Random Access

Are Mississaugans suffering from ballot fatigue?
With the near-certainty of another federal election this year (1), a provincial election coming up Oct. 4 (2), the nomination battles that will precede both of those contests (3) and the recently-completed municipal election (4), it is understandable that the average voter is getting cross, or maybe cross-eyed, at the thought of more candidates darkening their doorways.
“It’s an issue, absolutely,” says Brad Butt, who seems like he’s been around Mississauga politics for a couple of generations but will only turn 40 during this Year of the Unwanted Election. “There’s a real malaise out there, a real discontent for a variety of reasons. The word ‘politician’ has gotten a worse reputation out there in the past few years.”
Butt is very aware of the cynical voter syndrome because he’s one of three people who want to represent the Conservative Party in the provincial riding of Mississauga South.
Also in the running is Port Credit resident Effie Triantafilopoulos, a lawyer with excellent credentials who has served as chief of staff to the federal ministers of Industry, and the Treasury Board. She was the CEO at Save the Children Canada until September. She still sits on that board, as well as the boards of the Canadian Manufacturers’ and Exporters’ Association and the Empire Club.
The third member of the impressive field is Zoran Churchin, 41, founder and owner of the property management firm known as Zoran Properties Inc. and the president of All Saints Serbian Orthodox Church in Mississauga for the past decade.
This is the first time that provincial boundaries for the Ontario election will coincide with the new federal boundaries, so all of the riding associations have been reorganized and are in varying states of readiness for the fight to come.
To confuse matters more, there’s also a full-scale fight for the federal Tory nomination in Mississauga South after Phil Green got fed up with the lose-two-times-and-you’re-out rule imposed by the Prime Minister’s Office and its chief enforcer Doug Finlay.
Frank Magazine recently charged that, “poor Phil has run into the same PMO firewall that greets the rest of the party’s rank and file.” Green declined to run again after the party refused him an exemption that was granted to what Frank calls “favoured two-time losers” and party insiders John Capobianco and Bob Dechert of Mississauga-Erindale.
There are at least four federal Tory candidates asking for support in the South – the riding that looks the most winnable for the party both provincially and federally. They are Tom Simpson who was first into the race, Raya Shadursky of Orchard Heights, Hugh Arrison of Mississauga-Oakridge, and Ward 2 Peel District School Board Trustee Don Stephens.
Incumbent Liberal Paul Szabo has already been renominated.
Since long-time MPP Margaret Marland only lost by 234 votes in the provincial election four years ago, there’s lots of interest in taking on first-time incumbent Tim Peterson provincially.
The Tories can only ask to call a nomination after they get 650 paid members. That’s uphill slogging, according to Butt, who has run twice for council (in Wards 1 and 7), once provincially in Mississauga East and once federally in Mississauga South. “It’s a lot tougher to sell memberships now than when I ran for the Canadian Alliance in 2000,” says Butt.
Ordinary voters can barely muster enough energy to pay attention when the real election comes along these days, let alone get involved in the nomination process.
You can explain until you’re blue in the face that nominations are critical to the quality of candidates we elect, but many voters are just too jaundiced and too disappointed with some of the dunces we’ve elected recently to even care anymore.
Call it boner fatigue.

Why do some problems, that look as if they should be fairly easy to solve, never seem to go away?
Take the ongoing shortage of judges and justices of the peace.
When Judge Casey Hill presided at the Davis Courthouse in Brampton December 4, he was supposed to announce his verdict in the case of former Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board Program Superintendent Bev Williams, who is charged with fraud related to HRDC grants.
It’s a high-profile case involving public figures, two different levels of government, allegations of kickbacks and phony invoices for phony jobs. Lots of juicy stuff.
Instead of delivering his verdict, however, Hill delivered a lecture, one that has been heard from the benches many times before, dating back to the old days of Peel County.
Even though the trial ended in April, Hill explained that he was not ready to render a decision. He put his ruling over until Feb. 19 because he simply has not had enough time to sit down and give it the reflection it needs before writing his decision. That’s because there are too many cases in Peel, regarded as the busiest jurisdiction in Ontario, and not enough judges.
It took more than six months to fill three vacancies on the bench, although there is no shortage of qualified candidates according to Hill (and numerous other observers.)
In the case of a shortage of Superior Court judges, it is the federal government that has been dithering over appointments. But we have exactly the same problem getting sufficient numbers of judges and justices of the peace appointed by the Ontario government.
That means constantly jammed traffic courts, deferrals of trials, delays, dismissals and loss of revenue for municipalities, and subsequently for Mr. and Mrs. Ratepayer. If everyone who got a traffic ticket ever decided to ask for a day in court, the whole system would quickly grind to a halt.
It doesn’t seem to matter what political stripe the government is, the problem of getting timely appointments within the justice system just persists and persists.
Every year at this time, Chief Justices of various courts give their little inaugural addresses. You can pretty well expect that this line will appear each year, “Unless the current vacancies on the bench are filled quickly, the court will be severely handicapped in maintaining access to justice for members of the public.”
Maybe we just need two new appointments to bring this whole matter into public focus. Mr. Justice Denied, meet Mr. Justice Delayed.

Boy, does Wajid Khan have a deal for Stephen Harper.
For sale: one used MP, in decent shape. Low mileage in government. Sun roof and a/c just installed for Mid-East trip. Can be easily certified using party manual. Brakes need work. Convertible.
Bonus: sale includes tickets to a Toronto Maple Leaf hockey game with colour commentary from the next seat by Gord Stellick.
Yes, here we a go-go again. Is two-time MP Wajid Khan going to stay a Liberal or jump to the Conservatives?
If he does jump, he’s not going to get a Cabinet post, at least not unless Harper is going to create a new portfolio for him. Harper announced his big shuffle this morning (To the strains of the theme song, That’ll Do Rona, Rona - Run, Run.) It was a No Khan Do for the MP from Mississauga-Streetsville.
With speculation rising again that his appointment as a special advisor to Harper was actually a co-op placement with the new government, Khan is fast running out of allies.
His Liberal caucus colleagues are obviously nonplussed by his offsides run for the Tories. From Harper’s point of view, it would be wonderful to have an incumbent running in all-red Mississauga but will Khan be a detriment on the hustings in what is likely to be a very close race?
How will the Tory faithful in the riding feel about working for a guy they vilified last time around as an outsider who had broken his promise in his first run for office to move to Mississauga?
At the all-candidates’ session for Mississauga-Streetsville sponsored by Rogers Television last January, one candidate uttered these immortal words: “I will never cross the floor, and that’s my word, and my word is gold.”
Sorry about the tease. It actually wasn’t Khan. It was Raminder Gill, the Tory candidate who was being asked about the fact that he became a provincial Tory MPP after running unsuccessfully for the federal Liberal nomination in Malton.
How about this scenario for the next federal election in Mississauga-Streetsville? Khan switches to the Tories, Gill runs for the Liberals and the public becomes so disenchanted with the process that the election is won by a used car salesman to be named later.

“What can we do with that idiot?” asks Tony Srnec before launching into a profanity-laced tirade against his MP, Wajid Khan. “I watched the TV and I almost kicked it,” he says in English that is broken, but not as broken as he thinks our political system is.
“Is that how it’s going to be in politics?” wonders the Streetsville resident, who pays $100,000 in business taxes and is still working hard at age 72, 41 years after coming to this country.
“Are they all liars, cheaters and hooligans? I came to Canada but I call it democratic stupidity. It is lying, lying, lying. I am so upset. Another crossing. This is nuts. How are we going to teach our grandchildren if there is no honesty?”
Good questions.
No good answers today.
Not after Wajid Khan did what was long suspected and scurried across the floor of the House of Commons.
Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion forced Khan’s hand, as even Prime Minister Stephen Harper made clear, in the press conference this morning where the MP appeared with new stripes on his back.
Dion undoubtedly feared that, not only did he have a potential spy in his midst but Khan could pull a Right Dishonourable David Emerson — win the seat for the Liberals and then, car dealer that he is, cash in his chips for a shiny new seat on the front benches across the way if the Tories won.
The people of Mississauga-Streetsville have a perfect right to feel the rage that Tony Srnec expresses today. People vote in good faith, weighing their options carefully and voting for people or policies they believe in. To have your MP cavalierly cash in those hopes for personal gain is a disheartening perversion of the democratic process.
So what happens now?
Ironically, the person who may benefit from Khan’s defection is someone who suffered at the hands of another high-profile crossing.
Given the short time frame and the possibility of a quick election, the Liberals may make an appointment for their nomination. There are lots of potential possibilities, such as Bob Rae or Gerard Kennedy. But how about Martha Hall Findlay, the Liberal leadership candidate who almost beat Belinda Stronach in Newmarket-Aurora in 2004 and then resigned as the Grit candidate when Stronach crossed the floor and subsequently took the seat?
Findlay has a couple of fans in two people who know a little bit about bitter nomination contests.
“It would be great to have a smart woman out here,” says former MP Carolyn Parrish and Ward 6 Councillor Carolyn Parrish. “She’s exciting. She’s dynamic and she’s intelligent.”
When Steve Mahoney got out of a meeting this morning, he had some phone messages from Ottawa, including one from a Liberal senator.
“What is it with the water in Mississauga that these MPs think they can do anything they want,” he said of the Khan defection.
He doesn’t answer hypothetical questions, so the new chair of the Workers’ Safety Insurance Board wouldn’t say if he’d be interested in a nomination or in an open race.
“I think there will be a nomination unless there’s a strong female candidate who wants to run out here,” said Mahoney.
The possibility of a Hall Findlay appointment intrigues the former councillor, MPP and MP. “That would be a great appointment here. Why not a quality person like her?”
If you are the Liberals, you have to love the optics. The double-crossing parachute Tory cast against the new parachute Grit, a wronged woman who, despite being victimized once in the same nefarious turncoat circumstances, did the right thing and stepped down for the good of her party.
Talk about your marquee match for floor-crossing fetishists.
No matter who the Liberal candidate in Mississauga-Streetsville is, the federal election here just got a whole lot more intriguing.

“Walkin’ the floor over you,
I Khan’t find an MP that is true
He’s switchin’ and crossin’
As our hearts break right in two,
Walkin’ the floor over you.”

There is something about party floor-crossing that brings out the floor-pacer, if not the beast, in all of us: the core betrayal that it epitomizes.
You don’t have to live in his riding or have voted for Wajid Khan to be angry about his decision to switch parties in the midst of a term.
It may well be, as Khan told our Managing Editor Steve Pecar in an exclusive interview Friday, that his decision to join the government benches was motivated by love of country, and was an act of patriotism over partisanship.
Patriotism trumps a lot of things but it still doesn’t trump the democratic process.
If you believe strongly that the new Conservative government has the right approach on the Middle East and Afghanistan, or foreign policy in general, that’s fine: Resign your seat, declare yourself a Tory and put your political future where your principles are.
Many people in Mississauga-Streetsville voted for Khan not out of love for him or his party, but because of their deep concerns about the approach of the Conservative Party of Canada on numerous issues. Imagine their horror at finding out, in retrospect, that their vote for Wajid Khan was a vote for Stephen Harper.
Khan is not the first to cross the floor, but he should be the last to do so without severe political consequences.
The Manitoba NDP became the first jurisdiction in Canada to propose legislation to deal with the problem last April when it moved to amend its Election Act so that there will be a price to pay for the David Emersons, Belinda Stronachs, Scott Brisons and Wajid Khans of this world.
Anyone who crosses the floor would either have to sit as an independent until the next election or resign and run in a by-election for their new party. Seems a sensible idea.
The federal NDP has tried the same gambit a couple of times, without success. Their last effort was an amendment to the Tories’ Public Accountability Act that would have automatically have forced a by-election.
When it comes to minority governments and survival, it’s all about the headcount ability and not much more.
When politicians cross the floor, it dishonours the entire process, no matter which parties and governments are involved. The guys in government today, who howled about the shame of it when they were in opposition, will shrug their shoulders and welcome a new member to caucus.
The spate of floor-crossings is symptomatic of a much bigger problem in Canadian politics: the continuing blurring of the ideological lines between the parties and the supremacy of political perception over political policy.
Maybe one of the reasons that turnouts for federal elections keep dropping is that voters are having a tough time discerning any significant differences between the parties. Figuring out what you’re really voting for is tough enough, without having to wonder if the guy you elected is going to turn out to be a poster boy, literally, for what you voted against.

The speculation has already begun about whether Wajid Khan can win the next election in Mississauga-Streetsville.
Today in the Globe and Mail, columnist Jeffrey Simpson’s verdict is a strong no. “It is extremely unlikely Mr. Khan can win his seat as a Conservative, given the strong Liberal preferences of the area.”
Former MP Carolyn Parrish doesn’t think so either. “I think he’s thrown his electoral chances away,” says the newly-minted Ward 6 Councillor. “A lot of Tories will either stay home or go Green.”
Because he was a parachute from Forest Hill in the first place, who still doesn’t live in Mississauga, Parrish says Khan won’t reap any of the benefits that usually accrue to a local incumbent, which conventional wisdom says amounts to a maximum of 5-10 per cent of the vote and grows slightly the longer you are in office.
Nina Tangri says there are understandably mixed feelings about Khan in Tory ranks. Starting with her, of course, since she was the Conservative candidate who lost to the car dealer when he won his first term in 2004. Tangri sits on the federal executive that will decide tomorrow night how to proceed from here. It’s not too often that the group deliberates how it should deal with a nominated Liberal candidate who just landed in their laps with Stephen Harper’s lipstick all over his forehead.
“My own feeling is that he never felt comfortable in the Liberal Party after the Prime Minister (Paul Martin)” left said Tangri, the local insurance company co-owner, who is running herself for the provincial nomination in the same riding. Her only declared opponent so far for the provincial run is Dr. Carlan Stants.
The winner will face Bob Delaney, who beat Tangri in Mississauga West last time around.
The three-time local candidate doesn’t minimize the disgust that Khan’s action has provoked in many quarters nor the collateral damage that it causes to everyone in politics.
But all of the aforesaid doesn’t mean he can’t win the next election, argues Tangri, citing the re-elections of Keith Martin, Scott Brison and Belinda Stronach under similar circumstances.
As crossing the floor threatens to become a regular reality show, it is clearly no longer the kiss of death it once was.
The homogenization of politics has minimized, unfortunately, the importance of the local candidate. So much depends on the national campaigns and so much depends on the performance of the leaders in those campaigns that everything else pales in comparison.
Besides, Khan may not even be the Conservative candidate. There will be a nomination and if there are truly disgruntled members in Mississauga-Streetsville, that is the time to truly exact their pound of flesh. Tangri says a couple of people had previously shown interest. One of them is almost certainly Peter McCallion, who has dallied with the idea a couple of times before.
As for the Liberals, former Markham councillor Khalid Usman, who lost a bid to become a regional councillor in November, is interested in parachuting into town. He tried for the Mississauga-Erindale post that Parrish left in 2006 and was widely fingered as the man on the stage who made the infamous remark about Omar Alghabra’s nomination win being a victory for Islam.
Bob Rae, who seriously considered Mississauga-Erindale last time around, hasn’t made a decision and told News freelancer Owen Jarus via e-mail yesterday that it will be a while yet. Other potential Grit candidates include Masood Khan (making it a potentially confusing Khan-Khan dance), local dentist Dr. Farid Ayad and perhaps even Charles Sousa, the banker who is active in the Portuguese community. He failed to unseat Liberal incumbent Paul Szabo last time around but has a nice profile for Mississauga-Streetsville.
Steve Mahoney seems content to chair the WSIB and wait for the 20-year-old rumours of Hazel’s retirement to finally come true — maybe.

In finding teacher Joanne Saundercook-Menard guilty of accepting a $30,000 bribe in a Brampton courtroom last Friday as part of the HRDC scandal, Madame Justice Bonnie Wein made some very telling comments.
She concluded that Saundercook-Menard was a highly-regarded teacher who was well-thought of by her supervisors and peers and was considered absolutely honest and above board.
“Nonetheless,” said the judge, “I find that she was knowingly drawn into the culture of dishonesty that had developed at the (Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School) Board.”
Now isn’t that a sentence to stop you dead in your tracks?
A culture of dishonesty is not exactly what you would choose as your vision statement, is it?
Three of the four people employed by Dufferin-Peel and charged with taking part in schemes where they profited from HRDC grants have now entered guilty please or been found guilty. The most senior of them, former Program Superintendent Bev Williams, who was fired by the board at the start of this process, awaits a verdict Feb. 19. on charges of fraud amounting to some $190,000.
In August, Joan Rowe, a former project manager at the HRDC office in Mississauga was sentenced to 28 months in prison after a guilty plea to charges she defrauded the federal government and accepted secret commissions. She was ordered to pay back nearly $500,000.
As for a culture of dishonesty, new Dufferin-Peel Chair Bruno Iannicca is having none of it. “I don’t believe it is a cultural issue,” he said today. “It’s not a program department problem, it was just a few bad apples. We have a lot of hard-working honest employees and you can’t paint everyone with the same brush.”
Perhaps so, but there has still been some disturbing testimony so far that seems to indicate due diligence was not exactly a byword at the board.
Williams testified that being paid for extra work outside her salary was common practice at the board and throughout the province. There were no policies prohibiting employees being paid through individual companies they set up, she said.
That testimony was contradicted by Director of Education Michael Bator, who testified that he was unaware that Williams was being paid separately for her HRDC project work. In fact, Bator was among a group of senior administrators who went to Scotland as part of the grant training project. He later repaid the money to pay for his and his wife’s portion of the trip.
Iannicca says the board has taken numerous steps to close the barn door since the problems surfaced. “We’ve tightened up the process of signing authority. Invoices are no longer paid without the required detail of the expenses they cover. We have adopted an employee code of conduct and we don’t do business with any employee-owned companies.
“We did have rules but a certain group decided not to follow the rules,” Iannicca said. He pointed out that it was a forensic audit by the Board that led to Williams’ firing and then the police investigation, which is still continuing.
The judge’s comment about a culture of dishonesty is just one person’s opinion, the Ward 7 trustee points out.
Yes, it is a single person’s opinion. However, it is the considered opinion of someone in a position of authority, delivered after careful review of days of sworn testimony.
Whether the board chooses to acknowledge it or not, Madame Justice Wein’s offhand comment about the culture at the board will continue to reverberate long after everyone has forgotten all the details of all of these cases.

Dave Taylor is sitting in the McEwan Field Station talking about the weird winter weather and its effects on the bird population at Riverwood, the garden park in waiting that provides 150-acres of much needed public green space in the heart of our city.
He has no sooner referred to “our resident red-tailed hawk” when believe it or not, the Mississauga raptor hoves over the horizon and is clearly visible outside the window. Then hawk is checking out the bird feeders that surround the field station, which serves as a living laboratory for hundreds of students who can get a taste of the wild in Mississauga without attending a junior hockey game.
Today Taylor and teacher Rita Schulze launched the Riverwood Bird Feeding TREK (Teaching Responsible Environmental Kinship.)
Among the attendees at the launch, besides the red tail, was a resident Cooper’s Hawk, several cardinals, a few northern juncos, and a clutch of chiding, chattering chickadees who were, of course, the main hope for the handful of home-schooled students who were the first participants in the Bird Feeding TREK.
They wanted oh-so-badly to have a bird feed out of their hands and, although there were a few close calls, it didn’t happen for the students. Schulze was, however, able to use a cocktail of kiwi slices dumped in a sticky substance garnished with sunflower seeds to lure the chickadees to feed.
Back in November, the former public school teacher was leading a group of students along the trails that constitute the real classroom at Riverwood when the Cooper’s Hawk could be seen chasing a Great Horned Owl. The owl eventually lit in a tree and was nicely silhouetted against the sky. It was one of those ideal teaching moments that outdoor educators dream about.
The bird feeding program isn’t just for students. About a dozen volunteers take the seed provided by the corporate sponsor, Scott’s Canada of Mississauga, and spread it on feeders that are set up along the trek, most of which are stumps in the woods that have been left for that purpose.
Taylor says the strange weather doesn’t exactly provide ideal bird feeding conditions. It’s a lot easier to bring the birds in when there’s snow cover and they don’t have multiple alternative sources of food.
January and February are slow months for outdoor education centres, because of cold weather. Without snow for sking programs, it’s even slower.
The bird program should attract more customers in this traditional down (pardon the pun) time.
The students will actually assist in academic research. The birds they see will be entered into the phenology (effect of climate on animal, plant and bird life) data base at Riverwood to be available as a living record of the changes that are taking place there. UTM students are already studying such diverse issues as the white-tailed deer population, the red maples, the impact on wildlife of the bird-feeding program and even the attitudinal changes in students who are exposed to the outdoor education program.
With the school boards struggling to stay in the outdoor ed. game because of funding problems, the Riverwood program is a beacon of light. How ironic it is that outdoor education programs seem to be dying in inverse proportion to the rise in concerns about global warming.
One of the parents attending today was Monica Spee who is home-schooling her seven-year-old son Alexander. They’ve been to Riverwood four times already with a group of home schoolers. “We’ve taken up camping and travelling more, going up to Sudbury and Grundy Lake (Provincial Park) and we come up here for the occasional walk,” she said. “We time our trips to when the birds migrate.”
Those are words to gladden the heart of any environmental teacher.

Emblazoned on the canvas bags that they hand out as promotional items, EcoSource Mississauga has printed the following message: “The truth about our plastic bag addiction is that society consumes well over 500,000,000,000 (that’s 500 billion!) plastic bags annually, or almost 1 million per minute.”
When the archeologists dig up the remains of our generation, we will be surely be known as the Age of Plastic since so much of our refuse won’t decompose because of the durability of the material. The Age of Reason, you’ll note, is long passed.
The Toronto press today is full of the story of how a City councillor there has declared war on plastic bags. Their bags go to the dump, unlike in Mississauga where film plastic is at least collected in the blue box while Peel Region tries to find a market for it.
There are signs of hope that our addiction to those deceptively flimsy plastic bags, which can persist up to 1,000 years, is waning. Grocery stores finally seem to be getting the idea that they should be encouraging people to use alternatives. My local Longo’s had a promotion last Earth Day to sell their large, sturdy bags for 99 cents each.
Lee Ann Mallett, executive director of EcoSource, says people forget that the first R in the 3Rs is Reduce, and the last is Recycle, not the other way around. It’s a lot better to use a canvas bag to carry your groceries home than to put a plastic bag in the blue box, where we as a society pay for its collection, processing and the energy used to make it into a new product — if a market can be found.
Getting the grocery chains on side is critical to changing behaviour because when people are in the checkout line, they use what’s available. It is a good thing that some stores give you a few cents of credit for bringing your own bags. It is a better thing that stores are starting to charge people for plastic, although Mallett says, “it would be a lot better if they charged the real cost.”
If people realized the negative impact that plastic has on our wildlife, oceans and watercourses, they would be much more likely to pick up a canvas bag. Plastic washes into catch basins and blocks drainage, greatly increasing flooding and damage in heavy storms.
About a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals (including 30,000 seals) and turtles are killed by plastic marine litter every year, around the world.
Plastic blows out of landfills and finds its way hundreds and thousands of miles to lakes and oceans.
More than 140 marine species become entangled in debris and even more are likely to eat it.
“All you have to do is see your pet at home play with a bag and see how they get caught in the handles to understand what can happen,” says Mallett. “Yet people forget about that.”
Some jurisdictions are moving to plastic bag taxes as a deterrent. Big Plastic is fighting back.
We can all fight back in this case, simply by employing reuseable bags. Yes, you have to launder them every once in a while. And you will find yourselves packing grocery bags yourselves, because store clerks seem to automatically think that you should supply the labour if you supply the bag. Those are tiny drawbacks in the big picture, however.
If you want to see how staggeringly big the problem really is, visit http://www.reusablebags.com/ and check out the running plastic bag use counter on the
front page.

It’s amazing how quickly the winter instincts come back.
Like the instinct to roll over and go back to sleep when the clock radio tells you that the snow predicted overnight has turned to freezing rain.
Yes, today was the City’s first designated Global Warming Repudiation Day of 2007.
Real ice pellets. Real snow. Real mess getting to work.
Since my house came equipped with a skate-board ramp camouflaged as a driveway (the kids in the neighbourhood have tried it out more than once), any speck of snow is a problem, or rather a challenge, as the motivational speakers might say.
If you do not clear the snow quickly from our driveway, you will either have to park on the street when you return and shovel the driveway, or you will have to take several runs to try to get up it. When you don’t make it, you face the ignominious prospect of sliding back down the driveway.
Which is why the first thing we do of a winter morning is to peek out tentatively through the California (!) shutters to see just how incorrect the weather information of the previous evening has been.
Fortunately when we are leaving for work on a day such as today, when it proved impossible to scrape all of the frozen stuff right down to the pavement, gravity is our friend. More than once, we have slid down the driveway to the street.
On this first storm day in the Year without Winter, the most dangerous of the weather elements proved to be the mirage — the mirage that other drivers will remember how to navigate in the snow.
There seem to be only two kinds of winter drivers in Canada. The first is snow blind. They cannot see that snow has fallen and, therefore, they drive as if it were a balmy August and they were barrelling down the highway with the top down.
The second kind is paralyzed. They must be watching each snow flake fall to the ground and trying to note the differences in shape, because they barely crawl along, trying to avoid disaster by not moving at all.
As we return to the ritual of the removal of snow, it’s good to have a theme song going in your head while you clear the driveway. I’m particularly partial to recalling Harry Belafonte singing something calypso and sunny such as Day-O or Island in the Sun.
Or how about his rework of the wonderful song from the stage show The Fantastics called Try to Remember:
“Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,
The fire of September that made us mellow.
Deep in December, our hearts should remember
And shovel. Shovel. Shovel.”

He was a young man a long way from home, fighting leukemia in the cancer ward at Princess Margaret Hospital, and he badly wanted to watch an important hockey game.
But his credit card was maxed out, so the plug got pulled on the television set he was renting. The young man from Timmins could watch the game in the public area, if he could find the strength to get there.
It was an experience that left a very bad taste in the mouth of huge sports fan James Dinneen, who lay in the next bed to the resident from northern Ontario, who died five months later.
Dinneen mentioned it to his father Jim and his mother Janet as they brought him his lunch and supper each day from Mississauga (James refused on principle to eat hospital food.) He mentioned it to his brothers from Sigma Nu, the University of Toronto fraternity he joined when he moved downtown to live on campus after one year at UTM.
James had been a strapping specimen of a young man until he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia Dec. 9, 2002. In the next 11 months, he would spend 222 days in the hospital, fighting for his life and for the rights of himself and his fellow patients.
Dinneen’s friends made sure he had a computer to entertain himself by tapping into the hospital phone lines but the 31-year-old was bothered that others, who weren’t lucky enough to be wrapped in a loving circle of family and friends, suffered endless boredom along with the burden of their fatal disease.
Now his parents and his younger sister Jacquelyn, a physical education teacher at Shelter Bay Public School, are launching a charity to help other patients in the same situation as the young man in the bed next to James.
CHIP (Communities Helping Individual Patients) has been in the works since a few months after James died Oct. 28, 2003. “Chip” was the nickname he adopted when he was a counsellor at CampTotoredaca in Meadowvale as a teen.
His father Jim explains that the first chapter of the program will start at Credit Valley Hospital, where those who can’t afford long-distance phone calls or the cost of a TV can get assistance. Eventually, the program could include laptops.
His parents say their son’s frat buddies, who were a tower of strength during his illness, have come through again to make their dream a reality. Javier Vargas, Edward Lounsbury and Jean-Pierre Laporte, among others, have provided great assistance. Laporte, a lawyer, suggested the program be set up as a registered charity and he did all the legal work gratis.
Laporte says his friend showed unbelievable courage in the face of death. A month before he died, James organized a charity roller hockey tournament from his bed that raised $10,000.
When he saw him two days before he died, Laporte says James was as cheerful as ever. One hand was swollen so badly that he couldn’t raise it but as Laporte left, James waved his good hand and said casually, “Talk to you later, eh?”
The launch of CHIP takes place Saturday Feb. 3 at Hollywood on The Queensway in Etobicoke where the owner, a former partner in P.K. Creek in Cooksville, has donated the space and the food. There will be door prizes, a presentation by Jacquelyn on CHIP, a silent auction, music and most, importantly, says James’ Dad, a great party. James always loved a good party. Tickets are $50.
All the information about CHIP is available at www.chipcharity.com.
Asked what a difference a program like this could have meant had it been in place for his son, Jim Dinneen doesn’t hesitate. “It would have meant so much to him just to have a web cam so he could have been able to say goodnight to his kids (Ryland now 8 and sister Tristan, now 5. ). That would have made a world of difference.”

April 1 is not a Fool’s Day this year.
It’s a day a lot of people who care about our planet have been waiting a long time to celebrate.
It’s the day that Peel Region launches its long-awaited curbside organics collection program across Mississauga.
If you are one of the growing legion of green nerds who think we are way behind the curve in changing our wasteful (you should pardon the expression) garbage ways, this is a significant development.
It seems that Peel has been talking about a wet organic waste collection since Mel Lastman was still a pup in North York.
It seems as if we have squandered our opportunity as other cities have pressed ahead. Even Toronto somehow got ahead of us on this one since they have the green bin program already. We are one of the last major cities to jump on the wet compost wagon.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, says Lee Ann Mallett, executive director of EcoSource, the local environmental education group that has been carefully watching things evolve since Peel and Mississauga were one of the first to join the blue box brigade in the 1970s.
“Actually Peel has been very progressive in the way it has approached the organics issue,” she says. “It will be developing food quality compost, so it decided to create a whole new facility to process it. We’re really excited about finally getting the organics program but we do want to do it right,” she said.
So there will be rules, as there always are.
Starting in mid-February, homeowners will begin to get the Norseman green bin, (the same model used in Toronto) and an accompanying small kitchen bin delivered to their homes. You will use that to dispose of that old deli meat you never quite got to, the mouldy cheese, the stale muffins, yesterday’s yogurt etc. You can also add paper towels, greasy pizza boxes, shredded paper, pet fur, facial tissue, human hair and those lemon and orange peels that you weren’t sure should go into your backyard compost. No animal waste or diapers as some programs allow though.
Peel residents will use paper bags or compostable plastic bags that will soon appear on grocery store shelves for their wet organics. Andrew Pollock explains that Peel uses a different process than Toronto. They make their wet organics wetter by adding water that makes the plastic float to the top, where it is skimmed off. In Peel the wet stuff will be processed at the $35 million Material Recycling Facility on Torbram Rd. and then shipped to a curing pad near Dixie Rd. and the King sideroad in Caledon.
The resulting compost will be sold to wholesalers so you can buy it back, without knowing it, at local garden centres.
When fully rolled out, the organics should increase Peel’s diversion rate from landfill sites for its curbside programs from by about 10 per cent to 55 per cent. The goal is to hit 70 per cent by 2016.
There’s a catch, of course. Since the amount of waste in the regular garbage stream will fall, Peel residents will only be able to put out two garbage bags of waste a week starting next October, instead of three.
Although no one has yet broached the subject, the next logical step is to consider what Toronto has — garbage collection once every two weeks instead of every week. But one step at a time.
Let’s just be thankful that we will soon have a new garbage stream, appropriately wet of course, to keep our waste out of the earth, the streams and the air.
Hmmm. April 1 isn’t that far away. Time to start hoarding your hair clippings.

Under the general heading of Inmates Running the Institution, how about the news this morning that there may be a ban on homework and classroom presentations imposed at the Toronto District School Board in the three to five days before exams begin.
You won’t be too shocked to learn that the proposal came from a student trustee. But the notion somehow got enough consideration to be recommended by the board’s program committee. Now input will be gathered before it goes on for consideration by the full board.
Wild guess: students will be overwhelmingly in favour; teachers will be strongly opposed; parents will be scratching their heads...again.
Whatever happened to letting professionals do their jobs? Do we have to mandate everything for everybody all the time?
The argument in favour of a work ban says that students are so busy studying right before exams that is unfair to ask them to complete major assignments.
Ted Kuhn, the student trustee who proposed the assignment holiday says that, “high school has become so stressful, that to have a major test or presentation (on) the days before an exam won’t help your exam performance or your love of learning.”
What it might well do is simulate conditions that Kuhn and his generation will face regularly in the work world after they graduate. Why wait to experience the pain?
While we all remember the stress of having teachers give deadlines for assignments within the same few days (don’t they ever co-ordinate?), this is one of those things you can generally file under “fact of life.”
We keep hearing complaints about the crowded curriculum and the difficulty teachers have in covering all of the material assigned in the time allotted.
Universities must provide remedial courses and seminars to teach material that was supposed to be covered in high school, but got missed in the continual curriculum squeeze.
If students really want some perspective on student stress, we could always arrange some student exchanges to Japan.
One Toronto school has already tried the moratorium for a while but dropped it this year. The reason? Students were skipping school in that last week to study.
If by any chance this whole homework avoidance strategy ruse works, we working stiffs should consider adapting it to our own needs.
We can demand that our employers provide no new assignments in the last two weeks of April, when we are burdened with the psychological trauma of trying to file our income tax forms.
We can demand that no presentations be required in the week before we go on vacation, lest the resulting stress spoil our pending state of serenity. Not to mention the dangers of post-holiday stress syndrome.
Strike up a program committee, run it by your student trustee and send it to your board. Then run like hell.

Ross MacIntyre


Robi Botos opened his three-song set last night with a stirring version of There Is No Greater Love.
It was prescient on several levels. There is no greater love, or respect, than Botos (pronounced Botosh) has personally for any other pianist, living or dead, than he has for Oscar Peterson. That’s why he wanted so much to be part of the tribute concert.
It was evident from the disappointed reaction of the audience at Oscar Peterson Public School when it was finally confirmed for certain that Peterson was too ill to attend, that they hold him in the highest esteem as well.
And if any further proof were necessary, you could just refer to the remarkable souvenir program produced for the event, where students paid tribute to their school mentor.
“Oscar Peterson music makes me feel alive, awake and energized,” wrote Mitchell Clark in one of the series of student comments. “It makes me feel like I want to fly higher than the birds, like a plane.”
Now that kid knows his music.
Botos was hoping, naturally, that the man whose jazz playing he has admired since he was a child in Hungary would be there to listen. He especially wanted to play a song he has written in the Peterson style called Things Are Gonna Change.
Before the concert, the 28-year-old was visibly excited at the prospect of playing for the legend.
“Since I was a child I have been listening to Oscar Peterson,” said the Toronto resident, whose father was a musician. “He was one of the early influences on my music. He is the most brilliant jazz pianist ever and this is an unexplainable honour.”
Botos and brother Frank on drums and Attila Darvas on bass (in the same format as the classic Peterson-Ed Thigpen-Ray Brown trio), took us wandering through a woodlot on Autumn Leaves (you could almost feel the crunch beneath your feet) and finished up with the bluesy Billie’s Bounce, one of OP’s favourites.
Robi, who won the solo piano competition at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2004 and then opened for Peterson a year later in one of his career highlights, looked distracted after the concert. He was explaining why, “no one swings better than Oscar” when he suddenly stopped and started listening. “Man, they shouldn’t be doing that,” he said. Through the PA system, the old OP trio was playing and Botos was shaking his head in amazement and admiration.
The school staged another remarkable concert, like the gala last year where Peterson played himself.
Shannon Butcher, who once again opened with her trio, really liked the multicultural twist of this year’s program which featured Jonno Lightstone on clarinet and Jordan Klapman of the Klezmer Swingtet, Tasa featuring Ravi Naimpally on tablas and the irrepressible Heather Bambrick.
Bambrick managed to work a thank you to the school’s Grade 1s, who had led everyone earlier in the Chugga-Chugga song, by adding a line to the Irving Berlin classic. At Peterson Public School, it seems, they dance the Chugga Chugga Cheek to Cheek.
You’d think at an arts public school in Mississauga, someone would have mentioned all the alumnae of the Cawthra Park program who participated. They included Butcher, who was in fine voice (her CD is still in the works), drummer Dave MacDougall and Ross MacIntyre on bass. McIntyre, who contributed a lovely lush solo on East of the Sun, is a former Tecumseh Public School student who benefited greatly from the advice of another Mississaugan, Pat Collins, with whom he studied while in Grade 9 at Cawthra.
MacIntyre also has a faint Peterson connection.
He once had a lesson with the amazing Ray Brown. Is he a big fan? “Everybody is a big fan of Ray Brown,” he says.
And, it should be said, of his leader as well. Even if he’s not there in person to accept the accolades.

It doesn’t seem right but here it is, our first Monday Monday without Denny Doherty. A new reason not to trust that day.
He and Mama Cass Elliot always seemed like the soul of the Mamas and Papas, even though John Phillips was obviously the (drug-crazed) creative force. The group had an instantly recognizable sound: light, breezy, cheerful and uplifting.
And those harmonies. It was a memorably communal croon, which left an impression much like that of another California group, the Beach Boys. Listeners were transported to a world of late night parties followed by long afternoons spent lolling on the beach exploring the summer side of life.
If you ever get a chance to see the documentary that Bravo Canada keeps showing periodically on the The Mamas and Papas, check it out. Denny waxes eloquent about the early days and it is obvious that he can still hardly believe that they really happened.
He relates how one night, while he tried for the umpteenth time to convince John that the folk music craze was over and the British invasion had changed everything, Phillips announced that they needed a vacation. He ordered his wife Michelle to close her eyes, walk to a wall map and pick a spot.
Which is how they ended up in the Virgin Islands where they quickly blew nine grand in cash, mostly on acid, while trying to figure out their sound. Denny kept trying to convince John to have Cass join the group but Phillips resisted for a long time. As the money ran out, they started performing in a converted bar where Cass worked as a waitress. She tried to change John’s mind by singing harmonies while she wiped tables.
They maxed out their credit card, got kicked off the island and sold everything they could to get to New York. There John and Michelle were forced to walk back from someplace in a snowstorm and, in the freezing cold, stopped into a church along the way to warm up. I think you know what happened next.
They lighted out for California where, as Denny recounts on his web site, www.dennydoherty.com, the group was really born. It happened one day when Cass was doing the ironing while the other three rehearsed. She decided to join in at the top of her lungs.
“Suddenly there’s real power,” says Denny as he recalled the story for his stage production, Dream a Little Dream. “We have to sing harder to keep up with her. And that’s when Harvey showed up. No, not the big invisible rabbit. Harvey was an overtone - a fifth voice that was created when the four of us sang together and it all worked! It wasn’t folk music anymore, man. At long last it was really and truly rock and roll!”
By the time Doherty moved to Mississauga a couple of decades ago, he was long past looking for the limelight. He lived quietly, first on Lewisham Dr. in Park Royal, then in Lorne Park, doing some periodic stage work, and then the highly successful CBC children’s show Theodore Tugboat, where he made an impression on a new generation.
There was never any pretence about him and reporters for The News who interviewed him over the years inevitably found him eminently down-to-earth and approachable.
Anybody who would name a group The Mugwumps and have his phone number listed in local telephone book isn’t your celebrity ego tripper. Cass, Zal Yanovsky and John Sebastien who would later hit with the Lovin’ Spoonful, drummer Art Stokes and James Hendricks were all in the Mugwumps at various times.
Doherty got the name for the group from his Newfoundland grandmother. On the Rock it refers to a creature that is mug on one side and a wump on the opposite. In other words, it was neither fish nor fowl. The Mugwumps did some folk and some rock and a few things in between.
The Mugwumps may not have known who they were, but Papa Denny always seemed to have a pretty good idea of who he was and what the Mamas and Papas were.
Interesting, isn’t it, that despite his numerous successes, Doherty ended up not as an LA beach boy in the promised land but as a mensch from Mississauga.
That’s a place where the leaves turn brown, the sky turns grey and, if you take a walk on a winter’s day, you can still indulge in some warm-weather dreamin’.
Those Mugwumps always have to have it both ways.

The idea of the Lenten or Christmas rose, botanically known as a helleborus (insert your own snide reference here to possible derivation of the name from political debate) has always appealed.
How many flowers have the potential to bloom in the winter around here? Of course with the strange pseudo-winter we have had, there was a possibility for a while there that the whole garden could be over this spring by May 24.
Be that as it may, the helleborus is supposed to be one of our earliest plants, with little buds noramlly sticking their heads up through the snow, with the snow drops in late April or early May.
When I bought a set of three expensive hellebores by mail order from a garden centre some distance away a few years ago, they promptly died.
This was undoubtedly due to operator error, as most of my garden blunders are. I planted in fall, which is good for bulbs but not so good for plants that need to establish roots. And I bought from a mail order house which raised plants in a different climate.
Live and spend again.
So I bought three new plants from the ever-reliable Humber Nurseries in Brampton, planted them in the spring, and they have done very nicely in my so-called woodland garden outside the front door of our house. One of the plants, a nice dark red-purple, has bloomed each year and gets bigger and bigger.
The second, which supposedly has blooms of three different colours (am always leery of such apparent miracles) is doing very well but only has sporadic blooms of a single colour.
The third is the heartbreaker. Every fall it puts out small pink and whitish blooms, far too early, it would seem. They droop through the winter, usually underneath the snow, and then.... droop in the spring. One or two try to lift their heads but soon find it too much effort and fade away.
This last fall, there was a particularly large crop of buds and they were bigger. A couple of weeks ago I come home to find — Ta...Da – there is one beautiful big bloom almost fully open. A lovely alabaster with very, very yellow stamens.
The camera batteries were dead, so, alas, there is no photographic evidence.
The blooming hellebore is, of course, why real winter arrived that night. That’s when we had the big storm. The garden gods don’t ever want you to think you might get the upper hand.
The blooms were piled with snow for awhile. Now they are revealed once more, in all their former flaccid glory. They are quite likely defunct for this year.
But for one glorious fleeting moment, there was summer in January and it was grand.

Silken Laumann (left) and Kathy Harvey with Kathy’s painting called Dwelling Places.

Kathy Harvey always could light up a room.
She did it again yesterday when her family and her many, many friends gathered at St. Stephen’s-on-the-Hill United Church to celebrate her remarkable life.
They were there from Trillium Health Centre, where she lived most of the last three decades of her life and from the Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Society, where she served as both key fundraiser and as ideal role model. They were there from the broader health community and they were from the community circle of care that she helped create and maintain.
Harvey, best known to the public as the mouth-painter who made the distinctive Christmas cards that the MS used to raise funds annually, died at age 66 Friday.
“She truly was a remarkable woman,” said Nancy Milne, executive director of Mississauga’s MS Society and an instant friend of Kathy’s since they first met more than 17 years ago. Virtually everyone she met was soon a great friend because of her open and giving personality.
“She had the ability not to give in to her disease,” says Milne. “You could always see the ability within her disability. Everybody had a unique relationship with her. She accomplished so much given her situation. She was so seriously disabled but you never saw that, you never really even saw the wheelchair. You could always see the person. You could always see Kathy.”
Reverend Deanna Wilson called it, “her sparkle, her light heart, her capacity to love and be loved. She used those gifts for the MS Society, the other hospital patients, for everyone who came through her door.”
But don’t be deceived. There was a steely determination to the Dartmouth native who grew up in Winnipeg, where she became a nurse. She was a natural-born leader in a wheelchair who got things done. She immeasurably improved the life of terminal patients who live out their lives at Trillium by forming a committee to represent their interests and then serving outside the hospital on the Halton-Peel District Health Council and the Community Care Access Centre of Peel.
Her friend Jane Underwood told the memorial that Kathy had a born flair for problem-solving and a wide network of friends whom she could call on when reinforcements were needed to solve a problem.
“She was determined not to die until she got to know her grandchildren,” said Underwood in reference to Harvey’s ability to far exceed the best-before date that the doctors had given her.
One of the many people who came to remember Kathy yesterday was Ron (he chose not to give his surname) who drove her around to various appointments in his accessible vehicle for 22 years. They instantly liked each other when they met.
“She was an angel,” he said.
Ron was there when Kathy accepted her 2002 Ontario Medal for Good Citizenship and she and Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman got into a animated discussion in the middle of the awards ceremony. “They talked and talked and talked. She just had this personality and she knew everybody.”
Kathy was also supportive of his personal goals. So much so that when he took her to a meeting with the vice-president of Ford Motor Company, the man came out to the van at the end to say, “no matter what you want to do, Ron, I’m behind you.”
Ron’s future wasn’t on the meeting agenda, of course, until Kathy got into the act. Now that’s a friend in deed.
Ron worked on Christmas this year for the first time and picked Kathy up to spend her last holiday with her family. She adored music and Ron opened the new James Taylor Christmas album he had received. They had themselves a very loud concert on their trip.
The memorial yesterday reflected Harvey’s deep love of music. She helped plan the service and had a tough time pruning her list of “Golden Oldie” hymns from the original 18 to three.
Her old friend and high school classmate from Winnipeg, composer and performer Victor Davies, who wrote the music for the opening and closing ceremonies at the 1999 Pan-American Games, played three of her favourite tunes beautifully on piano.
A medley of Billy Strayhorn’s Satin Doll, an excerpt from Davies’ score to a film called For The Moment and an uncompleted melody that Kathy loved, which is simply known as Kathy’s Song.
Kathy’s Song turned out to be full of gaiety – light and lovely — just like the lady.

You drive north some 800 kms. to Chapleau. Then you get up on a Sunday morning in -30 degree C. weather and you drive snowmobiles as far as you can into the bush. Then you showshoe, carrying 20 kilo (44 lb.) backpacks stuffed with gear, into the deeper bush.
Finally, you reach your destination. You can spot it by the small round air hole that’s encrusted in ice.
Now you’re ready. You squeeze yourself into a tiny opening, if you can, and drop down into a pitch-black hole.
And to what end do you devote all this effort? Why, the chance to wake up a very sleepy black bear sow, who has given birth in her sleep, and may not exactly be thrilled to have you drop in.
Not on the top of my things-to-do-before-I-die list, but right up there for naturalist, teacher, and writer Dave Taylor of Mississauga.
In his latest book, called Black Bears A Natural History, Taylor describes the culmination of that field trip to Chapleau - a charging mother bear who blows out of her den and has to be tranquilized half-way up a tree, with a hypodermic mounted on the end of a not-very-long plunge stick. It’s all in a day’s volunteer work for Dr. Martyn Obbard and the Ministry of Natural Resources but it was a true revelation to Taylor who wanted some colour for his book and got a little more than he bargained for.
The next day Taylor squeezed himself into another den and hauled out his own cub for tagging.
Black Bears A Natural History is a culmination of a lifetime of observation and nearly two decades of writing and photography by the 58-year-old, whose book is all the more remarkable when you realize that he is responsible for virtually everything in it, including graphs and computer-generated illustrations. The former Peel elementary teacher ran the Britannia farm field centre in its too-short existence, and has always maintained an alternative identity as a writer.
In his retirement from the school board, Taylor has taken on a new challenge of supervising the education program at Riverwood.
Tonight, he’ll combine his roles when he goes Into the Bear’s Den at the MacEwan Field Station at Riverwood in a talk and book signing, which starts at 7:30 p.m.
The Mississauga resident has written about 70 books, all of them about the natural world, and many of them for children and on-line education publishers.
Richard Dionne, managing editor of publishers Fitzhenry and Whiteside said it’s no coincidence that the new book is doing really well in Canada. The handsome 188-page soft cover is, “a reflection of Dave’s deep understanding and respect for
these often misunderstood animals and a determination to share his wisdom
about them with the rest of the country. It’s not simply a portrait of the black bear, but a highly personal account by a dedicated naturalist.
“The result is an in-depth yet accessible account that feels like it was written by a friend. And all of Dave’s extraordinary color photographs are taken in the wild -- we see the animals as they are, in their own habitat, without the romance that can often cloud our impressions. It’s a book only someone with years of experience and passion could have produced.”
This guy has written a few blurbs for dust jackets, hasn’t he?
In an interview, Taylor’s love for bears, whom he’s been observing and photographing since his teens, shines through.
The trip with MNR staff was, “an amazing experience,” he says. “It was a revelation to see the dedication of the staff and the absolute care they take with the animals.”
Ironically, the introduction of the bear hunt in Ontario may have been the best thing that ever happened to the animals, he says, because it has allowed the ministry to really start doing population research and radio-transmitter tracking. Much has been learned, including the unfortunate fact that male bears are responsible for much of the predation of the cubs and sows.
Black Bears A Natural History ($34.95, available at most bookstores) is a breezy, entertaining read that is comprehensive yet conversational, a tricky combination to master.
Looking at a photo of him carrying the baby bear from the Chapleau-area den, shading its unprotected eyes from the damaging rays of the sun, Taylor notes that only one of the three cubs lived until the next season.
He pauses for a moment and then says, “I like to believe that this cub is the one who survived.”

There were lots of words of praise yesterday about how good the care at the Carlo Fidani Cancer Centre is, as Health Minister George Smitherman visited Credit Valley Hospital to deliver a $5 million cheque,
You could dismiss many of them as the pronouncements of politicians looking at an Oct. 4 election date with the public, or administrators seeking applause for their own accomplishments.
But you could not dismiss the sincerity of CVH Chair Cheryl Englander when she stepped to the podium and talked about her own battle with cancer and the extraordinary treatment she got at the hospital.
As she sat at the opening of the cancer centre June 9, 2005, Englander was torn by conflicting emotions. “As (then) vice-chair of Credit Valley Hospital, I was bursting with pride and optimism,” Englander related yesterday at the celebration of the installation of a fourth linear accelerator for radiation treatment.
“As I sat there as Cheryl Englander, a resident of the community, I was overwhelmed and just a little bit frightened. You see, I had received a diagnosis of breast cancer just a few weeks earlier. I was recovering from one surgery, about to have another and knew that radiation and, perhaps, chemotherapy, lay ahead of me.”
Her family doctor works from Trillium Health Centre. He wanted her to go to Princess Margaret for treatment but Englander, naturally, wanted to use the brand new centre, 10 minutes from her home and a lot more welcoming in its design.
In an interview after yesterday’s celebration, Englander recalled how the CVH design team went out of its way to make the cancer centre a welcoming space, from the towering Douglas fir beams that suggest an indoor forest, to the plants and trees and fireplaces, and the radiation bunkers that don’t have any steel doors to clang shut, leaving patients to feel like they are alone and imprisoned by their disease.
“It sets a whole tone for your psyche about how optimistic you might feel,” says the 55-year-old.
Because the centre had just opened and so many personnel were brand new, Englander was able to move through the system anonymously. “I just wanted to go through it like everyone else does,” said Englander, who believes she was the second patient treated on linear accelerator No. 3.
“Because I’m on the board, I paid attention to how the staff interacted with patients. What I saw was that anyone going through this will get the same exceptional care that I did.”
In fact when she later toured the hospital as chair, many of her caregivers realized for the first time that she was on the board.
In her speech, Englander said that, “As I drove here every morning, five days a week for six weeks, I was very aware of the fact that my no-hassle trip here and the calm, healing atmosphere I encountered allowed me the strength and determination to go to work after my treatments.”
She added, “I guess you could say I got better care than I asked for.”
Englander, who was blessed with early detection, a state-of-the-art centre and caring and well-trained staff, laughs when it is suggested she has become a sort of poster adult for the hospital.
In her case, “world class health care right here,” has become substance, not just a fundraising campaign slogan.

There is something about attack ads that makes me automatically want to vote FOR the person being attacked.
No matter the party. No matter the issue.
The increasing prevalence of political advertising that forsakes the platform for the personal attack is extremely disheartening. It dumbs down the political discourse and leaves you feeling that the participants should hit the showers, like the ballplayers do, before they come out to give the press their post-debate spins.
Clichéd as it may be, we seem to be slowly moving towards more American-style advertising.
Fortunately, we still have a long way to lower ourselves to reach some of those depths, which border on outright character assassination. Listening to some of the 30-second spots on American radio in which a Democrat or a Republican is accused of everything short of hiding Osama bin Laden in the attic, you can hear the sound of the libel lawyers starting the meter running.
Our own federal, provincial and, most recently, municipal campaigns definitely have a nastier edge, as the fierce competition for the media spotlight convinces the competitors that they have to ramp up the rhetoric.
The federal election writ hasn’t been issued, yet the writ for dishing dirt apparently has been dropped. The Conservatives are out first with ads that put new Liberal leader Stéphane Dion on the defensive for the Liberals’ less-than-stellar performance on the environment while he sat at the Cabinet table.
The record of the Liberals on the environment and Dion’s contribution to said record is a perfectly legitimate target for criticism, but why does it have to be wrapped in a personal attack against the man?
Leave the lampooning of Dion’s bookish intellectualism and dalliance with separatism and Harper’s synthetic hair and goodbye handshakes with his children to The Rick Mercer Show, Royal Canadian Air Farce and This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
In comments this morning quoted in The Globe and Mail, pollster and TVO broadcaster Allan Gregg says attack ads feed, “the general cynicism... It’s probably smart politics. I don’t know if it’s good public policy.”
Attack advertising is, in fact, bad policy, because it splatters everyone in government and public life.
If politicians want some respect for their embattled vocation, they should stop slagging each other at every opportunity.
One of the reasons fewer people are turning out to vote every election could well be that they are increasingly turned off the entire process by the antics of the participants.
As the great Winston Churchill once said (and wouldn’t today’s advertising attack artists have drooled over his switches in party and his rumbling jowls?), “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

You can imagine how disappointed Sandy Millar was last week when, after eight months of desperately trying to find her beloved cat, she finally hooked up with an animal that looked like hers, but wasn’t.
Standing in an industrial area near Winston Churchill Blvd. and Dundas St. on a frigid day, a heavily-bundled Millar tried to lure the stray with little bits of kibble provided in the bowl that had belonged to her 10-year-old snowshoe Himalayan named Cappuccino (Cappy for short).
“This cat had a beige back and my cat had a white one,” Millar said in her Erin Mills home yesterday. “My cat had big beautiful blue eyes and this one had darker eyes. Cappy’s crowning glory was her big fluffy tail that she arched over her back. This cat had a short tail.”
Bitterly disappointed after all of her seemingly promising detective work had failed again, Millar nonetheless lured the growling cat closer and closer, eventually feeding it with her bare hand and then grabbing it by the nape of the neck. “It isn’t my cat,” she called out to the workers at Mirror Interiors across the road on Bristol Circle who were watching the procedure and had been feeding the cat. It apparently lived in open fields nearby that are pock-marked with a labyrinth of old underground coyote runs.
Hoping to find the owner, Millar took the animal to her vet, explaining that even though it wasn’t her Cappy, she hoped that it would have an identifying microchip under its skin.
A few minutes later, a reproachful attendant came out from the examining room and asked, “Are you Sandra Millar?” When she confirmed she was, she was told, “Then, that’s your cat.”
Now, Millar has a new chapter, with a happy ending, to write for her instructional book called 101 Ways To Catch a Lost Cat (which should be subtitled, How To Avoid All The Mistakes I Made) which will be published by Detselig Enterprises of Calgary in about a year.
One of the things the book will explain is that the colour of a cat’s fur, and even the colour of its eyes, can change when it has been in the wild and is in poor health.
Millar is a 64-year-old who taught art full-time in Mississauga schools for many years, now supply-teaches for the public board, and does freelance writing on the arts for The Mississauga News.
When her cat skipped town a few days after she moved into her new home last summer (a common occurrence after a move), she visited the book store to try to find a how-to-find-your-cat book. When she couldn’t, she decided to write one herself.
She made a lot of classic mistakes: failing to notifying animal control right away, using black and white flyers instead of colour and not taking advantage of the best network of animal watchers in any town, the schoolchildren.
A chance discussion with a woman in the office at Garthwood Public School last week set Millar on the reunification path with Cappy, who is now starting to recover from her outdoor ordeal.
What amazed Millar most about the entire experience, which saw her resort to an animal psychic in desperation at one point, was the genuine, heartfelt interest that total strangers took in her loss.
“I thought that maybe 20 per cent of people would care,” she says. “I never imagined that 100 per cent would care.”
She received innumerable phone calls as a result of the flyers she plastered around the neighbourhood. Seventy-year-old Vittorio paid for colour photo-copying because he knew the the black and white was not effective enough. Paulette at Mirror Interiors not only fed Cappy but pointed out her regular haunts that led to her capture.
“I was just overwhelmed by how much people really cared,” says Millar.
It not only takes a village to raise a child, but it apparently takes a whole compassionate city to find a lost cat.

Norbert Hartmann is ready for that martini now.
And who could really blame the man for taking up drink?
You could say that the trustees of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board provided a bitter twist for garnish last night, when they rejected out-of-hand Hartmann’s carefully crafted strategy to allow them to extricate themselves from their budget deficit, complete with a one-year extension of the deadline.
The provincial supervisor, in everything but name, is caught between the rock of the Ontario government’s inflexible and inadequate funding formula and the hard place of intransigent board trustees who have drawn a line in the sand. They have decided that they will not be the ones to do the dirty work to balance their budget.
Hartmann is a co-manager without any co-managers.
The Ministry quite intentionally did not designate him a supervisor, although he is clearly carrying out the duties of that post.
It was created by the Harris Tories, who appointed supervisors to go in and teach those recalcitrant trustees in Hamilton, Ottawa and Toronto (including current Education Minister Kathleen Wynne) that the budget must always be balanced and Queen’s Park’s bottom line must always rule.
That is a tough argument to sell in education, where the product is people’s (read voters’) children whose lives really can be adversely affected by a decision to cut out a Reading Recovery program that could put them back on the rails of success.
It’s harder to argue that their lives will be damaged by a decision to cut out administrative spending or busing, however.
Hartmann’s report, Moving Forward Together, is a well-considered and pragmatic approach to the problem. He didn’t just cut busing blindly to St. Sofia, the Eastern rite school in Ward 3.
He retained busing for St. Sofia because it serves a special portion of Catholics who otherwise would not be served at all. Because French immersion programs “are wholly dependent on ability of students to get to the sites,” he retained busing there too.
But he nixed buses for Holy Name of Mary because it is a school of choice, in his opinion. That decision is undoubtedly made knowing that parents can organize and pay for their own busing and that Mississauga Transit will likely accede to a request for new service along Mississauga Rd.
A tiered response to Reading Recovery was proposed, saving a very valuable program that truly can be a lifeline for struggling students, especially new Canadians and those who start school with little or no English.
The long and short of it is that Hartmann’s report is a reasonable, measured approach to a tough job, which recognizes and responds to many of the community’s and trustees’ stated concerns.
It’s a sound agenda for cutting the budget. The problem is that trustees have decided that any more cuts will hit the bones of the system, and they will have nothing to do with it
The government, facing election Oct. 4, isn’t going to be in a hurry to promote any more confrontation, although their patience is clearly running thin, given the highly critical remarks about trustees recently from Mississauga West MPP Bob Delaney.
So, Mr. Hartmann may spend a lot of time in the next few months working on his headache and thinking about the cocktail hour. Maybe he should rename his report Moving Nowhere Together.
The moral of the story at this point seems to be that we elect people to make the easy decisions, and we appoint them to make the tough ones.

A note of explanation is required about the photo. At the board meeting Tuesday, students from Robert F. Hall Secondary School in Caledon lobbied for extension of a culinary arts program there which would eventually be linked to a similar program at Humber College. The students brought food and (non-alcoholic) drinks and provided the martini glass that sits beside Mr. Hartmann.