Random Access

After the official ceremonies, the speeches, the refreshments and the hoopla, Oscar sat down to play.
And time must have stood still for those privileged enough to hear the best jazz pianist in the world, if not the best in the world, fooling around with the brand new gift of a Yamaha Canada clavinova that he'd brought along to the opening ceremonies of the building that bears his name.
“He was like a kid with a toy,” says Dave Shackleton, a teacher at Oscar Peterson Public School in Churchill Meadows, whose wife hauled him back into the gym when she saw that OP was going to test the limits of the most up-to-date electric piano on the market.
The staff and the stragglers who hung around long enough got to see their own little private concert.
The clavinova not only is a digital piano, but it can replicate the sounds of acoustic instruments with eerie accuracy.
“It's three-quarters of the size of a baby grand,” said Shackleton. “When Dr. Peterson was playing it and he hit the button for flute, if you closed your eyes, you'd think someone was playing the flute. It sounded acoustically correct.”
The member of more music halls of fame than you can shake a drum stick at, Peterson has a long fascination with electronic keyboards.
“When he started to play with the upright bass on his own, it was like the rest of us weren't there,” said Shackleton, who has taught in Peel for five years but knows of Peterson's world-wide popularity from stints teaching in England, Korea and Japan as well.
Wouldn't be surprised if OP was thinking of his beloved long-time late bassists Ray Brown and Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, whom he's called, “the two best bass players in jazz.”
“At (almost) 81, he has tremendously long fingers that just fly when he's doing that impromptu stuff,” said Shackleton. “I can just imagine what he must have been like when he was young and in his prime, cause he's still the best.”
When the Peel District School Board appointed Caroline Mochrie of Sheridan Park Public School to be principal at the new school in Churchill Meadows and decided to make it a “music school,” Ward 9 Trustee Sue McFadden had the perfect name in mind.
As it turned out, the school didn't just get a name, it got a mentor of the highest order.
The good doctor (16 honourary degrees and counting) has provided better treatment than they could have ever imagined.
“Oscar and his wife Kelly are involved in the school at every level from concerts to reading with children,” says McFadden.
“His participation in the school music program has been the turning point for so many children at the school. We have certainly noticed that no matter what language the children speak or where they originate from, they all speak the same language when it comes to music.”
As biographer Gene Lees put it in the title of his book (and the title of an OP album), Peterson has “The Will to Swing.” He also has a long memory and remembers how music changed the life of an immigrant family with five children who settled in St. Henri in Montreal, where he was born in 1925.
After the school was named for him, Peterson admitted that the honour catered to his two greatest weaknesses, the piano and children.
“I fully intend to make every attempt (itinerary permitting) to be there personally and musically for these wonderful youngsters that are hopefully entering not only the educational phase of their lives, but also the musical segment of that phase,” he said in his online journal. “This I am proud to publicly acclaim and intend to carry out my promise.”
So far, so fantastic.

Our mild January this year was a relief to many humans, but it was a disaster for the urban peregrine falcons of southern Ontario.
Not since the peregrine breeding program began in earnest in 1995 have so many nesting sites failed.
Weather was responsible for disrupting the breeding cycle and resulting in fewer eggs being produced and fewer eggs hatching, according to Mark Nash, who heads the Canadian Peregrine Foundation.
The nesting site that the raptors have used on the superstructure of the Lakeview Generating Station was back in the bird-breeding business this year and hopes were high when four eggs were found.
But alas, the bad luck that has consistently dogged the site, where many hatchlings have been born but none had survived until last year, struck again.
Nash was elated when he visited the site last month and found three eggs had hatched and a fourth was in process. The fourth youngster was “pipping,” poking a hole in the egg to make his way into the world. Nash took many pictures of the process.
A few days later, two of the three chicks were dead in the nest, which is highly unusual and there was no sign of the mother, which is even more unusual. “The male was inattentive and we were very confused,” said Nash. “We've never had mortality like that. It was very suspicious.”
The mystery was solved when a female sub-adult, or a teenager in our terms, was spotted in the area.
Foundation officials surmise that the intruder either killed or drove off the adult female and has taken over the territory. “Unfortunately, we've seen this on many different occasions,” said Nash. Since she's sexually immature, there won't be any successful Lakeview breeding this year. Not only that, but it often takes a breeding pair a couple of years to successfully raise young when they do set up housekeeping.
In a similar incident last year, Nate the Great as he was known, the St. Lawrence Cement peregrine who became famous as one of the first to carry a radio transmitter and help track the species' movements, was killed by a younger male.
There is good news for Lakeview though. The generating station is being demolished, but the falcon incubator program will live on, in a new and better form.
Ontario Power Generation (OPG) has constructed, at its own cost, an 80-foot tower that has been carefully sited with a south, south-east orientation on the waterfront, several hundred metres south of the Lakeview buildings that are to be demolished.
“It has a lakeside view, one that would be envied by many people living in condos in downtown Toronto,” joked Nash. They might not be so crazy about the pea gravel floors. That feature, however, will be a chick magnet to the urban-raised falcons, along with the sides and roof of the 10-ft. high nesting box that will sit on top of the tower.
The tower is the first of its kind in Canada and has even been designed with the future in mind. If the Lakeview site is ever sold and the location of the nesting box becomes a problem, it can be taken down and re-erected on the site, or elsewhere.
At a time when there's been a lot of bad news for the Foundation, including the failed nesting sites, the closing of a critical small animal clinic at the University of Guelph that treated injured falcons and dwindling interest in supporting the program by the Ontario government, the Lakeview initiative comes as welcome news.
So does the fact that the Foundation is now talking with developers about buildings that would be constructed with falcon-breeding in mind in the first place.
“It would be great if we could make these places peregrine-friendly in their design," said Nash. “It wouldn't cost any more to have the appropriate ledges facing south and southeast. All we need is a little 3 by 6 ft. ledge somewhere out of the way. It's a really simple, easy thing to do.”
How about retrofitting someplace like, say, the clock tower of the Mississauga Civic Centre which isn't used regularly anyway, for a demonstration program?
That would discourage the pigeons that proliferate at City Hall (I'm not talking about the good citizens coming to pay their taxes) and could become a tourist attraction.
That would be perfect. A hawk in the mayor's office and falcons in the belfry.

“I'm just as shocked as anyone about how our young people could be led to such crimes. I can't even imagine why. We live in what is arguably the greatest country in the world. It's not perfect but it's far better than many other places.”
Mississauga-Brampton South MP Navdeep Bains is scratching his head, like the rest of us, when it comes to trying to figure out how at least five of our residents — kids who were mostly born here and went to school here — end up with their pictures plastered on the front page of newspapers across the world as the new face of terrorism.
This is by far the most disturbing thing about the charges that have set us all back on our heels: that they involve second-generation Canadians who walked the halls of Meadowvale Secondary School, played on our soccer fields and hung out at the Meadowvale Mall.
The overwhelming urge is to ask: How could they? How could they betray the faith that we, as Mississaugans and Canadians, put in them when we welcomed them to a new land, a new life and endless opportunity they would never have in their country of origin?
It's also the key question to answer if we want to truly protect ourselves from this threat. We can't do that with security cameras and passports at the border.
Why does immigrant Navdeep Bains come to Canada, become one of us and get himself elected to Parliament, while others become isolated from our collective experience and become unwitting fodder for zealots purporting to be religious men, who want to wreak revenge on innocents for the sins of the western imperialists?
“If we had those answers, we could probably prevent this kind of thing,” Bains said from Ottawa this morning. “People do become isolated. There's so often a feeling of alienation at this age. Young people are vulnerable and impressionable on a lot of these issues. These are things we must address as a society.”
These were typical young men going through the impossibly difficult time of life between childhood and adulthood. These are youngsters looking for a purpose in life, wanting to see the world in simplistic terms, who are shaped by the cavalier violence and cruelty that permeates so much of our culture from video games to the school yard, and desperately seeking an identity and some action that transforms the mundane routine of their daily lives into the thrillers they see on the big screen. They are the natural prey of fanatics.
Ironically, it is their parents who are often the most shocked at the secret lives their children lead as (potential) teen terrorists. Fueled by a passion to make their children's lives better than their own, the parents work two or three jobs, provide the Internet connections that allow their kids to sign up for Bombmaking 101 with a couple of clicks of the mouse, and insist that their children remain devout.
Unwittingly, they provide the kindling that makes for an incendiary match with radicals who assume the parental role and are only too willing to fill the gap left behind by the absentee parents and fuel the teens' desire to see the world in terms of black and white, right and wrong, East versus West. Life is a game and only one side can win.
So, how do we protect our children?
With the usual weapons that seem so frail and useless. By engaging each other. By really talking to our children. By ensuring that our communities are welcoming places that tolerate difference. By denying the fanatics' lies that we don't care about what happens in the rest of the world. By continuing to lead our lives in confidence that no matter what horrors people execute in the name of their chosen cause, human values of love and respect will ultimately prevail.
Doesn't quite seem enough, does it?

Threaten to blow up the Parliament buildings and the media comes running to watch you thrown in jail.
Threaten to blow up four sisters in Lakeview and the media comes running to ... record the historic event for posterity.
MOnday at around 7:30 a.m., Murray Demolition, working on behalf of Ontario Power Generation (OPG), plans to blast the huge stacks known as the Four Sisters at the Lakeview Generating Station, into oblivion.
“I’ve had calls from every media outlet from Kingston to Kapuskasing,” said John Earl this morning. Earl is the communications officer at OPG who will be herding the media and the public into Roy McMillan Park at the foot of Hampton Crescent early Monday to get photographs of the stacks’ demise.
If there are high winds, the event will be postponed because OPG doesn’t want dust blowing over the surrounding neighbourhood.
Of course, a cynic would suggest that those who live in the area wouldn’t mind one final dust bath after all of the black gunk they scraped off their cars and houses for so many years.
Based on the number of calls received by The News and other papers in our chain, there’s more interest in recording this event than there is in Shiloh Nouvel, super-spawn of Brangelina.
This morning, I even took a call from Andy McLellan, who grew up in Mississauga and now lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas.
In a voice that definitely had a southern drawl in it that has more to do with Lubbock than Lakeview, McLellan, 38, asked about the time of the event, which he plans to record along with half the population of the GTA.
Since he works for an airline, it’s no problem for the Gordon Graydon resident to get back to his hometown. He found about it through a friend and then checked out The News’ web site.
“Everywhere I’ve lived in the city, I have always seen the stacks,” said McLellan. “It’s kind of nostalgic. I remember when the people came up from the U.S. to protest, in the 1980s I think it was, and climbed up on the sides of the smokestacks.”
He was referring to a protest by Greenpeace activists who were drawing attention to the pollution the plant was emitting and unfurled a gigantic sign after rapelling up the structure.
McLellan realizes that people might find it a might strange that he would come such a long way to see something that will be over in just a few seconds.
“The stacks are something that have always been there for me,” he explains. “It’s kind of blowing up a part of your past.”

Oh, the vagaries of the procedural bylaw.
Lost in the mists of irrelevance 99 per cent of the time, the procedural bylaw is the bible for the conduct of meetings for public bodies. It sets out rules and regulations and is almost always a revelation when read. It’s kind of like your insurance policy: you only refer to it when something untoward has happened.
Yesterday the procedural bylaw reared its ugly head in council chambers at City Hall.
The result could be the end of a fine tradition that citizens have enjoyed for almost three decades.
Former Mayor Ron Searle introduced the concept of a public question period on the regular City council agenda shortly after being elected mayor in 1976.
“I just felt the general public had a right to be heard, even if they weren't aware of what was on the agenda,” Searle recalled this morning. “The problem, of course, is that you get a lot of activists who want to talk.”
Ah, there’s the rub.
For years Mayor Hazel McCallion has bragged, and justifiably so, about how Mississauga politicians are the only ones in the GTA who give citizens true access to their elected representatives, allowing anyone to get up to speak during the midst of the meeting on any subject.
Searle and McCallion, a lot of staff and a few reporters can recite the opening mantra from memory. It goes like this: “Is there anyone else who wishes to address council on any other matter. If so, would they please come forward?”
That’s not a question we’re going to have the privilege of hearing at council anymore.
In a decision yesterday, local politicians effectively scrapped public question period. It seems someone consulted the procedural bylaw and — egads — the questions are supposed to be about something that's on the agenda.
The temptation is to say that councillors can see that silly season has started with the run-up to the Nov. 13 election, and they don’t want to provide a convenient stage for all the people lining up at the podium to try to replace them.
I don’t believe this is a case of political paranoia, however. It’s more of a case of Don Barber Fatigue Syndrome.
Barber is the Lakeview resident who sees McCallion as the evil manipulator of the Mississauga world. He sees her hand in everything that is wrong with the City and its practices. His heart may be in the right place, but his rhetoric is way, way over the top. Witness his tasteless “gift” to the mayor of a bottle of her favourite sherry recently in an attempt to discredit her.
If McCallion were a litigious person, Barber would spend a lot of time in court defending himself.
One can sympathize with council’s concern about Barber and his ilk, but our politicians have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.
So what if you’ve been breaking your procedural bylaw for years? Does anyone ever enforce the rules that limit how long, and how often councillors can speak? Does the mayor know that she’s actually supposed to step aside and give the gavel to someone else when she wants to debate an issue?
McCallion doesn’t chair meetings, she compels them along the lines of her own thinking and nobody ever bats an eyelash (Stop me if I sound like Don Barber.)
No matter how it evolved, public question period isn’t just a convenience for politicians to allow, or disallow, at the whim of an interpretation of an obscure bylaw. It’s a right that Mississauga citizens have come to rely upon, and it’s an important symbol, as the mayor herself has stressed many times, of how open and accessible local government is.
Unwittingly, City councillors may have handed their challengers a rallying call for this fall’s campaign: Bring Back Public Question Period.

When you turn right onto southbound Mavis Rd. S. from eastbound Dundas St. W., you are descending the old shoreline of Lake Iroquois. That’s where the glaciers screeched to a halt just before Hazel was elected mayor, so you are at the top of a grade that affords a spectacular view of the lakefront to the south.
This morning around 6:45 a.m., on their last day of existence, the stacks of the Lakeview Generating Station dominated your view as you turned to go south.
The nearly 500 feet (146 metres) tall stacks were spectacularly backlit, as if someone had ordered up a perfect canvas on which to record one last memory of the Four Sisters.
At the site, there was a carnival atmosphere as Mississaugans of all descriptions converged to see part of our history blown to (memory) bits.
People streamed into the Roy McMillan headland of Lakefront Promenade Park from all over, a surprising number of them Lakeview and Port Credit residents who hoofed it there.
Among them was John Bye, who was thinking of those high school days too many years ago when he and his buddies Steve and Dean sank knee-deep in the fresh Pennsylvania coal that first time they sneaked onto the property to climb the coal pile.
Bye walked with his best friend Andrew McLellan all the way from Haig Blvd. and the South Service Rd. so they could arrive at 4:15 a.m. and claim a primo photo spot on a bridge in the park to record the last sobs of the Four Sisters. They were so early that they strolled by security which was just getting organized.
McLellan now lives in Texas and hadn’t seen Lakefront Promenade Park before.
The flight attendant took time off and used his airline perks to fly up for the special occasion.
As his plane was coming into Pearson, it circled out over the lake so Andrew could get a last view from the air of the stacks.
Twelve-year-old Patrick Jung was there with his father, Shawn Fitzpatrick who was taking pictures, as he always does. He was also reminding Patrick that his grandfather, Hans Jung, was one of the men who helped line each of the stacks, which were 12.2 metres (40 feet) wide at the base.
Jung, now almost 90, got the job placing the 1,583 cubic yards of brick that went into each silo, because he was one of the slighter bricklayers. He could squeeze into the entrance hole to work.
Sandra and Neil Watkinson and Bev and Gus Peebles are Tedwyn Dr. residents who are now retired and have lived in houses beside each other for 29 years. Instead of sleeping in this morning, they came to watch the media circus unfold. They could watch Breakfast TV without the ads.
Bev wore ear plugs so the rat-a-tat of the explosions wouldn’t bother her.
“We were going to bring our grandchildren but they were in school,” she said.
“It’s like an institution. It’s a landmark,” said Gus. “Whenever you’re flying or sailing you see them. You know where you are just from the stacks. It’s going to be hard without that beacon.”
Indeed, a few hours after the blast took place, John Bye and Andrew McLellan came into The News to drop off the pictures he took of the stacks going down.
The truth of what happened was just dawning on Bye.
“I’ve lived down there forever and it’s just going to be so different,” said Bye. “It’s just so strange. You look at the skyline and ... it’s naked.”

There are some things that are immutable in Mississauga politics: noise problems and scoopers at Pearson Airport, shortage of parking at condominiums and any Tim Hortons, gigantic trophy salmon on the walls of the mayor’s office and Ruth Thompson representing Ward 3 at the public school board.
First elected in 1972, Thompson is an institution at the Peel District School Board, where she’s done everything there is to do, and then some.
She’s been named the board’s education champion and already has a school named after her.
And she’s coming back for more.
This week, Thompson put her name in to run again for the board for the umpteenth time. She’s run so many times that she's actually lost track of how many times she’s won. She only lost once, to veteran Bob Skipper.
Seeking office again was a lot tougher decision for the 68-year-old this time around, though. A neck operation incapacitated her this term, forcing her to miss some meetings.
“I was losing my balance and then I had heart failure and kidney failure,” she recalled this morning.
“I’m still doing physio at Trillium Health Centre and my health continues to improve,” she said. “That’s why I decided to file (for re-election).”
Politics runs in the family, of course, for the sister of former Toronto Mayor, federal Cabinet Minister and Toronto Regeneration Trust guru David Crombie.
“I’m not as active as I was but I still feel I can contribute. The question I ask myself is, ‘Can I still, and do I still like to, represent my people?’ I still feel I can be of service.”
Asked if she would be running again if there were another active, qualified candidate on the horizon, Thompson hesitates. “I’d have to think about it.”
Representing the sprawling ward she now has, since wards 3 and 4 were combined, means it’s even more difficult to find candidates who know the lay of the land.
There aren't any who can match her encyclopedic knowledge about the board and its history.
It looked for a while as Thompson and other trustees might actually get a raise this term in the $5,000 dishonorarium they now receive. But yesterday’s grant announcements from the province don’t seem to include any allocation for that, or for the retroactive pay that former Education Minister Gerard Kennedy promised.
Even though she's running again, Thompson is displeased with Ontario’s unilateral decision to add another year to the municipal term.
“I totally disagree with it,” said Thompson in a typical fit of candour. “Nobody asked trustees.”
After experimenting with several different length of terms, Thompson is one of the few elected officials who've been in office long enough to to offer an informed opinion on the subject.
“Three years is ideal. There’s no necessity for four.”
The battle with the provincial government over inadequate funding is still in progress and Thompson, with her first-hand experience and incredible memory for recalling past political pitched battles, will be a valuable ally on the front lines.
Changes to the funding formula announced yesterday by Minister Sandra Pupatello will ease some burdens and accentuate others, as the province gradually puts a straitjacket on the ability of boards to move money around to pay for those areas (special ed and transportation) that are woefully underfunded.
“Nobody likes to threaten the government,” says the long-time board vice-chair. “But some realities have to be faced.”
Ruth Thompson doesn’t sound quite ready for retirement yet.

It’s a question Ryan Maiato has been asked a lot. A question she’s thought about before.
Why me?
Indeed, why was she attacked by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis before she was out of diapers? Why has the disease and the clutch of complications it spawned left her, at age 19, the size of a five-year-old, unable to walk, and reliant on a new therapy that gives her nourishment through a daily IV, since her body will not absorb food normally.
“I think about that a lot,” she says when asked why she has such a large burden to bear.
Her response is calm, deliberate and measured. “You try not to be bitter about it. You don't want to feel sorry for yourself but you just can’t help it. When you have an illness like this, it’s unfair.”
Although her appearance may not suggest it, her words confirm that Ryan is one very mature teenager. It seems the wrong kind of maturity, however. A wisdom brought on by too many trips to the hospital, too much knowledge about a disease that people (inaccurately) associate with old age and too many introspective sessions with the copious journals she keeps.
It is when the conversation turns to reading and writing that the fire begins to show in the eyes and the voice of the 19-year-old student at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Secondary School.
“When I’m writing a poem, it makes me feel good,” said Ryan in her Meadowvale home. “Writing calms me down. I’m happy to write.”
And read: J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter, of course, Lorlene McDaniel, and the inestimable Robert Munsch, with whom she has corresponded.
She’s written her own children’s stories too, testing them out on her cousins. She also wrote an article about, “people who are different,” for Mount Carmel’s school paper, an article which drew an enthusiastic response.
Ryan obviously has a flair for expressing her feelings. Here’s something she wrote last year about what living with arthritis is like.
“I have lived in worry my whole life. At age 16, I had a trauma to my head, caused by a simple headache. I almost lost my life.
“A year after that I broke my hip. Now I can’t walk altogether. Not walking has taken away a great part of me, my freedom and my independence. Arthritis gave me grief and it lead to all my problems, like my lack of walking.
“But it hasn’t taken away my hope. My friends and family say I have a great attitude. They say I’m an inspiration. So, despite my illness, I’m happy with what I have so far. My family, my friends and my hope.”

If there’s such a thing as low-brow heritage, the Port Credit log cabin would be its poster building.
It seems a little odd that so much effort has been put into saving a structure that was erected in Mississauga only in 1967 by the 3rd Port Credit Rovers, until you consider the context, which is what heritage is so often about.
The Rovers were looking for a new clubhouse and a centennial project, when scout leader Bob Collison heard about a log cabin in Mono Mills that was surplus to needs.
McKinley Transport was prevailed upon to truck the logs down to the west bank of the Port Credit River, where the Town of Port Credit had agreed to donate land. Some additional logs were taken from a cabin on land in Hockley Valley that former MP Don Blenkarn had donated to the Scouts and two more courses of logs were added.
The cabin itself probably dates from the 1840s, according to Scott Gillies, long-time stalwart of the Bradley museum. Disassembling, relocating and reassembling such structures is a long-standing tradition. The pioneers thought about log cabins like we think about storage sheds. They certainly did not think of them as something that would stand the test of time. Lots of them ended their days as pig sties, for instance.
The log cabin continued its highly utilitarian existence in Port Credit, hosting the Rovers for many years, then being an anchor spot for the Great Salmon Hunt and eventually ending up as a squat, slightly crumbling symbol of the superannuated in the parking lot near the reconstructed Port Credit lighthouse.
The very plain orphan was an unlikely candidate for preservation.
But that didn’t stop a coalition of interested citizens, hard-working museum staff, and willing corporate citizens (Petro-Canada, St. Lawrence Cement, Fram Building, Friends of the Museums, Community Foundation of Mississauga, The Mississauga News) from joining forces to raise $155,000 to refurbish the 25 by 18 foot, 11-log high structure. It should have stayed in Port Credit, of course, but there was no appropriate venue.
The Bradley Museum makes a perfect host because the cabin is the missing link for visiting students, demonstrating the initial era of settler life at Merigolds’ Point. The original Bradley House and The Anchorage fill out the retro-roster.
In a wonderful speech that ended this morning’s festivities, Museums Manager Annemarie Hagan warned, “We do need to be careful about romanticizing the past and the log cabin. It’s easy to look back through rose-coloured glasses and see only a nostalgic gentler, simpler time — to forget that a life with a high-infant mortality rates, back-breaking hard work, a rather uneven application of democracy and human rights and a lack of cold and hot running water for such luxuries as regular baths — was not necessarily gentle or simple or sweet-smelling.”
The former fish-cleaning station certainly isn’t sweet-smelling and it’s more mongrel than mansion, so it makes Hagan’s point perfectly.
History is rarely nostalgic if we look at it carefully. The coming of the settlers meant the dislocation of indigenous peoples. Ironically, many of them ended up living in the Credit Mission, where the Mississaugua Golf Club now stands, in log cabins.

For a guy who’s escaped the shadow of death more times than most of us have ever felt its cold shiver, Tony Clark is one happy man.
Clark is a born salesman who seems to have talked the Grim Reaper into taking a vacation.
“It takes a special person to sell Canadian toilet paper to the Americans,” the former vice-president of sales for Cascade Paper, who worked for a decade in the U.S., laughs.
And it takes a special person, and a special family, to dodge the death sentence that should have come automatically with the diagnosis of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) that Clark got May 11, 2005. The back pain that had ruined his ski trip turned out to be caused by a large mass that had already spread outside his kidney.
“We were both shattered. We were both in tears,” Clark said in an interview at his home on The Collegeway, recalling the moment he and wife Sharon got the news. The Greek vacation they had planned to take would have to wait. The possibility it would never happen loomed large in the back of their minds.
Almost the minute that her husband was diagnosed, Sharon was on the Internet, digging out every bit of information about a particularly nasty cancer and quickly becoming her husband’s strongest advocate.
“You become a student of your illness,” said Clark, who lived in Montreal for 45 of his 59 years and in the U.S. for another 12.
A man with an amazing memory for dates, names and quotes, Clark describes in minute detail the long and tortuous odyssey of his disease that sent him on numerous trips to the National Institute of Cancer in Washington, to hospitals in New York City, Buffalo and to the Cleveland Clinic. He tracked down top Canadian oncology urologist Dr. Michael Jewett, who removed his kidney. Clark nearly died when his other kidney shut down, but dialysis saved his life.
His life has been a blur of medical appointments, trips to the U.S., blood tests, and long conversations with friends and family. His eldest daughter Devon also has cancer. They talk regularly.
A man of deep faith, Clark simply refused to believe the advice he was given from several doctors that he had an incurable condition and would die within a year.
“I don’t accept that,” was his standard response. One can only imagine the surprise of doctors at Cleveland Clinic reacted when Clark greeted their diagnosis with the comment, “God is bigger than cancer and He’s bigger than your hospital.”
With conventional medicine offering no hope, Clark turned to a naturopath in Milton and showed some improvement. Then he heard about a trial for a wonder drug by Bayer that was being tested for the first time on other types of cancer. Clark’s problem is that he has a gene, discovered in the year 2000, that has been found in only 114 families around the world, that triggered his kidney cancer.
He doubted that he could get into the trial as a result.
“Well, we need 3,000 people in the study and we don’t have 100 yet,” came the welcome response.
Not only did Clark not have to pay for the $5,000-a-month U.S. program, but when it ran out at the end of last year when the drug was approved by the USFDA, he was incredibly lucky that a similar pilot was just starting in Canada.
The results for Nexavar, as the drug is called, have been nothing short of miraculous.
No wonder he is such a strong believer.
Clark is still alive 13 months after he was given that year to live. Not only is there no sign of advancement in his cancer, but he is back playing golf and has even started doing a little bit of consulting work.
Listening to him talk about his work with his church, his efforts to assist outstanding Toronto jazz pianist Laila Biali’s career and his and Sharon's plans to take that postponed Greek holiday later this year, you realize Tony Clark doesn't have time to die.
“A lot of people just don’t believe they’re going to get better,” he says. “I believe God’s given me a ministry with this illness. Don’t give up. There’s always hope. God’s allowing me to use this illness to help other people.”
When most of us roll out of bed each day, we moan at the thought of what lies ahead, another day of work, shopping, getting the kids to karate, whatever.
“I wake up each day and say, thank-you God. I’ve got another day. People are just so busy that they’re not enjoying the journey. They’re just trying to get to the destination.”
The ultimate destination will be upon us soon enough.
Happy Father’s Day, Tony. The journey is lighter because of people like you.

Talk about your strict bail conditions.
The Justice of the Peace who set the terms of bail in the assault case against Donald Barber sure knows how to hurt a guy.
Barber, who lives and breathes Mississauga politics, is banned from going within 200 metres of City Hall and the courthouse at 950 Burnhamthorpe Rd. W., where the councillors will be temporarily housed while renovations are made to their offices and the chambers at City Hall.
Not only that but Barber - who faces two charges of assault after an altercation with a security guard following his removal from a City council meeting June 7 — must stay the same distance away from any councillor.
While most voters in this country would treasure a 200-metre politician-free zone, it is an anathema to Barber, who has appointed himself the disloyal opposition to the Queen of Mississauga.
For some reason my head is filled with the vision of Barber and Ward 7 Councillor Nando Iannicca accidentally bumping into each other at the grocery store — and both running away from each other as fast as they can. A match race of reversing rhetorical roadrunners, if you will.
Barber says the bail conditions seriously hamper his efforts to write the political history of Mississauga and end his democratic right to attend public meetings. (See his remarks in the comments section on Don Barber Fatigue Syndrome).
Having Barber write Mississauga’s history is a bit like asking Hazel to profile regional government in Peel.
The odd thing, though, is that Barber has a point about banning him, even temporarily, from council meetings. Former Ward 5 Councillor Cliff Gyles not only sat on council while accused of much more serious crimes, but actually was allowed to run again after being convicted.
Besides, if there is a man brave enough to voluntarily take in every minute of every reading of every bylaw at every nerve-numbing council session, I say that man has earned the right to his pain.

“Life is just seems so full of connections. Most of the time we don’t even pay attention to the depth of life. We only see flat surfaces.” - Colin Neenan.
Ah, flat impervious surfaces and connections. There will be a lot of talk about those this week as Credit Valley Conservation (CVC) hosts a four-day program to publicize A Strategy for Sustainability, its updated version of the Credit River Water Management Strategy.
And yes, we see way too many flat surfaces in Mississauga and the Peel watershed. And we have a lot of trouble connecting those flat, hard surfaces in too many vast parking lots with the fast runoff that sweeps contaminants too quickly into our storm sewers which are connected to our watercourses, and send torrents of water rushing downstream to erode river banks and foul the water in Lake Ontario that we will soon enough be sipping on.
I know what you’re thinking. Here we go again. “Crisis on the Credit” headline number 10,053.
Well, it’s not alarmist if it’s true. The Credit has been in trouble for a long time, as a succession of reports have indicated.
The bottom line of A Strategy for Sustainability is that, if we just keep rolling along as if nothing’s wrong while we urbanize another 25 per cent of the watershed, as scheduled, we are going to have serious problems especially in the south end of the watershed. The potential disaster is told best in a single map in the report, Figure 2, Applying Current Planning and Development Practices (business as usual) for Future Growth.
In that scenario, which the CVC is too polite to label the “head in the sand” approach, the map is covered with bright red in Mississauga, indicating serious impairment. I’m sure it’s a coincidence that red just happens to be the universal symbol for stop.
A series of changes, some of them significant (strict enforcement of sediment control regulations when lands are stripped) but many of them relatively innocuous, could change the potential disaster of overtaxing development that is sapping our groundwater, raising water temperatures and killing aquatic creatures and fish and setting off a whole series of negative consequences that — guess what? — ultimately affect our own health.
In a session on strategies to sustain urban watersheds at the Mississauga Convention Centre yesterday Anne Kitchell of the Center for Watershed Protection in the U.S. made us look at our own community through fresh eyes. In a series of photos she and her colleagues snapped on a whirlwind tour, they showed us the folly of our ways, and some relatively painless remedies.
Streets too wide, houses too close together, rooftops gushing water directly into sewers instead of onto a natural area where the water can be absorbed.
In an instructive little piece she called, “101 ways to make a parking lot better” it became obvious once again, that doing things the right way is not only smarter but it often looks way better too. Instead of sticking 20 dumb little shallow boxes with tiny trees that are going to die of drought anyway in a parking lot, why not design attractive landscape strips that hold water, allow for attractive mini-gardens and perform a critical function in absorbing runoff?
Here’s another instructive conclusion in the CVC report that, not so long ago, would have prompted treason charges: “Regardless of urban form and stormwater management alternatives applied, there is a limit to growth if the goals and objectives for watershed health are to be realized.”
That will be a sobering conclusion for many to accept in the growth nirvana of Peel. This is supposed to be the land that knows no limits to growth. No more.
If we truly want to become the sustainable, healthy city that Mayor Hazel McCallion (who spoke Monday) and City council say we want, then the CVC report, coupled with the Province’s smart growth strategy unveiled here Friday, must get a ringing endorsement from City Hall.
One more flat reception could be deadly.

“Do you know who Johnny Gimble is?” came the question to Steve Briggs.
Which is a lot like asking Bob Dylan, “Do you know who Woody Guthrie is?”
Yes, Steve Briggs, guitarist, songwriter, background singer, producer and chief bottle washer for Toronto’s fast-rising Bebop Cowboys knows exactly who Johnny Gimble is.
A promoter from B.C. was asking Briggs if the Cowboys, purveyors of the western swing music made popular by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys in the 1930s an '40s, would be interested in playing on the same bill as Gimble.
Younger than the rest of the Texas Playboys, Gimble is the last vestige of the band that is synonymous with western swing. He was just 23-years-old when he joined the Playboys to play fiddle.
Gimble was also the star of Merle Haggard’s '70s album tribute to the Wills’ band, The Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World, which was titled in Gimble’s honour.
As it turned out, Briggs and the Bebops never did make it on the same bill with senior citizen Gimble because things just didn’t work out. But you can hear in Briggs’ voice that just the possibility of working with Gamble animated the whole band.
The Bebops were just at the Port Credit Legion a couple of weeks ago and Briggs was talking before the event about how so many Canadians were enthralled decades ago with the music that drifted across the border from WWVA in Wheeling West Virginia, WLS in Chicago and WSM in Nashville.
Western swing is a hard thing to define, but Briggs has lots of practice. There’s some folk, some country, some jazz, some pop and lots of dance music. That variety is part of what distinguishes the genre, or genres.
In the liner notes of the Bebop Cowboys’ terrific new CD, Canadian Dance Hall, Briggs explains that western swing was a popular “intersection” of musics that found a ready home in Canadian community halls and ballrooms.
Canadian Dance Hall is a popular intersection of not only genres, but performers. Sarah Harmer, Russell deCarle of the Prairie Oysters, vocalist Terra Hazelton, and musical Everyman Chris Whiteley lend their hand to the punchy songs and arrangements.
Port Credit’s Chuck Jackson sings the Briggs’ original That’s Why I Ain’t Been Home in Years, a revisiting-the-old-hometown song that includes the classic line, “the church is now a billiard hall/ nothing sacred’s left at all.”
Erindale’s Alex Pangman, who just earned a rave review for her new album in Canada’s jazz bible, Coda Magazine, sings the Wills’ classic I Laugh When I Think How I Cried Over You in her intriguing throwback style, which always keeps you guessing as to which vocal path she’ll take next.
There are lots of stars in this outing but chief among them, appropriately enough, is a fiddler who’s a lot younger than the rest of the band. Drew Jurecka is also a regular member of Jeff Healey's Jazz Wizards. Check him out as he backs Harmer on Stardust, the Hoagy Carmichael classic.
Trying to figure out why western swing is so appealing is difficult, but it’s probably the same thing that makes jazz so appealing. In a word, swing.
Even most of the ballads have a bop in their step that will inevitably work its way down to your dancing shoes.

Kevin Wallace may have to change the name of his Port Credit bike shop from 'Gears' to 'Tears' right about now.
That’s because the crying quotient at the spinning classes the shop sponsors have gone through the roof in the last 10 days as Wallace sped across the heartland of America in his unmistakable pink suit, racing against time and disease.
The idea of doing anything for 10 days with just a few hours of sleep is horrifyingly foolhardy in the first instance. But to add insult to insomnia, the Clarkson resident and 14 other solo racers were braving desert heat, prairie wind and steep mountain inclines to achieve the butt-breaking goal of being the first to pedal 4,900 kilometres from San Diego to Atlantic City.
Wallace was riding for his mother Betty, who died of breast cancer when he was 23. Thus the pink, and thus the passion Wallace has for the cause.
He and his dedicated crew turned the race into a community fundraiser for the Betty Wallace Centre established in his mother’s name at the Trillium Health Centre campus in Etobicoke.
In the process, they touched some deeply-felt emotions in the many people whose lives have been touched by cancer. An incredible number of people spent the last 10 days watching a little ball move across a map of America on the front page of www.teamrace.com.
They also poured out their hearts, and their stories, into the site’s guest book.
“Kevin, your little bike shop and you are the heart of a truly inspiring community,” reads one of the 685 messages, in reference to the close-knit (good kind) of biker gangs that form among cycling afficionados.
Wallace friend Robert Minnes was riding in the French Alps when he met a 62-year-old man who was doing a 3,500 km. tour around France to visit all the places he and his wife, who had died of cancer in January, had seen together.
“He was glad to be visiting all these familiar places because now he couldn’t bear to go to new places without his wife, so he was finding comfort in this pilgrimage through the years of his marriage and his travels with his beloved mate,” wrote Robert. “Stay strong Kevin. We are all there with you every minute of the day. And know that you have a soulmate who shares your commitment and who is on his own solitary journey of profound importance somewhere in Provence right now, with the sun keeping him warm and with a smile on his face, as he heads towards his next memory.”
The crew members who shared the e-mails with Wallace — messages that he admitted helped him to survive to the finish— sat in what they dubbed, “the crying chair,” for obvious reasons, to read them.
An e-mailer who signed herself Jane D., who was in a Gears class when Kevin updated the group via telephone about his progress from his bike, remembered the death of her Dad 20 years ago, a death that took place in a clinical and frightening environment.
“This week I’ve been thinking a lot about my Dad,” wrote Jane. “If he had had a place like the Betty Wallace Centre I think things would have been a little easier. We could have faced our situation together as a family and been there for each other more. My Dad wouldn’t have needed to battle his illness on his own. A kind and compassionate environment would have meant the world to my Mom too. Although cancer is still out there, you’re waging war on the fear and isolation that patients feel by giving them a warm and reassuring place to receive testing and treatment. You’ve given them the human touch - something they really need in order to win against cancer. Thank you for making the Betty Wallace Centre a reality in our lives. We are so lucky that it’s there.”
Yes we are. And it shouldn’t really take a monumental act of commitment like Wallace’s to compel us to give to it, should it?
Wallace has raised about 100,000 tear-stained dollars so far. You can still give at www.teamrace.com.

The world needs more people like André Marin.
Marin is the Ontario Ombudsman who made headlines again yesterday when he complained about bureaucrats who are “rule slaves” and said, tellingly, that, “in far too many cases, we have seen compassion fatigue among public servants. Sometimes you need to grow a heart.”
Ouch!
At his press conference, Marin called on the provincial government to expand the powers of the Ombudsman’s office, to allow him to deal with the quasi-provincial bodies, the ones that receive significant Ontario tax dollars such as school boards, hospitals and municipalities.
Marin has already demonstrated the benefit that an independent advocate can achieve for the public. His work uncovered the insidious practice in which parents of children with severe disabilities were forced to make their children wards of children’s aid societies or face bankruptcy trying to pay for medical treatments themselves. His investigation also forced the government to expand screening for genetic diseases in newborns.
Needless to say, no one who sits in government was ever in favour of an ombudsman. They find out things you don’t want the public to know, and then the press comes running to trumpet the news.
But Premier McGuinty should remember how he felt about the Ombudsman when he was in Opposition. He should also check in his heart of hearts (even if he has to grow one) to recognize that the Ombudsman has made better the lives of many, many vulnerable families and, quite probably, saved some lives in the process.
Not only should McGuinty grant Marin’s request, he should mandate that all those quasi-provincial bodies Marin wants to be able to field complaints about, have ombudsmen too.
Better yet, those bodies should voluntarily appoint them.
One of the main problems in fighting City Hall, the school board, the hydro commission etc. is their monolithic structures.
So many people are so discouraged at the thought of bucking the Vogons that they never even try in the first place.
The potential political embarrassment factor will mean local officials resist ombudsmen with every fibre of their beings.
Despite what those politicians might think, appointing a complaints investigator is a very smart thing to do politically in the long run. Yes, you pay a price from time to time when some slip-up or stupid policy is exposed. But the value in terms of proving that you really care about providing the best service, and not just bragging about it, is inestimable.
Think of the possibility of well-respected people like Henry Stewart (former city manager and chair of the OMB), former Peel Social Services Commissioner Paul Vezina, ex-Peel Board Chair Margaret McKee or former Peel CAS Executive Director John Huether being ombudsmen.
Does any local body have the nerve to appoint someone to take a good, hard INDEPENDENT look at their problems?

P.S. Before anybody can shout “hyprocrite” I’d like to say that, yes, an ombudsman would be an excellent idea for The Mississauga News.

Don’t believe the experts. Summer doesn’t start with any solstice. It starts when the martagon lilies begin to bloom.
The martagons aren’t like most other lilies. They have a different form, with swirling whorls of leaves at a couple of strategic locations along the stem. The head of tiny buds sits at the top of the plant for a long time, then all of a sudden the plant sets off separate branches, so that every bloom gets its own dropping showcase. It has a kind of Christmas-tree shape and a Christmas kind of feel because its blooms are so sprightly.
The flowers are commonly known as turk’s caps, because they hang down in that shape. The name martagon apparently comes from the Turkish word martagan, which is a kind of turban.
In the breeze, the flowers waft back and forth gently and must often must be staked.
Martagons are especially valuable to the gardener who must contend with shade, because they actually prefer that setting.
When I was a child, my grandmother’s cottage garden was a spectacular array of lilies of various sizes and shapes. But the martagons always stood out. She had white ones with yellow stamens, yellow (then called Mrs. Backhouse, now called Brocade) and a dark red-brown called Dalhansoni.
By the time my interest in horticulture finally progressed beyond mere admiration of someone else’s labour, there were still a few martagons straggling through the “jungle” at the back of the garden. They were rescued, eventually put in the right spot in a shady new section in front of the garage. Now they are the stars of the show each June.
Through a wonderful nursery in Neepawa, Manitoba called The Lily Nook (www.lilynook.mb.ca), numerous lilies, including martagons, have been restored to Peg’s garden.
A portion of the winnings of the Super Bowl pool a couple of years ago was illicitly invested in a martagon called Black Prince. The price tag was $60 for a single, fist-sized bulb. The purchase was illicit, because (don’t tell) it was not specifically mentioned to the person with whom I share my life. Slipped my mind in the euphoria of the post Super-Bowl celebration I guess.
It was impossible to tell the first year whether the Prince was still with us, as martagons tend to be slow starters.
He was toasted with a dry martini (Broker’s gin if you must know), and great sighs of relief, when his inky-purple blooms finally appeared last summer.
Old photographs prove that it would be impossible to surpass the breadth and colour of my grandmother’s passion for lilies, but we try our best and for a couple of weeks each June, the martagons pay their own special, bobbing tribute to her.

This morning The Toronto Star published the nominees for its “Essentially Canadian” list of music.
A dangerous proposition that. Which is, of course, the whole idea: They want to make you mad so you’ll blast off an e-mail to them about how incredibly dopey some of their choices are, despite the expert panels they carefully selected to make the picks.
Well, here’s one sucker who’s falling hook, line and sinker.
First the good news. Nice to see somebody remembers music didn’t begin with rap.
The inclusion of folk singer Ruth Lowe’s I’ll Never Smile Again (1939) is a nice tip to the swing era. Same with Ed McCurdy’s, Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream (1949) with the early folk era, although the Frank Slide should also have been on the list.
While the list purports to cover all genres, it obviously can give just a tip of the hat to most of them. Shania Twain (Any Man of Mine, From This Moment On) is the token country artist, but where’s Wilf Carter when you need him?
The Capture of Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River tells the true story of the 48-day chase by the RCMP across the snow and ice of the north in the early '30s. If that’s not iconic Canadiana, what is?
Don’t look for any jazz, either. I had to search carefully to find one — yes one — entry for Oscar Peterson, his superb Hymn to Freedom. How about all of the Canadiana Suite, or at least a couple of the best pieces such as Wheatland or Hogtown Blues?
Oscar gets one entry, the same number as Eddie Schwartz (Hit Me With Your Best Shot) who just happens to be one of the judges.
Then there’s the right artist but the wrong song category. Entrants include Murray McLauchlan (Farmer’s Song or Hard Rock Town, not Down by The Henry Moore), Neil Young (Helpless yes, but not Old Man. Everybody Knows This is Nowhere is his best album but pick Cinammon Girl or It Won’t Be Long, not the title song), Stompin’ Tom (Sudbury Saturday Night not the overexposed The Hockey Song), Tragically Hip (Bobcaygeon, not Blow at High Dough), Jann Arden (Insensitive is still her best), and even Gordon Lightfoot (Railway Trilogy has to be there but Early Morning Rain and That’s What You Get For Lovin’ Me trump If You Could Read My Mind or the overrated Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald).
How could anything written by Paul Anka (Puppy Love) make any top 100? Thank goodness the execrable My Way and You’re Having My Baby (And I’m Milking the Bathos) were excluded.
Speaking of exclusions. Where are: Sweet City Woman by the Stampeders, Dreamboat Annie by Heart, Driftin’ Snow by Willie P. Bennett and More Often Than Not by David Wiffen?
I assume there’s only one song by Ian Tyson, Four Strong Winds, because that one is going to win when The Star reveals its top 10 Saturday.
Tyson is a superb songwriter, in my estimation, whose songs Summer Wages, Some Kind of Fool, Farewell to the North, Short Grass and Wild Geese are filled with haunting, restless images of nature in motion that define the Canadian experience.
If the intent is to define that experience, however, maybe the winner should be Glenn Gould for his Goldberg Variations.
A brilliant but erratic musician with a fetish for cleanliness and an endless depth of insecurity taking us Bach to the Future. How Canadian is that?

It was difficult to say what was tougher for Jeff Rushton — tracking his buddy Kevin Wallace’s Race Across America (RAAM) via the Internet and phone calls in Mississauga— or flying down for the last five days and seeing the pain close up and personal.
If anyone knows what Wallace was feeling as he pedalled 4,900 kms in a little over 10 days, it is Rushton. He’d ridden from California to Florida with him in January 2002. They did a cancer-raising bike trek from Vancouver to Halifax in ’03 and then they’d really worked together, two hours on the bike and two hours off, competing in the two-man section of the San Diego to Atlantic RAAM two years ago.
Despite the incredible toll he knew the ride would take on his friend, the 44-year-old Rushton had no doubt that Wallace would complete his extreme solo cycling marathon this year.
“He just has this incredible fortitude and stick-with-it-ness,” said the Lorne Park resident this morning. “If he sets his mind on something, he will accomplish it.”
I had to talk to Jeff Rushton to find out about what Kevin Wallace must be feeling in recovering from the torture of the race because Wallace doesn’t want to talk about himself.
If Rushton is waking up in the middle of the night and rushing over to get Wallace a water bottle, you can imagine what nightmares Wallace himself is going through.
But Wallace gently guides each of the hundreds of questioners he’s faced away from the tributary of his own race and back to the source of his inspiration: his late mother Betty and the fight against cancer.
“The real story is the power of our mothers and our wives and our daughters to fight this disease,” says Wallace. “They’re the news. I was just a guy out on a bike trying my hardest to get the attention of people. I’m glad I provided some inspiration and great entertainment for a cause like the Betty Wallace Health Care Centre.”
While Wallace is going to be whacked for a while from the sleep deprivation, his sugar and fat energy diet and the neurological effects of his ordeal, Rushton said he won’t suffer the deep funk that many other riders do after peaking for such an extraordinary event.
“That goes back to his psyche and why he did this,” said Rushton, who has also had cancer touch his family. “This was about creating a community of people to fight cancer, a community supporting the cause. It was all about the greater good for him.”
And now it’s about continuing the momentum and keeping the wheels rolling on the fight against cancer. That’s why the banner across the top of the splash page at www.teamrace.com is no longer going to say Kevin Wallace, There is no finish line...
It is just going to say, There is no finish line...
The last 24 hours of the race were torture, said Wallace, but he knew he had to make it for all those battling the disease.
“I had the option to quit but those people who have cancer, they don’t get to quit,” he said.
“Now that the race is over, I get the comforts back in my life,” added Wallace. “For people with cancer, there is no finish line. I’m just humbled to have delved into a fraction of what those people have suffered.”

Imagine wandering over to check your thermostat and finding a text message on it asking if you’d mind if Enersource increased the temperature in your air-conditioned house by a couple of degrees for the next three hours to help ease the power shortage.
It could happen here, sooner rather than later.
Last night at Huron Park Community Centre, Enersource Hydro Mississauga held an open house for the 550 households participating in the Smart Avenues pilot project: a living laboratory to show people how they can really take advantage of the smart meters that will be installed in every house in Ontario by 2010.
By now everyone should be clueing in to the fact, thanks to successive governments who never had the courage or will to address the issue, this province faces a potential crisis with its power supply, likely in the near future.
Way too late, conservation is finally being taken seriously as an alternative.
Enersource has taken the bit in its teeth and run with its conservation program. Smart Avenues will be the centrepiece.
“We want to make Smart Avenues a model for all of Ontario,” Enersource’s Chief Conservation Officer Carmine DiRuscio told the residents from the selected study area south of The Queensway to the QEW from the Credit River to Hurontario St.
There was a glut of information on everything from a gizmo called The Energy Detective (TED) that can instantaneously show you how much power and money you can save by turning off your air conditioner, to timers for appliances, smart thermostats that can cycle your air conditioning on and off every 15 minutes, to the known quantities of Compact Fluorescent Bulbs and front-loading washing machines.
A partnership with broadcaster Anwar Knight (Global TV, Rogers’ Daytime) has produced a series of fun TV spots that give viewers clear, easy instructions on how to save big bucks by simply putting timers on their hot tubs, pool pumps, and freezers and fridges.
There’s even an extreme solution that Enersource calls Power Down on Peak. More like voluntary blackout, I would say. In return for a 100 per cent reduction of power in your home (they'd give you 24 hours’ notice), the electrical distributor will credit your power bill $105 and then give you $25 an additional hour for the time the power’s off. The idea is to develop a pool of volunteers to go completely off-line to reduce demand in a power crisis.
“It’s a no-brainer if you’re not at home,” was one woman’s instant reaction.
It’s obviously not for everybody but it makes the point that radical problems may call for radical solutions, and one size doesn’t fit all. Ten Enersource customers have already been signed up for a small Power Down pilot project.
At the suggestion of Enersource Senior Communications Manager Ken MacDonald, a smart meter has been installed in our house in Erin Mills and our family will be delving into the world of time-of-use rates, dishwashers running on timers at 2 a.m. and wall-to-wall laundry on weekends to see how this thing works.
The new meter isn’t really all that revolutionary. It just records your use of electricity every couple of hours instead of every couple of months.
It’s only going to be smart if we figure out how to use it to maximum advantage.

P.S. I’m going on vacation for a sinfully long three weeks to test taste this summer’s raft of rosés, watch the birds and scour the garden nurseries for bargains. Random Access returns July 24.