Random Access

The banning of an 11-year-old girl from Québec from a minor league soccer game last weekend for wearing the hijab has raised issues that most of us probably thought long settled.
In case you somehow missed it, Asmahan Mansour was kicked out of a tournament because she would not remove the hijab that covered her head and was tucked into her uniform. The referee claimed that Asmahan’s safety could be in jeopardy because she could be strangled or injured if the religious head dress was yanked on by another player.
Since then, it has emerged that the FIFA rules that govern soccer do actually allow soft lightweight head coverings that pose no danger, but the incident has nonetheless inflamed the smouldering cinders of religious and ethnic conflict that always seem to bubble just under the surface in Québec. Gee, I wonder why.
From the celebrated Human Rights ruling that allowed the first Sikh RCMP officer to wear a turban, we have a long line of decisions nationally and locally (Gurbax Singh Malhi was, in fact, the first MP to wear a turban in the House of Commons) that support the wearing of religious symbols, as long as they do not endanger anyone.
Of course, safety is in the eye of the beholder. Do we not remember the instructional case of Pardeep Singh Nagra, the former diversity officer at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Ontario amateur lightweight boxing champ? He refused to shave his beard and fought a long legal and Human Rights battle, including court injunctions, until the Canadian Amateur Boxing Association changed its rules.
Can’t you just hear the referee saying, “OK gentlemen, I want you to fight a clean fight: no kidney punches, no rabbit punches and no whisker rubs!”
Even more celebrated was the case of the kirpan in Peel’s public schools. In that case, the Peel District Board refused to allow the ceremonial knife to be worn. Eventually the case went to the Ontario Human Rights Commission which ruled that a dagger, limited in size, could be worn in a secured sheath, concealed under clothing.
The issue raised a huge fuss at the time but I’d venture to say that a whole new generation of Mississaugans doesn’t even know the policy exists.
Which proves that it was never such a big deal in the first place.
Let’s put Asmahan back on the field where she belongs, give Premier Jean Charest sensitivity training and make the (protective) hijab mandatory for that head-butting honcho, Zinedine Zidane.

The person who came up with the term antibiotic was way ahead of the times.
In its root form it means “against life”, with “anti” meaning against and “bios” meaning life.
In their infancy, antibiotics were the new shiny wonder toy that would cure everything and they were liberally — too liberally — prescribed.
Now many bacteria have become resistant to the drugs and have mutated to create bigger and better bugs, which are a serious problem in hospitals where controlling infections is a constant battle.
This week’s events at Trillium Health Centre remind us that antibiotics can be literally, against life, in that they can hasten the onset of bacteria like C.difficile that can attack a vulnerable person and kill them.
The headlines, of course, make it sound like Clostridum difficile dropped out of the blue and grew overnight into a full-blown, out-of-control crisis that quickly took the lives of four patients.
As I learned from talking yesterday to Trillium Director of Infection Prevention and Control Dr. Kystyna Ostrowska, things are a lot more complicated than they may first appear.
C.difficile has been in hospitals for decades and comes in many different forms, most of which are relatively benign, even to the sick.
To maintain a good balance of bacteria in your gut, you should have about 15 per cent bad bacteria and 85 per cent good bacteria.
When elderly people with multiple medical conditions need cardiac surgery or cancer surgery or treatment for some other serious condition, the doctors have no choice but to give them antibiotics to fight post-operative infection. While doing that necessary thing, they must balance the probability that killing much of the good bacteria in the intestines in the process will make them much more vulnerable to the bad guys.
C.difficile is naturally present in about four per cent of the population. That doesn’t seem like much but once the bacteria becomes active causing serious diarrhea, it can spread very easily.
A patient can come into the hospital with it, or can acquire it once in the hospital very easily. Determining when it was actually acquired is a highly problematic business and probably not that fruitful an exercise, despite the fact everyone wants to know exactly how it started.
This new Québec strain of the disease is much more virulent. Although it is likely no threat to anyone in generally good health, it is certainly a danger to those who are very elderly, suffer from numerous medical conditions, have been on antibiotics for prolonged periods and are in hospital or institutions.
Dr. Ostrowska said that the importance of the protocol to treat these patients (gloves and gowns and the full rigmarole) has been stressed and re-stressed to all hospital staff. “Individual staff responsibility and what you do when you care for patients is very important,” she said. “In the post-SARS era, staff is much more aware of their part in a team effort and they think in terms of what I can do for my patients.”
Isn’t it interesting that when all is said and done, the best line of defence against C.difficile and so many other medical threats is still soap and water, properly applied with lots and lots of elbow grease.
In passing, Dr. Ostrowska mentioned other outcomes of the C.difficile problem that don’t immediately come to mind. One is that there is a limit on the number of private rooms at any hospital and eventually you are using rooms that were intended for more than one patient. When that happens, it causes a backup in the whole system.
Patients must wait longer to be admitted and the spillover can mean problems elsewhere in the hospital, such as the emergency room.
Outbreaks like the one at Trillium are likely to become more common in future. “As the years go by, the patient population is getting older and they come in sicker and they are dealt with much more aggressively medically, and surgically,” explained Ostrowska, a Mississauga resident. That can mean they are also more vulnerable to post-operative infections like C. difficile
Yet another good reason to support community-based support services that allow people to stay as healthy as possible as long as possible in the comfort of their own homes.

Could there be anyone more interested, and more disappointed, in the current kerfuffle about an 11-year-old girl banned from playing soccer in Québec because she wears the hijab than Pardeep Singh Nagra?
As he watched a professional soccer game on the tube Saturday, in which the goalie from Chelsea wore a rugby-like helmet with a padded chin strap, Nagra couldn’t help but laugh at the idea that a hijab could be a danger to other players.
When he was growing up in Malton, where he now lives once again, the former diversity officer at University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) played lots and lots of soccer, which was his favourite game.
He wore his hair in a topknot with a small handkerchief around it, or in a bandana or in a tight turban because his Sikh religion required the head covering. He and plenty of friends did that for years and nobody said a word. “It’s happening every day on playing fields all over Peel and there’s no problem,” says the 37-year-old who has a unique perspective on this case from a number of points of view.
As manager of the employment equity office at the Toronto District School Board, Nagra knows the ins and outs of human rights legislation and the innovative ways some people find to avoid embracing others’ religious or cultural customs.
After an injury dimmed his dreams of a soccer career, Nagra took up boxing and ended up in a celebrated confrontation with officials in that sport over the fact that he wore a beard in the ring.
Over five years, the Morning Star Secondary School graduate took on the soccer establishments who, of course, didn’t want to talk about the tenets of the Sikh religion and the ring. First he challenged the beard ban, which was also an alleged safety issue, in Ontario. He won a Human Rights decision. Then it took another court challenge against the federal association to get the national rules changed.
“Still as we speak, they don’t accept it,” says the former Peel Regional Police force auxiliary member. “They were very arrogant during the whole thing.”
Nagra is astounded that the International Football Association Board upheld the ruling of the Québec referee on the weekend. It just doesn’t jibe with reality, he said.
Many women professional soccer players and some men wear headbands and kerchiefs. One male professional player wears glasses on the field. The goal posts, and another player’s head are a lot more potentially damaging than any head covering, says the married father of one.
He is hoping that Asmahan Mansour and her parents will pursue the hijab issue because he knows they will win in the end.
But, let there be no mistake, there will be a cost. Nagra’s own personal battle to overturn the ban on facial hair for boxers cost him a lot of time, a lot of personal grief and a lot of money for lawyers.
And he has a very good question for all of us who like to be smug about how different and accommodating Canada is to minorities. If that is true, why did it take a Supreme Court challenge to allow the first turban to be worn by a police officer and a Human Rights Commission ruling to allow a Sikh boy to wear a sheathed kirpan in a Peel public school in 1990?
If Canada is the tolerant place we like to think, shouldn’t those changes have been made voluntarily, not through application of judicial force?
“When you say Canada accedes to minorities, when you say that people are being accommodated... it keeps people in a marginal position,” says the Malton resident. “It means that the dominant culture will tell you what the limits are.”
And isn’t it interesting that when Asmahan played back in Ontario this weekend no one made a peep. In fact, the same thing goes on, as it should, every day in every other province across Canada except Québec.
You would think that our friends next door are the last ones who should have to be reminded that understanding and acceptance, like so many other worthwhile qualities, begin at home.

Taking things for granted is a way of life for all of us when we are young and healthy.
How many of us have seen the ads for blood donor clinics; heard the, “It’s In You To Give” mantra; thought about what a good idea it would be to share a litre or two of our life-flow with someone else; and then gone right back to our daily business?
Sergio Galido was one of those people until what sounded like a simple procedure to remove a tonsil turned into a nightmare last year that ended with a diagnosis of leukemia.
The 51-year-old Lisgar resident spent too much of last year in Princess Margaret Hospital, having several transfusions, the first of which did not take. Patients having cancer treatments can require up to eight units of blood a week.
Galido said this morning that one of the images from his time in the hospital that remains etched in his memory is the sight of so very many patients, lined up on Mondays and Wednesdays to receive blood transfusions.
“When you see so many people lined up it makes you wonder, how did the get all this blood to be transfused... and this is just one hospital,” said Galido. “I am truly grateful to those blood donors,” he said in his quiet voice. “If not for them, a lot of people, including me, would not be alive today. So I say thank you to all those who donate blood. They do it with a very compassionate heart. When you think that they don’t know the people they are donating to, it is even more honourable.”
The married father of two, who has lived in Mississauga since he came to Canada from The Philippines in 1990, has beaten his leukemia for now. “I’m okay now. I’m in complete remission but to ensure a future healthy life, I really need a bone marrow transplant. It could come back at any time, in two years or 20 years.”
Since no match was found from his six siblings, Galido is hanging his hopes on the Unrelated Bone Marrow Donor Registry. Problem is that there are almost no Filipinos registered in that registry with Canadian Blood Services, which severely reduces the likelihood of a match.
That’s why his wife Lea got in touch with Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board Trustees Esther O’Toole and Luz del Rosario and she got in touch with Canadian Blood Services. Now the all-call has gone out to the GTA Filipino community for a blood clinic and marrow registry booth to be held Friday from 2-7 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. at Erin Mills Town Centre.
Galido sounds almost nonchalant as he says the chances of a match are “very slim.”
His family are more sanguine, a hopeful word which has its roots , interestingly enough, in the Latin for bloody or blood red.
Daughter Kristine, 16, in a piece she wrote to help encourage people to come out to the clinic this weekend, describes the brutal shock of her father’s illness.
“My world came crashing down and I’m sure the worlds of my loved ones did the same,” says the St. Francis Xavier international business student. “I’ll never forget the look in my Mom’s eyes when she said, ‘Dad’s got leukemia.’ I can’t even count the days I spent trying to sort it all out in my head.
“For six months, he battled the vicious beast that was cancer and won… for now. Now he really needs a bone marrow transplant to keep the fight going. We worry every day about how it’s going to happen. I love my Dad very much and I want him to be around for a very long time. I graduate from high school next year and sometimes I even wonder if he will be around for that. It makes me wretched with sadness when I think of it.”
If you know anyone in the Filipino community, please encourage them to take a few minutes from their busy lives this weekend to make what could be a life-saving contribution. A lot of people lining up at Credit Valley Hospital or Princess Margaret or Trillium Health Centre next week will thank you for it profusely, even if you never hear their words.

There is no hesitation when Harvey Shear of the University of Toronto Mississauga is asked to explain why the concept of the “ecological footprint” has gained such a foothold in our imaginations over the past few years.
“Because it’s such an easy thing to recognize,” says the professor of geography. “Everyone knows that when you walk in the sand, you leave a footprint.”
The ecological footprint is a measurement of the impact we make on the surrounding environment by our use of energy and resources, a snapshot of how our lives and our lifestyles actually affect the planet. The beauty of it is that it is applicable to almost anything: a business, a municipality or a university campus.
“When people look at a 50-acre farm field and realize that the way it is being operated, with the water, fertilizer and resources being consumed that it is the equivalent of a 200-hectare property, they say, ‘Omigod, That’s a lot,’ ” says Shear.
A biologist by training, he is a former employee of Environment Canada and helped organize the Status of the Great Lakes conferences in 1998 in Buffalo and in 2004 in Toronto.
At both of those events, University of British Columbia Professor Bill Rees, the man who came up with the concept of the ecological footprint (along with his PhD student Mathis Wackernagel) stopped the show with his speeches.
“You know how it is with those luncheons, everyone is eating and you hear the clink of the utensils and you can’t hear the speaker,” says Shear. “When Bill Rees spoke, there was not a sound. People were literally enthralled.”
Rees is coming to Mississauga March 21 where he will be attending a number of campus events and then giving a public lecture at 7 p.m. in the Kaneff Centre on the myth of the sustainable city.
The Rees version of the inconvenient truth may not be attracting Al Gore-style media mania, but it has Mississauga’s small, dedicated green community all aglimmer. And TVO has already asked if they can come out to tape the presentation for their Big Ideas series.
“When I told my third-year undergrad class last year that he was coming in the fall, their eyes just lit up,” says Shear.
When the ecological footprint of the Great Lakes basin was calculated a few years ago by one of the graduate students, it turned out to be five-and-a-half times the actual size.
“We had a graphic made up of it and it covered about a third of North America,” says Shear. “That’s when you realize we really have to look at the lifestyles we lead.”
One of the real beauties of the footprint approach is that, once it has been calculated, it can be revisited periodically, to see if the impact is expanding or reducing.
Toronto has already calculated its footprint. Shear sits on the environmental strategic planning committee in Oakville, where he lives, that is working on developing one there.
Wouldn’t an environmental footprint project for Mississauga make excellent sense, in consort with the Healthy Cities Stewardship Protocol that the City, UTM, Peel Public Health and numerous other municipal entities are already engaged in?
That would really provide a living legacy for Professor Rees’ visit to our fair city.

The schlemozzle over the pay of councillors who sit on the board of Enersource Hydro Mississauga and the structure of the board is obscuring a subplot that is almost as interesting: Will long-time Enersource board member Ron Starr keep his job there?
Starr, of course, challenged Ward 6 Councillor Carolyn Parrish at the polls and history tells us that those who run against a councillor and lose and then reapply for a citizen appointment are summarily handed their head on a platter. For references, see Wendy Pozak, Peter Ferreira, Ted Blackmore, etc.
It may be a vindictive policy but it is a long-standing one. If you run, win. If you lose, don’t expect your old job back.
Councillors were understandably disconcerted when the proposal was made to simply return the existing board of Enersource to office en masse, without the niceties of advertising and interviewing candidates. The theory was that the board did a great job so they should get a free ride for another four years.
The board has done a very good job, but that is not the point. So has the committee of adjustment and no one made the suggestion they should not reapply, even though they are a highly competent and experienced group too.
By the way, Ward 10 candidate Craig Lawrence, who sits on the committee of adjustment, has reapplied for membership.
So apparently has Peter McCallion, the mayor’s son, who is in the real estate and development business and is also considering a run for the federal Tory nomination in Mississauga-Streetsville.
Needless to say, having anyone in real estate and development sit on the committee does not seem appropriate. Add the complication of the surname and you have a whole new perception problem. Generally not a good idea all around.
While the so-called “double-dipping” of councillors who sit on Enersource has drawn all the attention, several politicians were even more concerned that City Manager Janice Baker sat on the Enersource board and drew a second salary. Divided loyalties are never a good thing when the inevitable disagreements arise between the City and the retail electricity company of which it owns 90 per cent.
In the new constitution of Enersource, the mayor and three councillors will sit on the board. No staff member will.
• • •
Has anybody else noticed the absence of The Watcher?
Since the November municipal election, in which Donald Barber probably surprised himself as much as anybody else by collecting 5,571 votes, or a whole five per cent of the mayoralty vote, Mr. “Brown Envelopes are Welcome” has been lying very low.
Probably just recharging his batteries for the legal fight to come next month when he appears in a Brampton court to fight the assault charges stemming from the aftermath of the council meeting last year where local politicians reshaped their long-standing open policy on public question period. Barber vehemently denies that he assaulted a security guard after he left council chambers and will plead not guilty.
On his web site he has accused “those who fight dirty” of sabotaging up his computer during the campaign. He says he is back now and has lots to post once he gets going.
The bail conditions that keep him from attending City Hall must be proving an impediment. Bet you Donald has the most complete set of City council tapes outside of Rogers Community Television.

Organic farmer Lorenz Eppinger and EcoSource are taking direct marketing to a whole new level.
Eppinger, 43, has a 100-acre certified farm just north of Campbellville. He has been growing chemical-free food there since 1989.
In order to be successful in his business, he knows you have to be your own marketing board. He has a full-time employee who works on finding consumers for the fresh produce he grows, which ranges from rutabagas all the way through watermelons.
On Wednesday, Eppinger was at Thomas St. Public School to meet a few of his new direct customers, who were probably the most enthusiastic he’s seen for a while.
Representatives of each of the 37 classrooms at the school, who are members of its “Green Team” who are assisted in their environmental endeavours by Grade 7 teacher Sheenu Sethi, gathered in the school lobby for the announcement of a new program.
It’s one that makes so much sense you wonder why no one thought of it before.
The Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation is funding EcoSource for a $106,000 pilot project that will see schools like Thomas St., which is the first to try it, partner with farmers like Eppinger to provide healthy student snacks.
Lee Ann Mallett, executive director of EcoSource, who put the program together is amazed at the number of threads it pulls together into a very sensible pattern.
Having local farmers supply apples, carrots, pears and other fibre food to the 953 Thomas St. students does so many logical things: helps fight child obesity, reduces garbage from over-packaged snack foods (the school is starting a composting program where the fruit leftovers can be turned into soil conditioner for the school gardens), promotes better education since students learn far better running on the natural sugars in fruits and vegetables than on the artificial ones, helps fight global warming and improves air quality because the travel time for the fruit is so drastically reduced.
The ecological footprint of the Greenbelt Farm to School program is the paw print of a mouse compared to the elephant imprint of many imported foods.
Some of the startling facts about our carbon-belching food habits were included in a backgrounder from the Greenbelt Foundation.
Check these out. Our average meal travels about 2,500 kms. to our plate. It takes 435 calories to move a seven-calorie strawberry from California to Ontario. Buying New Zealand lamb rather than Ontario lamb results in the use of 400 times more energy. The energy used to supply the food we eat is responsible for up to a quarter of Canada’s greenhouse gases.
EcoSource is hoping that, instead of negotiating contracts with cola manufacturers, our local school boards will consider board-wide contracts with local farmers.
Although the growing season and the school year don’t exactly coordinate well,
Eppinger says greenhouse produce and strategic imports will ensure a steady supply.
The best benefit of the program for people such as him might just be the development of a sustainable, educated market in future. If these kids grow up to be “conscientious consumers” they will be checking out the source of their food supply and demanding that local stores post the “carbon component” of the fruit they buy. “That’s the stuff that could make a huge difference in the long run,” says the farmer.
As he finishes speaking, a young female student sidles up to the proprietor of Greenfields Farms and says, “Thanks for the apples. They were so good, I had to eat two of them.”
• • •
I will be on vacation for a week, returning March 19. See you then.

Calgary (Wild) West MP Rob Anders is probably most famous, or infamous, for being the only member in the House of Commons to oppose making Nelson Mandela an honorary citizen of Canada in 2001. He explained at the time that he believed Mandela was a Communist and a terrorist.
Notwithstanding the fact that Anders will never be posted to the diplomatic corps, he may at last become better known for something other than his intemperate and inappropriate remarks about Mandela.
That’s because last week, a Court of Queen’s Bench judge in Calgary upheld the complaints of 11 members of the Conservative association in Anders’ riding who asked that the candidate’s nomination be set aside.
Justice Ged Hawco issued a 22-page ruling that stated in part that, “the party did not follow its own rules with respect to setting the date for the nomination or with respect to conducting a fair and effective candidate selection process.”
Anyone who has been around the nomination process for provincial and federal candidates for any length of time knows how prone the whole thing is to mystification, machinations and manipulation.
If there is an Achilles’ heel to the democratic process, it is the nomination, the last (and maybe the first) bastion of the political rapscallion.
It has always amazed me that the election of our ultimate leaders begins with the appointment of a candidate, normally selected by just a handful of party faithful playing by rules of their own devising that almost no one, including them, understands. Talk about your stepping stones on sinking sand.
The whole process is dependent on the indulgence of the party bosses, who allow it to unfold according to the rules if it suits their purposes or pull the invisible strings that change the rules when necessary. Many a candidate who has done faithful service to the party and gone forth to inevitable slaughter at the polls in one election finds himself or herself shocked when the party’s fortunes turn around and the party’s executive is whipped out from under him or her and a shiny, bright new candidate is anointed for the next run now that the party actually has a chance to win.
This scenario has played out many times in Mississauga. Actually, the Liberals are generally worse offenders than the Tories but the stripe of the animal is really irrelevant.
The federal Liberals even have an official, “We know better than you do” policy that allows them to appoint a certain number of candidates across the country, on the premise, one assumes, that democracy at the top should start with autocracy at the bottom.
Fortunately, the days of busing groups of supporters from specific ethnic or religious groups to a nomination (so they have no way to leave when balloting goes on all night) seem to have ended. The massaging has now become a lot more subtle.
To his credit Bob Delaney, a participant in the monster nomination battle for Mississauga West in 1993 eventually won by Carolyn Parrish, actually tried and had some success in fixing his party’s rules.
In the wake of the Anders’ ruling, the squawking has already started that the courts have no business in the political backrooms of the nation.
Maybe not. But if our political parties continuously flout their own regulations, consistently ignore or manipulate the rules they have set for themselves to benefit a chosen member and are clearly unfair to legitimate, if unwanted, challengers, then clearly something must be done.
If parties want to keep the courts out of it, they should set up legitimate avenues of appeal within their own parties, ones not staffed by long-time lackeys and trained kangaroos.

Let us pause for a moment today and consider them — the structures our forebears built and loved that we have allowed to vanish from the Mississauga landscape.
Here’s a roll call of headlines from The Mississauga News that tell the story best: City’s heritage stock dwindles as another old home burns (McCauley House on Eglinton Ave. 1995); Historic 140-year-old house wrecked by work of vandals (Irwin House, Second Line West, 1991), Development firm fined $2,000 for demolishing heritage home (Austin-Dell House, Eglinton and Hurontario St., 1990), Fate of Risch house hangs in the balance (1995), Historic building falls to wreckers’ ball (Harris House and Cooksville Methodist Church on Dundas St. in Cooksville, formerly called Harrisville, 1991).
There are many more, but you get the idea.
Flash forward to today and count the recent toll of houses all damaged by fire and potential candidates for “wreckers’ ball” headlines in the near future: the Asquith House (1760 Bristol Rd.), the Rae House (1480 Derry Rd. E. in the former village of Mount Charles) and (to a lesser extent because it was occupied) the Cerny House (Saxony Crt. off Mississauga Rd. near the historic Bickell estate, better known as the former home of Bruce McLaughlin.
Then on March 9 came the inevitable final, fatal fire at the one-time home of Victor and Agnes Sandford, the siblings who owned the farm at the southwest corner of Eglinton Ave. EW. and Mavis Rd. for decades. A few months after Vincent died aged 87 and Agnes moved into a nursing home in the late 1990s, a huge blaze consumed the cattle barn and the drive shed, which had a huge stone cold cellar.
The designated heritage home’s fate slow descent toward demolition really started then. It would soon fall victim to Abandoned Historic House Syndrome.
That typically starts with developers buying a property, renting it to irresponsible tenants who begin the destruction process, threats from municipal politicians who insist the house must be saved, pledges from developers to do their best for the property after they assess the rising costs, abandonment of the building, a series of attacks by vandals and arsonists and ultimately, destruction of the home once it is officially deemed a safety hazard.
It’s a sort of reality shame show you could call the heritage wheel of misfortune.
Tom Urbaniak, Mississauga heritage buff, author, university political science instructor and long-time local observer called it, “the heritage version of deferred maintenance” in an interview a couple of years ago. Much of the problem with the heritage review process is that it operates predominantly in crisis mode, according to Urbaniak. “By not being proactive, we get into all of these last-minute crises where one of the most important buildings in the City would be lost if we don’t act,” he said. “It would be a lot easier if it had been designated a decade ago but instead, the sky is falling. It just turns into a vicious circle and we’re always caught in reactive mode.”
Eric Rogers, a former Heritage Advisory Committee member, is one of many people thoroughly frustrated with the experience with the Sandford House. “If the fence had been put up after Sandford had initially transferred the property to developers it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble over the years. Why the City ever accepted a snow fence on the property is beyond me.”
“We have a heritage department and a property standards department. They both don’t seem to have done much in the past ten years in protecting this class of property,” adds Rogers. “People I’ve met on the site after the fire all wondered why the City hasn’t done anything to preserve it.”
New Ward 6 Councillor Carolyn Parrish is also wondering why vandals are all but invited to play in heritage structures. “They should be surrounded by firm, sturdy high fences, with huge ‘no trespassing’ signs posted,” she told News reporter Joe Chin this week. “Flood lights and cleaning up the grounds so they look maintained would also help.”
Stephen Wahl, who has been keeping an eagle eye on Sandford and the heritage process and planned to salvage much of the still-useable material from the house says that after this latest indignity, “the gloves are off.” He plans to press the City to follow up on the numerous work orders under its property standards bylaw which never seemed to be carried out by the owner.
By the way they fail to protect their own properties, many heritage building owners all but invite the ignoble fate they fall victim to, charges Wahl.
Somebody clearly has to draw a line in the sand or we are going to keep on playing heritage roulette forever in this town.
Yes, to be fair, we have saved many worthy properties over the years. But we have lost many, many more.
A 2002 study carried out by the University of Waterloo found Mississauga had the second-worst record of 22 municipalities surveyed in Ontario in saving candidate heritage buildings. From 1985 to 2001, Mississauga lost a total of 66 buildings that were either designated for preservation under the Heritage Act, or placed on the municipal inventory of buildings considered potentially worthy of designation. Only Richmond Hill, which lost 95 heritage properties, suffered more than Mississauga.
We have a new Heritage Act that supposedly includes real teeth the old one notoriously lacked.
Now, in the wake of yet-another landmark loss, we must somehow find the will to make sure that the Sandford House isn’t just another name on a future list of houses we didn’t-try-quite-hard-enough to preserve.

The call went out to the Filipino community in Mississauga and the GTA when one of their own — Sergio “Bu” Galido — needed a bone marrow transplant. It responded.
Boy did people respond — from as far away as North Carolina.
That’s where Karla Aguila, 28, lives. She came to Mississauga when she was just six years old and lived and was educated here until she moved down to the States three years ago because the opportunities were better for her in nursing.
In an e-mail after reading about Sergio’s leukemia, which is temporarily in remission, Karla offered her help. “As a registered nurse who takes care of children suffering from cancers like that of Mr. Galido, I understand his plight,” she said.
As a pediatric oncology nurse, Aguila sees children who are lucky enough to find a marrow match.
She keeps an eye on events in her old hometown through the Internet and that’s how she found Sergio’s story which prompted her offer to join the registry herself.
One of the problems for Galido is that there are very few Filipino-Canadians on the Bone Marrow Registry of Canadian Blood Services (CBS), so the chances of finding a match for him if he does need a life-saving transplant in the future, are severely reduced.
That’s why the family, with the assistance of Ward 6 and 11 Dufferin-Peel Separate School Trustee Luz del Rosario and CBS, set up the March 9-10 blood donor clinic at Erin Mills Town Centre. About 70 people were expected but a total of 142 units of blood, enough to save the lives of 426 people, were collected. Members of the Filipino community came from far and wide, including one family from Owen Sound. They have relatives living in Mississauga who have a son with leukemia.
Sergio’s wife Lea said her family, who all turned out in matching T-shirts they had made for the occasion, was very happy with the response.
Unfortunately, lots of those who came out were under the mistaken impression they could sign up on the spot for the bone marrow registry. In fact, says Sarah Hayden of CBS, people from 17- 50 years of age must read some educational material and complete a health assessment and a consent form. They can either do that online or call 1-888-2-DONATE to request an information package. Their information will be reviewed and they will then have give a small blood sample. If their health profile and blood sample are suitable, they will be added to the registry.
Lea Galido says many potential bone marrow donors who came out to help her husband may not actually sign up. “By the time they get home, they’re tired and they forget about it,” she said this morning. Some families have a language barrier dealing with online applications and many others just don’t have computers.
Because of privacy concerns, Galido could not speak directly to donors or gather their contact information.
Del Rosario says that while the clinic was excellent, a lot of people went away disappointed because they wanted to act immediately to find a match for Sergio.
That’s why she has set up another session Sat. March 31 at the Kalayaan Cultural Community Centre, 5225 Orbitor Dr. Unit 3, beginning at 11 a.m. to recruit more Filipino donors.
“We’re going to do an educational session and we are going to have a few laptops there so that, if people want to, they can gain access immediately and sign up,” says del Rosario, a former Citizen of the Year and long-time volunteer with Carassauga. Someone from Blood Services will be on hand to answer any questions.
The word is going out on the grapevine and del Rosario hopes to get another outstanding turnout.
No one is happier about that than Sergio, not because he necesaarily expects to find a match, but because the entire process builds up the registry that may well be critical for other Filipino-Canadians in future.
“It was pretty positive and not just for him,” says his wife of the Sergio Bu Memorial Blood Donot Clinic. “A lot of first-time donors came out. We hope they will continue to give. Sergio — he’s OK,” she says. “He’s a fighter.”
Looks like he has a growing army of allies in his battle, which is always a good thing.

Bill Rees was about 10 years old, on the summer porch of his grandfather’s farm, having supper with his family and a gaggle of cousins when his life’s work suddenly became clear.
“I was just sitting there, staring idly into space when it hit me like a ton of bricks: everything that was on the plate before me not only came from the farm, but by our own. It was an epiphany,” Rees said as he stood yesterday at Wilson Pond in front the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) campus where he would later deliver the keynote address for Environment Week.
“It was like the floor had fallen right out from under me and I was sucked down. We are what we eat and how we acquire it. It became almost an obsession with me to understand the human connection to the earth, in many other ways as well,” said the University of British Columbia professor, who did his undergraduate and Ph.D studies at U of T.
When he was in university, he could not study the human population ecology that fascinated him because, as the old joke goes, it hadn’t been invented yet. So he studied bird population ecology and then went into planning and carved out his own field.
Now, of course, the idea of the ecological footprint – the total amount of land and water required to support a particular human endeavour — the concept Rees envisioned, is ubiquitous.
In his “plausibly provocative” Snider lecture last night to a far-too-small audience in the Kaneff Centre, the 63-year-old professor made a compelling case that cities are unsustainable in their present number and constitution. “The world is in a state of overshoot,” he said. “Consumption exceeds our long-term capacity to keep producing” at this rate.
The earth is like a ship, Rees said in a particularly effective metaphor, “and we can overload it.” Then he reminded us that the first-class accommodations on the Titanic got wet just as fast as steerage, an obvious reference to the extravagant lifestyles of North Americans and Europeans compared to the rest of the world. Having already decimated much of our own forests and agricultural land, we now export fossil fuel exploitation to China and Third World countries.
“We are eroding the fundamental capital of our own existence,” Rees said.
Although media reporting on the Canadian census recently trumpeted the fact that 80 per cent of us now live in cities, we are more reliant than ever on food sources and energy sources outside of them.
Industrial farming means we crowd huge numbers of animals into one area, import fodder for them from lands which we pump full of artificial fertilizers and treat the real fertilizer, the waste of the farm animals, as a waste product. “This is not the work of an intelligent species,” Rees said in a comment that he applied to any number of our current practices.
The bottom line is that we (and that’s the big WE, everyone in the world) must reduce our eco footprint by 80 per cent, the UBC prof estimates.
The good news is that it can be done, says Rees, if we recognize the problem, understand that farmland now deemed worthless today near big cities may be worth 10-50 times more than land for housing in 50 years — and move back toward that old concept of self-reliance. California, which supplies 75 per cent of North America’s table vegetables, has already issued a report warning that its future crops may be jeopardized by irrigation shortages.
Rees recommended good old-fashioned City-states as a potential solution, a throwback of 100-150 years, to the days when an urban centre was supported by the surrounding countryside that fed its needs, literally, because food had to be only a day away from market or it wouldn’t keep.
Back to the days when everything on your plate could have come from your own farm or at least a farm not very far away. Back to a day when conspicuous consumption wasn’t an international competitive sport and when, ironically, enough, studies indicate people were happier with their own lives.
Back, one can only hope, to a sustainable future.

When Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty met with the editorial staff of The Mississauga News during the campaign leading up to the fall 2003 election, he was asked about the inanity of the pooling scheme that the Harris Tories had set up, which siphoned millions and millions of dollars out of Peel and into Toronto.
The theory was that Toronto’s bigger and better social services network served people from Peel and outlying regions, who gravitated there naturally.
While that certainly happened in some cases, handing our tax money to another municipality hardly seemed a reasonable recognition of the problem. Maybe those people would have stayed in Peel to get help if Toronto’s social services network wasn’t so much better-funded than ours.
Not only did pooling perpetuate the discrepancy in the relative strengths of the local social safety nets, but it was blatantly undemocratic. It meant Peel tax money was sent outside our borders to be spent by Toronto politicians. Ones we did not elect.
Mississaugans were, in effect, subsidizing a higher level of service in Toronto than we could provide for ourselves. It never made any sense.
McGuinty didn’t seem to be much concerned about the democratic deficit that day in 2003. Thank goodness he has changed his mind.
Maybe all those discussions with Ottawa about the fiscal imbalance caused him to look in the mirror.
In yesterday’s provincial budget, the Liberals announced that pooling will be slowly phased out over seven years with the end coming in 2013.
Peel Region Chair was a very happy man this morning. A day after pooling ended, he got to inaugurate the (long-overdue) green bin organics program.
At the Torbram Rd. Integrated Waste Facility, Kolb reflected on the decade-long fight to end the pooling scheme. “Ten years,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it.”
It’s not like Peel doesn’t have lots of its own projects on which to spend its money, starting with its public housing stock which is deteriorating and is in need of expensive refurbishing. It will take a one per cent increase in taxes for each of the next seven-eight years to pay for that alone.
While pooling is gone, there won’t be any cheque in the mail from Queen’s Park anytime soon. To wave a red flag about the pooling scheme, Peel has been withholding a portion of its pooling payment in protest for the past couple of years. Commissioner of Finance Dan Labrecque said, “it’s too bad we had to do to do that to get their attention.”
Peel still owes Ontario about $60-$61 million and has budgeted repayment of $59 million this year.
Good for the Liberals for phasing out pooling. Now, while you’re dealing with Harris errors and omissions, how about uploading some of those health and welfare costs?

On the day last November when the media got a preview of Pier F of Terminal 1 at Pearson International Airport, the most striking thing about the place wasn’t the people mover flat-escalator system, or the dramatic architecture of the glass-wrapped hammerhead. It was the huge, slightly foreboding presence of Tilted Spheres.
That’s the name of the public sculpture by San Franscisco-born, Yale-trained artist Richard Serra that is the centrepiece of the hammerhead.
The four gigantic pieces of solid steel curves, open at the top, are somewhat reminiscent of Darth Vader’s mask, split open and lying on its back. Interestingly enough, you could make neat Vader-like rumblings with your voice inside the sculpture, with attendant weird echoes bouncing all around.
On the media tour, Massachussetts-based architect Moshe Safdie talked about how light had been invited into the terminal building, how it has been designed to bring calm to travelling, one of the most stressful of all human activities, and how public art had been intentionally placed at the centre of Pier F as a symbol of how aesthetics and the utilitarian world of the airport can co-mingle( like domestic and international passengers).
Asked about Serra’s work, Safdie gushed, saying it connoted motion and, because of its unorthodox shape, geometry. “It creates a sense of tension and stability,” he said.
Well, a sense of tension has developed all right, mostly because some members of the public apparently believe that public art is a blackboard suitable for private messages.
The piece has been vandalized by numerous travellers who have scrawled their initials, happy faces and personal messages all over the coating that was applied to the steel to prevent it from rusting.
Tilted Spheres has turned into Curved Shambles.
What absolutely unconscionable, uncivil behaviour.
You wonder not only about the lunkheads who perpetrated such destruction but about their parents, friends and the numerous passers-by who must have witnessed it and done.... nothing.
No, it’s not the end of the world that some philistines want to paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa but this incident is another disturbing sign that the culture of entitlement is becoming dominant.
The GTAA is going to try to find a way to remove the graffiti and change the steel coating to eliminate further defacement. They will not cordon off the piece but they may well have a security guard on duty, or put up security cameras.
That may minimize the problem but it won’t address the root question: How do we change the pervasive attitude that people have the right to destroy public property so long as no one else is looking?

When her eldest daughter Emily was in her first years of elementary school, Jane Crooks was mystified about why she would bring home stacks and stacks of homework daily.
“When there was a spelling test on Friday, we worked on the words,” recalls her Mom in the family home in the new section of Old Meadowvale Village. She pauses a second for emphasis. “It was the most painful thing you ever want to go through.”
Emily was obviously bright but she was getting Ds in reading and writing. A succession of teachers at St. Richards, St. Albert of Jerusalem, St. Barbara and St. Julia suggested she wasn’t applying herself enough, but Mum knew best. There was a bigger issue.
A little research on the Internet and Crooks had a potential diagnosis of dyslexia.
An assessment by a woman in Oakville named Cathy Dodge Smith, who works using a special program developed by dyslexic American Ron Davis, confirmed Emily had the condition, often described as a learning disability.
Tonight, a confident 14-year-old Emily, now getting good marks in Grade 8, will meet Ron Davis for the second time. She will give her speech about dyslexia – the one that won the school contest and took her to the regional finals – and she will close it with her trademark trick: reciting the alphabet backwards.
In an interview after school yesterday at her home, Emily explained how she came to stop regarding dyslexia as a problem and started thinking of it as a gift.
Dyslexics have the ultimate visual learning style. As Emily explains in her speech, for dyslexics, “letters appear to be backwards, upside down, sideways, moving around or even floating in the air.”
That creates pure terror when they are asked to read aloud because they do not have the advantage of being able to “sound out” words. And the toughest words are often the shortest ones. That’s why Emily had to bring everything home from school to try to figure out what it meant.
Davis, a dyslexic himself, was age 38 when he came up with his own system of using the ability of dyslexics to think in pictures to their own advantage, by creating symbols for about 200 “trigger words” that give people the most problems.
When Emily sat down with her facilitator in Grade 4 for a week of work, they tackled the word “the” first. They looked up the meaning in the dictionary, Emily spelled it backwards and forwards, and they each used 10 examples of sentences with the word.
Then Emily took out the modelling clay and used one of those sentences to create the “trigger” that would shoot the daylights out of her problem with “the” every time she met it again. She modelled a man standing underneath a shower to symbolize the sentence “In The Shower.” Now, unconsciously, that trigger clicks in every time she sees the word. Within a few days of starting the program, her reading was markedly improved.
She and her Mum developed the other trigger words in days and days of review.
Tonight from 7-9 p.m. at the Mississauga Convention Centre on Derry Rd. W., Davis, who eventually became an engineer, author and sculptor will explain how he developed his method and why he thinks it should be in much broader use.
Emily, who would one day like to get into film-editing or something else very creative, says people underestimate, “all of the good things about dyslexia.” It helps her designing and executing assignments at school, like the xylophone she made for music class which earned an ‘A.’
When the math teacher asks student to manipulate shapes in their minds to figure out all the angles in geometry, Emily is always the first one with the answer.
In fact, some of the greatest artists and inventors in the world used their dyslexia to their advantage, people like Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Graham Bell, Isaac Newton, Pablo Picasso (that explains a lot) and Thomas Edison.
Not bad company at all for Emily.

This is the time of year when a little army of grey and brown creatures, with slight blue flecking on their sides, starts moving through the forests at University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM).
The Jefferson Salamanders are headed for their breeding pond, a natural depression in the forest floor filled with relatively pure water, where they will mate before returning to the forest. The resultant larvae have external gills to start but will first develop front legs, then rear ones. When they are fully developed, they will climb out of the pond and head into the dense hardwood forest themselves.
It’s a ritual that has been going on for hundreds, if not, thousands of years in the mature woodlot along the west bank of the Credit River, says Wayne Weller.
As an Erindale College graduate student in 1974, he spent a year capturing, studying and releasing the amphibians. His work under the supervision of Professor Gary Sprules led to publication of an article in the Canadian Journal of Zoology.
“It was the first authenticated record of Jefferson Salamanders in Canada,” Weller said yesterday in a telephone interview from Niagara where he now works as the senior environmental scientist for Ontario Power Generation.
Weller was also part of the Jefferson Salamander Recovery Team which did the groundwork that led to the indicator species being listed as nationally threatened in 2003.
Over the years Weller has maintained his interest in the Jefferson and blue-spotted salamander population at UTM, which he confirmed through his grad studies at more than 600 at one time. His “year in the woods” consisted of tracking the comings and goings to the pond, which is tricky because salamanders are nocturnal. They live in leaf litter or soil on the forest floor and are all but invisible to the non-scientist, except when they mate or migrate. He studied the development of the eggs and larvae. He trapped some of the migrants by putting up a zig-zagging drift fence that forced them into corners, where a small pit was dug, filled with collection canisters. “Unfortunately, we didn’t have the technology then to tag them.”
The same breed was also discovered by environmental enthusiast Donald Barber at the Cawthra Bush in Mississauga several years ago and is suspected of being a resident of the Mississauga Garden Park at Riverwood, just upriver from UTM. The Jefferson has been in the news recently because Ontario is providing a long-needed update of its 1971 Endangered Species Act.
More than three decades after Weller’s work, UTM Professors Sprules and Nicholas Collins would love to be supervising similar student studies of the Jefferson population. “If we wanted to get out there and get a good knowledge, this would be the time of year to be doing it,” says Collins.
Some support last year from Environment Canada and Credit Valley Conservation allowed some work to be done. Unfortunately the funds didn’t come through in time for the migration but the school has confirmed that the Jeffersons are still around. They put out boards and found some salamanders under them and, “we did see some mating activity, so we know they’re still there,” says Collins.
Now that new legislation is being put in place, the university is hoping that there will be some funding to go with the tougher rules to protect 133 species. A graduate student for a couple of years, a $10,000 grant, money for material and equipment would be a big help.
“We will likely be applying for a grant so we can study this in a really disciplined way,” says Collins.
Nowadays, you could place a tracking transmitter in a salamander’s back and learn far more than he was ever able to in his studies, says Weller.
As an undergrad, Weller, then living in Etobicoke, rode the shuttle bus out to the Mississauga Rd. campus for the first three years of his undergrad at Erindale. The South Building didn’t exist yet, so students like him who were in four-year programs, took their final year downtown. Weller plans to attend the 40th anniversary reunion here June 2.
Although some construction activity on campus encroached a little too close for comfort to the Salamander habitat a few years ago, Weller says the campus is an ideal location for long-term survival of the species. The natural conditions are obviously right and there is a watchful academic community keeping an eye on all that (non-student) scurrying in the woods.

Two weeks ago it was the Sandford House, now it’s the Gray House.
Mississauga’s depleted heritage catalogue appears to be sitting in the middle of a shooting gallery.
In retrospect, the Gray House never had a chance after the lease for the bar and restaurant was allowed to lapse by the new owners, Fram/Slokker. They bought it from the original owners, the Gray family that had founded St. Lawrence Starch.
A house unguarded is an invitation to disaster. The beautiful stained glass, some with 19th century designs, was ripped out. Ornate plaster structures, from which the chandeliers hung, disappeared. A fireplace was ripped from the wall.
The developer, Mississauga’s own Frank Giannone, a Port Credit resident since 1984 listened when a group of concerned residents, led by John Cassan, a local real estate agent, made a pitch to move the house. Giannone said he’d give it to them for a buck, and throw $200,000 into the pot for the restoration, whose cost just kept rising.
But there were problems, lots of problems. The fledgling group met with the City and started to realize the enormity of its task. The house probably could not legally be moved onto nearby Lion’s Park as planned. Where was the business plan to create and finance the marine museum to honour the rich fishing heritage of Port Credit? And always (understandably) there was the bottom line, how much money can you raise?
The developer, wanting to revisit an earlier Ontario Municipal Board case that approved two buildings of 10 storeys on the land, met with residents. A much more ambitious plan was hatched. In a deal valued at $7.5 million, Fram/Slokker would donate property for public uses that would refresh the dilapidated Lion’s Club pool and park nearby and incorporate the Gray House into a new branch library to replace the 50-year-old building, constructed on landfill beside the Credit River.
The idea was sailing along until the greater public got wind of the library move. Then everything swiftly fell apart.
Never underestimate the emotional attachment of a community to its schools, its parks or its libraries — the spaces in which they put down their roots. Residents love their library where it is, thank you, even with its outdated architecture, inadequate size and very obvious limitations.
Mayor Hazel McCallion tried her best to drive the deal through but local councillor Carmen Corbasson dissented. A council chamber full of residents helped convince most of her colleagues she was right.
The cost of the decision is the loss of the Gray House, as every councillor knew when they voted.
It’s hard to find a scapegoat in all this, although everybody is trying hard. Giannone says it’s been five years since the file was opened and he has been open to many alternatives. He feels members of the ratepayers group initially supported the deal, then changed their minds when the public opposition to the library move became evident.
The residents wonder how the onus of saving a significant public building somehow gets to be their prime responsibility. They are just a few people who care deeply about their community, not deal-brokers and fundraisers.
The condominium development is still on the books. Giannone wants to build a 22-storey apartment building and a 16-storey seniors’ residence.
With the Ontario government’s mandated intensification strategy for municipalities, this project in the shadow of the GO Station would seem to be the poster child for smart growth. If council doesn’t approve it, the OMB almost certainly will.
If that happens, a lot of people will look back and wonder why the Gray House had to take the fall for a deal gone wrong that seemed to make such obvious common sense.