trustees to do that, but they don't make policy, they can't raise taxes, they're totally dependent on grants and they have to go and sit in the quiet corner when the minister is unhappy.
If Dufferin-Peel doesn't see the light and acquiesce to a lot of cuts it clearly doesn't endorse, what will be the consequence?
In its conclusion, the investigation team says that in its meetings with board officials their frustration with the ministry came through loud and clear. "It was made very clear to us that a large part of the board's frustration was due to the perception that its message to the Ministry of Education ... was not being heard. Through our many discussions with senior officials of the ministry, it has been made clear to us that the ministry was well aware of the problems that boards were having with the funding model. The board can thus rest assured that its messages were indeed heard."
That may have been meant to provide comfort to Dufferin-Peel, but it may be the scariest statement in the whole report.
It says, "yes, they hear your message. They just don't care about it."

"We're going to grow our own family doctors."
No, that's not a twisted source with a big bump on his shoulder speaking, as thunders roars in the background, from the nether depths of the bio-genetics department at UTM. It's Wayne Fyffe, president and CEO of Credit Valley Hospital (CVH), talking about a new program that launches here July 1.
Although it hasn't attracted much fanfare, the opening of the prosaically-titled Family Medicine Training Unit (FMTU) is a big deal in this city and should have a big impact on a problem that doesn't receive much attention: the fact that a lot of Mississaugans (up to 20 per cent by some estimates) can't find a family doctor.
It's fine to make healthy living and preventive medicine an overriding priority in a reformed primary care system, but that sensible strategy isn't much good if families can't get access to primary care in the first place.
The supply of more family doctors through the FMTU is critical to CVH and our community, but is really just a spinoff benefit to some much more basic advantages as far as the provincial government is concerned.
Giving new doctors a strong grounding in family medicine under the watchful eye of veterans of the field before they go into practice is one of those.
Allowing new graduates to practice from the get-go in the new world of collaborative medicine, where the doctor's time is spent doing what a doctor should and various nurse practitioners, nurses, dieticians, pharmacists, physiotherapists help the patient see as little of the doctor as possible, is another.
Here's how FMTU works. Every year when they graduate from the U of T Medical School, a group of new doctors (nine in each of two years eventually) will set up shop in the office building at the south-east corner of Eglinton Ave. and Erin Mills Pkwy. There, they'll take classes with a group of experienced family doctors who have their own practices there.
The freshly-minted docs will see a limited number of patients under the guidance of their supervisors, and get oriented to the complicated world of health care and, especially, the greater role that community agencies such as Peel Health and the Community Care Access Committee (which provides home care) will play. It's what used to be called a medical internship.
The leader of the program is well-respected local doctor David Clarkson who is winding down his own career by helping to gear up the careers of a new generation.
Experience elsewhere suggests that a good number of new doctors who go through this kind of program are likely to set up shop in the neighbouring vicinity. Even if they don't, the hospital will benefit in the short run because it will have a place to refer patients who come to the emergency department and don't need to be admitted, but do need to see a family physician.
The value of an old hand watching over recent graduates - something he benefited from personally when he first started practicing in Mississauga, is hard to underestimate, according to Dr. Clarkson.
"The mentoring role is critical for family doctors and for specialists," he says. "It's important that doctors know how to think, how to behave and how to balance work and life."
Sometimes those new-fangled concepts, convoluted acronyms and P.R. spins cover up something that truly is valuable: some good old-fashioned common sense.

I'm a Red Green fan, but I can change - if I have to - I guess.
Yes, as all you legion of mismatched suspender and plaid fans know, Friday marked the last episode of the very silly and very, very funny Red Green Show. It was a show dedicated to the inalienable proposition that men never grow up. Or as Red would say, "If you can't stay young, you can at least stay immature."
The show stayed immature for 300 episodes and 15 years, much to the obvious mystery of its creators and the delight of its fans.
I'm actually old enough to remember the Red Fisher Show from the 1960s. That featured endless grainy film of fish being hauled aboard and endless discussions about the intricacies of catching walleye in the incredibly fake confines of Scuttlebutt Lodge, the imaginary place that sort-of inspired the Red Green satire in the first place.
We've been watching Red loyally since actor Steve Smith, a one-time Streetsville resident who used to be an elementary teacher around here, was on CHCH-TV way back when.
It survived many rocky up-and-downs and cancellations and station switches and eventually this most Canadian of shows actually became a cult classic on American PBS stations.
No wonder the Yanks are worried about our porous borders. If Red and Harold and Dalton and Mike and the boys can capture the imaginations of Americans that easily, what hope do they have against mature terrorism?
There were a lot of goofy segments that provoked giggles and groans over the years. I particularly liked 'Ask The Experts,' where Lodge members would answer letters from readers, blithely offering advice in areas about which they knew nothing. That prompted the segment's theme - those three little words men find so hard to say: "I don't know."
I shall miss many other things about the show, but none more-so than 'Adventures With Bill.'
Now I'm not saying this just because the incredibly talented Rick Green, who played Bill and co-wrote the Red Green show for most of its history, just happens to be a long-time Port Credit resident.
Green (The Frantics/ Prisoners of Gravity/ History Bites) is a master of the slapstick style that has its roots in Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Bill's totally unjustified belief in his physical skills was surpassed only by his foolhardy confidence in his friends. The result produced some of the finest short bursts of tragi-comedy since George Bush tried to speak English.
Invariably, a wounded but none-the-wiser Bill, laughed off his injuries and returned to test the limits of his own inabilities again the next week. Fortunately for us, he never found them.
Without Red, Bill, Harold and the members of Possum Lodge, life isn't going to be as giddy for 30 minutes every Friday night, and that's not such a good thing.
Anybody here know the Latin for, "When all else fails, watch the reruns?"

Hanan Sweidan graduated this morning. Again.
Born in Jordan, Sweidan studied to be a chemist and worked in Kuwait as a research assistant at the Kuwaiti Institute for Scientific Research until she moved back to Jordan.
She and her husband Basem, also a chemist, moved to Canada and Mississauga with their four sons in 2003.
When they arrived here looking for a better life, the family had some big decisions to make.
"I wanted to have a job related to my experience and my education (B.Sc. from the University of Kuwait)," Sweidan said.
It was decided Basem would get a job (He's since started his own wholesale business related to pharmaceuticals) and Hanan would go to school and try to resume her career as a chemist.
She spent a year upgrading her English. Then, acting on advice she received from many sources, she decided to go back to school here to add Canadian academic credentials to her resumé and improve her job prospects.
She graduated from the post-diploma program at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in environment last August.
"I am applying many places but still I have no job," the Erin Mills resident said.
"It's a competition," she said with a sigh.
A competition that's tough on anyone, but especially hard on a 47-year-old woman new to English and new to the country. Not to mention one who is paying tuition for two sons studying engineering at McMaster University.
Undaunted by her failure to land a job in her field yet, Sweidan took another major step to stay in her field when she signed up earlier this year for the Enhanced Language Training (ELT) program of Mississauga's Inter-Cultural Neighbourhood Social Services (ICNSS).
It's an intensive 10-week language program that takes foreign-trained professionals in three areas, environment, customer service and administration, and gives them a real grounding in Canadian business culture.
More importantly, it gives them a six-week placement that provides participants with a reference and local job experience on their resumés at worst, and, at best, provides them with a job. To date, 20-30 per cent of the mature students have been hired by the firms where they were placed.
Even if they don't get hired, the experience of working at a Canadian business, making contacts with others in your line of work and gaining some much-needed confidence is critical, said Sweidan. She finishes her six-week term tomorrow in an entry-level position at Maxxam Analytics, which has its head offices in Mississauga.
One of two students who spoke at the graduation, Sweidan said afterward that the ICNSS program is a bridge that helps newcomers span the huge gulf between their whimsical dreams of landing a job and the harsh reality of getting one.
"When we had our interview at the embassy when we came to this country, they accepted us as professionals," Hanan said of she and her husband. "I can't do anything else. I do not want to work at Tim Hortons," she said, niftily demonstrating that she's already in touch with the core values of Canadians.
It has been a tough three years. The attempt to land that elusive job has been a lot longer and harder than they had envisioned, but the Sweidans aren't giving up.
Hanan is speaking for many, many newcomers when she says: "We came here with a passion, to this great country, to contribute and to share. We came here to give and to gain. We came here with great hopes."

Cross-country skiing is one of those sports that Canadians have felt guilty about for a long time: As in, why aren't we a lot better at it?
In a land with plenty of snow and plenty of flat, we were, appropriately enough, lost in the wilderness.
And then along came Beckie.
She looked more like a waif you'd want to take home and fill up with a big home-cooked meal than an athlete, but Beckie Scott overcame our pre-conceptions and became an unlikely star on the World Cup circuit.
It was a slow climb. She finished 45th in her first Olympics in Nagano.
Geez. We always seemed to be 42nd or 56th or 63rd in those days in the real winter events, like Nordic skiing which was dominated by the Europeans and Scandinavians.
Of course, we'd have a chance to medal in the side-by-side snowboard whirlybird event that was the newest entry in the Games. There's a reason those medals feel tawdry and slightly diminished. Because they are.
Cross-country skiing is a legitimate winter sport. You can tell by the number of people collapsing and/or throwing up at the finish line.
Beckie Scott wouldn't go away and she brought a discipline to her pursuit of excellence that inspired the whole Canadian Nordic program.
She not only refused to join the cheaters who used drugs to enhance their chances of victory, but she called them out.
Scott became the first woman from North America to win an Olympic cross-country medal in Salt Lake City. She knew that she had been cheated of gold by the two skiers in front of her and she said so, and took considerable heat for it at the time.
She persisted and was proven right when she got the gold some two years later. Life isn't fair and Scott was denied the chance to stand on the top of the podium and hear her anthem played while the world watched.
This year, Scott was dominant in World Cup (10 medals) and was a frustratingly-close second in the overall World Cup standings, the truest measure of the best in the world.
It's often said that sport is about character-building, but too rarely does it hold true.
Scott's case is a refreshing exception.
We were privileged in this country to watch her grow from a strapling of a girl into a powerhouse of a woman, unwilling to accept anything less than the best from herself. She insisted on a fair playing field for every athlete and, by the power of her personal will, she helped clean up not just her sport but all of the Olympics.
She has earned her retirement, and she deserves our heartfelt thanks.

Imagine for a moment that they did the logical thing with potential municipal electoral candidates and screened them for their knowledge about the community they wish to serve, their life experiences and their general suitability to hold office.
Then imagine that a senior official in Mississauga's human resources department is sitting down with a potential mayoralty candidate.
"Good morning, Sir. I hope you don't mind if I ask you a few questions to determine if you might be suitable to replace the current mayor. Some of these questions might seem a little odd but I can assure you they do have a purpose.
"First of all, have you ever single-handedly saved a City from potential immolation as a result of several derailed railway cars carrying potentially lethal amounts of chlorine, while, at the same time, being carried around the accident scene by a senior Ontario Provincial Police officer?
"No, eh. Don't worry, we'll just ignore that one. Let's go on to an easier multiple-choice question.
"If you heard that police were dealing with a distraught man standing on the roof of his home with a rope around his neck, would you:
"A. Go about your normal business and let the police handle it?
"B. Monitor the situation and stay on alert in case, police want you to intervene?
"C. Go down to the scene so that the man can wave at you and blow you a kiss before he scrambles down?
"OK, I guess that wasn't quite as easy as it seemed.
"How about something straightforward? Can you skate circles around NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman at a press conference? Can you skate circles around Mel Lastman without even putting on skates?Can you arrange to be at 20 community events in Mississauga every day and never be on time for any of them?
"Have you ever been in a collision with a truck as a pedestrian and inflicted more damage than you suffered?
"Do you have any 32-pound salmon on your office walls that you personally caught? Do you think you could attract a couple of dozen Fortune 500 companies to the municipality?
"Can you do that Vulcan mind-meld thing to make a judicial inquiry disappear from people's memory banks?
"Hey, where are you going, Sir? Don't give up so easily.
"Oh, well - guess he just wasn't woman enough for the job."

If there's a spot where Mississauga's past and future intersect, it's on Eglinton Ave. W., just west of McLaughlin Rd.
There, for years, on the south side of Eglinton sat a little patch of paradise - the farm owned by Earl Madill.
I'm sure lots of folks thought it had no business being there, perched as it was on the northern flank of the Mississauga City Centre and dividing, as it was, the two halves of the Heritage Hills subdivision.
For contrarians like me, it gladdened the heart every time you drove by the spot. It was inherently pleasing that someone recognized the value of green, open space - for its own sake - and was resisting the lure of so-called progress. It seemed a conscious choice of the agrarian past over the cookie-cutter, ticky-tacky present.
My wife used to get positively giddy at the sight of real, live cows in the middle of the field. "Good for him," she'd say, knowing that the land must have been worth a fortune for development. "Good for him."
If you've driven by there lately, you've seen the skeleton of the Confederation Pkwy. extension going up through the property. Confederation will open from its current terminus at Burnhamthorpe, fly over the 403 and then align with McLaughlin Rd.
But the farm isn't disappearing just yet, according to Ben Madill. Ben is the heritage firebrand who was the late Earl's brother and was largely responsible for the saving of the Britannia Schoolhouse which he attended on his first day of school in September of 1921.
Madill, who will turn 91 on May 20, said his brother bought the 100 acre farm around 1942 for some $4,000. Earl's son Joe has sold some of the property, but has retained 45 acres that he'll continue to work. Joe lives in a house in the subdivision, right beside the farm.
The way things are going, he may have the last working farm in the city in a few years, within spitting distance of City Hall.
Ben has heard from a lot of people who valued the symbolic significance of Earl's farm.
"I was in the bank one day and I happened to meet a lady who was telling me about how she and her kids used to feed the cattle through the fences. After we talked for a while, I asked her where it was and it turned out it was Earl's place," laughed Madill.
"It's a sad thing that things we really need are disappearing," Madill said. "The farms, the scenery. It's nice to see some parkland."
As for the much-discussed Britannia Farm, another touchstone to a past when gridlock referred to too many cattle trying to get through too narrow a gate, Madill would like to see the minimalist approach adopted there, too.
"There's nothing wrong with doing nothing with it," he said.
Amen.

Terry Pierce Jr.'s experience in refereeing hockey could come in very handy for the new project he's taken on, trying to win the Ward 6 seat on Mississauga City council from a pair of renowned politicians.
There's likely to be a lot of...ah... rhetoric flying between ex-MP Carolyn Parrish and ex-councillor Ron Starr. Pierce figures he might be able to jump in the middle and draw some attention to his own campaign by calling a few instigator penalties on his high-profile opponents.
"Yeah, I don't think my chances are so good based on the two big front-runners," laughed Pierce, who registered to run on his 34th birthday to give himself a little bit of added luck.
If you're counting, he makes the fourth candidate in the marquee race that is already larger than many expected. Olive Rose Steele, who ran for public school trustee in the same ward in 2003, is also in the field.
Pierce's dad, a long-time Mississaugan, was an NHL referee for nine years ending in 1977 and his son spent many years trying to follow in his skates. Now Pierce Jr. tends bar in the city centre, where he can walk to work from his Elm Dr. condo.
"I'd be walking to City Hall so that $17,000 car allowance they get - I would not have to touch it," he laughs.
But politics is no joke to Pierce, who grew up mostly in Streetsville and has lived here all his life, save for three years spent earning a degree in kinesiology at the University of New Brunswick.
"My heart's always been in Mississauga," he said. "It's almost a joke among my friends. I can't tell you who America is at war with, but I can tell you about the accident at Mavis and Britannia. Since I was in Grade 9, Mississauga is almost all I care about."
The candidate's first instinct was to run in the community he knows so well, Streetsville, but there was one problem with that.
"I really like George Carlson."
So, ironically, he's going to be taking on Carlson's pal Parrish as a result.
Pierce Jr. wants to stick to bread-and-butter issues like gridlock and plans to try an old-fashioned approach that seems to be going out of style: knocking on all the doors he can in the ward.
"I'm starting next week. Working in the bar industry, my days are free."
As he talks out loud about his approach, Pierce Jr. seems to settle on a campaign strategy against the heavyweights.
"They are setting themselves up for three or six years from now (when they run for mayor)," said Pierce Jr. "I'm going to be involved in just being a councillor. I hope people will see past the fact that they want to set themselves up for what's down the road. I don't want to be a one-term councillor.
"You never know. Stranger things have happened."

Rudolf Czekalla got a decidedly chilly reception from City councillors Wednesday when he had the audacity to suggest they give more than lip service to the concept of civic "inclusivity."
The Mississauga resident probably had no idea of the reaction he would provoke from local politicians when he asked why the City bans non-citizens from sitting on its committees and advisory bodies.
(In some cases provincial legislation specifies committee members must be qualified as electors, meaning they need Canadian citizenship, but for many other bodies, there is no such rule.)
The city centre resident had directed a very civil letter to the municipality suggesting it was time for the "archaic" condition of citizenship to be dropped. That's already happened in other municipalities such as the City of Toronto, where Czekalla happens to work.
The multicultural nature of Mississauga and the large number of landed immigrants here make the rule outmoded, he argued.
"In the end, is not the fundamental essence of true citizenship more properly characterized by what an individual does to serve his or her community than by a mere piece of paper obtained by virtue of having lived in the country three or more years?"
Not according to Mayor Hazel McCallion and City council. They took real umbrage at the suggestion.
Under cross-examination from the mayor, Czekalla explained that he has German citizenship. Germany does not allow dual citizenship. For reasons "too complicated to get into," the 36-year-old said he didn't want to renounce his current citizenship to become a Canadian even though he's lived here 28 years.
"You’re not prepared to take that step that grants you privileges and freedom of speech. The citizenship of your (former) country is more precious to you than the one you're living in. Boy, that really bothers me," McCallion told Czekalla. "If (people) want to contribute I think they will go out of their way to get that piece of paper."
Let's suspend disbelief for a second and imagine that McCallion retired and moved to another country. If that happened, do you think Madame Mayor would renounce her Canadian citizenship?
And, if per chance, she wanted to use the benefit of her gazilion years of municipal experience to benefit her new community, wouldn't that be a really good idea?

Some songs move into your soul and refuse to leave.
One of those is on the brand new CD by Stephen Fearing called Yellowjacket (True North Records).
It's called "Johnny's Lament." Like a lot of good tunes, it sounds on first listening as if you've heard it a thousand times before. Maybe that's the essence of transcendent songs.
It's a piece written from the point of view of someone who's been awake all night, haunted by the demons of the past and the uncertain prospects of the future. "So I lie on my back/ And wait for the sun/The water colour morning bringing roses for the dawn" says one of many memorable lines.
It is truly a lament, with Fearing's stunning guitar work and husky vocal invoking the heavy sense of loss.
Despite the title, it was only when I had a chance to talk to Fearing, who appeared recently at the Living Arts Centre in Mississauga, that I realized the inspiration for the song. Then things became a lot clearer.
Although there are no specific references in the piece to him, the song is for the late Johnny Cash, the genre-busting rockabilly/rock/folk/country/roots artist who defied all musical boundaries and crossed 'em all at one time or other.
Fearing watched a DVD about Cash's life in which the late singer said, "Sometimes at night/When I hear the wind/I wish that I was crazy again."
Those became the opening lines of Johnny's Lament. On the documentary, Cash talked about a dark period in his life, in the midst of the worst of his numerous addictions, when he went up into the hills behind his Nashville home, crawled into a cave and lay down to die.
Eventually, after for who knows how long, Cash found the will to live and somehow made his way out of the labyrinth to the surface.
Johnny's Lament is sung from the point-of-view of the older, wiser man looking back on that surreal experience and, "crawling out of that hole toward the light."
The singer reflects on the wildness of his past, regretting it and wanting to relive it in equal parts.
It's a brilliant song full of human contradictions that nicely matches the spirit of the complicated man who inspired it.

It's totally apropos that the door of the former St. Peter's Rectory at 1556 Dundas St. W. in the heart of Erindale Village should be painted bright red.
The colour might be said to stand for the blood, as in blood, sweat and tears, that orthodontist Eric Selnes and his wife have put into the place since they bought it and decided to restore it in February of 2005.
Or, since red is the colour of love, the door could be a symbol of the passion that Dr. Selnes and his wife Dr. Helen Grubisa, also an orthodontist, have for heritage. They bought the house with the intention of returning the 1861 structure to its original glory, and they've managed to do that despite the many unexpected challenges that arose.
The red door might also be symbolic of the colour of the ink that was spilled all over the project. Dr. Selnes estimates that about $500,000 was spent on the renovation, not including the purchase price.
The door is believed to be original to the house. In fact, the house's exterior has changed little since Dundas St. W. was a dirt track and Charlotte Schreiber was painting watercolours of the church that towers over the Credit and the former village of Springfield.
Now the inside of the house, which was last used as a rectory in 1960, matches the period of the exterior.
The first thing that strikes you when you step inside the restored building is the beautiful exposed brick walls that were the original back wall of the house before it was expanded. There are lots of original window casings and four original fireplaces. A new board and batten section that was not original to the house has been replicated and the original stone returned to the outside foundation.
Selnes wanted to expose the huge original ceiling beams too, but the cost of a sprinkler system that would be required nixed that hope.
The original designer for the project wanted the interior to be modern high-tech glitz, all stainless steel and glass, the antithesis of what Eric and Helen wanted. So they became their own designers and along with Helen's father, Zelko Grubisa who was the contractor for the job, they lovingly put together the new pieces of the interior. Chief among those is a central staircase, built from scratch out of old Canadian oak.
Because all the outside walls were heaving in from years of frost, they had to be underpinned. A new basement was created as a result of two months of digging, by hand. An outside exit from the basement had to be created at the insistence of the fire department.
And although that exit and the requirement for wheelchair access diminish the historical effect somewhat, the result is still a triumph.
Matthew Wilkinson, Heritage Mississauga's historian, whose great-grandfather constructed the building, says the orthodontists, "have done a wonderful job protecting and enhancing the heritage attributes of the building while making it entirely modern in function. It is an integral component of the cultural landscape of Erindale Village."
After his wife fell in love with the building, the couple talked to Mark Warrack at the City to find out how it could be restored and the project got rolling, there was no way any obstacles were going to get in the way, said Selnes.
"Why did we do it? It's just a piece of Canadiana," says Dr. Selnes of the structure. "It's got good energy, good karma. It's pre-Confederation. It just screams out: Keep it. It needed to be respected."
Then he adds tellingly, "I think I may appreciate it a little bit more than most people, because I'm an old soul."
It takes one to save one.

Some people might be intimidated by jumping into a high-profile City council race that features a former MP who seems to make national headlines in her sleep and a wheeler-dealer man-about-town who already knows City Hall better than some of our sitting councillors.
Olive Rose Steele isn't some people.
"I see myself on a par with them," says the soon-to-be 59-year-old in speaking of Carolyn Parrish and Ron Starr, two of her three opponents in the Ward 6 council race. (Terry Pierce Jr. is the other registered contestant.) "I think Mississauga is looking for fresh new faces."
Steele ran for public school board in the same ward, where she's lived for 14 of her 32 years in Mississauga, in the last municipal election. It might have been natural to expect she'd run for the Peel District School Board again, especially given that incumbent Warren Kennedy is not seeking re-election.
While she still maintains a strong interest in keeping students in school longer and improving after-school programs, Steele didn't hesitate to jump into the council pool even after her high-profile opponents had taken the plunge.
"I am not going to bring Ottawa politics or Queen's Park politics into my ward," she said. "Yes, they are seasoned but I feel it is my right to run because I have something to offer. I feel I could make a difference."
In fact, Steele and Starr had coffee recently, "because he wanted to know how serious I was."
Serious enough to have given at least some passing thought to a platform which includes increasing affordable housing for seniors and putting in programs, "to help young people who've lost their way to come back into society as good citizens and not be left floundering."
Like many people, the African-Canadian feels a little nonplussed when she tunes into City council and sees a colour palette whose theme song could be, "A Whiter Shade Of Pale."
The long-time Queen's Park civil servant, who now runs her own employment agency in the city centre, says cheekily that she hopes to give council, "not only some colour but a different perspective."

Now that we've survived all the hoopla surrounding the grand unveiling of the Greater Toronto Transportation Agency (GTTA), complete with the requisite wall of transit vehicles from the various GTA transit authorities as a photo backdrop, we're left wondering: What exactly is this new beast?
A work-in-progress is the obvious answer.
Surely no one could disagree with the need for a co-ordinating body to manage the mish-mash of transit systems in the GTA, to maximize efficiencies in routes across borders and create a one-fare "smart-card" system.
Mississauga's Harinder Takhar is the latest Transportation Msinister to "work toward" this goal. It won't be easy. And it's not certain that the GTTA will be any help, at least not in its present form.
There are major structural problems. The TTC is a mature system. The transit systems in the surrounding 905 regions are anything but. The TTC's budget (and its infrastructure replacement needs) dwarf those of the 905.
There are major political problems. Municipalities will still run transit systems and still receive funding from senior governments. Without the power of the purse, how will the GTTA convince cities and regions to work together?
The debate over structuring the board of the new body is a microcosm of the looming problems. As the largest transit entity by far, Toronto wanted the majority of voting power. The regions already have to live beside the elephant and they didn't want it running the circus.
Ontario has decided the board will consist of five 905 representatives, one from each region, four councillors from Toronto and two at-large "business" representatives appointed by Queen's Park. You can just imagine the behind-the-scenes machinations over those latter appointments. If Toronto Board of Trade President Glen Grunwald is one selection, the other had better be from the 905 or the body will face the wrath of Hazel and her cohorts.
It's obvious that Ontario hopes to introduce the concept of the GTTA, fiddle with its political make-up over time to find a workable balance, and then give it more and more power.
So how will the municipalities feel about giving up control?
They'll be opposed on principle of course, since they are elected to look after the transportation interests in their individual municipalities.
On the other hand, if a regional transit system can use new gas tax revenues to relieve the transit burden on the property tax, they'll take a lot more kindly to the concept.
Right now, the GTTA just looks like a nice lyric in search of a melody. You can't make music without all the pieces.
It also founds eerily similar to another regional co-ordinating body that died a slow death because it was never clear what it was, or exactly what it was supposed to do.
Can the GTTA avoid the long, slow fade to oblivion that was the fate of the late Greater Toronto Services Board?

Ashlie McIssac? Ashley MacIssak? Ashley McIsek?
Damn. Going to have to learn to spell that name.
That's because Ashley MacIsaac, the man flying below the radar in the Liberal leadership race, could be the next Prime Minister of Canada.
Scoff all you want but MacIsaac has the gazongas to get the job done.
We know this because of his appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 1997 when he ended a typically maniac fiddle performance with a kick that revealed he is a traditionalist of the first order when it comes to wearing a kilt.
Before he's even elected, the candidate has already given a whole new meaning to the phrase, "The Honourable Member from Cape Breton."
Here's a back to the basics bad-boy who could make Pierre Trudeau look like General Francisco Franco.
MacIsaac once called up a Calgary newspaper and announced he was planning a gay wedding just so he could imagine the look on Ralph Klein's face when he read the story the next day.
In an interview about his apparently serious intentions to run, MacIsaac said, "I have for many years relied upon the sex, drugs and rock 'n roll image to sell tickets. That's not what I plan on doing to sell my particular platform or what I think the Liberals need to do to move forward."
You see, we need not worry about scandal if this Celtic cowboy is elected. He's pre-corrupted! Been there, done that.
What interest could a lowly, oh-so-obvious advertising scam have for a worldly man such as Ashley? He's set his standards way higher than that.
Just imagine the parties at 24 Sussex Dr. If it's true, as Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper believe, that you have to be buddy-buddy with the U.S. to have them even consider Canada's point of view, then a party animal like Ashley is just what we need to warm George Bush's heart.
If anyone can get George and Laura out on the dance floor to do the limbo, it's our man MacIsaac.
Even if it backfires and George won't loosen up, the rest of us can at least sit back and enjoy the pleasure of seeing the Prime Minister of Canada fiddle while Bush burns.

Robert Hubert has found his own unique way of protesting the work stoppage at Community Living Mississauga that has interfered with one of the real pleasures he gets out of life.
He's letting his frustrations pile up, in a manner of speaking. You see, Robert, 43, has an intellectual handicap. He's one of many adults who work in local grocery stores, taking loose grocery buggies and putting them back in the fenced corrals where they belong.
But a funny thing has happened since Robert's worker at Community Living Mississauga went on strike April 10.
Instead of collecting the buggies and putting them back where they belong, Robert has started placing them in front of the entrance to the grocery store at the Credit Landing plaza in Port Credit. His mother isn't positive Robert's actions are deliberate but she does know that he's upset.
"He does not understand about strikes," says Robert's mother Marie. "He feels abandoned."
If he doesn't stop his one-man protest his mother is worried he will be suspended, something else he won't understand. Then he'll be at home for another 25 hours a week with precious little to do.
Marie and numerous other parents across the city are coming to their wit's end as they come to grips with the fact that the CLM strike, now three weeks old, has no apparent end in sight.
If the effect on Robert not seeing his support worker has been so profound, Marie Hubert wonders what it's like for more severely disabled adults who have been forced to bunk in together in group homes under the supervision of managers and replacement workers they don't know.
"They're not used to strangers. They're used to seeing the same people on a regular basis. It must be horrifying and scary for them," says Hubert.
The change of routine during the strike and the lack of activities for her son is undoing a lot of good progress he was making, says Mary Bruyea of Erin Mills. Her 25-year-old son Matthew has autism and is epileptic. He may not be able to express it but he really enjoys going to the "base site" at Britannia, where the adult CLM clients gather regularly to socialize, see their friends and take part in recreation. "He can't say it but I know it's a vital part of his life," his mother says.
"It's just very, very difficult," said Bruyea, because there's only so many drives and so many walks she can take in a day to keep Matthew alert. "He just lies on the couch all day. He sleeps a lot more and it's when he sleeps that he has his seizures."
The most frustrating thing is that CLM and Local 251 of the Ontario Public Service Employees' Union aren't even talking about resuming talking.
"They're not really considering their clients, as far as I'm concerned," said Bruyea.
Sylvie Gauthier, 40, normally has a steady five-day workday routine that includes helping out with reading in primary school classrooms two days a week, going to the CLM Palstan drop-in program and working at a local grocery store.
"She has an outing every day and those are the highlights of her week," said her sister Marie, with whom Sylvie lives. "It's difficult at the best of times for a person with a disability to accept change and now, all of a sudden, all of her services are gone."
Like the other families, Gauthier doesn't want to point fingers at the union or management. She just wants the dispute settled.
"Somebody's got to make the first move," she said. "People with disabilities have been abandoned."
Marina Noronha can already see that her 28-year-old son Jason has regressed.
"Emotionally it's hurting and it's placed tremendous stress on the family," said Noronha. Instead of being at the Palstan centre for 35 hours a week, Jason sits at home and watches television.
"He has his pals there and all his activities, like swimming. Now he just listlessly watches TV."
In a letter of protest, Manisha Mohan said this week, "the entire reason that these individuals require special support is that
their understanding of greater issues and circumstances is limited. It has caused great duress and upset to these vulnerable people. They do not understand why their staff is gone, why their programs have stopped, why their lives have been turned upside down.
"These workers are unlike others where the consequence of them not working is that a production line has ceased or class work has been delayed. They are providing with the means for people to survive and live there lives which are already difficult. Many parents and families have been left in distress, as programs they rely heavily on to care for their family member with special needs, are now gone. The cessation of this work is analogous to that of medical staff going on strike."
Except that patients can usually speak out about their plight.