Random Access

I may be in Mississauga today in body but my soul is still on a trail in Prince Edward Island National Park, ignoring the mosquitoes that are breakfasting on the back of my neck — field glasses trained on the beautiful gray-blue head and the trailing black necklace of the Mourning Warbler. Too bad the batteries in my ... ppdriuitiisoxxzazyying camera aren’t working.
Oh well, I guess there are a few small problems, even in paradise.
Just back from three lovely weeks of vacation in which, you will be shocked to know, I did not think about handicapping the Ward 10 council race for even one fleeting second.
Returning from vacation is a disorienting experience in which the mind refuses to accept, for as long as humanly possible, that the pleasures of sun and slow suppers, the extended cocktail hour, sinful desserts, the best fruit and vegetables of the season and the joy of reading for its own sake were but a brief reverie.
A week at a cottage within a few minutes’ walk of the red beaches on the northern coast of PEI creates an indelible impression of beauty and calm.
As my wife Janice put it, over the crest of every hill another postcard was waiting to unfold before your eyes. She took to calling the place the Shire, in reference to the idyllic home of the Hobbits in Lord of the Rings.
Our map called it the Gentle Island and we certainly found it so, although one suspects that it may not seem so peaceful in the teeth of a winter gale off the ocean. The place was immaculate and, although filled with tourist attractions, generally maintains its pastoral charm. Either PEI has an armed corps of paint police or Islanders have an innate sense of their own architectural traditions which they wish to uphold.
The only real tendency to the tawdry we saw was in Cavendish, with the hawking of the Anne of Green Gables legend. If pumping children’s stories about a fiery island girl is the closest you get to garish, you’re doing all right.
Being a bit of a birder, our location was ideal, as more than 300 species of birds can be seen in PEI National Park. There were many more Great Blue Heron than American robins and I saw at least as many foxes (who make dens in the sand dunes) as dogs.
Early one morning on a solitary trail that I kindly shared with a million mosquitoes, I found the bubbling springs for which the trail is named. They were occupied by a pair of American Black Ducks who were thoroughly enjoying their morning sauna before being rudely interrupted.
Know exactly how they feel. Was just starting to relax myself and get the feel of sea in my soul and red dirt on my shirt when this work-for-a-living thing reared its ugly head again.
Wake me up when reality is over.

Donald Barber’s entry into the Mississauga mayoralty race sets up the unfortunate possibility that the “debates” to take place during the municipal election campaign this fall will be all about personality, not policy.
With his good friend Roy Willis already in the alleged race for the City’s top political post Nov. 13, it seemed unlikely that Barber would make his fourth run at ousting Hazel McCallion, for whom he has ill-disguised contempt.
That all changed when the founder of Friends of the Cawthra Bush was charged with assault of a security guard after being escorted from the council chambers following a heated exchange with the mayor and councillors June 7. Barber wanted to know why a long-standing policy that allowed citizens to ask general questions about policies of public interest had been changed without notice.
Councillors refused to allow him to speak and both he and Willis, who also had legitimate concerns about the sudden change in policy, were escorted from the chambers.
What happened next will be the subject of an upcoming criminal trial (no date has been set) as Barber defends himself against two assault charges.
It is already clear that Barber considers his arrest a political act and, if he is convicted, that he will portray himself a political prisoner. Among the outrageous comments on his website is an accusation that when you take on McCallion, “no act of evil is out of bounds.”
Barber had to use an agent to register for the mayor’s race because one of his bail conditions bans him from City Hall.
He has every right, of course, to put his name forward as a candidate. He does not have the right to turn the democratic process into a personal vendetta against the mayor.
At a Ward 3 all-candidates’ meeting in the 2000 election, with the mayor absent, Barber was roundly booed when he claimed McCallion, “may be mentally unfit to hold office and her physical health is questionable.”
Unfortunately, Barber turns every mayoral debate into a personal diatribe against the incumbent. It makes no sense as a political strategy because even those who have their own concerns about the mayor’s reluctance to enter her well-deserved retirement, have little taste for character assassination.
Needless to say, McCallion is quite capable of defending herself on the campaign platform.
The election campaign offers the opportunity once every three or four years to hold the mayor accountable for her past policies and to seek details of her vision for our collective future.
Unless Mr. Barber changes his stripes, however, it’s much more likely McCallion will spend her time on the platform this year trying, or retrying, a criminal court case and responding to provocative accusations that she simply cannot let go unanswered.
That would turn the whole exercise into a rhetorical shambles. The result would be a real disservice to the democratic process that Barber says he holds so dear.

You can be sure that at one point in his concert Saturday night on the square in front of city hall, Peter Appleyard will play a song called Django.
“I think it’s the most beautiful ballad in jazz and I told John Lewis that the last time I saw him,” says Appleyard from his home in the country to the west of here.
Lewis, of course, was the pianist and leader of the inestimable Modern Jazz Quartet, the tasty outfit that took the high road in jazz for so many memorable years in the '50s and '60s with Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Percy Heath on bass and Kenny Clarke (later replaced by Connie Kay) on drums.
Appleyard doesn’t play much of the MJQ catalogue because, “I don’t think anybody did it better. I just don’t think I should be doing that.”
If someone asks for The Golden Striker or Bag’s Groove, two Jackson showcases that helped establish the vibraphone as a force in jazz, Appleyard will play them but he doesn’t go out of his way to do so.
The native of Britain plays so often in Mississauga, sits on the board of Orchestra Mississauga and attends so many concerts here as an audience member, that he feels like one of us. He’s never actually lived here but he’s part of our musical framework.
He plays Django, Lewis’ tribute to the great gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt for more than one reason.
When he was a regular at the Park Plaza with Cal Jackson’s band in the '70s, Appleyard used to play the tune often.
Another huge fan of the piece was a regular named Tibo Kapsi. He would sometimes walk into the club while the band was performing Django and yell out “Bartender: four Cognacs.” That may have accounted for some of the band’s fondness for the piece.
Appleyard now plays the piece in honour of Kapsi, who was murdered in a horrible incident a couple of decades ago on the farm in Woodbridge where he raised Black Angus cattle.
Some youngsters were using a car to chase his cows when Kapsi asked them to leave. When they returned, he went out again to confront them. One of the young men had carved a willow branch into a sharp point and threw it at Kapsi, striking him in the chest and taking his life.
“I didn’t play the song for years after that,” said Appleyard, “but now I play it for my dear friend.”
Every once in a while, after he tells the Django story in a nightclub or bar, someone in the audience will have four Cognacs delivered to the bandstand.

If anyone is thinking that David Culham might be interested in trying politics again after his six-year term on the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), they can think again.
Looking tanned, healthy and happy, Culham dropped by the office this morning to deliver a letter to the editor. Now that he’s retired from the OMB, the former Ward 6 councillor (for 23-years) can once again speak out on public issues.
Anyone who knows the 62-year-old realizes that the most difficult thing about accepting the OMB appointment must have been the restriction on expressing his opinion publicly. No one enjoyed expressing his thoughts, and expressing them forcefully, more than the passionate Culham whose hard-nosed advocacy basically bludgeoned his fellow regional councillors into introducing the blue box recycling system here in the early 80s.
If there was one thing Culham enjoyed more than expressing his opinion, it was planting trees. Over the years his philosophy of “sweat equity,” the euphemistic term he used to describe the process of getting your hands dirty to improve the community, resulted in thousands of new trees in parks, conservation areas, and along the Credit River trail that now bears his name.
Culham told me this morning that he has no interest whatsoever in resuming his political career. Although he works out regularly, the councillor knows how much energy the job takes. He’d rather devote himself to more productive things, like watching his grandchildren grow up.
The most important thing that happened this week was that his 10-year-old granddaughter Alex headed in her first goal at a soccer game in Guelph where Culham often travels to take pictures.
Culham and Mayor Hazel McCallion, who both came on Mississauga City council in its inaugural term in 1974, had some monumental clashes and fought an internecine war of words for years as he awaited the rumoured retirement that was (is) never to be.
Although they spent the last few years of Culham’s career sniping at each other, the mayor and councillor agreed on most goals. They regularly disagreed on how to achieve them.
The pair ran into each other not too long ago in Streetsville and ended up chatting about the ins and outs of the new legislation governing the OMB for the better part of three hours.
I once asked Culham about the tough rhetoric and the semi-belligerent tone he sometimes employed in debates. He replied with one of his fractured quotations, the ones that often had his colleagues scratching their heads in puzzlement.
The councillor had a unique way of not quite saying what he intended, but still leaving you knowing exactly what he meant. His response to the question was, “I’m a reasonably nice guy, but in hockey and in life, you have to carry your elbows.”
The Gordie Howe of Mississauga politics, unlike his namesake, looks like he knows how to stay retired.

If you go to Jason Roti’s political web site, you’ll find a blog that’s written in Latin.
“I’m trying to appeal to the niche voter,” laughs the 21-year-old Ward 3 council candidate with good humour when asked about it.
When you’re a first-time political candidate, strange things happen. Roti has been having difficulty with the website he established for his first run at municipal politics. A block of Latin “dummy text” was used to demonstrate to the former John Cabot Secondary School council president and valedictorian how the text would eventually look on the site. But, the site keeps riverting to that demonstration mode.
Well, Jason isn’t the first politician to try to speak to the voters in a language most of them can’t understand.
The website problem is just another little glitch in a campaign that has already hit several bumps.
If one wanted to be cruel, one could say that Roti is already a political veteran because he’s working on his third ward in just seven months of campaigning for a seat on City council.
He registered Jan. 2 to run in the new Ward 10 because there was no incumbent. “I thought it was a good opportunity.”
But, when his older brother Graziano entered that race a couple of weeks later, Jason switched to Ward 11 where he would face George Carlson.
While out campaigning, he left his car in Ward 3 where he grew up and still lives.
It was broken into. The car stereo and a number of other possessions were stolen.
That’s when Roti decided to run in Ward 3.
“It was like a sign that I should focus in my own community. That’s where a lot of help is needed. The Bloor-Fieldgate area is in rough shape,” he said.
It’s going to be a tough ward to crack. Not only is he facing long-time incumbent Maja Prentice but former ward trustee and now Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board Chair Peter Ferreira has jumped into the race. John Busic is the fourth candidate so far.
As if that isn’t enough Roti, who started a group called Youth Active in Politics to try to get young people more interested in local politics, was in a traffic accident July 9 at Dundas St. E. and Stanfield Rd. He’s still recovering from back and neck injuries but expects to be ready for the fray that leads to the Nov. 13 election.
Asked if there are any circumstances in which he can foresee switching wards again, Roti laughs heartily.
“Pina would probably kill me,” he says, in reference to the City’s no-nonsense election co-ordinator, Pina Mancuso.
While he’s laid up, Roti can always work on his campaign platform, or, if need be, brush up on his Latin.