Random Access

If every Canadian family used one roll of recycled toilet paper in their bathrooms today, the number of trees saved across the country would be just under 50,000.
Yeah, that’s an awful lot of outcome for such a simple act.
Suzanne Blanchet, president and CEO of the Cascades (pronounced Cask-ad) Tissue Group, which specializes in recycled paper products puts it another way: “It will take 50 years to grow a nice tree for a product like a piece of paper towel or a (facial) tissue or a bath tissue that lasts five seconds.”
Montréal-based Cascades has been making recycled paper products since it began operating in 1964, and, from the sigh in the voice of the CEO when she is asked about the history of the product, it hasn’t always been easy.
Finally though, things are changing for Cascades’ products. Having the words “recycled” or “organic” on the label has gone from being a marketing liability to a marketing bonanza, especially for companies like Cascades that walked the walk before everyone else talked the talk.
A few months ago when Greenpeace was holding a protest outside a grocery store in Mississauga, one of its members was handing out a guide to paper products that rates manufacturers on their environmental practices. Cascades was at or near the top of every category, since it is the only producer of tissue paper to receive both EcoLogoM and Process Chlorine Free (PCF) certification for its paper-bleaching process.
The firm uses about 80 per cent less water than the industry average in its process of taking the office paper we throw in our blue bins, putting it in a giant blender, screening out the debris, washing it so the ink floats to the top, creating a pulp, bleaching it and making new paper.
Went looking for Cascades in my local store, but no luck. In fact, the company has had a hard time getting equal space on store shelves in Ontario, because the big brands have a lot more influence and money to spend influencing the retailers about product placement. Many retailers don’t want to take a risk with something a little different.
Now, however, Cascades products are finally available in Mississauga. They’ve been at the Highland Farms, at Matheson Blvd. and Hurontario St., since January.
Blanchet says the company also achieved a recent “breakthrough” by getting Wal-Mart Canada, which has its corporate offices in Meadowvale, to start carrying its Satin Soft recycled brand in Ontario beginning this April.
In a phone interview from her Montréal office, Blanchet said the company had done well in much of the rest of Canada (especially in B.C. where all those forest-loving hippies live) than it has in Ontario.
Now, however, customers are starting to ask for recycled products and are starting to go elsewhere if they don’t find them. When she stayed at a hotel in Québec City recently, where her firm’s products were in use, management could not say enough about the positive response they have received from guests.
“In the 1980s and 90s lots of people used to say that recycled products were too rough and not as clean and white,” says Blanchet. “At the first, it was rougher but now it is just as good. Recycled things were under the radar. Now people want to care about the planet and that is a big motivator.”
There is virtually no cost difference in producing paper products from virgin forest or recycling it if — and this is a big if — you have integrated processing facilities such as Cascades has.
Let’s hope this will be like trans-fats and pretty soon, all the other paper companies will start jumping on the bandwagon. As consumers we need to insist they do the right thing.
A new consumer survey, which Cascades commissioned to go with its new marketing push in Ontario, found 83 per cent of respondents would switch toilet paper brands if they thought it would save trees.
Why not? It doesn’t cost anything. And with every flush, there comes a cleaner conscience.

Ever wonder what it would be like to never have to go back to work again, to put up your feet and have time for every book in the world that you’ve ever wanted to read?
Only about two or three times a day, I’ll bet.
Well, Guy Ashford-Smith used to do that. Now he says — be careful what you wish for.
When the 50-year-old Lisgar resident went to his family doctor for his annual bout with pneumonia in the winter of 2001, he never imagined where it would lead: to an instant trip to the emergency ward at Credit Valley Hospital, where a nurse’s eyes got big as saucers when she took his blood pressure.
He was asked to lie down and take oxygen. “That’s the last thing I remember,” he said Wednesday in the living room of his home on a lovely sunny winter afternoon. “I woke up three weeks later. The doctor told my wife he didn’t think I’d survive.”
Ashford-Smith had only 7 per cent lung capacity and obvious respiratory problems. Doctors thought he might had muscular dystrophy. Fortunately an intern at the hospital who had been studying MD, and a quite similar condition called Pompe’s disease, suggested they test for it.
Sure enough, Ashford-Smith learned that he is one of the unfortunate 10,000 or so people in the world who have Pompe’s, a degenerative, neuromuscular disease for which there is no cure. “I’m missing an enzyme that helps me use the energy in my muscles. I store the energy in the muscles and when enough energy stores up, there’s a sort of explosion.”
The graduate in civil engineering from Humber College, where he met his wife, now has about 30 per cent lung capacity. He tires easily. “Some days I come downstairs and have a cup of coffee and that’s it, I’m done for the day.”
He has very little strength in his upper leg muscles, making it difficult for him to
get out of many chairs. He uses an elevated chair that sits in four plastic cups so he can slide out of it without too much trouble. He has to be very careful not to fall because he can’t get himself up. His wife and three daughters have a tough time getting the 220-pounder vertical again.
This all sounds quite depressing until you chat with Ashford-Smith for a while. He is one of the lucky ones when it comes to adult-onset Pompe. The 50-year-old is not in a wheelchair or on a respirator yet.
He is obviously happy there is good news to share about a potential pharmaceutical breakthrough against Pompe.
A new enzyme replacement therapy called Myozyme, manufactured by Mississauga-based Genzyme Corporation, was approved by Health Canada last year. When given to the infants who are born with the disease, and who rarely survived in the past for more than a year, they have now all survived at least 18 months.
The release of the drug prompted Genzyme to bring together the 13 adult Canadians who have Pompe. That, in turn, prompted them to form the Canadian Association of Pompe, of which Ashford-Smith is the president (www.pompecanada.com).
“Myozyme is helping stop the progression of the disease so far. People have more energy,” says Ashford-Smith. “It’s kind of holding things in place until something better comes along. It’s not a cure.”
Earlier this week, the Mississaugan met with Ontario Health Ministry officials on behalf of the association to press them to fund the $400-$500,000 annual per patient cost of Myozyme.
The association is about both public education (especially of doctors) and about the camaraderie of communicating with the only other people who can really understand what living with Pompe is like.
Ashford-Smith is a house-husband now. His wife used to do accounting from home but now she has her dream job teaching in a Brampton private school which their youngest 14-year-old daughter attends.
He can’t do the heavy housework but Ashford-Smith wields a mean barbecue fork and does most of the family’s cooking, which is a challenge because his wife has Celiac disease and can’t consume wheat gluten.
He needs lots of protein so he’s getting good at soy and tofu. He has to avoid carbs, so he loves to work with fresh herbs and vegetables. He is an experimenter in the kitchen, and loves it when a new dish solicits raves from the family.
He misses the pleasure of his work at CTS in Streetsville where he would go into companies from whom the firm bought supplies and work with staff there to improve the process and save both partners money and grief. “I enjoyed my job. My brain is wired for working,” he says.
When well enough, he makes models and reads military history. He spends an awful lot of time sliding out of his chair to let Lacey, the family’s deaf-from-birth dog, into the back yard.
One thing still intact is Ashford-Smith’s sense of humour. He reflects on the fact that he has a lot of time on his hands, just like a lot of people dream of.
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess this is my lottery ticket.”

Don’t look now but artificial respiration is being administered to some long- comatose ratepayer associations in Mississauga, and the result can only be good news for residents and the municipality as a whole.
The Lakeview Ratepayers’ Association has already been rejuvenated and is girding to fight a new gas-powered plant on the Lakeview G.S. site.
Now comes a sighting of the venerable Park Royal Community Association (PRCA), which was formed in 1958 and had a long history of social and political action before it petered out from lack of interest at the beginning of this decade.
One of those applying oxygen is Muktha Tumkur, who has lived in the area for fewer than five years. She got interested in its history through her opposition to a proposal to put a new car wash bay at the site of an old gas station, at the corner of Truscott Dr. and Bodmin Rd. right across from Park Royal Plaza.
Taking up a petition to oppose the car wash, which was the subject of an Ontario Municipal Board hearing last month, proved highly educational for Tumkur.
“I never heard of a ratepayers’ association before in my life,” she said.
Her anger at jamming such a modern facility on such a small, older site prompted her to start talking to her neighbours on Seagull Dr. She learned about people like Tom Peebles, who died in December, but was one of the founders and stalwarts of the long-lived PRCA.
Looking through old clippings and scrapbooks that people had kept, Tumkur was amazed to see how the association enriched the lives of everyone who lived in Park Royal (the neighbourhood developed by John Welton and his United Lands Corp. and bounded by the QEW on the north, Southdown Rd. on the east, the CN line to the south, and Winston Churchill on the west.)
“They had field days (the three-legged race was always a big hit) and bingo nights and sewing classes and they even declared a Mrs. Park Royal, who was the best housewife,” says Tumkur.
In fact one of the young bands who played at the teen dances was some group called Rush. Wonder what ever happened to them?
The late Denny Doherty, by the way, lived for a while on Lewisham Dr. when he first settled here.
Several former ratepayer leaders have shown interest in getting it going again. More impetus was provided during the municipal election campaign when Park Royal resident, and Ward 2 council candidate, Brian Hurley lamented the lack of active ratepayer sounding boards.
“I’m particularly interested in the beautification of Park Royal,” says Hurley, who would like to see a nice entrance sign erected on Truscott at Southdown Rd. like the one on Sheridan Park Dr. that announces entry into Sheridan Homelands.
Mrs. Park Royal may be stale-dated, says Hurley, but how about a contest for the best front garden?
There are no shortage of issues. If you are going to the Clarkson GO, you can have a roller coaster ride on Bromsgrove Rd. to warm you up. The sewer flooding problems in the south end are still ongoing and Park Royal, like virtually every other Mississauga neighbourhood, is going to face big-time pressure to add density to multi-residential properties considered to be underused.
The Park Royal Community Association will officially be re-launched Thursday at 6:45 p.m. when the revamped constitution is presented and new officers will be elected. An annual general meeting will follow.
Ward 2 has traditionally been a hotbed of ratepayer activity in Mississauga, as current Councillor Pat Mullin, and former councillors Margaret Marland and Mary Helen Spence can amply attest. The ward still has 14 associations on its books.
Although it might seem like a contradiction, especially since active ratepayer associations often serve to educate and train potential political opponents, good councillors want active ratepayer groups.
The worst thing you can do as a politician is guess what your community wants.
Thank goodness Park Royal will again have a voice. May a trend follow.

“Endowed with growing and diverse populations and chronically short of resources and new revenue sources, major cities cannot provide the services, the infrastructure and the community assets that they need to thrive. If we do not address these shortfalls, neither our cities nor our economy will be globally competitive.”
Those are the words of Anne Golden, president and CEO of the Conference Board of Canada who issued a report yesterday optimistically titled, Mission Possible: Successful Canadian Cities.
Like a lot of high-level reports, it tells us an awful lot of what we already know.
Things like the fact that our cities are struggling with issues of gridlock, lack of high level transit and affordable housing, infrastructure replacement, environmental degradation, and intensification of development, all with little or no financial or planning assistance from the provincial and federal governments.
Things like the fact that while the feds keep downloading to the provinces and the provinces keep downloading to the municipalities, cities are stuck with the same old problem of revenues that must be primarily generated from property taxes – a highly inflexible system that doesn’t allow innovative investment in areas that could really stimulate local economies and help create a cultural identity (i.e. the arts).
“Chronically short of resources,” states the report, “and poorly equipped with governance powers, our big cities are struggling to fulfill their potential as engines of national prosperity.”
Never mind that. They are struggling to fulfill their potential as engines of local prosperity.
By now you are probably thinking that you’ve heard this speech before... and indeed you have. Hazel McCallion, David Miller, Ann Mulvale, even Mel Lastman have all been singing the same tune for so long, that the hymn book falls open automatically at the same page.
Perhaps a sea change is at hand, however.
The so-called “cities agenda” that big city mayors like McCallion have been touting for a decade or more, finally seems to be making some inroads onto the media and political radar.
We now have a revamped Municipal Act in Ontario that actually recognizes that Toronto is a different beast than the rest of the cities in Ontario. Someday, we’ll reach the shocking realization that all God’s cities have unique needs.
With a provincial election in October and a federal election TBA later this year, the Conference Board of Canada report is perfectly timed to put the cities debate where it belongs, close to the top of the national agenda.
It is often said that municipalities are the children of the provinces and the federal government.
Looking at the history of the paternalistic relationship, it would be more accurate to call them the orphans of the storm.
Time for a long-overdue reversal of misfortune.

Some odds and ends today.
Unfortunately, the Smart Avenues pilot project from Enersource Hydro Mississauga aimed at helping residents get the most out of their smart meters has hit a bit of a dead end.
The Ontario Energy Board has approved projects in Ottawa and Hamilton to go ahead with more detailed pilots for detailed implementation of the meters, which will start to be installed in local homes this year and are to be in every Ontario home by 2010.
They will calculate the time-of-day when energy is used and charge you more if you power up during peak periods of use, and give you a rate break if you do your laundry or use your dishwasher late at night. The changing rates are designed to encourage conservation and penalize the energy hogs.
The community south of The Queensway down to the QEW, from the Credit River over to Hurontario St., was used for the two-year pilot. Enersource tested several programs including technology that allowed you to log onto the Internet and look at your hour-by-hour power useage and allowed participants to watch the effects of turning off appliances or electronics.
Ken MacDonald of Enersource says Smart Avenues helped the company figure out how to encourage people to get the most from their meter. Probably more importantly, it helped map the best technological approaches to installing the new meters right across Mississauga.
Some of the programs continue including Peak Saver, where you can get a new programmable thermostat in return for signing up to allow your air conditioning to be turned down, or off, for brief periods in the heat of summer to reduce overall power use. There’s a button to sign up for the program on Enersource’s front page at www.enersource.com.
One of those participating will be Mayor Hazel McCallion. Of course, it’s perfect for her — since she’s never at home.
• • •
Congratulations to the student body at UTM who turned out in force (more than 2,000 votes cast) at a referendum last week to support a UPass for public transit for eight months of the year. Students will pay $89 more in student fees but will get a pass for unlimited travel on Mississauga Transit during the regular school year. The idea has been floating around for years and years but never came to fruition until transit and UTM administration finally got this proposal done.
It’s guaranteed revenue for transit and significant savings for most students who commute.
The size of the majority (83.2 per cent) indicates that lots of undergrads, who don’t use transit and must still pay for parking on campus, have figured out that there is a bigger picture out there. As Mark Overton, dean of student affairs, said, “students realize that this arrangement will trim their transportation costs and their environmental footprint.”
Just by coincidence, UBC Professor Bill Rees, who invented the ecological footprint model, is going to be a special guest lecturer at the Mississauga Rd. campus in March.
• • •
Maybe somebody besides the cognoscenti will finally clue in on the extraordinary talent of Lori Cullen now that she has been nominated for a Juno for Vocal Jazz Album of the Year. As I said in my 2006 year-end wrap-up, the Mississauga native’s Calling For Rain CD is a revelation that just keeps getting better with repeated listenings. It’s a collection of (mostly) covers that still works wonderfully together. Warning: Lori’s version of Joni Mitchell’s voyeuristic Two Grey Rooms will give you goosebumps.
It’s unfortunate that a superb jazz vocal record by another singer largely raised in Mississauga, Denzal Sinclaire, was not nominated. My One and Only Love is a tour-de-force for Sinclaire, who discovered his love for jazz during music classes at Applewood Heights.
Judging by the sweep of nominations by five women for vocal jazz honours, the Junos may have to consider a separate category for male and female jazz singers in future.

The most interesting part of the recently-published The First 100 Years: Mississaugua Golf and Country Club Centenary history has, interestingly enough, nothing to do with golf.
Brent Long’s commissioned history of the club includes a lot of fascinating stuff, including the story of how founder John A. Hall and friends, who were looking to relocate the Highlands Golf Club in west Toronto in late 1905, stumbled onto the beautiful property south of Dundas St. W. that would become the future Mississaugua.
It turns out that a hankering for a sweet, fresh apple had a little something to do with the location of the course. Hall and friends jumped out of the surrey they’d taken down the dirt track known as Springfield Rd. because they spotted some heavily-laden apple trees.
While they were munching the fruit, Hall was overwhelmed at the sight of the magnificent view of the Credit River valley that unfolded before his eyes.
He announced that the search was over and the spot of the future course had been determined. Then he promptly pulled out a golf club and marked the territory by driving a ball deep into the valley.
It’s possible that Hall’s drive hit a tree that still stands there.
In a fascinating chapter near the end of his book, titled A Walk In Our Park - Our Beautiful Trees, Long, arborist Bill Hall and greens chairman John Cornwall extoll the virtues of the many mature trees on the property that are potential candidates for the Ontario Honour Roll of Trees. It is a long and impressive list.
The age and variety of these trees are a revelation for those of us who have seen nothing more of the course than the grand old clubhouse.
On the left side of the fairway approaching the eleventh green stand a pair of
Burr Oaks that are 56 inches in diameter and nearly 300 years old.
Other impressive specimens include a 200-year-old elm on the first hole, two rare Sycamore trees (Are we in Indiana, Toto?) near the seventh green that are likely two-and-a-half centuries old, several white pines that exceed 150 years of age and the two largest Red Oak trees in the City.
The most infamous tree on the course is the 55-inch diameter horse chestnut that predates the course and stands to the left side of the 18th green (It is shown in the accompanying photo). There’s a wonderful picture in the book of the chestnut in full blooming spring glory. “It is the one tree on the property that most members have a story or two to tell about,” writes Long.
Mississaugua’s amazing collection of about 50 varieties makes it one of the few courses that could double as an arboretum.
You no longer have to be a member to see many of these superb specimens. You can go to http://www.mississauguagolf.com/index.cfm?ID=618 to check them out.
The book, which costs $79.50 and includes many striking pictures of the trees, is still for sale at the club.

When Suzanne Weiss’ neighbour in Lorne Park told her about the Clarkson French Club, she was thinking.... probably similar to a book club, reading literature and poetry and practicing the language. After all, her neighbour Alaine Baines’ husband was a retired professor.
“I thought it would be hoity-toity,” the retired flight attendant said yesterday as she stood in the kitchen of the Balsam Ave. home of Cécile Kennedy, who was hosting the weekly meeting of the club that has been churning along for a formidable - make that for-mee-dab-le - four decades.
“But when I went to my first meeting at Laurence’s, there was champagne! Now I regret that I didn’t join three years earlier when I was first asked. It turns out it’s a social group and it’s just so much fun. We really enjoy each other’s company.”
That was obvious from the numerous gaggles of conversation — all in French of course — that the 26 members of the 39-member group were so boisterously engaged in.
They come from 16 different cultural or ethnic backgrounds, some are Anglophone and some are Francophone but they all share one common love, the beauty of the French language.
From their joint experience, they have also come to treasure the joys of lasting friendship.
It was January of Centennial Year when the Québec-born Laurence (or Laurie) Bennett decided to invite four friends to her Lorne Park house for a coffee party, so they could speak their favourite language. “We hit it off and away we went,” said the irrepressible Bennett. “It was a place to keep our French alive. The only rule was that there was to be no English spoken.”
In the early years, the club sponsored pre-school and after-school French classes. Study of French in schools didn’t start until Grade 7 in those days. Now, one of those students from the first classes is actually part of the group.
“It really represents Canada, with all the different people, if you think about it,” says member Germaine De Backer.
Take Elisabeth Evans, who was born in Switzerland, learned German as her first language, French as her second and English as her third. She taught in the school program for several years.
Monique Massue, who is the only one of the five original members beside Bennett still in the group, says the club has been a wonderful touchstone for friends through the years, who have drifted all over the world and drifted back. “It means an awful lot. It means that French is important,” says Massue. “People want to keep it alive. They want to talk. Many of them are not fluent but that does not matter. They try. And this is such a nice way of doing it.”
There is always someone who holds things together in such an enterprise and the members are unanimous (save she herself) that Laurie Bennett not only got it going, but kept it going.
“You couldn’t find a happier group,” says 85-year-old Peg Holloway, the 1979 Liberal federal candidate in Mississauga South, who is a long-time member, “and much of it is Laurie. She’s been the catalyst.”
It hasn’t all been roses, however. There was that short experiment to include the husbands.
Françoise Gravel had her husband Alf, who worked for Bacardi at the time, mix up a lethal rum punch to warm things up.
“It was a fabulous punch,” recalls Alaine Baines. “It was so good that the men all thought they were bilingual. The more they drank, the better they thought their French got,” she laughed.
• • •
Three Mississauga jazz musicians, two of them accomplished composers Pat Collins (bass) and Brian de Lima (piano) are debuting their new trio with local drummer Sly Juhas tomorrow night at 7:30 p.m. at Trinity Anglican Church in Streetsville. Guest trumpeter is Mike Malone.
This is a rare chance to see a group of multi-talented local pros take flight. Only wish I could be there.
Tickets are $10 and proceeds go to benefit a group called Handpumps For Hope who are involved in African relief. Their website is at http://www.handpumpsforhope.org/.

The inanity of the pooling scheme that former Ontario Premier Mike Harris introduced to fund Toronto’s social services is nowhere more evident than in the discussion Peel Region councillors had Thursday about introducing a dental program here for low-income seniors.
The discussion was sparked by new Ward 6 Councillor Carolyn Parrish, who was approached by a pair of constituents who are seniors and have no dental insurance. Only 36 per cent of Peel seniors had such insurance in 2003 and only 48 per cent had ever seen a dentist that year, even though the teeth often provide one of the first early-warning signals of problems with health.
The Ward 6 seniors went with some friends to visit one of the 13 public low-cost dental centres that Toronto provides for those who are eligible for the federal income supplement benefit (under $17,000 for a single and $23,000 for a family).
After they waited in line for several hours, they were told they were not eligible because they live outside Toronto.
The ironic part, of course, is that we ship some $64 million of our tax money to the east every year as part of the pooling program so that Toronto can provide a level of service that our own residents do not receive. Peel’s entire health department budget is, in fact, $65 million.
So property tax being collected in Mississauga, which should only go to services within our own borders and should be spent by politicians we have elected, is being exported to Toronto so that politicians whom we do not elect can provide a service that Mississaugans do not have. It’s absolutely ludicrous and a blatant example of the principle of taxation without representation that caused some uprisings around these parts in the past.
Parrish says it will cost under $500,000 for Peel to provide the same program Toronto has here. Well worth the investment.
The debate also prompted the Ward 6 Provocateur to propose that some City councillors run in the Oct. 10 provincial election to encourage Ontario to end pooling.
While that seems like a sexy way to bring an issue to the fore, it is fraught with problems.
Suppose Mayor Hazel McCallion runs in Mississauga-Streetsville. Do you really think a Bob Delaney or a Ted Woloshyn would beat her?
If she wins, there would have to be a by-election, either for the provincial seat or for mayor.
Even if the municipal third-party protest garnered enough votes to swing a seat, does anybody really think that would end pooling? The only real beneficiaries, of course, would be the Tories since the Liberals now hold all local seats. Hmmm. Aren’t they the folks who dug this sinkhole for us in the first place?
Generally speaking, it is not a good idea to clutter the political landscape with special interest parties or candidates. Yes, they have a right to run and no one can stop them, although more than one councillor has suggested a hefty deposit be required to discourage people who are not serious about winning office.
Before they rush out to become fringe candidates themselves, councillors might want to remember how they generally feel about the species when they show up in their territory.
Do they really want candidates running against them in four years to highlight specific problems of on-street parking, transit, councillors’ salaries, airport noise, bike paths etc., etc.
How about a slate of candidates to protest the fact that they haven’t been able to fix pooling yet?

If you want to know who put out the best album of 2006, turn into the Grammy Awards in say... about 30 years time.
That’s probably how long it will take the recording industry to figure out what really went on in its business in the past year.
It’s fascinating to look at this year’s nominees and reflect back on their careers.
Take your Bob Dylan, for example. The poet laureate of the 60s picked up two more Grammys Monday night, one for solo rock vocal performance (Someday Baby) and one for best contemporary folk album for his Modern Times CD.
Before that, he had won one Grammy in 1994 for best traditional folk album, three in 1997 for his comeback album Time Out of Mind and one in 2001 for Love and Theft.
No one in their right mind would suggest that Dylan peaked in the late 90s. Yet, according to its most prestigious honour, that’s when he came onto the recording industry radar.
If you went by his Grammy record, his Bobness might as well not have recorded Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde or Freewheelin’ or Bringin’ It All Back Home, all of which caused nary a ripple on the Grammy meter at the time.
It was absolutely hilarious to see Dylan, whose singing was never his strong suit and who seems to have lost most of the little voice he had, up against Toronto-born and Winnipeg-raised Neil Young for the honour of top solo rock vocalist.
Yeah, that’s the same Young who the other members of the seminal rock group Buffalo Springfield were so reluctant to allow to sing lead on their first album.
Young has done wonderful, if uneven work, over four decades now and while his work remains vital, his new anti-Bush, anti-war album and last year’s mellow Prairie Wind, will not make anyone forget Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, Zuma, Rust Never Sleeps or my personal fave, the admittedly offbeat Tonight’s The Night.
The Grammy organizers have obviously figured out that they have screwed up often in the past. So they have tried to rectify their error by issuing retroactive awards for music that was produced more than 25 years ago.
You could call this the Oops category if you wanted. Blonde on Blonde and Like a Rolling Stone have been honoured via that method.
The other tack the Grammys have taken to minimize the damage is to create so many categories that they can’t possibly leave anybody out. You almost expect a “Best Performance in a New Genre of Music Yet to be Titled” award. (Frank Zappa is up for the lifetime achievement award in that one, by the way.)
At least there is one contemporary performer who won a well-deserved award this year.
In category 77, Best Spoken Word Album, the co-winner for his recording of Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis was former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. He beat out a couple of other well-known political comedians, Al Franken and Bob Newhart.

One book leads to another, or so Mississauga history buff and former Ward 7 Councillor Dave Cook (1981-88) finds.
When the former ratepayer president set out to write a history of the Applewood Acres community where he grew up and still lives, he had in mind a 50-page booklet.
Well, that little project turned into the 224-page book called Apple Blossoms and Satellite Dishes that the former Mississauga News reporter published in 2004. Most people know that Col. Harland Sanders lived in the neighbourhood just north of the QEW, but few knew that people such as author Peter Newman, hockey star and commentator Howie Meeker, singer Michael Burgess, classical music conductor Robert Aiken, Shakespearean actor Robin Gammell, actress Lisa Jakub (Mrs. Doubtfire, Independence Day) and actor Jonas Wolfe (Genghis Khan, The Laughing Policeman) had lived there.
While doing that book, Cook kept stumbling over the story of Dixie Arena in one form or other. That inspired his second historic volume, From Frozen Ponds to Beehive Glory: The Story of Dixie Arena Gardens which he published last year. It chronicles the hidden life of the late, lamented arena as a medium for flower shows, car shows (Cook is an avid motorsport fan who raced his own car for many years), wrestling, curling, lacrosse and roller skating, among other things.
In the course of that research, the writer was reminded of the story of the air school for the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan during the Second World War which was located on part of what is now Pearson International Airport.
The school, where some 200,000 pilots received the first 50 hours of their training, was located at the corner of what was then Britannia Rd. and Sixth Line and was often referred to as the Malton military base.
The building later became the Workmen’s Compensation Hospital. “I sold papers there as a kid,” remembers Cook, who started his journalistic career in radio.
A notorious criminal case took place there Nov. 25, 1955 when a Dr. Rex Hylton was shot by a patient. One of the detectives on the case was future Peter Demeter tormenter and Peel Regional Police Chief Bill Teggart.
“If anybody has any information or memories of the base, I’d love to hear from them,” says the 64-year-old.
Unfortunately, Cook won’t be doing any writing for a while. He is scheduled to undergo “beating heart” triple bypass surgery by Chief of Staff Dr. Gopal Bhatnagar at Trillium Health Centre next Monday. That procedure comes 11 years after he suffered a heart attack. Cook felt that one coming. He quit smoking a week before it happened and he has adopted a more more healthy lifestyle ever since.
Best of luck to Dave as he recovers.
Anyone with information about the Air Training Plan can contact him at cook.dave@rogers.com.

Somewhere, the late Art Steffler is smiling.
The scrappy long-time trustee, who served an incredible 42 years on the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board, always loved a political battle, and he loved nothing more than a fight with the big, bad Ministry of Education.
The current imbroglio with Queen’s Park over the Catholic board’s budget deficit has been brewing for many, many years although it only got on the radar for most of the public when the accusations and counter-accusations started making headlines.
During budget discussions in 2002, Steffler foreshadowed the current stalemate with the Ministry when he argued that trustees should defy the law and refuse to balance their budget, which was $6.3 million in the red at the time.
“Don’t we have any backbone?” Steffler asked his fellow trustees at the time. “If we want to draw attention to it and to show we’re not getting enough (funding), we have to go with the $6 million (deficit).”
At the time, Steffler’s stance was dismissed by his colleagues either because they considered it grandstanding or they thought it premature. School boards always live in hope of getting additional funds from Queen’s Park if they play nicely.
There is no doubt that trustees are right when they state that most of their deficit problems stem directly from the inadequacies of the provincial funding formula.
The Ministry (no matter which party is in power) loves to mandate new programs in big shiny announcements and then issue grants that cover only a portion of their costs. Boards have been shuffling money from other programs to cover chronic shortfalls for programs such as special education and busing for years and raiding their reserves until, as in the case of Dufferin-Peel, they ran out of them.
The legislation requiring a balanced budget led to the annual shell game where trustees “balanced” their budget by assuming the ministry would give them the money they needed to break even during the year. Which the government often did.
Boards have been paying lip service to the idea of a balanced budget for as long as they have been required to have them. “It’s not against the law to file a balanced budget and then overspend,” Steffler said at that 2002 administration and finance session. “We’ve been doing it for 20 years.”
Trustees would still rather face the wrath of the ministry and its threat of personal fines of $5,000 for trustees who don’t approve a balanced budget (are the defiant Dufferin-Peel trustees going to be charged?) than the wrath of parents (and voters) whose children will lose services.
Having travelled this far along the high road, the trustees can’t back down now.
They did not want their fingers on the knives that made the cuts, so they passed the blade over to supervisor Norbert Hartmann. He will do the dishonours.
While the trustees’ resolve is admirable in many ways, it is also fraught with potential problems, not the least of which is that they have abdicated basic control of the system that we elected them to run Nov. 13.
They must have read with some trepidation the story in The Toronto Star yesterday wherein Toronto trustees, who lived through the supervisor’s takeover there in 2002, reflected on that experience. Most said they would never willingly go back under supervision.
As a voter, you can’t help but have mixed feelings about this situation. Would you rather have an unelected bureaucrat (competent as he may be) making the critical financial decisions at Dufferin-Peel or an elected trustee who can be held responsible at the next election?
The worst danger might be that the Ontario government finds that its political and fiscal agenda is much easier to impose through a supervisor, without the voice of the local community being expressed.
Ironically, by taking their tough stance, Dufferin-Peel trustees might be making it easier for the government to declare all of their ilk redundant.

Big Brother is going to have his hand on the controls of my air conditioning this summer and it doesn’t bother me in the least.
Our family has signed up to be one of 1,600 homes in Mississauga who will participate in the peaksaver program.
In return for a free new $250 programmable thermostat, which allows you to automatically pre-set the temperatures of the furnace and air conditioner for designated blocks of time, Enersource Hydro Mississauga is going to have the right to turn up my air conditioning this summer on those blazing hot days when the combined AC across the province has every power plant chugging full bore.
From its central office, Enersource will be able to cycle my AC on and off, putting the fan on to circulate the cool air when the AC is off.
The concept is simple: many small increases in temperature in the 60,000 houses that will be on peaksaver across the GTA, Hamilton and Oshawa by the end of the year adds up to huge power savings, about 60 megawatts (MW) worth.
By turning the AC up a degree or two in your house for an hour or so and turning on your circulating fan periodically over the summer, officials hope to save one kilowatt of power per house. As Ken MacDonald of Enersource explains it, so non-techies like me can understand, 10 light bulbs of 100 watts apiece makes a kilowatt of power. One thousand kilowatts makes a megawatt. One MW saved in every one of 60,000 houses makes 60 MW.
The cost of installing a peaksaver thermostat in the home and all of the attendant technology needed is about $500 to save that kilowatt of energy.
If we had to provide that same kilowatt by building new generation facilities, the cost would be about $1,000.
So, not only is conserving the right thing to do because it minimizes emissions, but it also costs half as much for the identical benefit.
One of the other volunteers for peaksaver happens to be the senior citizen who inhabits the mayor’s office.
Ontario Energy Minister Dwight Duncan dropped into Mayor Hazel McCallion’s house on her birthday Wednesday to give her a cake and give himself a photo opportunity. He was also there to promote the peaksaver program.
Both Duncan and McCallion minimize any concerns people might have about the state manipulating the thermostats of the nation.
McCallion says people are starting to get the connection between lifestyle and climate change and they will embrace peaksaver like they have embraced blue box recycling.
Besides, it is a voluntary program and any participant can override the central control if they wish. Where it has been tried elsewhere, most participants didn’t even notice the intervention, noted Duncan. This may well be because most of the time on weekdays, they will not be home to notice them. (The program doesn’t run on weekends when power demand is already much lower.)
The mayor seemed most excited, not about the summer benefits of peaksaver, but about the fact that in the winter, she can now program her thermostat to warm up her house before she gets up at 5:30 a.m. That means she doesn’t have to run downstairs over freezing floors to turn the thermostat up.
The star of the show at the McCallion house was actually her 11-year-old German Shepherd named Hurricane. When the birthday cake was removed from its box for the special presentation, guess who was the first to clean up the stray icing that got left behind? (The mayor didn’t see it and I’ll never tell).
Hurricane also recognizes a photo op when he sees it.
But when he ventured into the living room the mayor said, “Hey you. You’re not supposed to be in here.” The mayor’s authority is such that the dog, three staff, two photographers and a reporter all immediately left the room.
You can get all the details about peaksaver and find out how to be one of the volunteers in Mississauga by visiting www.enersource.com and clicking on the peaksaver button on the front page.

There’s already speculation (see Ian Urquhart’s column called Gas-fueled Power Plant on Agenda in The Toronto Star today) that the Ontario government is going to forego a couple of little details — like the bidding process and the environmental review process — to put a new gas-fired power plant at the site of the former Lakeview Generating Station.
As you will recall, Ontario Power Generation, which shut down its plant at Lakeview at the end of April 2005 as the first link in the Liberal plan to remove all five dirty coal-fired stations from the provincial inventory, has signed a memorandum of agreement with our local electricity retailer, Enersource Hydro Mississauga, to “explore the possibility” of putting a new 900 megawatt gas-fired plant on the site.
You can see why the government might be in a hurry to renew a use that might at first glance seem like an improvement to surrounding residents.
First of all there is the very legitimate issue of ensuring adequate electricity supply. The Ontario Power Authority (OPA) has already warned about the problems in bringing new supply on line in Ontario in time to replace the coal stations. The Liberals broke their election result on the timing of closing those station closures as a result, extending it three years to 2010. OPA has also warned that, with the removal of Lakeview with its nearby supply which improves local reliability, Mississauga needs new generation relatively quickly, by 2011, in fact. In the new-generation business, that’s like next week, given the long approval process.
Then there’s the precedent of the Sithe gas-fired station in Brampton, which the Liberals approved without a real bidding process, on the basis of pressing need and a gap in service in that area. There was nary a peep from anyone, it seemed, when that happened.
So, is Lakeview an easy target for a new power plant?
Absolutely not, especially if Jim Tovey and the newly-reformed Lakeview Ratepayers’ Association have anything to say about it. They have already enlisted the assistance of their MPP Tim Peterson, who presents their petition and their position daily in the Ontario Legislature.
Lakeview will not just quietly accept another long-term lease on pollution. They are mounting an aggressive counter-attack.
Tovey has contacted the Environmental Law Association of Ontario and the Environmental Defence League, which is interested in undertaking a blood sample study of long-term (40 years plus) Lakeview residents.
McMaster University Professor James Quinn published a study with colleagues in a science journal a few months ago that studied genetic mutations in lab rats. One set was placed near the Stelco plant in Hamilton and another in a relatively unpolluted community. The Stelco rats experienced twice the number of genetic mutations. The professor will be invited to present his findings to residents at a future meeting.
Anecdotal evidence has long held that Lakeview residents have an inordinate number of health problems.
Then there is the “morality (or is it immorality) of geography” argument. “Lakeview has affected out community for three or four generations,” says Tovey who has lived there since 1989 and has seen the gentrification of much of the neighbourhood. “They should rethink the idea of putting dirty things in a dirty neighbourhood over and over again.”
By a dirty neighbourhood, Tovey means one which literally scraped black guck off its cars and houses more times than it can count.
Sure gas technology is a lot cleaner now, but why should Lakeview bear the burden again — because it’s easy to slap another plant up and (some) people are used to being environmentally abused? That’s no justification.
The upstart ratepayers hold their next meeting Thurs. March 8 at 7 p.m. at the Cawthra Senior Citizens’ Centre. Their MPP and councillor will be there and you can bet there will be lots of talk about the new plant.
As well as that update , the agenda also includes a talk and slide show by Heritage Mississauga’s Matthew Wilkinson about the history of the Arsenals property at the foot of Dixie Rd. which is to be transformed into a regional park.
The ratepayers have some great potential ideas for that park including establishing a 25-minute walking trail that will allow local Grade 8 students studying the history of the Second World War to explore their local connection to the small arms plant, which was run mainly by women who remained on the home front.
Tovey also dreams of one day putting a cenotaph in front of the water tower, which is being preserved as a heritage symbol in the large, central green space.
The ratepayers also have a new web site at www.lakeviewresidents.com which will undoubtedly form part of the front line of their defence against another local power plant.

It’s time to start pumping our legs again to see if we can catch up to that legendary 60-year-old Swede, who is in so much better shape than we are.
Yes, friends and couch potatoes of all shapes and sizes, ParticipACTION is back.
Yesterday, federal Health Minister (and former Brampton West-Mississauga MPP) Tony Clement was in Toronto to announce that the program that put the healthy living philosophy, and helped launch the whole concept of “social marketing” in this country, is back on the boards.
The feds are ponying up $5 million over the next two years to revive ParticipACTION, which went into hibernation in 2001 after the then-Liberal government choked off its funds.
If you are of a certain age, you well remember the controversial ads that so shamed Canadians. A voice-over informed us, as we watched an older and a younger man jogging, that the average 60-year-old Swede was in better shape than the average 30-year-old Canadian.
There were numerous outraged newspaper articles written in 1973 debating the veracity of the claims. In the end, the exact facts proved irrelevant. The important part was that Canadians starting thinking about moving their bodies around again. A lot of them did more than think about it, they did it.
It is impossible to think of ParticipACTION without thinking about the 60-year-old Swede, the Body Break TV spots with Hal Johnson and Joanne McLeod and Mississauga’s own Russ and Merle Kisby, who were the heart and soul of the movement for so very long.
Russ was the president of ParticipACTION from its inception in 1972 until it stopped functioning. Merle was his wife and able assistant.
Kisby was a disciple for the cause wherever he went and helped get the international movement going. Some two-dozen similar programs were established around the world based on the Canadian model.
The international respect in which he is held is reflected in recognition such as the World Sport For All Award he won in Vienna in 2000 and the Sport For All Pioneer Award he brought home from South Africa in 2001.
Most people still don’t realize that all of the valuable air time for promoting the good cause of exercise was donated free by the media, at an estimated value of a staggering $280 million over the course of the program’s existence.
Kisby lobbied hard against the short-sightedness that ended ParticipACTION, of course, and helped to get its archives housed at his alma mater, the University of Saskatchewan where you can get a retrospective of the entire program, including the ads at http://www.usask.ca/archives/participaction/english/home.html.
Last summer, the university named an active living lab after Russ.
The lesson of ParticipACTION, of course, is that exercise is for life. In every health article you read these days, exercise is cited as one of the best forms of prevention of any disease or condition.
In June 2002, Kisby was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given only a year to live. Because he was in such good shape, he was deemed a perfect candidate for an experimental form of treatment that involved aggressive surgery, and extensive chemotherapy and radiation.
Kisby beat the odds of coming back, just as his favourite cause has now done. Unfortunately, his health is failing again. It’s too bad he could not have savoured the pleasure of yesterday’s resurrection of ParticipACTION in person.
In a reflective article as the program was shut down, Kisby wrote that, “Perhaps the most important learning from ParticipACTION’s first three decades, particularly for wellness leaders, is the power of one.
When confronted with a big problem people often think: “Something should be done . . . . but what difference can I make?” And another well-intentioned effort ends before it begins. The hidden, pessimistic assumption is that big problems will only succumb to big money, big organizations and big government.
In our ParticipACTION experience, it’s not necessarily so.
From the start our task was to help change the health attitudes and habits of a whole country. At first, it seemed a lot like trying to move a mountain with a wheelbarrow. Remarkably, the mountain has been moving.
We found that the resources necessary for action and change are usually already in place. Therefore we concluded that the best way to move mountains is to mobilize those resources, to work as a catalyst, to bring the movers and shakers together under the umbrella of a good idea.”
Sometimes good ideas, like good people, make a big comeback.

As she was dropping off her application, plus her $50, to be considered for a Juno nomination, (who knew?) Lori Cullen had a kind of premonition.
“I am not one to have a lot of confidence,” said Cullen this morning in an interview from her Toronto home, “but when I dropped the CD off I was thinking, ‘Hey, I might have a chance here.’ ”
Of course, when you’ve made a record with the intense, unique style and emotional wallop of Calling For Rain, your chances of getting recognized are a lot, lot better.
Sure enough, Cullen, the native of Mississauga who attended St. Gerard Elementary School, St. Martin Secondary School and Sheridan College, finds herself one of five nominees in the category of Vocal Jazz Album of the Year at the 2007 Junos, to be held in Saskatoon April 1.
“One of my friends looked at the list and said Diana Krall is up against you,” laughs the 33-year-old. “I thought that was a different way to put it.”
Well, Cullen may not be used to the fast company of Krall and Molly Johnson, but she knows that her work belongs on the same page. “I’m totally optimistic about what it’s going to be,” she says of the Juno experience. “I’m going out there to enjoy it. It really is an honour just to be nominated.”
First of all, of course, Lori has to get used to the concept of being a jazz artist.
“I’m not really a student of jazz,” says Cullen, “but I guess I’d better be now,” she jokes. “I just consider myself a singer.”
Her kind of jazzy-pop-folk defies categorization. She sings a lot of what would normally be called “folk” material on Calling For Rain, including tunes by Gordon Lightfoot, Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, but they don’t sound folky. When Cullen gets finished with them, they sound like she wrote them all. Such is her ability to insinuate herself into the lyric with a voice that sounds small on first impression, but gains staying power with each listen.
The most amazing transformation on the CD is Gilbert O’Sullivan’s Alone Again Naturally, which always seemed like a piece of pop pap. The song’s dark lyrics take on a whole different dimension in Lori’s interpretation.
Now that she is Juno-nominated, is there a temptation to repeat the formula of the last CD and hope for a major record deal?
Well, yes, there is that temptation says Cullen. But it has already been beaten back. She enjoys the independence and control of producing her own records, not to mention the fact that when she sells them at a show, the money stays in her own pocket. Unless there is a big offer to go international, or provide big market support, she would resist a mainstream label.
Cullen is already in pre-production for her next album which is going to be something completely different.
Like Calling For Rain, which was rehearsed with her band for three nights at the Montreal Bistro and then recorded in one 14-hour session (except for her vocal overdubs), this one will be live-off-the-floor.
She is collaborating with singer and producer Chris Dedrick, leader of the New-York based The Free Design (www.thefreedesign.com) in the late 60s and early 70s on a CD that will be mostly original material.
“It’s a brass quintet,” and recalls the sound layering of the Beach Boys, says Cullen. Dedrick and one of his sisters who was also in The Free Design will do back-up vocals. “I just like the sound, the buttery sound,” says Cullen.
It’s a project Lori has had in mind for some time. Not even a Juno nomination is going to distract her from her long-time plan to make this record.
She didn’t get her nomination by following any other Muse than her own, so why stop now?
Her fans can see a preview of the new CD at a Mother’s Day show at the Enwave Theatre (formerly Harbourfront Centre Theatre) at 231 Queen’s Quay May 13. Cullen will be in the studio shortly thereafter.

Grant Clarkson is old enough to remember when there was no high school in Mississauga.
When he grew up in the village of Dixie, after you graduated from Dixie Public School (the original one located north of the Dundas), you went to Etobicoke Collegiate.
Port Credit High School on Forest Ave., now Mentor College, opened half-way through Clarkson’s high school career but he stayed at Etobicoke, where he played line on two championship football teams in 1932 and 1933. Future CFL quarterback Jerry Doucette was one of his team mates.
I’m willing to bet that Clarkson was a pretty tough guy on the football field. Throughout his political career which included stints as councillor, deputy reeve, reeve and acting mayor on Toronto Township council and councillor for the Town of Mississauga, Clarkson had this chronic habit of speaking his mind and taking on issues that others chose not to face head on.
He was a bit cantankerous, to be honest, especially when it came to matters of ripping up the natural environment or tearing down pieces of our collective heritage.
Maybe because his roots are so deep in the community and he grew up in a time when Mississauga truly was a collection of villages, Clarkson took the desecration of the local environment personally.
When the hunting lodge of Sir Beverly Robinson was sold to Erin Mills Development Corporation in the early 60s, Clarkson and local lawyer Jim Beattie believed the striking building, now the offices of the Heritage Foundation, should be saved for posterity. They convinced the municipality to buy it.
The developers also tried about the same time to make Mississauga Rd. four lanes through Port Credit to Streetsville. “I said no bloody way,” the 91-year-old recalls. “We said keep it the way it is and that’s how Erin Mills Parkway got built,” he told me this morning from his 17-acre property on the Credit River, where he has planted about a thousand trees over the years.
This afternoon, Clarkson received one of the very first Ontario Lieutenant-Governor’s Lifetime Heritage Awards from James Bartleman at Queen’s Park.
If there is any one story that shows Clarkson’s persistence and strong will, it is the story of the mural painted on the blinds of the old Meadowvale School House in 1906 by acclaimed Canadian artist Fred Stanley Haines.
A pastoral scene of the Mississaugas camping beside the Credit River in Meadowvale Village, the work, which was pasted onto the walls of the school house became a personal project for Clarkson.
He was president of the Peel County Historical Society and Chairman of Credit Valley Conservation in the mid-1970s, when he made the project a priority. The painting was painstakingly transferred by a team of experts from the blinds and taken to Ottawa, where it was restored to its original lustre by a team of experts.
Unfortunately, exposure to ultraviolet light while the mural was on display in a local hotel caused additional damage and it had to be restored again recently. Guess who spearheaded the work and again footed a substantial part of the bill?
Clarkson was on hand last year when the mural was placed in an appropriate place of honour outside the second-floor entrance to the council chambers at the Mississauga Civic Centre.
The painting is now wrapped in plexiglass and will be preserved for future generations.
It would not have happened without the vision, the commitment, and yes — the stubbornness — of one Grant Clarkson.
Asked if Mississauga might look a little different without his personal interest in heritage, Clarkson just chuckled this morning and said, “I’m not looking for any credit. I’m just happy that these things have happened.”

Heritage Week was a smash in Mississauga, and for once we’re not talking about the wrecker’s ball.
It began with Mississauga Heritage Foundation Awards Monday, which honoured everyone from Museums of Mississauga raconteur and Mississauga Booster columnist supreme Richard Collins to the collaborative efforts of all those who got the Port Credit Log Cabin moved to the Bradley House site.
It was an especially good week if you were a nonagenarian heritage buff. Ben Madill, 92, who still works and lives on his farm at Highway 401 and Hurontario St. was a “Members’ Choice” award winner, along with 90-year-old Pauline Duinker of the Mississauga South Historical Society.
Ben and his wife Marjorie celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary in April.
Then Grant Clarkson, 91, topped it off yesterday when he accepted one of the very first Ontario Heritage Trust Lifetime Heritage Achievement Awards from Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman.
Apparent moral of the story: take an interest in history and your own might be longer than expected.
While Clarkson was recognized for his long-time contribution in the new special category, three other awards were handed out by The Heritage Trust under its regular community award scheme.
Those went to Mississauga’s Old Man of the Lake, Lorne Joyce, who knows everything about anything that happened in the fishing trade in Port Credit; Rob Robson who restored the former Commercial Hotel in the Village of Meadowvale to its original glory and the Mississauga Garden Council, for promoting and preserving the natural heritage of the Riverwood. They will all be recognized later at a City council meeting.
By the way, don’t expect to see the names of the winners on the Ontario Heritage Trust web site, www.heritagefdn.on.ca. In one of those amazing Catch 22s that governments love to wrap themselves up in, publicizing the names of the winners on the web site would be a violation of Ontario’s privacy laws. So the government is saying, ‘Fantastic job protecting our heritage, folks. Too bad we can’t tell anyone who you are.’ In future, winners are going to be asked to sign Freedom of Information waivers so that their names can be put in press releases and on the web site.
• • •
Former Ward 7 City Councillor Dave Cook is doing well after heart bypass surgery Monday at Trillium Health Centre. “The medical staff was superb,” says Cook. He plans to write a future guest column for The Mississauga News about his fears going into the operation and his reaction afterward.
• • •
Real reason Britney (Oops I Did It Again) Spears shaved off her hair? So her voice would sound more like that of Sinead O’Connor. Result? Nothing Compares 2 U, Sinead.
• • •
Seen in the venerable Globe and Mail’s Last Words column last week: Wilfrid Laurier, 1841-1919, “Say fini.”
Now that is what I call a man committed to bilingualism. Unless, of course, his real last words were, as I strongly suspect, “C’est fini.”
Say fini, Wilfrid.
Fini Wilfrid.

Twelve years, 11 months and nine days, give or take a couple of Feb. 29ths.
That’s how long it has been since Canada won a gold medal in men’s downhill skiing on the World Cup circuit.
Congratulations to Erik Guay, who conquered the icy terrain in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (sounds so much better than Bunny Hill, doesn’t it?) Saturday to break a long, long drought in the premier event of men’s skiing.
The downhill is to skiing what the 100-metre dash is to track and field, the glamour event that will always be the bellwether of the health of the rest of the program.
The health of our men’s skiing program, which paled for so many years in comparison to our women skiers, is finally sound again. You need look no further than the results of the race that Guay won Saturday for proof: our surprise silver medallist in the recent world championships, Jan Hudec, finished fifth and Manny Osborne-Paradis, who might be the best of the new crop of male skiers in the long term, was seventh.
This is the second meet in a row where we had three skiers in the top 12.
The team is doing most of this without the leadership of veteran Thomas Grandi, who just rejoined the tour after his wife Sara Renner, a fair cross country skier herself, gave birth to their first child.
Why the improvement in results for the Canadian team, who had their best showing ever at the world championships?
A lot of it stems from Ken Read, the president of the national ski federation who has brought the same will to win to management of the team that he did as a competitor with the Crazy Canucks.
Once again, we have a core of tough racers who seem to be competing against each other for success as much as against those racers with the different uniforms.
When he was appointed in 2002 after the disastrous Salt Lake City Olympics , Read — who looks the same as he did when he raced, but for the grey hair — said, “We have been amongst the best and we can be amongst the best again in winter sport. The goal is to restore Canada as a snow-sport power. We want to have athletes that will win, and we want them to win frequently, and we want to have a number of them in each discipline who will have the chance to be on the podium.”
Don’t look now, but that is exactly what seems to be happening, although our women have faltered a little of late.
In every role he has held, Read has been a fierce competitor. Even when he was Brian Williams’ TV sidekick on the CBC broadcasts of the skiing circuit, Read’s disappointment at mediocrity and his insistence on nothing less than the best shone through. You could tell things would be different if he ever got the chance to be in charge.
Ken is now in charge and you can Read standards, quality, commitment and resources in places where there used to be giant gaps in our program.
When he took over, Read said his goal was quite simple, to make Canada the best ski team in the world by the time the Olympics take place in Vancouver in 2010. That seemed like a joke just a couple of years ago but now it seems a possibility. (Maybe we can send the Austrian team to the wrong mountain by mistake).
At least if we don’t achieve that goal, it won’t be because we didn’t give it a try. And it certainly won’t be because we lacked the will to demand the best of ourselves. Ken Read will see to that.

Former Ward 6 Councillor David Culham wants to correct the record as to how the acquisition of the Adamson-Robinson house, known as The Grange, built around 1829, came into public ownership.
In a previous entry about the heritage award recently presented to former Credit Valley Conservation Authority Chairman Grant Clarkson, it was incorrectly stated that the City of Mississauga bought the property in the mid-1970s.
In fact, the property was given free of charge by the Cadillac-Fairview Corporation following a lengthy series of negotiations that involved a number of people, including both Clarkson and Culham.
In the accompanying photo, you can see Clarkson at the far left, with long-time Peel County Historical Society stalwart Russ Cooper, second from left. Jerry Sheff, centre, is the guy who doesn’t look as happy as everyone else, probably because his company is giving away the house, which was refurbished by the municipality in 1981. It subsequently became the Boy Scout centre for many years and is now the perfect host for the Mississauga Heritage Foundation.
Culham (dark glasses) is to the right of Sheff beside Margaret Lawrence, the then-president of the Township of Toronto Historical Foundation. She got the ball rolling on acquisition with private meetings and a follow-up letter to the inaugural council of the City of Mississauga in 1974. Far right is then Recreation and Parks Commissioner, and later City Manager, Ed Halliday.
Culham says he arranged a deal where Cadillac-Fairview not only donated the house but a one-acre surrounding parcel that was superfluous to the subdivision that the developer was processing at the time.
“As previously agreed, Cadillac Fairview held a press conference and a community meeting, and publicly gave the house and the land over to me on behalf of the new City in the spring of 1975,” says Culham.
No matter the details of how the house came into public hands, the end result is something to be applauded.
In his book titled Looking For Old Ontario, Professor Tom McIlwraith of the University of Toronto at Mississauga talks about Adamson-Robinson as a fine example of the Regency style of architecture.
“The Regency is the one gracious dwelling type clearly associated with Great Britain and has been the architects’ means of entering Ontario’s domestic landscape. It is also a rare type in Ontario, and this is an ambiguous house — horizontal in mass, yet vertical in detail. The cottage roof (that is, four surfaces) squashes any feeling of tallness induced by the long chimneys and French doors that extend from floor to eave,” he writes.
“The Regency cottage is a fancy humble house — the icon of an insecure colonial elite whose members were as inadequate as the humblest settler in coping with the raw environment. Anything plainer and more modest would vanish into the misty beginnings of all housing — the very world that aspiring settlers were striving to leave behind.”
Of Adamson-Robinson and other examples of the Regency cottage in Ontario, the former chair of the Local Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee, says, “once stripped to their functional bones, these high-art structures pointed a way for a new generation of domestic building to rise up in sensitive response to the needs of a distinctive society emerging from the Ontario woodland.”
So Adamson-Robinson is a vanilla, bourgeois way-station on the way to building a better Canadian house. And a valuable reminder of the stops we made on our trip to today.

It’s interesting that the debate over the extension of special police and judicial powers that came to a head last night with a Commons vote became such a political lightning rod.
That seems to have a lot more to do with the jockeying for political position before the gun goes off in the next federal election campaign than it does to do with the very serious issues raised by the legislation.
In the wake of 911, with the Liberals in power, Parliament passed extraordinary measures that allow a suspected terrorist to be held, without charge, for up to a year. A second provision compelled suspects to testify about their knowledge of terrorist activities behind closed doors.
Extreme measures indeed, measures that would never normally be considered except in the wake of such attacks as those on the World Trade Center or the FLQ crisis of 1970. Measures that were recognized as so unusual that an internal blow-up clause was included, forcing our MPs to renew the powers after five years.
Whether to extend those powers is not a subject to be taken lightly, nor to be the subject of the kind of frat-boy, food fight theatrics we have witnessed in the Commons in the past few days.
This issue requires sober reflection, not finger-pointing from both sides of the House as the Grits and the Tories try to position themselves for the coming campaign by casting aspersions on their opponents — the Liberals painting Prime Minister Harper as a villain whose low-blow against Mississauga-Brampton South MP Navdeep Singh Bains was an intentional attempt to paint their party as pro-terrorist and the Tories demonizing Stéphane Dion as a bumbling moron who has to whip his Party to oppose a cautionary piece of Legislation they themselves originated.
Surely the wise thing to do would have been for all parties to accept the Senate’s proposal, as Harper did, to leave the legislation in place for now and have a civilized debate over the next few months about how to come to terms with our conflicting goals of stopping terrorism in its tracks, while maintaining the rule of law and right of defence for all of our citizens.
There are lots of outstanding questions still to consider.
Are these extensions really required when police never used their provisions in the five years they were in place?
In view of the Supreme Court’s recent unanimous ruling striking down provisions that allow alleged terrorists to be held indefinitely without charge on the basis that they are potential threats to national security, what are the chances that these regulations being upheld by the courts?
Should we allow critical issues of national security to be hijacked by the personal political agendas of leaders who appear a lot more interested in grooming themselves and their party images for the pending election campaign than they do in giving sober thought to critical issues?
Is it too late to reconsider the adversarial system?