Random Access

One of those seriously unimpressed with the conviction of Pothole Poet Antonio Batista is that veteran of multiple death threats, Ward 6 Councillor and Mayor-in-Training-Wheels Carolyn Parrish.
When she was an MP and practising her Texas two-step on that doll who lives in the White House, Parrish was inundated with nasty missives in response to her famous aside about “those American bastards.”
Parrish says she certainly would not have referred the issue to police had someone penned a free verse about her, rather than Pat Saito, which fantasized about her next home being in a comfortable councillor-sized hole in the ground.
The first Mississauga-Erindale MP says the Liberals made her refer a number of the nastier threats she received to the RCMP for investigation. One particularly upsetting email said that the writer had seen photos of Parrish’s two daughters on her web site and mused about what pain he would inflict on them.
“When the police traced it down and went and knocked on the door they found that some kid had been down in the basement sending out emails under his Dad’s name,” says Parrish. “Boy, were his parents ever upset and did he ever get in trouble!”
Parrish agrees with defence lawyer Clayton Ruby that the most appropriate response to the pothole poem would have been a motherly phone call, not a reference to the police.
As for the issue that infuriated Batista — being charged for taxes that rightfully were the responsibility of Green Park Homes because the law only allows the City to bill the first assessed owner of new homes, the councillor said she has solved similar situations already — by threatening the developer into co-operation. Someone has obviously been paying attention to the modus operandi of Her Warship.
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Everybody knows about the power of one, which refers to the ability of an indomitable individual to make real change. But how about the power of two? That term may well come to refer to an amazing pair of Mississauga women who have just managed to reverse, with a few months’ work, a long-standing grievance that hampered the delivery of decent meals in senior citizens’ home across Ontario.
Julie Curitti and Angela Shaw are old friends who went to nursing school together and were asked to co-chair the family advisory council at the Cawthra
Gardens Long-Term Care facility.
When they started asking questions, and discovered that the “raw food allowance” paid by Ontario was $5.46 per senior per day they were shocked and outraged. They put together a little campaign that started with their family council and their local church and ignited a firestorm of public interest. It reinvigorated campaigns by the Dietitians of Canada and by their own Registered Nurses of Ontario, found a leader in MPP Peter Fonseca and coincided nicely with the timing of the provincial election.
The result is that Ontario yesterday came through with the increase to $7 a day that the their petition targeted.
Moral of the story: If you want to doctor up a big problem in Ontario, send a couple of nurses to do the job.
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Are either of the two leading political parties in Ontario at all interested in winning the open seat in Mississauga- Brampton South?
You have to wonder when neither the Liberals or the Tories have a candidate in place 10 weeks before we go to the polls.
There’s no incumbent in the riding, which you’d think would make it a magnet for would-be MPPs. Of course a lot of Liberals were interested before the party decreed that a hand-picked female candidate would be appointed. But where is she?
Masood Khan, realtor/actor/publisher/politician is still waiting anxiously for his nomination date but the delay in setting one by the Conservatives speaks volumes.
All of which begs the question: What if they called an election and nobody ran?