Random Access

Last Sunday, Terry Wilson was in his backyard in Old Meadowvale Village when some passersby on Second Line West called out to him. Second Line is elevated behind his backyard and the visitors could see that there were several charming miniature structures there, including a hen house, a re-creation of the Silverthorn mill, and an emporium.
The visitors and their three children asked if they could come into the backyard. They were understandably charmed by the shady grove, where Wilson has lovingly created replicas of a bygone era. They are all made out of reused materials and many contain actual remnants of the old village. For instance, his mini mill building displays a mortice and tenon joint from the last real mill torn down in old Meadowvale in 1954.
At the request of his visitors, Wilson opened up the tiny church he has built on his property, which has a small pulpit and a half-dozen pews. “The mother went
inside and all of a sudden she began singing in this angelic, beautiful voice,” he says. “She sang an entire hymn a cappella.”
Wilson’s visitor isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, to feel the spirit of the special place she entered.
It is the spirit of a way of life that is largely gone now.
A descendant of one of the Group of Seven painters visited the backyard a couple of years ago and told Wilson that it would have made a beautiful backdrop for one of the classic paintings by one of the group.
Wilson and his mother Rosemary, who has her own unique rear yard sanctuary two doors down on Pond St., have deep roots in the village which was declared Ontario’s first heritage preservation district in 1980.
Their family forebears moved there in the 1930s. Rosemary, whose maiden name was Earle, grew up on a farm on Creditview Rd.
In her large backyard, Rosemary tends two different gardens. One is full of the splendour of old-fashioned perennials and wildflowers. The other is full of books.
In a beautiful raspberry coloured 100 sq. ft. building in her backyard (seen in the background above), Rosemary tends to the village’s literary needs with a small, eclectic collection of mostly-donated volumes.
On the wall there is a clipping of an old newspaper story about Minerva Castle of the Women’s Institute, who set up the first village library on what was then Rowancroft Gardens. Rosemary carries on the volunteer tradition.
Once a week, on Thursdays from 7-8 p.m. unless someone wants to chat longer, Rosemary throws open the doors to the collection, which works on the honour system. Library hours have become a sort of ritual, like picking up the mail in olden days, when people from the village can gather to chat.
You won’t find any Dewey Decimal system in place here. More like the hunt and pick method of book selection, although there are sections clearly devoted to gardening, poetry, cooking and, of course, heritage.
“I run the library the same way I run the garden,” says Rosemary with a laugh. “If something has found a certain place where it seems happy, I leave it where it is.”
Her 54-year-old son, a former high school teacher who spent many years at Meadowvale Secondary, says the backyards “are a response to what we see as the changing times. We’re losing all the little communities: Derry West, Palestine, Mt. Charles, Elmbank.”
The Derry Rd. bypass saved the village from certain destruction but it couldn’t save it from the vulgarities of the gentrified newcomers who began buying up properties and putting up monster homes.
“The traditional architecture was being compromised,” says Wilson. Some of the newcomers talked about putting in curbs and sidewalks (Egads) and some even considered chopping century-old maples, elms and oaks that give a cooling, shading effect that add to the overwhelming feeling that the village is covered by some sort of time capsule-bell jar.
“The economic pressures make it a real challenge to protect the character,” says the avid gardener and conservationist. “We just thought we’d try to create the feeling that the old village had in its golden days.”
Who says you can’t fight progress? All it takes is some imagination, a pack rat mentality, a little carpentry and voilà, you have architectural control over your own little heritage village, where, if he had his way Terry Wilson would even have a bylaw banning the bourgeoisie.

There are only three of them left now, of the dozen people who sat around the table November 18, 1965 at the first-ever meeting of the Erindale College council.
E. A. “Peter” Robinson recalled Saturday morning, at the kickoff for the 40th celebration of what is now called the University of Toronto Mississauga, that he had barely arrived at the downtown campus from his native England when he was asked if he would like to be the first associate dean of a new school starting to the west.
“I thought about it for 45 minutes and then decided I was being a pioneer, which was only appropriate as a new Canadian.”
My, how things have changed since then.
John Switzer, who acted as master of ceremonies Saturday, was on campus the first year classes were held there. There was the “preliminary” north building, two tennis courts, 185 students, 40 faculty and an intimate education you just wouldn’t believe. “They were small classes of six or seven students that were like graduate seminars with all of these professors who were wonderful characters.”
There are a lot of anomalies about UTM, not the least of which is that students study there for four or five years, then go downtown at the end of the process to pick up their sheepskins at Convocation Hall. In some cases, it might be their first trip down there.
This year, in conjunction with the 40th anniversary, the school decided to do things differently.
That’s how 1,100 graduating students and their parents were invited to piggy-back on the kickoff of the 40th anniversary celebrations Saturday on a wickedly warm day.
There was an academic procession from the CCT building (There’s no I for Information available in it anymore apparently)‚ to the Recreation, Athletic and Wellness Centre, better known as the RAWC, as in Rock.
There were several formulaic speeches, but none, unfortunately, from former Premier Bill Davis, (and a great student of the area’s great founding political father, T.L. Kennedy) who is a master of the form. Instead of having someone reflect on the great history of the campus and its special people, (Principal J. Tuzo Wilson’s breakthrough work on plate tectonics, the battle led by Mike Lavelle to get Erindale and its basketball team into the OUAA in the 1970s, the late Archie French’s famous “den” in the gym basement, former grad student Roberta Bondar’s trip into space with the campus crest or the burgeoning forensics program and the green initiatives on campus) we got grad Rob Follows and his wife Katrina giving an inspirational travelogue on climbing the highest peaks on seven continents. Interesting, but inappropriate.
The best speech of the day may have come from the youngest speaker. Valedictorian Emmanuel Tolias reflected on the huge changes too: the ones that have come since this 37th grad class arrived on campus. The bulge of the double cohort helped pry capital funds – finally — out of Queen’s Park. When these students began class at UTM, there was no CCT building, there was no underground parking on campus and there was no Hazel.
Well, there was Hazel in the municipal sense but there was no “Hazel McCallion Academic Learning Centre,” the building that bears such a pretentious name to honour such an unpretentious person. The students have taken matters into their own hands, as is their wont, and shortened it.
Tolias, a product of the local Dufferin-Peel system and one of the winners of this year’s Gordon Cressy Awards for outstanding extracurricular service, asked his fellow graduates to recall how different the landscape looked four years ago, let alone 40.
“And don’t worry, you are not alone. That big screen in the CCT building seems peculiar to a lot of us,” said Tolia, drawing knowing laughs from his peers. “We know that things have really grown because even the hot dog guy, Mike, had to expand his business.”
Representing the interactive generation, Tolias good-naturedly goaded the parents into yelling at their children, “You Are Ready” to face the world. The grads gave the same message to their peers and then had to yell at their parents — “I Am Ready.” To which most probably replied, “Not for grad school at these prices, we hope.”
Leave the last sane word to Peter Robinson, who lives overseas once again but still makes the sojourn back to Canada each June to hand out the E.A. Robinson Medal for academic excellence at the UTM convocation downtown. He will do that again a week from now.
“After all these years, I have not lost my enthusiasm for this place,” he said. “That probably means it is still on the right path.”
Sometimes the right path is more than a little off the beaten track, but it’s worth the journey to get there.

Well, the pre-election civil war in the Tory camp in Mississauga South is over, and it ended as might have been predicted, with democracy being beaten back into the corner where it can cower in shame — unless we need to call it out for a ceremonial curtain call.
When did it end?
Some would say it was the moment that John Tory agreed to have Tim Peterson cross the floor to join the Tories.
In a riding that Tory was at one time rumoured to be considering for himself, the leader agreed to accept Peterson, who crossed with the clear understanding he would be the Tory candidate. The decision didn’t just make him the black sheep in his own historically Liberal family, it made him one in the eyes of a lot of long-time, dyed-in-the-wool Conservatives in the riding too.
Most of the association already thought it had identified the rightful successor to provide the kind of low-key but solid community representation epitomized by the last two MPPs, Margaret Marland and Doug Kennedy.
Effie Triantafilopoulos had been working for a quarter century to prepare herself as a candidate. The lawyer had experience serving with federal ministers in Ottawa, at the helm of a major charitable institution and had served in virtually every capacity for the party. She ran because, “I wanted to make a positive change and I felt we didn’t have a strong representative at Queen’s Park.”
The nomination already seemed well in hand when Mr. Tory blind-sided her and the other two candidates, Brad Butt and Zoran Churchin. They folded their tents politely but Triantafilopoulos, emboldened by the outrage within the association, decided to stand her ground.
Despite what the party said, the rules did not seem to guarantee Peterson a free ride to the nomination. When the local Tory association defied president Dianne Lawson and voted to hold an open nomination, it looked for an instant that floor-crossing might not be its own reward.
However, the executive committee had second thoughts and later reversed its position on holding a nomination contest in an extremely close vote. Triantafilopoulos was left stranded. There was nowhere to appeal, except the courts, where an expensive and divisive battle awaited.
So she gave up the fight, not graciously, but in time to save Peterson and Tory further embarrassment.
You don’t get that many chances in politics, and you can hardly blame the Port Credit resident for feeling her best opportunity had been thwarted, and by the inferior (in her opinion) candidate she set out to unseat in the first place.
“I was very disappointed with what happened,” the never-an-official candidate said after her decision to abandon the non-race. She likens the experience to being struck by lightning. “Now I’m going to take time to recharge, take a holiday and just be a civilian again.”
When her family decided she would go for the nomination a year ago, they intended it to be a one-shot deal. Right now, she feels like her chance has come and gone. The former executive director of the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association found the whole experience, save the outcome, “superb. I feel I’ve grown so much.”
In what is started to sound like a trend, she will work for the party but not in Mississauga South.
And she still feels that the nomination rules ought to be changed. Mississauga-Streetsville MP Wajid Khan was not guaranteed the federal Tory candidacy when he crossed the floor and no one else should be, she argues.
“The rules ought to be clarified so you can have a contested nomination,” says Triantafilopoulos. “That way, if you change parties and you win the nomination, you create credibility for yourself.”
Ah yes, credibility. Something that is so easy to call for and so difficult to earn.
Triantafilopoulos may have caused the party she hoped to serve a painful couple of months of negative publicity, but it is she who emerges from this sad little sidebar having gained the most in reputation. She stood up for herself when the system stiffed her and she refused to just fold her tent and salute the new, party-approved instant Tory.
Believe they call that character, something they don’t give out with your party card.

It’s only appropriate that one of the peregrine falcon chicks that was banded from the nesting box on the top of the Mississauga Executive Centre at 1 Robert Speck Pkwy. Monday should be named Ishaq.
Not only does it lend some Mississauga-style diversity to the chicks’ nomenclature, which tends to consist of very Anglo-sounding names, but it honours the man without whom the urban nest site in the City’s downtown core would never have happened.
Ishaq Gilyana started working with Oxford Properties Group, which owns the building, way back in 1987. He remembers coming on to the site with another man and marking the corners of the future building with tires under the direction of Harold Shipp himself, who kept an eye on the location from one of the adjoining high-rise office towers that he had built first.
Gilyana even remembers watching horses graze on the property when it was a horse farm and City Hall was located just across Hurontario St. at 1 City Centre Dr.
One day about a decade ago Gilyana, the handyman for MEC 1 as it is commonly called, went up to the rooftop to check things out. It was a cold day, with some snow still on the roof.
As he checked the area near the conning tower, Gilyana noticed that something strange was going on. There were small bones scattered all around the place and what looked like feathers. A piece of wood was sitting on an angle that, as it turned out, was where a pair of falcons had taken up residence.
Eventually the Canadian Peregrine Foundation was brought into the picture and a proper nest box was installed on the roof in 2001. The nesting pair of falcons — who now stay year-round because the pigeon pickings are so good (it’s still close to City all don’t ’ya know) took out a long-term lease and began producing regular broods.
Nearby Sts. Peter and Paul Elementary School got involved, more or less adopting the birds as a neighbourhood cause. They have invited the Peregrine Foundation to come to make their presentations at the school. They have invited the mayor to speak. She says it’s one of her favourite schools because it’s named for her sons, although we’ll take a wild guess that Her Worship hasn’t always found her sons, Peter and Paul, to be saints.
For the last couple of years, some of the falcon chicks have been named in honour of the school (Peter and Paula were two of last year’s crop) and some by the building managers.
Sante Esposito, general manager for Oxford, says the birds have often been named in some way for the building’s tenants, especially those on the 16th floor who have to put up with dirty windows from their messy avian neighbours. A window washer would take his life in his hands to try to do his job while the peregrines were raising a brood nearby.
This year, Esposito decided to name one of the birds Manny, in honour of the building’s operations supervisor, whose father died last week.
The other name chosen was Ishaq, not just to mark the fact that Gilyana discovered the nest but also to honour the great job that he does. “We call him Superman,” Esposito said. “Everybody in the complex appreciates his good work.”
As if on cue as Esposito is being interviewed, a minor crisis develops in the banding process. The birds each have one tiny silver band put on one leg indicating they are registered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and one black one on the other, indicating they are registered in the national Canadian data bank. The bands will be life-savers for the birds if they are trapped on their migration to the south, proving they are part of a recovery program for the threatened species.
In order to tell the individual birds apart in case of later mishaps, the silver bands are wrapped with different colours of electrical tape. That makes it easy for the volunteers who will be watching the birds for the next few weeks to know who is already flying and who has fallen out of the nest again and needs another elevator ride to its rooftop home.
At the last minute, it turns out that there aren’t enough colours of tape on hand for the four chicks.
So guess who is enlisted to instantly some other coloured tape?
A short few minutes later, Ishaq is back with what is needed.
Yes, it’s Superman to the falcon’s rescue again.
Finally, the man who started the nesting site, gets to relax for a minute and pose with the bird named for him.

It was dress down day for Dalton today when the Premier of the Province — who was tieless to promote the new “cool clothing campaign” he launched this morning, breezed into The News to unofficially launch his re-election campaign.
He was renewing acquaintances with the regional press that is deemed a lot friendlier by his handlers than those scofflaw reporters at Queen’s Park who shout rude questions and cut off Mr. McGuinty’s recitations of his party’s accomplishments over the past four years.
While no one interrupted his various infomercials while he was in the newsroom, it’s safe to say that the Premier’s words were not exactly taken at face value.
There was a marked contrast to the last visit McGuinty made to The News, in the campaign lead-up to the Oct. 10, 2003 vote in which he beat Mike Harris and the Tories. Counter-punching from the Opposition benches is, needless to say, a much easier position to assume than defending a government record that inevitably includes missteps.
If you were describing the style of McGuinty’s responses this morning, the phrase, “Float Like a Butterfly, Baffle Like a Bee” would come to mind.
Even more than many in his profession, Muhammad McGuinty has mastered the Alley Shuffle, as in, let’s lead them up the ‘we’re-doing-way-better-in-health-care-and-education-than-we-were-before’ alley and see if they notice I didn’t answer the question.
Queries about the financial struggles of our school boards, the fact that Peel is falling behind on the “Fair Share” issue, the continuing burden of social services downloaded by the Mike Harris regime onto the municipal tax base, difficulties dealing with growth issues at our hospitals, etc. were prompts for the Premier to plead that voters look at the big picture.
McGuinty wants to take everyone back in his time machine to the fall of ’03 when 26 million learning days had been lost to strikes, hospitals had been closed and merged, nurses laid off, meat and water inspectors fired, etc. etc.
Asked about his government’s failure to live up to its promise to review and fix the school funding formula, the Premier responds with figures about the enrolment increases at local school boards and the funding increases from Ontario (15.4 per cent enrolment hike for Peel, 43.2 per cent more in funding; 3.3 per cent enrolment hike for Dufferin-Peel, 27.9 per cent more funding.)
Running against ex-leader Mike Harris last time worked for the Liberals, so it looks like they are going to try it again.
To be fair, the government has made significant advances — in starting to reverse municipal downloading, phasing out GTA pooling, increasing post-secondary funding, expanding enrolment in colleges and universities and stabilizing the education system.
McGuinty wants us to know that, under all that rhetoric, there’s a nice guy trying to get along with everybody and get himself re-elected. Or as he put it, “We are not the repository of all wisdom. One of the most important things that the provincial government can bring to the table is good will and I think we’ve done a pretty good job of that.”
Is that good enough to earn another term?
Much will depend on how John Tory and the Progressive Conservatives position themselves for this race and whether or not the Liberals can pin the Harris legacy to Tory’s coattail. We’ll find out a lot more about that this weekend when Tory reveals major planks in his party’s platform at its Toronto convention.

The big bang at Lakeview June 25 may sound like nothing compared with the hullabaloo to follow, once the dust has cleared and the layers of steel, equipment and concrete have all piled up on each other.
There was an excellent turnout of ratepayer groups Tuesday when Ontario Power Generation put on a small information centre at the site to explain what is going to happen Mon. June 25. That’s when the powerhouse at the venerable station will bite the dust, as the stacks did a year ago.
It’s safe to say that the residents weren’t just there for nostalgic reasons. They want to know what OPG and the provincial government have in mind over the long term for the gigantic site. Construction on Lakeview began June 1, 1958 and Premier John Robarts pushed the button to start the first unit June 20, 1962.
As it so happened, current Premier Dalton McGuinty dropped into our newsroom two days later, so there was an opportunity to pose the obvious question: hasn’t Mississauga done its part already by hosting the GTA pollution party for the past 43 years?
Mississauga South MPP Tim Peterson says the issue was a key reason for his decision to cross the floor to the Tories. Peterson cited his disillusionment with the Liberals for pushing the power agenda in Mississauga, given the air quality deterioration substantiated by the Clarkson Air Shed Study done by the Ministry of the Environment. Peterson says the Grits are poised to approve the Southdown Sithe plant, the Greenfields South plant on Loreland Ave. AND the new natural-gas plant at Lakeview.
The Premier began his response, as he did with many of the specific questions he was asked, with an appeal to look at the “macro” level. McGuinty said the government has lost the equivalent generating power of Niagara Falls and was left by the Tories without adequate power supplies for the future. The Liberals have a new, greener plan pending but also have a standing obligation to supply and meet electricity needs.
“The advantage that Lakeview has is that the transmission capacity is there,” said the Premier.
Then comes the cruncher: “All communities are going to have to ask themselves, not what OPG can do for you, but what they can do to help meet our electricity needs.”
That answer is bad news for all those folks living in the “micro” environment around Lakeview.
The memorandum of agreement between OPG and Enersource Mississauga, to explore the possibility of a Lakeview gas-fired plant, which could be 800 megawatts or more, is evidently very much alive. When the chief pooh-Bah for the only shareholder in OPG, the government of Ontario, says even by inference that it makes sense to put a gas plant on Lakeview, you can be sure it’s in the cards.
McGuinty also worked into his response a reference to how proud he is of the post-Peterson era Liberal candidate in Mississauga South, Royal Bank vice-president Charles Sousa.
What stand will the newly-minted Liberal candidate take on the power plant, which will undoubtedly be the number 1 local issue in the South in the pending provincial election? Will Sousa play Mutt to McGuinty’s Jeff?
There’s an interesting parallel in the municipal microcosm too. Mayor Hazel McCallion has been very supportive of the idea of a new-generation Lakeview, which would provide an important local load source and improved security of service for Mississauga residents.
McCallion has been on a PUC or a hydro commission almost since the day she entered politics four decades ago.
But one of the newly-appointed councillors to the Enersource board is Ward 1 Councillor Carmen Corbasson, who represents Lakeview. She has made her anti-power politics stance for that property very clear.
Stay tuned. There are going to be lots of interesting force fields at work here.

Thanks to Jim Tovey, head of the Lakeview Ratepayers’ Association, for the picture of the powerhouse.

There is nothing like being taken into the hands of a true professional and gently guided for a couple of hours by a craftsman who has spent an entire career learning the nuances of his work.
That applies to everything from woodworking to political speechifying, which you could call wordworking, I suppose.
They should have posted a sign at the front of the Royal Bank Theatre Sunday night stating “Quiet — True Professional At Work” – but they didn’t need it.
All it took was the first few notes of Don Menza’s arrangement of Groovin’ Hard to realize that we were going on a great ride, thanks to the wonderful tone of the venerated Pat LaBarbera, who was the guest artist with the Mississauga Big Band Jazz Ensemble.
LaBarbera is one of those guys who gets taken for granted because he’s so firmly ingrained in the cultural landscape of the jazz scene in Toronto and Canada. He has the credentials — starting off with the Buddy Rich Band, travelling the world for years with the superb drummer Elvin Jones of the famous Detroit Jones boys (Thad and Hank who is still going strong), composer, recording artist and in the latter stages of his career, a great teacher at Humber, York and U of T.
And boy did he put the lie to the old saying that those who can’t.... teach. More like those who can... still play.
The Mt. Morris, N.Y. native whose brother Joe is a drummer of note and whose trumpeting brother John is a master of arranging (as we saw Sunday), has a habit of unearthing orphan songs: minor standards that deserve to be much more widely known but aren’t. His Juno-award winning CD called Deep in a Dream is a whole collection of such hidden treasures.
He played a couple of beauties in his first set with the 18-piece MBBJE. One was Fantazm, a 1948 Duke Ellington piece that his brother rearranged for his 2005 big band CD of the same name. It started with John Frias on baritone sax doing a lovely Harry Carney impression. A muted trombone ensemble section followed, then drummer Jay Boehmer on malletts transformed into LaBarbera on soprano, a too-neglected instrument. The piece conjured images, inevitably, of sinuous snake-charming music that put you into a bygone era.
Fantazm was followed by an exquisite arrangement by Ron Collier (who once directed MBBKE) called Midsummer, this time with LaBarbera on tenor. It was if we were suddenly swinging in the hammock at the cottage on a peaceful summer’s afternoon, with our favourite book and our favourite tenor man at our beck and call, performing our favourite song.
The saxophonist recalled how Collier, who worked with Ellington, had the great band leader come to Humber College to do a workshop following his famous Midsummer Night’s dream concert at the Stratford Festival.
The concert wasn’t all peaches and cream by any stretch and everyone got to stretch out on pieces like Sweet Georgia Brown and Walk on The Wild Side.
Tenor Time offered LaBarbera trading bars, and friendly barbs, with Dave Coules who more than held his own for the home side.
It was a wonderful evening which, unfortunately, did not draw the audience it deserved. Those lucky enough to be there recognized what they experienced, however, and rewarded the guest and his swingin’ hosts with what MBBJE said was its first-ever standing ovation. It was, you should pardon the pun, soundly deserved.

Even when he was a kid starring in variety shows and drama presentations at Fairview Public School and T.L. Kennedy high school, Larry McLean always knew what he wanted to be.
“I wanted to be an actor so bad,” chuckles McLean as he sits on the patio of his Erin Mills West home, looking a lot younger than his 53 years.
Well, every once in a while McLean can still indulge his childhood passion – by writing himself into scenes in the numerous film and TV series he directs.
Not bad for a guy who got into the business via the back door — getting his first break when someone saw him jumping cars on his motorcycle on CTV News and asked him if he would be interested in some film stunt work.
By then he was already known as “the other Hurricane” in Mississauga. There was Hurricane Hazel McCallion, who jumped political barriers like no one before her and there was Larry ‘Hurricane’ McLean, Canada’s answer to Evil Knievel, who jumped cars and trucks with equal nerve.
As Larry recalls it, one of the first times he met the mayor was at the opening of the McDonald’s restaurant on Millcreek Dr. and Erin Mills Pkwy. Hazel cut the red ribbon and Larry jumped several cars of different colours in the parking lot.
The stunt business was lucrative but dangerous. McLean broke his leg on national U.S. television on CBS Sports Spectacular in 1978 at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. There were numerous broken bones on other occasions.
His stunt work on film included TV series like Robocop and Due South. He became stunt coordinator, talked directors into giving him a few lines of dialogue every once in a while and, most importantly, watched, learned and asked questions about why and how shots were set up.
The stunt work, “was a launching pad for me to get into the film industry,” says McLean with an accurate, accidental pun.
He struck up a friendship with director Paul Haggis (who has gone on to direct Million Dollar Baby and Crash since) which led to a chance to do second-unit directing. “He gave me a chance to direct a few full episodes of Due South, which turned out great, and it just went from there.”
McLean has worked all over the place in the business, including at City Hall. A bout of insomnia not too long ago reminded him of one of his first jobs in Mississauga. At 3 a.m. he found himself watching Switching Channels, the first feature film shot at the Mississauga Civic Centre in 1987. The movie featured Burt Reynolds, Christopher Reeves, Ned Beatty and Kathleen Turner, who did a star turn coming down the Great Staircase before its sweeping expanse was ruined by building officials who insisted on the installation of safety railings.
“I jumped off one of the balconies” in the Great Hall, recalls McLean. Wow. Many’s the time we have all come out of the second floor chambers after a seven-hour marathon and wanted to do that, but Larry’s the one who got to live the dream.
McLean’s upstairs pool room is lined with incredible mementoes of his career from the numerous friendships he’s developed with people like Billy Ray Cyrus, whom he directed in the TV series Doc, Burt Reynolds, Dick Van Dyke, Harry Morgan, etc. etc. One favourite shot features George Wendt (Cheers) and John Candy whom he worked with on Incident in a Small Town. They are holding up a birthday greeting for McLean’s pal, Mark Portugal, who was a pitcher at the time with the San Francisco Giants.
When his pal Joe Walsh of the Eagles comes through town later this week, McLean will be at Casino Rama for the show.
He’s in between gigs at the moment, but has some irons in the fire. He could be directing Pam Anderson in a new spy series called Havana, doing a Disney series called Aaron Stone and/or be working again with John Watters in a true-life crimes series which is called Love You to Death in Canada and ‘Til Death Do Us Part in the States.
If it all seems a little overwhelming for a guy who grew up in Cooksville and whose 89-year-old dad Albert was a goal judge at Dixie Gardens Arena, well, it is. A backyard rose garden dedicated to his mother Meriam, who died three years ago, helps keep him grounded.
For the past year, he has been dating Mississaugan Barb Benson who has “stolen my heart and is my rock when the film business gets crazy.”
McLean realizes he could just as easily have been one of those stunt guys listed at the end of the movie credits, to whose memory a film has been dedicated.
“I was lucky to come out as unscathed as I did,” says McLean. “When I look back at some of that footage now, it’s scary. I broke my wrist, my leg, my ankle and my collarbone. I could have been a paraplegic or worse.
“Yeah, I’m blessed that it led me into the film business. From aspiring actor to doing stunts to stunt co-ordinator, it’s been amazing. But I love directing and I hope it will take me to my grave.”
Which should happen, as long as someone doesn’t offer him a feature role in front of the camera.

Nothing is coming easily to Tim Peterson these days, including the walkover nomination he was promised when he made the decision to leave the Liberal caucus to join the non-musical group known as John and the Tories.
It looked liked the public squabbling in the ranks of Mississauga South Conservatives was all a moot (or should that be mute?) point a couple of weeks ago, after Effie Triantafilopoulos threw in the towel in her battle to force an open nomination for the seat.
Not so.
Still stinging from Peterson’s decision and by the way their former enemy was foisted on them by a distant party executive that refused to abide any questioning of its wisdom, a dissident rump of the executive is now questioning if the MPP’s nomination meeting tomorrow night has been duly constituted.
Riding President Dianne Lawson faced a barrage of questions Monday night as the latest executive session turned rancourous.
Several members were upset that they learned, via a letter they had received that same day, of the nomination four nights later. Lawson explained that the party approved new rules March 25 that allow the nomination period to be shortened in appropriate circumstances, such as the acclamation for Peterson.
That didn’t sit well with many members who said they were not consulted.
When they looked at the revised rules later, they found that the nomination period can be shortened by the party, “when petitioned by a riding association for a shorter timeframe.” That got them even more exercised because no one remembered providing such authorization.
“This is totally, totally wrong,” board director Roy Willis said today of how the meeting was called. “Nobody’s against the nomination process, but you have to follow the rules,” he said.
“The rules were changed and we weren’t told they were changed,” adds director Lynne Butler. “I think you can see that the riding association is not being given options about things.”
Lawson, who has been the standard bearer for the party brass in the riding, is getting very, very tired of the refusal of some members to accept the obvious fact that Peterson is here to stay.
She says the executive did approve a motion April 10, asking that the party call a nomination meeting “expeditiously.” She says she followed that directive in asking for the meeting at Clarkson Secondary School at 8 p.m. tomorrow.
Asked why she didn’t bring that up when cross-examined about it Monday, Lawson said, “it (the meeting) was so hectic, I’d forgotten it.”
The riding president is “not sure what the problem is” with the dissidents. “Effie has accepted a position on the provincial strategy team,” so the fireworks should be all over, says Lawson.
But the bitterness engendered by the red carpet rolled out for Peterson, whom many of the faithful consider a less-than-stellar candidate, is not dissipating quickly.
Some are still questioning Lawson’s actions, saying that the request of the executive for the early meeting was in the context of having a complete, open and democratic nomination, not the coronation that now awaits Peterson. The director who placed the motion, Ed Kowal, calls the president’s interpretation, “an affront to civility.”
The good news for the Tories is that — since they’ve been so good at circling the wagons and shooting inwards during the nomination process — their aim should be pretty straight by the time they start shooting at some Liberals.

How do you convince Mississauga residents of the value of a precious environmental resource that they can’t see?
That’s the dilemma created by the Creditview Wetlands – the amazing natural phenomenon located in the Sherwood Mills subdivision north of Eglinton Ave. and east of Creditview Rd.
You remember the convoluted story of the public acquisition of the place: It was all set to be developed for a subdivision in 1987 when academics from UTM took a look at plant samples, and realized that the wetland was a remnant from the Ice Age.
What followed was a prolonged battle by environmentalists, led by botanist Jocelyn Webber, to convince City council that the place was worth saving and then to convince the provincial government to contribute to its purchase.
The developers claimed it was a man-made wetland only a decade old, which would be a breeding ground for encephalitis-bearing mosquitoes.
By the time Webber finished her research, it had gone from a class 7 wetland to class 2. There are only two of those in Ontario. Mississauga avoided a nasty OMB battle when it negotiated a deal to buy the property for $3 million plus in 1998.
The reason that no one knew about this sparkling jewel was that it was surrounded with heavy growth that created a visual barrier. It was only when you entered by canoe that the wonders of the hummocks, peat bog and the fantastic ferns became evident. Asked how such a treasure could go undiscovered for so long, Webber once said, “simply because no one knew it was there.”
You could argue that things haven’t changed much, at least for the general population. Even people who live a stone’s throw from the wetland, which is home to innumerable rare plants, trees, amphibians and unique birds for this area, don’t realize it’s there.
To protect the area, the subdivision built around it was reconfigured to try to provide a buffer of parkland and school yards up against it. Despite dire predictions that it would dry up in a few years, this natural marvel — totally reliant on surface drainage— continues to astound the oddsmakers.
Of course, it has a lot of help from its growing legion of friends, chief among them Fallingbrook Public School teacher Gary Mascola. He has energized its protection by engaging his students in active stewardship, with the assistance of the City, the Credit Valley Conservation and groups such as Eco-Action, which is helping to provide funding for much-needed buffer plantings that ensure pesticides from surrounding homes don’t do damage.
On one of two recent planting days, when students put in another whack of saplings and shrubs, they concentrated their efforts in a corner of the wetland which is finally going to give us a window into its wonders. A $100,000 project developed through a City master plan prepared for the wetland in 2003 is providing an elevated observation area. There the public may finally get to see at least a glimpse of what the fuss is all about. The photo above shows what the view looks like from there now.
Michael Gusche, project coordinator for the City’s community services department, seems like the perfect guy to oversee the job. He’s a reformed engineer, one of those guys who a generation ago probably would have plowed the wetland under without a second thought. “I was really troubled by all the hard engineering work I was doing,” he says in explaining his conversion. “Now I’m able to apply these skills to the environmental side.”
The elevated observation area includes a mini-arboretum of off-beat tree species such as shagbark hickory. There will eventually be three interpretative panels as well.
It’s not exactly a picture window at the moment. “The arborists are going to come and take a careful look at the forest wall and see if they can selectively prune and trim out some of the area so we can open up the vistas,” he says.
Maybe then we can catch a glimpse of an American black duck or a green-winged teal.
Grade 7 student Pooja Salooja went to Sherwood Mills school and didn’t even know the wetland was on its doorstep until students found a turtle on the playground one day.
Now, the member of the Down 2 Earth environmental club at Fallingbrook can rhyme off the names of all the rare plant species (Black Chokeberry, American Larch, Highbush Cranberry, late Lowbrush Blueberry, Virgina Chain Fern and Velvetleaf Blueberry.)
Asked to diverge from her script to explain what she thinks it will take to keep the wetland alive, Salooja says thoughtfully, “we need to get everyone involved to show them they are partners in this. It should be good if everyone takes care of it.”
To amend an old aphorism, when God closes a development door, he opens a little window on paradise.

If you had a choice of a beautiful towering waterfront penthouse, hand-crafted just for you or a loft in a 1950s-era industrial vestige from another age, which would you choose?
That’s the choice that the resident peregrine falcons at Lakeview Generating Station were offered this spring and the boxy old powerhouse at the power station proved to be a chick magnet to them – much to the inconvenience of all of the humans trying to manage their lives.
Ontario Power Generation (OPG), working in consort with the Canadian Peregrine Foundation (CPF), paid for construction of an 80-ft. tower last year that they hoped would become the new home for the raptors, but it didn’t work.
The birds like to be on the highest point of land possible, which is why they nest on cliff faces when they aren’t living in the suburbs.
Even though huge nets were draped across the Lake facade of the powerhouse to try to prevent the falcons from making another nest on a ledge, a small hole was apparently ripped open by the wind and they set up housekeeping there. On a recent tour of the site in anticipation of the demolition of the powerhouse scheduled for next Monday morning, one falcon could clearly be seen at his/her post.
Officials from CPF and OPG have been negotiating for weeks about what to do about the falcon dilemma and had worked out some tentative plans.
Against its better judgment, says Mark Nash of CPF, that group was preparing to assist Ministry of Natural Resources biologists remove the young chicks from their parents. Because of the danger of being attacked by the fierce birds, the biologists were going to be ensconced for their protection in a cage similar to the kind that divers use underwater when dealing with sharks.
The babies were late hatching and could not have regulated their own body temperatures without their parents, so they were to be taken to the CPF Wildlife Centre where they would have been raised, fed without human contact and eventually released back into the wild.
It was not the best solution but given the pending destruction of the powerhouse, it was the best of a bad lot of alternatives.
Alas, the effort is no longer necessary. There were three eggs in the nest originally but one disappeared some time ago. Only one egg hatched last Tuesday and by Thursday, there was no sign of any chick.
It’s unlikely that any other predator could get at the area because of the nets. The chick may have died or fallen prey to illness which has taken some others this spring, and the parents may have eaten the remains or removed from the ledge.
“We’re a little befuddled about what happened,” said Nash. “It goes to show again that Mother Nature is pretty cruel.”
A rescue is no longer required.
There was more bad news this morning from the Mississauga Executive Centre site at 1 Robert Speck Pkwy. where the second of four fledglings has died. Officials from nearby Square One called to say that they found a peregrine body, after one of the chicks fell to the ground — again — while learning to fly Sunday. It then took off again and flew west towards the dangerous parking lots across Hurontario St.
Earlier, the chick named Manny smashed against the building on a test flight and was killed.
The CPF volunteers have rescued the birds from the ground a dozen times already, bundling them into a bag and taking them back up to the 17th floor via elevator to the nesting box.
Things are going better at the St. Lawrence Cement site where there were four fledglings.
The best bit of news that Nash had to report about the Lakeview site, which seems to have been dogged with bad luck through the years, actually came a couple of weeks ago.
The adult falcons have shown no interest in the past in the artificial nesting box built for them, so that OPG could comply with legislation that prohibits the destruction of habitat of an endangered species. But this spring, Nash has seen both and the male and the female perched on the tower.
“That is very significant,” says Nash. “It demonstrates a huge acceptance of that box.”
It bodes well for next year when, with the Four Sisters blown to the ground and the powerhouse gone, the Peregrine-Tower-By-The-Bay condo, “will be the only game left in town,” says Nash.
Maybe then, the falcons will decide that the gentrification of Lakeview really does make it a good place to successfully raise a family.

They were angry. They were upset. They had been manipulated by their party leaders and they wanted their pound of flesh.
Many of the members of the Mississauga South Provincial Progressive Conservative Party got what they came for too.
Tim Peterson sat in the front row, saying nothing, nervously fingering a bottle of water and watching his alleged nomination meeting turn into a donnybrook of the first order. The party and Peterson got roasted by the membership, and there really wasn’t anything funny about it.
Friday night saw one of the most unusual political nominations in the history of local politics, as many of the long-standing members who had built the provincial Tory dynasty in the South gave their party leaders a little lesson in keeping in touch with the grassroots.
It wasn’t a pretty sight.
The formulaic ‘let’s-all-hold-hands-and-be-friends after a tough fight’ nomination scenario turned into ‘let’s-all-just-show-the-world-how-deeply-divided-we-really-are’ scenario.
There was long-time Tory Roy Willis calling for immediate adjournment of the meeting because of the questionable way in which it was called. Most of the audience at Clarkson Secondary School chanted “Call the Vote, Call the Vote” in response.
One of leader John Tory’s top advisors spent most of the evening verbally taunting Willis whenever he spoke.
Chair Blair McCreadie, president of the party, responded to the audience’s unruliness by fanning the flames of fury with the comment, “You’ve been saving up for a week and that’s the best you can do?”
Eventually, McCreadie declared Peterson nominated from the chair, something which had already officially happened a few days before, apparently in anticipation of just the unruly eventuality that prevailed. McCreadie’s inevitable announcement brought another couple of minutes of unison chanting of that old party favourite, “Shame, Shame.”
It’s a long-time tradition to trot out old political warhorses to be recognized for their stalwart service at such nominations. The crowd called out, “Margaret, Margaret” in anticipation of a few words from former MPP Margaret Marland, who lost her job in 2003 to Peterson by 234 votes.
But the former trustee and councillor didn’t deliver the usual bromides about past glories. She commented on, “the despicable way this has been handled” instead.
One of the few times the place went completely quiet was when former Mayor Ron Searle, Tory candidate in the 1965 federal election, rose to his feet. He said the process has been, “a violation of the democratic principles the Conservative Party has stood for over the years.”
At one point in the proceedings, someone called out, “this reminds me how things worked in Nazi Germany.”
John Tory must be thinking to himself, ‘of all the ridings in all of Ontario, why did a Liberal have to cross the floor in this one?’
They don’t salute on command for the party in Mississauga South. You have to earn your stripes to be a candidate. And you have to follow due process along the way or you end up in the ugly scene that unfolded Friday.
Things are so bad that even NDP candidate Ken Cole is openly inviting the Tory disaffected to publicly convert at a membership meeting he’s holding Wednesday night at Port Credit library.
Before the meeting Friday, Ryerson journalism student and Mississauga News freelancer Owen Jarus, asked Peterson what would happen if politicians such as him were not granted free passes to their new party’s nominations. “People wouldn’t cross the floor,” he said.
After his experience, people might not cross even with a guaranteed acclamation. And that would be a good thing.
If members of local riding associations follow the example in Mississauga South and continue to stand by their principles and don’t just blindly accept the Flavour-of-the-Month Turncoat expediency of their leaders, maybe “grassroots democracy” won’t be a term that is automatically accompanied by a sarcastic snicker.

Masood Khan is getting a little restless.
He’s been waiting to be officially anointed as the Progressive Conservative candidate in the riding of Mississauga-Brampton South since January, but it still hasn’t happened.
“I started last year,” he says. “We had a search committee and I signed 404 members, but they kept telling me it was too early in January to be nominated,” Khan said this afternoon.
Now it’s June and he’s still waiting. Khan has asked leader John Tory and party officials about his status, most recently at the convention two weekends ago in Toronto, and they have assured him he has nothing to be concerned about.
Still, it is June and Khan has heard that two other potential candidates have submitted letters of interest for the nomination to headquarters.
Khan is one of those people who has been around Mississauga politics forever, it seems, but has never really broken through into it per se.
He laughs when asked how he should be described. He’s the publisher of the Eastern News (a newspaper published in Urdu), he’s a local real estate broker, the long-time president of the River Run Ratepayers’ Association and an actor, producer and director of films for the South Asian market.
He’s served on City Hall committees and run for councillor several times (’91 ’97, 2000.) He ran for mayor in ‘03, when he got into a well-remembered spat with the mayor over his comments questioning her age and the fact that City Hall reflects a “white-coloured Mississauga” and not the “beautiful Mississauga with lots of colours, and lots of visible minorities” that is now a reality.
One thing Khan does not particularly want to be described as is the second cousin of Mississauga-Streetsville MP Wajid Khan, even though it is perfectly true.
“I think that is going to go against me,” he says, because of the controversy surrounding Khan’s decision to cross the floor in January to join the Stephen Harper Conservatives. Interestingly, Masood was a Liberal once upon a time as well.
Frankly, you can see why Tory and the Tories, might not be rushing to embrace a guy who has been decidedly underwhelming in his previous efforts at the municipal polls.
This is a seat that should be attracting a lot more interest from would-be Tory MPPs if the party really hopes to win power at Queen’s Park.
For one thing, it is the only Mississauga seat where there won’t be a Liberal incumbent. It appears that the Liberals, who are considering an appointment, will have a politically inexperienced female candidate as their standard-bearer.
The ever-confident Khan says that no matter who the Liberal candidate is, from what he knows of the potential runners, “they will be no competition” for him.
Unfortunately, for Khan, this isn’t one of his movies and he can’t just cast himself in the role of winner.
The federal riding is held by Navdeep Bains, who has made it look like very hospitable territory for the Grits in winning the riding twice since the new boundary was created.
With no high-profile candidates in the mix provincially, Mississauga South-Brampton should be one of the more interesting races to watch in the City, and a truer barometer of the success of the provincial campaigns than the others. That’s because the ‘local candidate’ effect there looks like it will be almost negligible.

For a guy who was invited to the Mississauga Civic Centre last night to discuss the design of the iconic building that is the darling of so many architecture critics around the world, Michael Kirkland spent an awful lot of time talking about streets.
That’s something that architects and planners and urban designers spend a lot of time talking about, but the general public hardly seems to notice.
“What is a street?” the Miami-born, Harvard-educated architect asked rhetorically towards the end of his presentation as part of the 20th anniversary celebration of the opening of City Hall. (Doctors bury their mistakes but architects are invited to come back two decades later to explain them, joked Kirkland who expressed a droll, offbeat sense of humour throughout his 45-minute address.)
“A street is not a public service; a street is a public space,” said Kirkland, who played the down-to-earth, practical American in the architectural partnership that also featured his emotional, English-born partner Edward Jones. Jones enjoyed lecturing local politicians on their ignorance of architectural history and suggesting that only Philistines such as they would possibly suggest altering the design produced by a nation-wide architectural contest.
City council lopped one floor from the main facade building of the design, much to Jone’s chagrin. He also strenuously objected to some of the reductions in quality of the finishes and furniture that were imposed to meet the budget.
“We need to have a tremendous discussion about the kind of streets we want to have and how buildings are to relate to streets,” Kirkland said last night. “We have to defend the street as a public place.”
The tall buildings that are now starting to pop up along Burnhamthorpe Rd., and which will be augmented notably when Marilyn Monroe sashays into town and plunks herself down and crosses her condo legs on what used to be Harold Shipp’s horse farm on the north-east corner of Hurontario St. next year, are a step in its unfolding evolution. “In the fullness of time, Burnhamthorpe should be a promenade street,” said Kirkland.
It was interesting that the architect, like the rest of us I suspect, had trouble placing City Hall in any real context, even twenty years after its opening. The name of the speech was “City Hall as the Cornerstone of new City of Mississauga” but the architect, understandably so, was reluctant to draw any conclusions based on what he’s seen so far.
The Harvard-trained winner of the Fullbright Prize urged long-term urban design thinking, with municipalities and planners setting the tone by setting out a strong backbone of streets and parks and a few signature buildings such as the Civic Centre to force surrounding developments to respond to quality with quality.
It was always the City’s intent, in commissioning the contest that resulted in construction of the $60 million edifice, which honours the history of architecture and the history of agriculture, to kick-start interest in the city centre and stimulate debate among its own citizens about what the fledgling City was, and what it hoped to be.
“It wasn’t intended to be a tidy end but rather an open-ended beginning,” Kirkland said last night.
He also spoke of how the circular council chamber is symbolic of the central role that dialogue between the citizens and their elected representatives plays in the City’s life. The central escalator was a controversial architectural move.
Part of the motivation of it was to indicate that the council chamber is, “a place of gentle and boisterous contemplation,” he said. “The rough justice of the ground is not the thing of the council meeting.” When you ride up the escalator you are “going to a place that is somehow sanctified in democratic terms.”
As you may have guessed, Kirkland was not at the council meeting earlier in the day when McCallion and Mayor-in-Not-So-Patient-Waiting Carolyn Parrish exchanged rough justice for 30 minutes about whether politicians should question staff in public, or get their questions answered before meetings begin.
The architect himself recalled how he was once hauled before City council to answer why the yellow brick rows of Mississauga’s Oz were being paved with American bricks. Kirkland said he finally got to speak at 10 p.m. after council spent an interminable period of time, first discussing the issue of illegal tattoo parlours and secondly, talking about how a major acquisition of pencils had somehow gone awry.
Maybe we’d better not get too hung up on the “democratic sanctification” of the council chambers until our collective post-council headache goes away.

Before Architect Michael Kirkland talked Wednesday night about how the Mississauga Civic Centre was dreamed up, some City Hall staff led a tour of the site to explain how the front deck and yard of the 20-year-old building are going to be re-energized.
The “Building for Two Seasons” has some operational problems, as is well known by anyone who has ever baked on the square during a summer function or shivered so hard they couldn’t do up their skate laces while they got ready to take a whirl around the ice rink in winter.
The City’s Placemaking project and the advent of the long-overdue My Mississauga summer entertainment program have brought some of the long-festering operational issues to the fore.
The perenially-ignored outdoor amphitheatre, which was envisioned as a place where the words of Shakespeare could rattle the nearby walls of power, has turned out to be a heat sink which would likely turn The Tempest into The Drought in a few hours.
Randy Jamieson of the City’s community services department, who said the amphitheatre has never functioned properly, explained that there is a proposal for a roof which would provide shade and cover from the rain. Hoorah.
The wisteria-covered colonnades on both sides of the square could get a makeover, with installation of garage-style doors that would provide protection from the elements, allow heat, extend the season and provide for markets, outdoor art sales or maybe even a café.
A small stage will be added in the lovely formal gardens on the west side of the square. I’m willing to guess 95 per cent of Mississauga's population does not even know that oasis exists.
The City is going into the outdoor chapel business there. Jamieson suggested the stage that is being installed for small weddings could also be the site of things such as poetry readings — perhaps a weekly open stage where the grandeur of the surrounding architecture which has inspired photographers and skateboarders for years — could do the same for local wordsmiths.
The visual barrier between the Civic Square and the library square to the south is to be minimized by lowering a wall along City Centre Dr. The squares will be better connected by lowering curbs, removing the median, lowering some air duct outlets that now create a barrier and taking out several of the too-small planters where trees are dying.
It is to be hoped that the portion of City Centre, between Duke of York and Living Arts Dr. will now be closed a lot more often, creating a pedestrian enclave which will draw people to the core to hear mini-concerts or visit the outdoor library and lunch-with-the-author series that are envisioned.
The circle of lawn at the centre of the library square, where the Musk Oxen graze, is to have its round mound beheaded. The bump causes a lot of problems because trucks can’t get on it for event set-up. During the annual Rotary RibFest, the barbecue sauce keeps landing in your lap because the picnic tables are on an angle.
There are lots of great ideas here, but there is also one great big caveat, of which Jamieson warned. Because the squares are both built atop underground parking garages, any reconstruction work may have technical restrictions, plus a big price tag.
A specific plan is being developed by Project for Public Places, the NewYork consultant who led the Placemaking project. Three million dollars is set aside for construction in 2009.
During the tour, Jamieson mentioned that the piece of property on the eastern edge of the library square, which was always intended to be the third leg to complete the triangle of City Hall and the Central Library, could also be put to temporary use. The last thing on there besides the pigeons was probably one of The Potato Eaters. “There are ideas of things such as an indoor or outdoor market that would draw people out of the buildings and give them things to do,” said the community planner.
Later Wednesday evening Kirkland spoke about the value of the national architectural competition that created City Hall – and noted that one of its greatest assets was that it provided an inspired benchmark for surrounding buildings and developers. Afterwards, Mayor Hazel McCallion recalled that the property was originally intended to be Mississauga’s museum.
Not a bad idea then and not a bad idea now.
While we’re reflecting on the virtues of having a brave and grand vision in the early 1980s, why not consider trying it again?
How about a national architectural competition for a new art gallery/museum on Duke of York Blvd. that could not only produce another landmark building in the civic enclave but help create the grand promenade on Burnhamthorpe Rd. that everyone hopes to see?

A lot of people who claim they really don’t like Carolyn Parrish are awfully happy to see her careering around City Hall these days.
There is reason again to tune into the council meetings on Cable 10, to pick up the newspaper and to keep tabs on municipal politics.
Someone has begun to probe beneath the placid waters of 300 City Centre Dr. (Cue the Jaws music.) The council meetings no longer resemble a Sunday morning sermon, complete with McGenuflection .
Parrish, the woman who Frank Magazine dismissed curtly with the description, “Big Hair, Big Teeth, Big Deal” may have launched a Big Mac attack.
The former school board trustee has professed nothing but admiration for the 86-year-old queen of Mississauga in her public statements. Her actions, however, speak otherwise.
Not that she has displayed disrespect per se. More like the kind of hint you might give your grandmother that it’s time to give up driving so she can enjoy the view better from the front passenger seat.
Parrish has very effectively, to date, gone about exposing what you could call the unspoken dark side of the Long Reign.
From challenging the appointments of long-standing citizen members on municipal committees (so Ron Starr wouldn’t be the only obvious floater, a cynic might say); to making a grandstanding threat to run a slate of municipal candidates to challenge social service pooling with Toronto; to warming up the electric chairs under several staff and board members at Enersource, LaParrish has made the jarring impact that was predicted.
Her many detractors will say that she has put her Jerry Springer School of Municipal Etiquette training to good use.
While the Ward 6 councillor’s self-aggrandizing style gets all the attention, her exceptional political instincts tend to get overlooked. She knows which targets to attack. She knows what upsets people.
And she knows that many Mississaugans believe it is long past time for the mayor to go, even if they would never in a million years say so publicly.
Take the silly debate last Wednesday where McCallion and the self-designated Mayor-in-Waiting went at it.
Parrish was probing staff about Enersource when the mayor took exception to the long, rigorous process, which could have been taken as a political fishing expedition. McCallion suggested Parrish ask her questions ahead of time and satisfy her curiosity, as the mayor does.
Well, that prompted a contretemps that served neither woman well. Parrish said she didn’t need a civics lesson from the mayor (who better to teach one) and said she’d continue to ask questions because, “This isn’t a secret society.”
The irony in that debate, for anyone who has been around long enough, was rich. It was McCallion, the ward 9 councillor, who earned much of her reputation for toughness by cross-examining the paid help when she was the unofficial leader of the opposition.
On election night last November, the mayor was asked if she thought that there was potential for the City’s business to be highjacked this term, as mayoralty and would-be mayoralty candidates, jockeyed for position.
She said she didn’t think that would be any problem and she would deal with if it arose. To be fair to everyone, if she does decide to retire, she would make an announcement around the end of the third year of the four-year term.
Wednesday may have been one of her ways of dealing with it.
The apocryphal stories are going around again about how “the mayor is losing it.” Some of them should have a heritage designation. The wishful thinkers have been saying the same thing for 20 years and, eventually, who knows, it may come true. But in the meantime, better beware.
The mayor is older. The mayor is more tired. But make no mistake about it, the mayor is the only one who will decide when — and if — she goes.
Parrish, and anyone else who is too quick to reach for the chain of office, had better be careful not to provoke the incumbent. She could ultimately exact the sweetest revenage, and just stay exactly where she is.

It was the shootout at the Metrodome bandbox last night and Doc Halliday showed us once again why he is often at his best, exactly when he is not at his best.
The Blue Jays’ ace did not have his ‘A’ stuff by any means, but he persevered as he always does and he ended up winning.
You almost expected to see Doc pull a handkerchief out of his pocket and start hacking away like Victor Mature, who played that other Doc Holliday in John Ford’s classic 1946 picture My Darling Clementine.
Pitcher Halliday may not be dying of consumption but he does make the guys on the other team feel like they are in an old movie that has already been scripted. They know that when he’s pitching, everything won’t be OK for them.
Watching the good doctor work is an exercise in character study. He doesn’t want us to know how much he wants to beat every batter, but he just can’t help showing it.
He curses himself when he walks somebody, especially the guys at the bottom of the order as he did last night. And he sweats so hard that he always looks like he just stepped out of the sauna.
He’s a working man’s pitcher with a working man’s work ethic. He throws strikes. He used to have a 12-to-6 overhead curve ball that looked beautiful but was largely ineffective. He changed it. His new curve is low on aesthetic value and high on strikeouts.
Once upon a time, Halliday would do a long, slow burn on the mound when he didn’t get a close call from an umpire. That, needless to say, proved counter-productive.
The missed calls still bother him just as much, but he’s dropped the histrionics. He just wants the ball back — fast — so he can maybe get the next close pitch called his way.
He still has dynamite stuff sometimes but when he doesn’t, he isn’t about to spend all day nibbling at the corners. He has confidence in his team mates to field the ball. As a result, his games are quick and, quite often as crisp as one of those early fall days that particularly suit the game.
And man, is he competitive. You could see it in the National League parks. He wasn’t worried about looking graceful when he had to go to the plate to hit. He was trying to get a hit and he succeeded a couple of times.
In last night’s game, there was one play that especially typified Halliday. A left-handed hitter at the bottom of the Twins’ order looked at all of the sweat pouring off the forehead of the veteran pitcher and tried to drag a bunt past him.
Halliday sprang from the mound, running full-out and flagged down the ball near first base. He turned towards the base-runner as if he was taking his bunt attempt very personally. It looked like he was going to throw a cross-body block at him for a second before Halliday settled for slapping him hard with the tag.
In that one little play, you could see that see how much he wants to win every time he takes the field.
If you’re looking for a prescription for professionalism, you need look no further than the Doc.

What is a summit meeting in Mississauga?
Well, for the almost past three decades, it has been when Hazel McCallion looks in the mirror and asks herself, “What do I think about that?”
Joking aside, word has come down that there will be a Mississauga City Summit scheduled for September 25 at the Living Arts Centre. It is based on the very admirable idea of drawing together the many constituencies that make up the city (arts, sports, business, non-profit, environment, social services, hospitals, volunteers, education, police, health, labour, government etc.) to look at where we are, where we want to be and how we plan to get there.
There is an understandable amount of cynicism (see opening paragraph) about high-level navel-gazing policy exercises that have a tendency to grab a lot of headlines, cost a lot of money and produce unquantifiable results.
Nonetheless, this could be a very valuable exercise, if done right.
The temptation for these sorts of events is to bring a laundry list of grievances to the table, drag out the people you think are responsible for most of your ills (i.e. the funders) and beat them over the head with the supposed validity of your case.
But rather than yielding to that urge, this event should more appropriately look at the broad picture.
Maybe the easiest way to do that is to ask ourselves some tough questions.
Such as:
What does Mississauga really, really want to be when it grows up?

Why, despite being a City of plenty in so many ways, do we have so much poverty and an underclass with virtually no support systems?

Why, despite the diversity that permeates our makeup, is that so poorly reflected in the leadership structure and participation of most of our organizations?

How, without a daily newspaper or an English-language radio or TV station, can effective communication with residents really be achieved?

How can we avoid the violence and gun issues which seem to plague every City that gets to be our size?

Why does Mississauga have such a limited number of public interest/watchdog groups, who push policy change and force public debates in most other cities?

How do we shape the maturation of our still-fledgling downtown so that it reflects more of the character of the civic buildings at its core rather than the concourse of condos at its periphery?

It may not be Yalta, but this “summit” can be a critical self-review for the municipality and a chance for its citizens to ensure we collectively have our eyes on the right prize — a human, liveable, pleasant, green place to live.

A lot of people came a long way to see the powerhouse at Lakeview Generating Station finally implode this morning, but not many did it by hitching half-way across the country to their hometown.
Waiting... and... waiting... and waiting for hours on end for the steady northwest winds required to blow the dust from the station demolition out over the Lake makes for a lot of idle conversation among the spectators.
A few people stood out in the small crowd, especially the guy with the throwback ’60s long-haired look and the Trailer Park Boys uniform.
Turns out he is 42-year-old Glenn Wells, who loves to talk as much as he loves to travel. He is wearing a blue athletic sweater with the word Sunnyvale on an angle across the front and the name “Ricky” emblazoned across the shoulders, bearing the number 422. The latter probably refers to the lottery pick Ricky got when they handed out brains at Sunnyvale Trailer Park.
Wells says proudly under his breath that he picked up the shirt for five bucks at a thrift shop.
In the course of passing our time until the big bang, Wells explains that he has arrived in Mississauga again this summer to visit his mother by thumbing from his home in Abbotsford, B.C.
Since he started the practice eight years ago, it has become a summer ritual. He takes a few weeks off work from his job as a painter, hits the road with a couple of hundred bucks and bums his way across the Prairies so he can return to Lakeview to see his Mum.
He happened to hit it right last year and was part of the huge group that heard Hazel do the countdown and push the button that brought the Four Sisters down.
This year, Wells was in one of the waterfront parks when he noticed a sign explaining the powerhouse destruction. “My stepfather used to work there,” he says of the big station. He wanted to see its final end.
While we watch the signets sleep in seemingly impossible positions, observe the black water dog chase the stick continuously and return to proudly deposit it with a thorough shake and hear OPG spokesman Bob Osborne periodically tell us that nothing has changed, Wells imparts his acquired knowledge from 26 years of hitching.
“Every year is different. This year I had a guy who used to be a paramedic and is now a truck driver pick me up. He told me stories you would not believe. In Canada, hitching is friendly and easy. Some people invite you into their homes and offer you a place to eat. Sometimes they even give you money.”
It turned out that the truck driver was illiterate and needed help reading road signs and was headed for North Bay, where he’d never been before.
“He offered to bought all my meals along the way. That’s what kind of people you meet. It’s amazing.”
On one trip a woman twice drove by him and didn’t pick him up. She stopped the the third time. “She turned out to be the deputy coroner of Pennyslvania. She drove me to Regina from Edmonton.”
There is a lot of common sense required in hitching, like in everything else. Wells is a sustainable guy. He carries a bright sign, in yellow with black lettering. It says “East Please” on one side and “West Please” on the other.
If you put a specific city’s name on your sign, people won’t stop if they aren’t going that far. A number of people have told him they stopped to pick him up just because he asked nicely with his sign.
Music is also important. His favourite accompaniment on his MP3 player is Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World.
Wells has learned from experience that there are two kind of drivers who pick up people. “Some of them want to listen to you and some want you to listen.” He can tell which is which within a few minutes.
Someday, Wells plans to write a book about his adventures.
In the meantime he dreams, like everybody else, about winning the lottery. If that happened, he would buy himself a limousine and head cross-country, picking up hitchers along the way – as long as they were good listeners.
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Am heading for the cottage for three weeks. Will blog at you again when I return.