Random Access

The best thing about Education Minister Kathleen Wynne’s announcement at Oscar Peterson Public School in Mississauga yesterday wasn’t what she announced — $1 billion for 100 new schools and revised guidelines for school closings — but the tone she used in announcing it.
Wynne, who already looks very comfortable in a job she is obviously better suited for than her two short-lived predecessors, didn’t seem the least bit doctrinaire in her attitude towards closing schools or combining them with community resources such as libraries or child care centres.
After touring some of the classes in the Churchill Meadows school, which concentrates on the arts and has not one, but two, real live music teachers (and you thought they were an endangered species) Wynne began her press conference with what sounded like a contradiction.
Yes, the media had been invited out so the ministry could showcase the beautiful state-of-the-art building as an example of the investment the government has made in new schools.
“But, as you saw in that Grade 1 class we visited,” said the minister, “what’s really important is the jokes, the teachers and the relationships that develop in classes.” Spoken like a former kindergarten teacher.
A building is just bricks and mortar but a school is the collective effect of dynamic collaboration among staff, students and the community.
You can name any school for Oscar Peterson but it’s only meaningful if people like Principal Caroline Mochrie assemble a talented staff and then execute their vision for an outstanding elementary arts curriculum.
The most important thing the minister said is that she wants to turn schools into “hubs.” And when the time comes to close a school, before that decision is taken a full review of its value — not just to the board but to the larger community — must be completed.
She understands that schools don’t belong to boards of education or governments. They belong to neighbourhoods. In some cases, they may be severely under-enrolled but that doesn’t mean they can’t still be the centre of community activity, especially if they are the only remaining public building within miles.
Those words were music to the ears of Director of Education (and part-time drummer) Jim Grieve of the Peel District School Board.
Under current regulations, boards are punished for every square inch of space that isn’t used for purely instructional purposes. Space used for a community library or child care counts as empty and, as a result, boards lose dollars they desperately need under the formula to build new schools in growth areas.
The minister’s flexibility should open the door to more of the wonderful literacy and numeracy programs that prepare students in high-risk communities for school, such as Success by 6 and the Early Years and reading readiness centres. Those programs will repay their investment many times over down the road in costs that are avoided because students won’t have to use reading recovery and other expensive remedial programs.
Viewing schools as community assets has other long-range benefits, pointed out Mississauga West MPP Bob Delaney. “Within a generation, for every one senior citizen we have in Mississauga now, there will be two and for every one person now over 80 years, there will be three. We have the buildings and the land. Those buildings could be useful as community centres or older adult centres.”
Puts a new spin on the whole concept of local life-long learning, n’est-ce pas?

Conn Smythe once said that if you can’t beat them on the ice, you can’t beat ’em in the alley.
In the Ward 7 council race, it’s more like, if you can’t beat ’em in the parking lot, you can’t beat ’em at the polls.
Yes, believe or not, two of the main combatants in the all-candidates’ session sponsored by the Cooksville-Munden Park and Gordon Woods ratepayers last night ended up taking it outside at the end of the evening — although both agree that no physical blows were landed.
That’s about the only thing that incumbent Councillor Nando Iannicca and challenger Shane McNeil could agree on last night.
No use getting into the allegations of who shouted what at whom in the parking lot at St. Timothy’s School and what digitally dextrous retort may have been made, because the verbal blows that were landed inside the gymnasium were solid enough in themselves.
You knew that the game was on when council candidate Beju Lakhani opened with a full-throttle attack on the self-described “chosen son of Ward 7” whose, “18-year long slumber is coming to an end.” Then he blasted Rip Van Iannicca for an alleged conflict of interest for collecting $33,000 on top of his $115,000 combined City and Region salary for sitting on Enersouce’s board.
Iannicca, of course, responded in unkind, reminding Lakhani that Enersource is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the City’s. (Interestingly, no one said a word about Hazel sitting on the Enersource board.)
“I have been the victim of an insulting charade perpetrated by Nando Iannicca,” McNeil said in his speech, referring to e-mails he received from someone posing as Rita Forbes, who turned out to be Nando’s older but-not-necessarily-smarter brother Sandro (the one with the PhD.)
Although he had been served with a notice of libel and slander Monday by the councillor, McNeil repeated his contention that the real author of the e-mails was the elected Iannicca, not his brother. He suggested, quite reasonably, that the democratic tradition of debate might be a better way to settle such matters than suing at the drop of a blog.
What set the councillor or his brother, or both, on edge about the McNeil campaign was a series of controversial statements on his web log, some of which were clearly untrue.
For instance, it was Toronto council, not Mississauga, that took a 16 per cent pay hike this year. McNeil complained that Iannicca bought home furniture with City funds, such as a computer desk, but that is authorized by a City policy that allows politicians to communicate with constituents from their homes, which is much more convenient on evenings and weekends.
The blog has since been edited to remove some of the statements and refine others and a homemade disclaimer has been added at the bottom.
Iannicca claims his honesty has been impugned and he will pursue legal action to clear his name.
Maybe more disturbing than anything McNeil said was the pure enmity that his face reflected as he stared at Iannicca each time he spoke.
For his part, the clearly too-tightly wound incumbent made his own accusations, one of which is patently incorrect according to McNeil. Rather than just having moved into the ward as Iannicca suggested, McNeil said he has lived in Ward 7 for close to a dozen years. He was not on the preliminary voters’ list because he recently moved.
No word yet on whether McNeil plans to use the same law firm as Iannicca.
The challengers landed some body blows (especially on the sorry state of the four corners and Cooksville in general) but when it came to content, Iannicca excelled, as the incumbent obviously should.
In all the hubbub, some very good ideas got lost or minimized. Iannicca wants to rebuild the T.L. Kennedy site to make it more urban and add a community centre next door, create a $2.2 million pedestrian and walk system along the hydro right-of-way on The Queensway and close Burnhamthorpe Rd. W. in the city centre on weekends to make it, “our great meeting place.”
He may have three degrees (journalism, political science, economics), skill in three languages and a way with words that few people on council can match, but Iannicca also has attitude.
He’s a hard-nosed streetfighter from Cooksville who enjoys a scrap and isn’t afraid to use the boots when he has to.
The problem is that, too often, he uses them when he doesn’t have to. That’s probably why Iannicca always seems to draw passionate opponents and the battle always manages to get extremely personal.

Ah, the trials and tribulations of being on the outside of the municipal political process, trying to get in.
The odds are stacked against you in so many ways.
Just ask Peter Ferreira or Brian Hurley or Don Barber, all of whom have complained during the current campaign that they don’t always get a fair shake from the process.
Ferreira is weighing whether or not he should attend Monday night’s all-candidates’ meeting being hosted by the Rockwood Homeowners’ Association (7 p.m. at Sts. Martha and Mary School), because, “I’m afraid I’m being set up.”
The chief challenger of incumbent Ward 3 Councillor Maja Prentice (municipal class of ’85), the current chair of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board feels, “that there’s going to be sabotage on behalf of the incumbent councillor.”
He bases his fears on the fact that his e-mail of several weeks ago asking about the format of the meeting was never answered and the “unfair billing” challengers got on the 3,000 flyers that went out advertising the event.
Under the headline Do You Want a Say in Shaping Mississauga’s Future?, Mayor Hazel McCallion and Prentice are mentioned in bold-face type as being in attendance, “along with other candidates seeking office.” The names of those in the “other” category are enumerated in much smaller type at the bottom, where the incumbents are listed again.
“Why do they get top billing, as if they need the attention?” asks the Ward 6 Catholic trustee. “Am I being paranoid?”
Yes, according to Rockwood Homeowners’ president Boris Swedak who says no slight was intended. The incumbents were listed higher simply because they currently represent the area. “There was no thought to any advantage. I think Peter is out of line,” said Swedak, a 33-year employee of the City’s public works department prior to his retirement.
Ferreira is also upset that McCallion appears in several pictures on Prentice’s campaign literature when the mayor strenuously objected to Ferreira using a photo of him and the mayor together from a library opening (he is the former Library Board chair) on his literature three years ago.
Ward 2 council candidate Hurley wasn’t invited to the West Erindale Homeowners’ Association annual general meeting (AGM) last night, but he went anyway as a guest of a member and sat in the front row while incumbent Pat Mullin spoke of current issues at City Hall. Hurley admits that Mullin did not give a campaign speech, “although she was on the very edge a couple of times.”
Hurley had asked to attend but was told by Peter di Scola of the association in an e-mail that, “We invite guest speakers who are part of the existing fabric of the neighbourhood and who can shed light on issues pertinent to us. We do not hold
forums for political purposes and although it may seem unfair to you to not have opportunity to speak at our agm, especially at a time so close to an election, I trust you understand, we as an Association do not favour any one candidate and are totally neutral politically.”
Maybe so, but the perception of bias is unmistakable.
Randy Skakun, head of the Cooksville-Munden Park Homeowners says it intentionally holds its AGM in May to try to avoid any hint of favouritism. If an AGM is scheduled during the campaign period, Skakun suggests an all-candidates should be added on to it. Makes good sense.
Sherway Homeowners recently held their 30th anniversary celebrations to which the mayor and the sitting councillor were invited. Mayoralty candidate Don Barber wanted to crash the party but was denied. Irene Gabon of the association says it was largely a social occasion for volunteers and the politicians who have served the area over the years and was not political.
Perhaps so, but couldn’t it have been held after the election?
Holding meetings mid-campaign and only inviting incumbents smacks too much of insider trading.
Besides, it’s not good politics. Sometimes, even in no-surprise Mississauga, you could theoretically wake up the morning after the election and find out you have a new councillor — who has a bone to pick with your ratepayer group.

The gloves are off in Ward 7 and the bare knuckles are starting to draw a little blood.
The rancour of last week’s all-candidates’ session seems to have ratcheted up the ill will between incumbent Councillor Nando Iannicca and his chief opponent, Beju Lakhani, who has been running hard — with a lot of assistance from former Ward 4 Councillor and long-time NDP stalwart Larry Taylor — since June.
Lakhani’s ire was raised when Iannicca handed out material last week which he says proves that the councillor has been using City staff and resources to fight his campaign.
In response to factually inaccurate statements from his opponents about councillor’s salaries, the ownership of municipal community centres and the size of tax increases, Iannicca wrote to City staff to ask for the facts. He took those memos, which are on City letterhead, photocopied them, then stapled a campaign piece to them and handed them out last week at the ratepayers’ meeting.
“He’s taken something that was produced through City resources and attached his flyer to the front,” complained Lakhani, who works as fundraising director for Foodpath. “He should have gone and done his own research. I just want a level playing field,” the challenger said.
“Absolute nonsense,” replies Iannicca. “Staff were correcting his errors and others’ errors. This is Nando following the letter of the law. I have a right to ask for the correct information as an elected official. I photocopied and disseminated the material at my own expense. I know what bothers Mr. Lakhani and that is the truth.”
One can only imagine how much staff looks forward to “clarifying” these issues for the public and/or writing addendums for campaign brochures.
Be that as it may, the stakes were upped (pun intended) over the weekend when campaign signs for Lakhani and Wards 1 and 7 public school board candidate Jeffrey Hui started popping on prime pieces of retail and commercial real estate in Ward 7 that Iannicca has “exclusive” permission from owners to use: many of them prominent developers and landowners he’s dealt with over the years.
Savvy campaigners, of course, stick their election signs on private property, such as plazas and condos, where they know that the City will not remove them. They know there may be confusion about the rules, and that people may assume that the owner has actually given permission for them. By the time the details have been checked, the election is often over.
Iannicca’s campaign manager fired off an email to Lakhani’s, saying that the Iannicca team has been given permission to remove the signs by the owners, but they wanted to give Lakhani team the courtesy (as if there’s much of that left in this campaign) of removing the signs themselves.
We will remove the signs where the property owner has advised us that they are not wanted, came Lakhani’s reply.
This is a negative billing option, says the incumbent, who plans to start removing signs forthwith.
Iannicca has verbal, not written permission to take down the signs, so it is not too surprising that his opponent isn’t just going to take his word for it.
Prodding and poking the good councillor seems to be a specialty of Lakhani and team. According to Iannicca, they plastered his condo with illegal signs earlier and knocked on his door and pretended not to know who he was.
Taylor asks sarcastically whether the incumbent has permission of all of the developers throughout the ward to post only his signs. “Sure, I’m going to believe an opposition candidate that he has that permission. We have put up signs where requested and if an owner says we’ve made a mistake, we’ll remove it. This is typical of the goon tactics that have been going on in Ward 7.”
With all of the forensic investigations likely to follow this campaign (Iannicca is suing candidate Shane McNeil) there may be a new TV franchise in this: CSI Cooksville.
There is one thing good about all this sign mess. We now know how to rid the Mississauga landscape of all those gaudy election signs as soon as possible after the election.
We just need to ask the candidates to keep doing what they’ve done throughout — being responsible for removing their opponents’ signs.

Running in the municipal election?
How would you like to use a photograph of a vibrant octogenarian with a — shall we say — unconventional fashion sense and an authoritative manner, on your campaign brochure?
Could appeal to the mature voter. True, you might have to use a step stool for the photo shoot and there could be a lot of reflection off the shiny necklace she likes to wear around her neck but I can assure you, the response would be worth it.
For someone who is not running a campaign, Mayor Hazel (Please Redirect Your Campaign Donations to Charity) McCallion makes an inordinate number of appearances on campaign brochures and web sites for various candidates in the current campaign.
When one is the human vortex of Mississauga politics, this unsolicited attention is not unexpected.
The public or private disapproval of the former Queen of Sprawl (Thank you Ann Mulvale and Susan Fennell) is perceived as critical to one’s electoral success, so it is not surprising that the mayor’s favour is curried at every opportunity.
As everyone knows, McCallion has un-elected more than one councillor with the monumental power of her disapproval. The power of her implied approval is considered just as powerful, obviously, because all kinds of candidates over the years have included her pictures in their materials in the vain hope that voters might believe they are the Chosen One.
Back in June, the mayor sent a letter to The News noting that the unauthorized use of her photo had already begun in the current campaign. “The use of my photo requires my authorized permission,” she said. Good luck enforcing that.
“I do not endorse the use of my photo in election campaign material produced by candidates and the use of my photograph should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any candidate.”
The photo issue came to a head in the last campaign when Ward 3 council candidate Peter Ferreira used a photo of Hazel, taken at the opening of the Streetsville library when he was chair of the library board, on the front of a brochure that included the slogan, “Supporting Visionaries That Embrace Change.” Oops.
An angry McCallion claimed the photo was doctored. (Ferreira insists it wasn’t and says he has the negatives to prove it.)
Speaking of negatives, the mayor issued a statement complaining that a candidate had used a photo without her permission which incumbent councillor Maja Prentice used in an ad in The News shortly before election day.
Ferreira is still smarting over the incident. The mayor is a public figure and if he is involved with her in a public function where photos are taken, he does not need her permission to use the photo, he maintains.
“Nowhere did it say she endorses me,” said Ferreira. Not explicitly, no, but it clearly implied so.
A not-so-sorry but wiser Ferreira has no pictures of the mayor on his flyer this time around, although there is a photo on his web site of the pair of them smiling together at St. Francis Xavier high school.
Prentice has two photos that include McCallion on her brochure, both at community events in the ward, which is perfectly kosher. She got the mayor’s permission for those. Which is interesting in light of the mayor’s earlier statement that, “I do not endorse the use of my photo in election campaign material produced by candidates.”
Ferreira says he has no problems with the mayor and realizes that she, “has a thing about protecting any member of her team” from being knocked off council.
He still thinks that Photogate ’03 involved, “making a mountain out of a molehill.”
Where photos of Mt. McCallion and the enormous shadow she casts are concerned, there are no such things as molehills.

When Bob Dylan comes to town and we children of the '60s go to hear him perform, we necessarily visit Our Back Pages.
We were so much older then... but, unfortunately, we are not younger than that now.
He was the voice of our times, the man whose songs embodied the questions of a generation about why Medgar Evers, Emmett Till and Hattie Carroll had to die, how injustice and racism could abound in a world of riches and why the answer was always blowin’ in the wind or drowning in a hard rain.
It is a shock to find oneself at the Air Canada Centre last night and to realize that the troubadour of your prime times is now a 65-year-old senior citizen.
Dylan long ago rejected the mantle of “spokesman of a generation” and, it would seem, has been actively working for decades to alienate his own fan base.
Despite his own best efforts, we refuse to let him go.
Lord knows he tried his best to dissuade us at times last night.
It is disillusioning indeed to stare into the vacuum of his voice. Let’s just be kind and say that when his Bobness opens his mouth these days, he sounds an awful like Broderick Crawford gargling with steel wool.
Many people object to the fact that many of his classic songs are unrecognizable in performance, rearranged, turned inside out, and rejigged to the point where only a few snatches of familiar lyrics (when you can hear them) give clues as to their identity.
I was on both sides of that argument last night. His version of Positively 4th Street, one of his deliciously vitriolic anthems against a former lover, was rendered impotent by a lifeless arrangement and vocal emphasis that never hit the mark. Dylan waited so long to come in at times that you were convinced he’d forgotten the lyrics. All I can say is... you got a lot of nerve to sing that song that way.
On the other hand, his new rockabilly setting of Highway 61 was brilliant, thanks largely to superb lead guitar work by Denny Freeman, who led a typically tight Dylan back-up unit. The man actually sang on that one, instead of slur-speaking.
You have to admire Dylan’s chutzpah. Other people in his situation might just replay the old songs people know, hire a bunch of background singers to drown out his voice and take the money and run.
Bob wrecks his own songs and reassembles them, makes every new version an adventure in listening, as well as performance, and doesn’t care whether we like it or not. We like it because the songs are still the anthems of our youth and, through all the decades, his lyrics still have the power to reach out and clutch you by the throat.
One song alone was worth the (extravagant) price of admission last night. Masters of War (1963) was as powerful as ever and Dylan just as sinister as the man following the casket of the death merchant and standing over his grave until he is sure he is dead.
He can’t sing anymore, but the man still speaks volumes.

Some random ramblings today on things electoral.
Nice to actually see some election signs for a mayoralty candidate around town. Roy Willis has recycled 500 of his old Ward 5 signs, changed the name of the office he’s seeking on them, and posted them strategically in Wards 1, 2, 5 and 6.
Willis has been working hard to distinguish himself from the other anti-Hazel candidate, Don Barber, and has largely been successful. Over the years Roy has become eerily diplomatic in his criticism of the mayor and the City, but still manages to make his points.
In this run, his first for mayor after innumerable forays in Ward 5, he has carefully avoided the personal attacks that have marred Barber’s campaign. He opponents have both pointed out effectively that the mayor’s platform can be boiled down to one simple concept: more of the same.
It will be interesting to see how many people who think that Hazel McCallion’s time has come and gone, and want to quietly register that opinion, park their votes with Mr. Willis.
• • •
Imagine Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board Vice-Chair Anna Abbruscato’s surprise when she was reading her copy of the Make Your Mark candidate information section of The Mississauga News and came across some of her own words in the response from another candidate.
Two sentences from Abbruscato’s flyer appear virtually word-for-word in the response which Ward 4 Dufferin-Peel trustee candidate Thomas Thomas gave to The News, including the verbatim sentence, “Co-operation between the school, the home and the church are the necessary ingredients to mould sound Catholic youth.”
Thomas, a former trustee himself, lives in Abbruscatto’s ward. The vice-chair doesn’t know what she can do about it but says, “I just feel ripped off that he would do something like this. I cannot believe that he has the gall to do that.”
Thomas says that there was no plagiarism involved and that he submitted his material to the News some time ago. Abbruscatto began distributing her brochure shortly after Thanksgiving. The deadline for candidate submissions was two weeks later on Oct. 23. “Everybody has their own ideas and nobody was copying from anybody,” says Thomas.
• • •
There are some mighty exercised folks in Ward 10. Elias Hazineh accuses Sue McFadden of using school board resources to write to parents in the Oscar Peterson community to promote her council campaign because the last sentence says, “Thank you for your continued support and I look forward to being able to continue to serve the Ward 10 community.” McFadden will declare the postage as an election expense for council. She says the letter just means she will support parents’ fight for new schools even if she loses.
Craig Lawrence says McFadden misleads in her Rogers TV blurb by saying she has lived in the ward for the last 10 years. McFadden replies that she has lived in the existing ward for that long. On election day, the ward will be split and she will live in Ward 9, not Ward 10 where she is running. It’s one of those statements that, while technically true, clearly leaves the wrong impression.
McFadden wonders if Lawrence has permission from the mayor for the photo of the two of them together on one of his pieces. The mayor has said she is not granting such authority. (see earlier item Say Cheese)
Lisgar voter Dave Belcher wants to know why Hazineh is running as, “our liberal in Ward 10” complete with red campaign signs. He’s asked MPP Bob Delaney if there was a nomination meeting he’d missed, if the Liberals suddenly decided they didn’t like the upper case or if party politics was introduced at the municipal level when he wasn’t looking. “To me, it’s a bit of trickery,” says Belcher.
• • •
Carolyn Parrish is fuming over a campaign piece by the so-called Committee For Accountable Municipal Politicians (a Cliff Gyles front?) that’s arriving in mail boxes across Ward 6.
It attacks her for speaking only 1,433 words in the 138th Parliament, comparing her unfavourably with the garrulous Paul Szabo. It also questions her poor attendance at question period.
“Your attendance at question period is irrelevant,” says the former MP, who spent time in her office doing real work, she says, instead of playing to the media. Since she was kicked out of the Liberal caucus about a third of the way through her last term as Mississauga-Erindale MP, her name could not be submitted by a party under the normal procedure to ask a question. Every Wednesday, she used the time allotted for independents to ask a single question. All of which probably means nothing to the voters of Ward 6 who are voting for councillor Monday, not MP.
Ms. Parrish should look on the bright side. For possibly the first time ever, somebody is complaining that she didn’t speak out enough.

Mea Culpa: In an earlier posting, I incorrectly stated that an assault charge against Donald Barber came after his appearance at a council meeting in November. It was actually in June.

What a short, strange trip it’s been, to misquote The Grateful Dead.
This year’s municipal election campaign seems to have been a lot more cantankerous and chippy than past affairs. You almost feel like we should ask Ward 2 resident Don Cherry to do voice-over for Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Mississauga ‘06.
Can’t you just hear it: ‘Did you see the old grey mayor nail Eve Adams into the boards there, Ron? Geeze. Now, all you kids pay attention here. That’s the way you do it. Wait until the councillor has her head down kicking her staff across the blue line and then Wham, you give her the old what-for. ‘An she got a little elbow in there, like she always does. Geeze. That was a thing of beauty.’
The election has generally not been a thing of beauty, but then what blood sport is?
Some quick observations.
Why do so many candidates put forward their names and then do absolutely nothing to get themselves elected? If you don’t have enough energy to send a picture of yourself to the newspaper, put together a 300-word outline of your reasons for running or trundle down to Rogers Television to give a three-minute spiel, how can you expect to collect a single, solitary vote?
And what’s with Rick Falco, the former Catholic school trustee who went from the favourite to win the Ward 5 council seat in the last election to running a phantom campaign for the vacated Ward 6 Dufferin-Peel seat this time around?
The all-candidates’ forum, which is the single most effective way to judge candidates, is going the way of the passenger pigeon. How could we have a marquee council race in Ward 6 without having Carolyn Parrish cross-examined about her mayoralty ambitions or Ron Starr asked about the Optimist Club camp issue that resulted in police charges against him, which were later dropped?
The all-candidates’ problem is symptomatic of a much more serious issue, the demise/dormancy of so ratepayer groups that should be the lifeblood of community discourse. Their absence is particularly hurtful at election time.
Biggest disconnect of the campaign: All the candidates pushing more efficient, effective transit who are also adamantly opposed to any higher density development. To make transit work, intensification is required. We should be talking how and where, not if. This will be the hot button issue of the next four years. Smart growth means more density in established neighbourhoods and lots more angry ratepayers.
Best campaign piece I’ve seen: Wards 1-3 Catholic candidate Mario Pascucci’s clean, readable piece, featuring photos of every school in the wards, with updates on projects at each. Easy to read and not an inch of wasted space.
Most honest statement: ‘Barring an unforeseen miracle, I don’t think I’ll be elected Nov. 13 ‘Jason Roti, Ward 3 council candidate at an all-candidates’ Monday night.
Not to be outdone by Carolyn Parrish’s smart car, mayoralty candidate Don Barber has been toodlin’ around town on a Segway, the battery-powered two-wheel motor vehicle that is being tested as part of a pilot project just approved by the provincial government. ‘On a tight budget, you have to get people’s attention and this is fantastic for that’, said Barber as passing motorists honked their approval.
By way of a segue, Barber won’t be riding his rented vehicle into the Great Hall Monday night. He’s barred from the building as part of bail conditions on an assault charge that was laid following a council meeting in August.
Barber has asked City Hall to lift the ban for one night so he could attend on election night. He has received no answer. ‘They are in stonewall mode’, he says.
The candidate is angry that so few Mississaugans seem to know or care what happens Monday. ‘It’s time to wake up and treat the election as if it matters. We have people fighting and dying for democracy in Afghanistan and here at home we’re clueless. Something is going on and it has consequences.

Predictability, thy name is Mississauga.
As long as Hazel McCallion is the cork in the bottle that is Mississauga politics, the status quo is the mainline go around here.
“Why did we even have an election?” moaned Roy Willis late Monday night after the most obvious result occurred in every council race.
Well, because of this little concept called democracy that mandates these periodic rituals.
The number of former Peel public school board trustees doubled from two to four on council (that’s 25 per cent) when Carolyn Parrish won in Ward 6 and Sue McFadden won surprisingly easily in Ward 10.
The men (Frank Dale, Nando Iannicca and George Carlson) are going to have to start lobbying for affirmative action programs, as they are now outnumbered nine to three.
Nobody won any big cash on this election, unless they are into betting the over/under on the 20 per cent turnout.
In retrospect, Parrish was always in control of the Ward 6 encounter with the huge advantage of a national profile that garnered free media plugs galore (can you say Hazel Minor) which apparently impressed the home folks. A fanatic organizer who hoards piles of invaluable information, polls regularly, has loyal foot soldiers and never skimps on the work on the street level , Parrish evened her record at running for council at 1-1.
Ron Starr found out that collecting money for council candidates isn’t the same thing as being one. Making so many appearances at council on behalf of the development industry left an uneasy impression on the minds of many voters.
Independent Ward 10 voter Dave Belcher told me last week he was voting for Sue McFadden because she was at every school event he attended over the past few years when she was his Ward 9 public school trustee. She was dedicated and hard-working and that was good enough to separate her from the gang who gravitated to the open seat in the west end.
McFadden registered first, organized first, hit the streets first and finished first.
Many see her as another in the pea pod of prosaic politicians that are the problem at City Hall. A hard worker who isn’t big on speechifying, McFadden will undoubtedly be overshadowed by Parrish, her luminescent seatmate in the class of ’06. But then there is a lot more to being an effective politician than generating headlines.
Bill McBain was probably the best challenging candidate in the whole city, who ran a thoughtful and effective campaign and still barely collected 20 per cent of the vote in Ward 9.
The Larry Taylor Cell, a loose group of reformist, mostly NDP-affiliated candidates coached by the former City councillor, ran solid campaigns for the most part but certainly didn’t get the results they expected. Brian Hurley ran strongest, collecting almost 20 per cent of the vote in ward 2 but mostly it was a case of strong on the street, in signs and canvassing, but soft at the polls. Especially in ward 7 where Beju Lakhani finished behind Shane (Sue You Later) McNeil.
When all is said and done in Mississauga we seem to be quite content with the divas we know.
Is it possible that the corollary of good governance is boring politics?
One more note: Got a glimpse of some of the emotion that rides on these so-called walk-over races Monday night when Ward 3 Councillor Maja Prentice (class of ’85) rose to thank her campaign workers, a close-knit group of friends and family at the Burnhamthorpe Community Centre. Prentice’s eyes welled with tears. She had to stop for a moment and compose herself.
It may look like it is easy to the rest of us but it’s not easy, win or lose, when you are battling in the trenches every day.

It wasn’t your imagination. That was the dirtiest campaign Mississauga has seen in a long time, according to many of the participants.
Take it from veteran campaigners like Maja Prentice, first elected in 1985, who Monday night called it “very naughty. Last time was dirty and it was dirty again this time,” the Ward 3 councillor said at her victory party.
Pat Saito had all of her large signs along Winston Churchill Blvd. pulled down by vandals just in time for election day. She’s filed a report with Peel Regional Police.
“This has definitely been one of the nastier campaigns,” she says. “It is really a shame that this type of dirty politics has come to Mississauga. I guess we have been fortunate to not have experienced it more in the past but it does make me wonder what kind of ethics some of the candidates have this time around.”
Of course, lots of the challengers have similar complaints about incumbents. The tone of this campaign was definitely uncivil, for a civic election.
By the way, Carolyn Parrish, who won in Ward 6, insists she was not responsible for the “dirty drop” that her chief rival, Ron Starr, complained about on election night. Someone photocopied old newspaper clippings about the charges brought against Starr by the Ontario Provincial Police, which were later dropped by the courts, and stuffed them in mailboxes in selected areas of the ward. It did look like an amateur job, judging by the quality of the paper and the helpful highlighting, which was obviously done by hand.
Parrish was also the subject of a couple of nasty spot-drops.
* * *
It’s understandable if you didn’t recognize Brad MacDonald election night as he awaited election results at City Hall with his sons, 7 and 10, and his campaign manager. He didn’t look anything like his picture in The Toronto Star.
The newspaper accidentally printed a picture of the Ward 5 council candidate of the same name and spelling, in its election section. MacDonald, it turns out, was too busy campaigning to notice and missed the chance for a correction. Made no difference, as he cruised to a win.
One of his priorities is working with councillor Katie Mahoney to ensure that the branch library at Sheridan Mall, a lifeline to literacy for many of the immigrant students who live in the surrounding community, stays open.
* * *
Nominees in the “They Must be Kicking Themselves Now” category:
Rick Williams and Rick Falco: Either one might had a good chance of knocking off Eve Adams in Ward 5 if they’d found the gumption to run. Williams, the public trustee and Falco, who finished second to Adams in 2003, both decided to pass and may have missed their chance. Falco jumped wards and ran for Ward 6 Catholic trustee, finishing second. Williams was re-elected to the public board.
It will be a long four years for them, but maybe not as long as the four years Adams will spend under the withering icy, isolating glare of the Queen of Scowl.
* * *
What if you spent most of the campaign period in the hospital, quit the campaign half-way through and still collected more votes than five other candidates? That’s what Gordon Clarkson managed in finishing a still-very-respectable second in the Ward 1 council race.
* * *
Finally, Monday night may have marked the last appearance covering a Mississauga event for Toronto Star reporter Mike Funston, who has been on the municipal beat here since he joined The Star in 1977. He will be working on a variety of projects for the paper’s special sections.
Mike and I spent far too many hours together at the press desk at City Hall over the years speculating on vote counts, futilely trying to pin down Hazel’s best-before-date and waiting for interminable in-camera sessions to end. The glory days of the Mississauga bureau and Mike’s experienced hand will be greatly missed.

How can we increase voter turnout in Mississauga? Just ask all of the council members not to run again.
That would seem to be the lesson from looking at participation in Monday’s civic election. (If Hazel retires, the incumbents might all be stepping aside from their council seats to run for mayor anyway next time around.)
The “highest” turnouts were in Ward 10 (29.6 per cent) and Ward 6 (27.3 per cent), where there were open seats.
If you don’t have an incumbent-free zone, then a little controversy involving the incumbent seems to be the next-best strategy for getting out the vote.
In 5, which always seems to be the throwback, wild west ward of Mississauga, they like their politics rough and tumble.
How else do you explain easily re-electing a councillor who seemed to be plagued with problems? For example, infuriating the powerhouse mayor by getting caught using City staff on your campaign during office hours, and then denying that it ever happened in the face of sworn evidence to the contrary?
Those of us who thought a conviction for election fraud might be a deterrent to getting oneself elected were reminded of the short memories of voters when Thomas Thomas became the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board trustee for Ward 5. He was convicted in 1994 for tampering with voting and was barred from running in 1997.
Somewhere out there, Cliff Gyles is plotting a comeback.
Mississauga Election Officer Pina Mancuso was pleased with the nearly five per cent jump in participation this time around from just below 20 per cent to 24.7.
The polls closed a few minutes later than planned in a couple of spots in Ward 10 because there were still people there to vote. “When you have lineups out to the parking lot, that’s a good thing,” said Mancuso. Of course, 23 campaigns all pulling the vote tends to prompt more participation too.
As for perceptions that there were more problems than usual with the permanent voters’ list, Mancuso doesn’t share that impression. In fact, the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation did a very good job of getting voters in the many new developments since 2003 onto the election list, she says.
Asked why some people who’ve lived in Mississauga their whole lives can inadvertently find themselves off the list when they appear at the polls, Mancuso said, “I wish I has an answer for that. That’s why we wish we weren’t the middle person in this thing.”
The municipality administers the election, but the voters’ list is maintained by MPAC, which tries to keep it up to date through death certificates, real estate sales etc. etc.
At least one grievous error was made in this year’s list.
Who is the most Canadian guy in the world living in Mississauga and the last one that you would want to drop from the list?
Yes, Ward 8 resident Don Cherry found himself fuming at the polls Monday when he had to produce ID and swear an oath.
You can be assured that Don, in fact, swore several oaths.
You can also imagine the lifelong Canadian’s comments about how many citizens who are just new to the country were on the list and the Coach wasn’t. The air was Maple Leaf blue and he wasn’t talking to his dog.
Some European or French guy must be in charge of the list, eh?

Tom Jupp wants to get something off his chest: the guy who seems to be sitting on it.
“It’s like somebody is sitting on your chest 24 hours a day,” he says in describing what it feels like to have emphysema.
Jupp, a 53-year-old Mississaugan, had a normal life until a year ago when a sudden attack landed him in Credit Valley Hospital (CVH). Since then he’s been hospitalized several more times, had to go on long-term disability from his job of nearly three decades at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited in Clarkson and has learned a whole new way of breathing (and not through his eyelids like Nuke LaLoosh, the Tim Robbins character in Bull Durham).
On Wednesday, Jupp was exhibit A in explaining the need for the new COPD program at CVH.
If you are like me, you are not familiar with the term COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.) It is the name under which emphysema, chronic bronchitis and other lung diseases are now grouped.
When CVH opened its new ambulatory care and cancer centre in June 2005, it said that more good things would follow, such as the opening and expansion of a number of clinics to serve community needs. This is a prime example.
Jupp had to spend six weeks away from his friends and family in Toronto’s West Park Hospital (once the old TB Sanitorium), learning the exercise and breathing techniques that will help him deal with a debilitating condition that can leave its victims breathless and hopeless.
“It’s phenomenal for us to have this,” says Debbie Coutts, co-ordinator of the program and a CVH employee since 1986. “There’s been a big void with this patient population.”
A diagnosis and a referral from a physician now provides patients with the opportunity to take part in a 10-week program where they not only exercise and learn how to control their disease, but they meet a lot of other patients fighting the same battle they are. Psychological support is a big issue for many of the patients, often ex-smokers in their 60s.
It should be noted that Mississauga’s GlaxoSmithKline has played a big role in financing this clinic, and many more across the province through its PRIISME (pronounced Prism) program, which encourages collaborative management of asthma, diabetes and COPD within communities.
To find out what COPD sufferers feel, you can give yourself this test: Take a deep breath and exhale half-way. Inhale again and breathe out half-way. That gives you the sensation of living without enough oxygen.
The major diagnostic tool for COPD is a spirometry test. By typing your birth date and weight into a computerized unit and then getting you to take a big breath and blow a mouthpiece for six seconds and then take another deep breath, testers can figure out your airflow.
Volunteers could take the short-cut version of the test Wednesday. Learned this from the experience: continuing to blow when there is no more air in your lungs makes one very, very dizzy.
One of those taking advantage was Mississauga West MPP Bob Delaney who aced his test twice (no hot air jokes please). He praised the new clinic as a place where sufferers can acquire the tools they need to go home and lead a normal life.
“Life has not come to an end,” he told the opening celebration. “This disease doesn’t control you, you can control it.”
Poster boy Tom Jupp agrees. He is now back cutting his lawn, although it takes him three hours to do it.
What about shovelling snow?
“I bought a snow blower,” he laughs, “and I taught my son how to use it.”

John is taking a week off from blogging to relax, drink wine, listen to his Oscar Peterson CDs and watch football. He’ll be back next week.

“The thing about Anita O’Day is that she always sings jazz. And what makes her singing always jazz is her improvisation. She takes a musician’s liberties with phrasing, harmony and rhythm and does it all while singing lyrics that still manage to make sense.”
That excerpt from Dom Cerulli’s liner notes for the 1961 album All The Sad Young Men gets to the heart of what made O’Day, who died Thursday at age 87, the prototypical jazz singer.
Listening to O’Day at the top of her game is like watching a tight-rope walker trying to cross the Niagara gorge in a hurricane.
Even when you’ve heard a cut a hundred times, the former Big Band singer, who started out with Gene Krupa, had the amazing capacity to make you hold your breath in delicious anticipation of how she is going to get herself out of the vocal corner she will inevitably appear to paint herself into.
Mostly, she did find a brilliant way of extricating herself, and bring a new dimension to an old, familiar songs like Sweet Georgia Brown or Fly Me To The Moon. Even when she didn’t, you had to admire her considerable gumption. She dared to go places many other singers did not have the courage to venture.
Because part of her soft palate had been accidentally cut off during a childhood tonsillectomy, O’Day had no vibrato to speak of and was unable to sustain notes the way many other singers do.
Necessity being the mother of improvisation, she transformed her limitation into a strength, learning to present the material in upside-down, backwards and sideways configurations that made songs much more than they otherwise could ever have been.
O’Day not only sang on the edge, she lived on it too. A troubled childhood, which saw her spend two years as a “professional” endurance walker starting at age 14, a couple of bad marriages and a long-time addiction to heroin and alcoholism
all took their toll. Hell, if she’d lived a cleaner life, she probably would have made it to 187.
Although she could sing ballads beautifully (She does the definitive version of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square), it is standards taken at warp speed that really define the Chicago native. Her best work is probably the album she did with bandleader/trumpeter Billy May. She tears through 16 numbers by Cole Porter in a trip to the moon on galloping wings.
One of her better albums is Anita Sings The Most, which she made with Mississauga’s Oscar Peterson trio and her long-time drummer, John Poole, in early 1957.
Peterson remembered the date well when I spoke to him about it in 2003. Norman Granz had selected the material in advance and talked to O’Day about it, knowing that he was going to be away when the recording was made and Peterson would be left in charge.
The great Canadian pianist dutifully took the play list to the session. “She walked into the session and immediately suggested something that wasn’t on the list,” Peterson recalled with a laugh. “That’s not on the list,” Peterson said. “What list?” replied O’Day.
The record got made the Granz-Peterson way and is a standout, especially Them There Eyes and Old Devil Moon.
When it comes to O’Day and her music, there is no such thing as a smooth ride. She understood that perhaps the most important thing about music, especially jazz, is the sense of adventure you bring to it. Heaven knows, she never lacked for that.

The Thought Police are alive and well and living in Ottawa (and Washington and Toronto and, Mississauga, for that matter.)
Witness the story in The Globe and Mail Saturday that reports that civil servants who work on the government’s climate change programs are being asked by the Harper Conservatives to help explain to the public why their jobs are no longer necessary.
You see, the Tories are about to kill a bunch more of those troublesome environmental programs that spread the myth of climate change.
So, they are apparently asking the folks who deliver the programs, and who will lose their jobs as a result, to report to them about potential fallout from those pesky environmentalists and the public when the news gets out. The idea is to help the government figure out how to deal with it.
The concept did not go over well with John Bennett of the Climate Action Network, who commented that the civil servants are very committed to the programs they worked on.
“So for them to be asked to explain why they should be cut, really, it’s right out of 1984. It’s telling bureaucrats to come up with lies to justify government policy.”
Such harsh language, Mr. Bennett. That is not how we communicate in Nuspeak. In Nuspeak, we say that it is the job of every dedicated civil servant to help Big Brother do succession planning, especially his or her own.
As for creating false appearances, if Big Brother was concerned only about such things, would he allow himself, and his Rubbermaid tire, to be seen in a baby blue traditional Vietnamese tunic on national television?
Yes, the word Kyoto is no longer in the Nuspeak dictionary, but that is for our own good, isn’t it?
The Party had the K-word expurgated from the climatechange.gc.ca last May. Then the site itself was expurgated a month later.
If Big Brother talked to the media, which he is much too wise to do, he would no doubt offer the same explanation that Winston receives in George Orwell’s novel: “That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the Party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others.”
So, you there, climate change civil servant — write your own job termination, spin it as a new career opportunity and sell it to the masses. Our happiness depends on it.

Every year for the past decade or so, a few of the graduates of Middle Rd. Public School (now Queen Elizabeth P.S.) and the Port Credit high school have been getting together at Bill Cunningham’s cottage in Muskoka to celebrate the past and, inevitably, to count the missing.
When they gather this year, Cunningham, 80, and the Port Credit alumnae will be raising a glass, or maybe two, to one of the best football players who ever strapped on shoulder pads at the Forrest Ave. building that is now known as Mentor College.
Bobby Cunningham died a month ago at age 79.
Bill Cunningham grew up on Indian Valley Trail while Bobby Cunningham, who was no relation, lived across the road from Riverside Public School where he went to school.
“We met in Sunday school when we were about six because we went to the same church, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian,” recalled Cunningham, who still lives in Port Credit. They were both natural athletes, although Bobby, at around 6 ft. and 175-180 pounds was a lot bigger than Bill, who played quarterback despite his height of 5 ft. 7 and his weight of 140 pounds. It is a “playing weight” he still retains.
“We had two star players, Bobby and Lorne Smith and you could see they were both going places,” said Cunningham, who retired in 1992 after 46 years with Zurich Insurance in Toronto.
Both Bobby Cunningham and Smith went on to play with the Balmy Beach Rugby Club, which was often a tryout league for the CFL in those days.
Sure enough, Cunningham was signed in 1948 by the Montreal Alouettes. He signed with the Als because they offered him $2,500, while the Argos offered just $1,000.
The next year, Cunningham played in the Grey Cup at Varsity Stadium, scoring a touchdown as the Als won. Although he doesn’t remember many details of that game, even though he was at it, Bill Cunningham does remember some of the high school games as if they were played yesterday.
Especially a couple of games in 1944, when Port Credit won the western division of the Toronto District Interscholastic Athletic Association with a stirring victory over Runnymede and then lost a heart-breaker to Vaughan Rd. when a receiver dropped a touchdown pass from Cunningham. “We came within a hair’s breadth,” he said, “which was quite an accomplishment because those other schools had big teams and they were big guys.”
Port Credit was coached by Frank Munro, now 93, who still lives in Clarkson. He was filling in as coach for legendary teacher Wilf Wood who was serving overseas. Port Credit High School would later be renamed for W.J. Wood.
People think that scrounging for football equipment is a relatively modern thing for high schools, but it’s not. “The only thing that matched was our sweaters,” laughed Cunningham, the team’s captain. “We had different helmets and pants and shoulder pads.”
Bobby Cunningham went on to be a golf pro at St. George’s in Etobicoke where his father had once been the pro and, although he never lived in Mississauga again, he taught golf lessons at a number of driving ranges out this way.
Jim Brayley, who played some high school football at Port Credit despite the fact he was so scrawny that, “they couldn’t use me on windy days” remembers the awe that Cunningham inspired with his hard-nosed play on the gridiron.
“He was a hero of mine,” he said of Cunningham who played halfback on both offence and defence. “He was really fast and strong and he had big powerful feet. He could kick the ball a mile,” said Brayley, who became a doctor and delivered the very first baby ever born at Trillium Health Centre (then South Peel Hospital) May 22, 1958 at 6 a.m.
“He had a lot of talent and he was a great kicker,” agrees Bill Cunningham. “He could boot it 50-55 yards every time. I could never understand why, when he turned pro, they never used him as a kicker. He was a big, strong guy. He played the game hard but in a way that was always clean.”
In the 1990s, Cunningham had two hip replacement operations, suffered a pair of strokes and had to have a leg amputated above the knee when gangrene set in.
Although time eventually tackled him from behind, Bobby Cunningham will always remain to a lot of his old high school mates, the golden boy who gave nothing but his best to the game.
“He was a good fellow,” said his old friend Bill. “He was always gung-ho. He was a serious type of football player.”

The Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board still has a huge deficit, will not control its own finances for at least the next two years until it balances its budget and has five new faces on an 11-member board.
Hmmmmm. Do you think perhaps its selection of a chair next Tuesday night at its inaugural board meeting might be kind of important?
This will be a critical year for the elected officials of Dufferin-Peel, who already have a frayed relationship with new Education Minister Kathleen Wynne and must decide if they are going to wade into the tricky business of “co-management” with the provincial government. First, of course, they have to figure out what it is.
Rather than appoint a supervisor outright to sort out the board’s finances, Wynne made Norbert Hartmann the chair of a co-management team that is to include two other trustees.
It would seem to make sense that the two members of the co-management team would be the chair and vice-chair who are elected Tuesday, but nothing in this scenario seems to be logical.
In any event, there are three veteran candidates for chair.
Ward 9 Trustee Esther O’Toole, who was the only politician in Mississauga acclaimed in the Nov. 13 election, is once again making a bid to become the first-ever female chair of the board. She was bitterly disappointed last year when Peter Ferreira was elected, despite the fact he had been a trustee for only a few months, having been appointed to complete the term of the late trustee Art Steffler of Ward 6. Ferreira ran unsuccessfully for Ward 3 councillor this year.
Two other long-time Mississauga trustees, Mario Pascucci of Wards 1 and 3, a 23-year veteran and Bruno Iannicca, a 15-year trustee for Ward 7, are running as well.
The campaign for chair is always an odd one, since it takes place mostly around the water cooler and in private telephone conversations. There isn’t usually a lot of hard sell required since everybody knows each other.
Whoever wins will be in uncharted waters, said Iannicca.
“We’ll see what the new year brings. No matter who wins, there’s never any hard feelings,” said the 48-year-old Iannicca who’s making his first-ever run for chair. “Whoever wins will be a good person.”