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Ask Zoran Churchin what he thinks of politics so far.... and there is a long pause.
“It’s been very hard to be honest with you. It’s taken a lot of dedication and hard work. As a person who has been businessman and a community leader, these are new waters for me.”
Yes, and shark-infested ones at that.
The 52-year-old, who is president of Zoran Properties Inc. started out as a candidate for the Conservative nomination in Mississauga South. He was in a tight three-way race with Brad Butt and Effie Triantafilopoulos when the rug was pulled out from under the trio by Party Leader John Tory, who invited Tim Peterson to cross the floor and dance.
Undeterred, Churchin turned his sights to Mississauga East-Cooksville. On July 5, what was expected to be a contested nomination against former Mississauga East MPP Carl DeFaria, turned into a walkover.
“He didn’t show up,” says Churchin, still sounding a little puzzled at the latest strange turn of events.
DeFaria, the first Canadian of Portuguese descent ever to serve in the Ontario Cabinet, represented the riding from 1995-2003 when Peter Fonseca took it for the Liberals. (DeFaria has also run twice federally against Albina Guarnieri, managed two campaigns that his wife Riina ran against Guarnieri and challenged Phil Green for the federal Tory nomination in Mississauga South in 2004.)
Even now that Churchin has apparently secured the nomination, things are not necessarily over. Riina DeFaria, who is president of the provincial riding association, has filed a complaint with party headquarters about the date that was selected for the vote. No decision is forthcoming yet.
Churchin, a self-made man who came to Canada for a few days visit with his uncle in 1972 and liked it so much that he made it his new home, is trying to ignore all the machinations of politics and get on with the job of getting himself elected.
Although he lives in the South, he has been active in the East riding, especially with his church, All Saints Serbian Orthodox, where he has been president for the past decade. He was instrumental in getting the church its own building in 2002.
In the last couple of elections, the Liberals have done very well in the riding, whose boundaries will change slightly with redistribution. That will give Churchin what he thinks is some Tory-friendly territory west of Hurontario St. to Mavis Rd. Given the ethnic diversity of the riding, “I do believe the residents of Mississauga East-Cooksville would definitely connect with me,” said Churchin who says “safer streets” health and the environment are key issues.
When asked about the Greenfield South natural gas-fired power plant proposed on Mattawa Ave. in the riding’s east end, he replied he doesn’t know enough about it yet to offer an opinion. “I’d rather not say anything until I have a 100 per cent understanding of an issue and I’m just in the process of learning.”
An honest answer, surely, but one that won’t satisfy residents who expect their candidates to be up to speed on issues before they offer themselves for office.
Polling shows that, “only 15 per cent residents can actually name the MPP for the riding,” he says, when asked how Fonseca has been performing.
With a new leader in John Tory, Mississauga East-Cooksville residents could again turn to the Conservatives, their candidate believes.
Churchin just laughs when the irony of his ethnic background and riding politics is pointed out to him.
Former Mississauga East MPP John Sola was kicked out of the Liberal caucus in 1993 for telling The Fifth Estate that, “I don’t think I’d be able to live to next door to a Serb.”
Although he was born in Serbia, Churchin wants to leave the old disputes in the old country and steer clear of any Sola-style polemics. “I’m a Canadian. I have my family here and I care about Canada, Ontario and Mississauga,” he says.
He already knows enough to leave the old, ticking time bombs all alone.

Joe Batista says he is going to find a couple of “gangsta’ neighbourhoods” in Mississauga and put up posters: giant posters that say “Gangsters —Kill for Cash!” There will be a web site listed below so he can be contacted.
Maybe then, Joe figures, he’ll finally draw the attention of Peel Regional Police.
Batista has been quoted in both The Mississauga News and The National Post saying that he plans to issue his own “death list” in the wake of his father Antonio’s conviction for uttering a death threat against Ward 9 Councillor Pat Saito.
Before he and his family went into court July 27 to hear the guilty verdict that the younger Batista had already predicted, he told me, “If my father is found guilty, a new crime has been created by these idiots — the crime of satire.” He said he would issue his own satirical death threat list and expected to be charged by police as well.
“I’m not kidding,” he said.
Earlier, during the May trial, he told Post report Joseph Brean that he was interested in setting up an “assassination protocol” fund to which people could contribute if they wished to see a certain politician eliminated.
It was colourful and dangerous talk that he thought for sure would reward him with the confrontation with the law he so clearly desires. He sounds disappointed that the authorities have yet to contact him.
Batista is still livid that his 75-year-old father was convicted. His father is “insulted” that the judge suggested that Antonio doesn’t not know enough English or is not well-educated enough to have written a satirical poem. “I have an education,” says Batista the younger, who sounds like he wants to retry the case with him as the defendant this time around.
His father definitely hurt his own case by taking the stand and testifying that he didn’t know what satire was until he discussed it with Clayton Ruby, his defence lawyer.
He hurt it more in the tone and tenor of his remarks, which clearly indicated a personal animosity for Councillor Saito. He was deeply offended that Saito did not respond promptly to his complaints (because of an e-mail snafu she testified) and that she was on vacation for two weeks when he tried to follow up his inquiries.
Because his father is an immigrant whose first language is not English, “there is a double standard at work here,” says Joe Batista, who, like his father, ran a token protest campaign against Saito in the municipal election last fall.
“What happened to my father is nothing short of a dictatorship,” says Joe. “They are so close-minded to call his intentions criminal,” he said today in a phone interview from Washington, D.C. “I call them revolutionary.”
“I cannot stand a society that tramples over the rights of its citizens and old people.”
So far his attempts to get himself arrested for his outrage have fallen short and Batista sounds as if he wants to remedy that right away. “Yes, I intend to be satirical in the delivery of my sedition,” he says.
If the police don’t call him soon, Batista’s ally and City Hall watchdog Donald Barber will officially complain about his behaviour to the police chief to set the criminal process in motion.
Although his father said outside court that he would appeal his conviction and Ruby is obviously anxious to argue at a higher level about the lengthy history of satire as a legitimate form of dissent, an appeal is not a sure thing.
It will be highly expensive and highly stressful for Antonio, who has prostate cancer and his wife Mina.
Joe Batista would like to spare his parents that, if he could.
Instead of putting his parents through the continuing ordeal, their son obviously wants to cast himself as the defendant in chapter two of this political/criminal drama.

Where will it end?
The intrusion of advertising into our lives — where will it end?
Once upon a time, in-your-face advertising consisted of a couple of teens in animal costumes standing on the side of the road waving big placards that promised a pepperoni special.
Now advertising is becoming downright menacing. You can’t tune into any sporting event without being bombarded by logos.
There’s the virtual blimp on the football games and the advertising logos that make it look like some company is sponsoring the names and numbers of those retired players whose names are emblazoned on various “rings of fame” in football stadia.
Everything is sponsored. The scouting report on the starting pitchers is brought to you by this corporation. The out-of-town scoring update is brought to you by another.
Sooner or later, there will be a brush-back pitch followed by this corporate pitch: “That close shave brought to you by Gillette.”
Some broadcasters are thinly-disguised pitchmen who actually look for ways to work the sponsors’ names into the story line of the games.
It is just a matter of time until they show a tight shot of the Blue Jays’ dugout, which is polluted already with “virtual” corporate emblems, and you see the “expectoration of the day” brought to you by a local company that specializes in cleaning up toxic waste.
It’s too bad all-time Jay pitching leader Dave Stieb – who led the majors in scratching of the nether groinal regions every year during his long career— retired before he could get a deal endorsing an anti jock-itch powder. Suggested tag-line: “Dave Stieb doesn’t worry about scratch hits now that he’s discovered Anti-Jockitis.”
All of which brings us to the new lowest form of advertising that has recently hit the streets — literally — in Mississauga and environs.
It’s a billboard on rolling stock — a huge lime green truck with revolving advertising panels which drives around on our busiest roads giving maximum exposure to the advertisers’ message and maximum aggravation to anyone who thinks about the concept for a milli-second.
Talk about your aggravating ad pitch. Here we have an advertising vehicle that is burning our dwindling supply of fossil fuels and abetting global warming unnecessarily, promoting gridlock for pure commercial gain and consciously expanding its ecological footprint to boost the bottom line.
In the Why It Works section of its web site, the company says that Statistics Canada reports that, “Canadians spend 6,570 minutes a year commuting to work (109 hours).”
You can add a couple of minutes thanks to their little enterprise.
How can consumers fight back? In the same old way they always have when offended by advertising or, in this case, by the means of advertising: by refusing to buy the products of those who haven’t figured out that sometimes the messenger is as offensive as the message.

If there’s anything good about the oppressively hot and humid weather we experience too often this time of year, it is mousse.
Not the kind that floats on the top of your champagne, although there’s nothing wrong with that. But I mean the light confection you typically make with whipping cream, whipped egg whites, a sprinkling of gelatin on cold water and a sugar-egg yolk base.
Those desserts are perfect to top off a summer meal when you don’t feel you have enough energy left to chew.
The best mousses don’t really require anything other than opening your mouth and depositing. They seem to vanish instantly, after applying a supple soft shoe to your taste buds.
We had a nice one on Civic Holiday, a lemon mousse which perched gently on the fulcrum of tart and sweet. While you were trying to decide which it was, it was gone and you had to take another mouthful to further your research.
The downfall of mousse is, of course, the whipping cream. The Hammer of Grammar always says we should just apply it directly to our hips to save time.
We usually substitute an edible oil product, which is like walking Babe Ruth so you can get at Lou Gehrig.
Bought a liquid cream edible oil derivative this time, one of those which has to be refrigerated and used up within two weeks. So the mousse derby is on. We’ve had maple mousse, mango mousse, three-bowl rum mousse (white rum if you must know) and the aforementioned lemon.
Can’t figure out why we haven’t had them in our regular lineup for a while.
The recipes all say to make them well ahead and cool for several hours or overnight, but in reality that never happens. That would require pre-meditation, which would require energy, which is exactly what we’re short of in these hazy, lazy days of summer.
As a result, we have discovered that short-cutting the chilling time for mousse is not necessarily a bad thing. It tends to be lighter and fluffier with a gentle chill and there tends to be less separation of ingredients. (If it does separate, just call it a parfait and press ahead.)
People are most familiar with chocolate mousse which is generally quite a different and delightful thing in itself. Unfortunately, it tends to be a little on the heavy side in most restaurant versions.
Chocolate mousse comes in many forms but it really takes an expert to get it right.
Check out this chef: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRIwuxqKyyk

Janet Dalziel had never heard of Celiac when her doctor told her in 2002 that it was that disease that was causing her health problems. Her doctor told her she could no longer eat gluten, a special type of protein that is commonly found in rye, wheat, and barley.
Eating gluten harms the inner lining of the small intestine for Celiacs and the condition can become progressively worse, leading to the onset of other health problems such as anemia (because iron is not being absorbed properly) or osteoperosis (because calcium is not absorbed.)
Dalziel went to her doctor because she was falling asleep on her couch every night at 8 p.m. Fatigue is one of the numerous symptoms of Celiac, which make it so difficult to pin down. For some unusual reason, her doctor suspected the disease right away and sent her for the $150 blood test (not covered by OHIP) which pins it down. The blood test was positive and a minor biopsy confirmed the diagnosis.
“I’m a good amateur cook and I went home and said ‘Oh my God, What can I eat now?’ says Dalziel (pronounced Deal.) “We decided to go out and we chose Chinese food, because that seemed safe. Wrong — because there is gluten in soy sauce.”
Still reeling at the thought of living a life without her usual cereal, bread, baked goods, etc. the retired high school vice-principal and her husband went to a book store and picked up a couple of key instructional books.
“Then we went to the biggest Loblaws that we could find and we started going up and down the aisles looking for what I could eat,” Dalziel said in an interview at the offices of the Canadian Celiac Association on Dixie Rd. near the Gateway plant. “There was nothing. That’s when I burst out crying in the middle of the store.”
Five years into her life as a known Celiac, Dalziel is an educated consumer, a knowledgeable ambassador for all those who have the disease and the current president of the group, representing 7,000 members across the country.
The scariest thing about Celiac, she says, is that there are thousands and thousands of Canadians walking around without even knowing that they have it. Lots of them think they have indigestion or migraines or depression or lactose intolerance, all of which are symptoms.
“Tens of thousands of people don’t know they have it and their doctors usually don’t know it,” she says. “It’s an average of 10-11 years to get a diagnosis.”
The only really good study done on its prevalence suggests that, for every one person diagnosed, a staggering 133 cases go undetected.
“There are people sitting on organ-transplant lists who might not have to be there,” if they were appropriately diagnosed says the president of CCA, which does its best with a dedicated volunteer board and a small staff to tell the largely untold story of Celiac to the world.
Clarkson resident Nadia Chychota was diagnosed 14 years ago. Her mother died of colon cancer in 2003. Nadia believes the cancer was brought on, at least in part by the weakness of her immune system from Celiac. One of Nadia’s sisters also has the genetic condition.
Chychota, a volunteer with CCA, says that there is one very good thing about Celiac disease: once you know you have it, you can eat a gluten-free diet and return to good health. “I always congratulate people on their diet and say ‘Welcome to the club,’” she says. “It’s a disease but it’s the only disease I want to have,” she says, “because it’s the only one where you can be assured of feeling better once you learn the diet.”
It is a tricky thing learning the diet, though. The 38-year-old is in the midst of launching her own business, called Shelf Confidence which will help newly-diagnosed Celiacs on the steep learning curve they will face.
“I know how frustrating it can be,” she says. “You don’t know what it’s like until you’re diagnosed.”
Reading the ingredients’ list for food products becomes critical. Chychota plans to go directly into people’s kitchens with an information kit, to look through their shelves and tell them what they can still eat and what they can’t, which stores carry appropriate products and where they can eat in local restaurants, etc.
“I won’t be speaking medical-speak,” she says. “I can talk to them plainly and provide support and try to explain the gluten-free diet.”
The Mississaugan hopes to launch her little effort to make a big dint in the disease during October, which is National Celiac Month.

Well, looks like the "Education Premier" is back.
Dalton McGuinty splashed down at Roberta Bondar Public School this morning to deliver $309 million over two years to right some of the wrongs of the funding formula — yes, the same one he said he would fix while he was on the hustings in 2003.
Nothing like a little last-second space walk to slap a few patches on the thermal shield of the shuttle Endeavour Re-Election.
Now we will have to see if the old bucket of bolts can withstand re-entry to earth's blogosphere.
Most election promises do tend to burn up when they are exposed to the oxygen that the rest of us breathe at ground level anyway.
McGuinty brought his "Be Happy — I’m Still Not Mike Harris" act to Peel to tout the strides he's made towards reversing the damage that was inflicted by the one-size-fits-all funding formula, which really, really hurt urban boards like the Peel District and the Dufferin-Peel Catholic boards.
Together the two boards will get nearly $20 million in new money. That should be enough to ease the reins of Dufferin-Peel Board out of the hands of Norbert Hartmann and put them back into the hands of the people Catholic ratepayers elected last November to run it. Which is generally a good thing.
The $12 million set aside to deal with the ongoing saga of transportation subsidies that don’t cover the real cost of busing sounds good, until you figure out that is for the whole province and the Peel District alone estimated it was $11 million in the hole a year ago at this time. (Peel got $2.9 million more and Dufferin-Peel $1.8 million more after an initial review earlier this year.)
The government press release states that, "For 2008-09, an additional $127 million will be provided to further strengthen the funding formula by better matching funding with current actual costs. This investment will focus on additional areas that boards have identified, such as English-as-a-Second-Language, school board operations, non-salary compensation, schools in areas of local growth, adult education and local priorities."
That sounds like good news for our boards which have major growth issues in the north and limited ability to provide the ESL programs that new arrivals need and deserve.
Do you suppose that when the Peel Board decided to open an elementary school for year-round (Bondar) schooling that trustees envisioned that it would make a great backdrop to host political announcements in the summer when most schools are closed? Do we get a credit for that in the funding formula?
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Did anybody else notice that the Politicians' Appreciation Day hosted by the Mississauga Board of Trade last week was under-appreciated, to put it mildly, by the business community and the public? There were almost as many politicians there as residents. And Mayor Hazel McCallion was the only member of City council who attended.
Next year, to make the politicians feel better, the Board will probably combine the event with Lawyers' Appreciation Day and Media Appreciation Day.
The big question: will attendance go up or down?

Larry Steinman has heard rumours that, as a condition of the acquisition of the public right-of-way that Ontario Hydro acquired long ago for the 230-kilovolt power line that cuts behind his house, the utility had to agree to protect the ancient oaks that line the corridor.
Even if that legal obligation was never given, doesn’t Hydro One, the successor to Ontario Hydro, have a moral obligation to do everything it can to protect those spectacular denizens of Lorne Park who line both sides of its power alley?
As you stand in the brain-refreshing shade of those trees on a stifling summer afternoon, as I did yesterday, I can assure you that every fibre in your body tells you that the electricity transmission giant does, indeed, owe something to these other giants — the ones who seem to be spreading their branches imploringly to the sky.
They may be asking for divine intervention at this point, since Hydro One has apparently decided — beyond a shadow of a doubt — that they are growing too dangerously close to the power lines for comfort.
Steinman and his neighbours certainly don’t want to plunge us into another blackout like the one we suffered four years ago yesterday, but they do think Hydro One should live up to its pledge to work with the public, as touted in their mission statement and on their website.
They think hydro should consider a reasonable compromise.
Although he’s no arborist, Steinman says that the top few feet of the tree can be lopped off to satisfy the requirement for 20 ft. of clearance below its lines. Hydro One spokesman Alan Manchee says the government-owned corporation doesn’t like to do that because it’s really not sustainable.
Annihilating every mature tree that potentially infringes on a power line is not sustainable either, politically or environmentally, but that seems to be the bottom line of Hydro One’s policy.
Steinman and his neighbours aren’t going away. In fact, the self-described “quiet retiree” is thinking about taking a crash course in civil disobedience. It will start with a trip to Rona to buy the chains that he and his neighbours intend to wrap around themselves and the red oak tree, if hydro brings in the chain saws.
• • •
August 15, 1925. That’s the day the greatest musician in Canadian jazz history and, arguably, the best jazz pianist of all time, was born.
Happy 82nd birthday to the legendary Oscar Peterson, a resident of Mississauga since 1972.
Health issues forced the cancellation of his Legends of Jazz concert scheduled at the Downtown Jazz Festival earlier this summer in what promised to be a bravura week that also featured Dave Brubeck and Keith Jarrett.
His old friend Bill King, once a student at the jazz school that Peterson and Phil Nimmons pioneered in the 1950s, says Oscar is synonymous with jazz in Canada and around the world.
“He is our whole connection with the world of jazz,” he said this afternoon. Peterson, George Shearing and Brubeck (what is it with pianists and longevity?) are the last vestiges to the golden age of jazz, says King.
“He is one of the few lions still left,” adds the pianist, magazine publisher, disc jockey, producer and jack of all jazz trades. “He was always one of the main guys with Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington and everyone else.”
Some of King’s happiest jazz memories revolve around Peterson, including the production of the landmark 2003 concert at the Living Arts Centre that paid tribute to the legend. King produced the musical lineup that brought some of the greatest names in contemporary jazz to Mississauga, including Renee Rosnes, Jeff Hamilton, Russell Malone, Benny Green, Carol Welsman, Oliver Jones and David Young, not to mention another of the few remaining giants, Oscar’s old friend Clark Terry.
If Oscar can get to a piano today, you know his family is going to be treated to the swingiest version ever of Happy Birthday.

Far be it from me to rush the good doctor of the 88s, Oscar Peterson, into retirement.
In a story about the master’s 82nd birthday yesterday, I wrote that OP has been forced to cancel a couple of concerts recently and was not performing anymore.
I am delighted, on the advice of his teenaged daughter Celine, to correct the record.
“He’s still performing, he’s just taking a break,” says the younger Peterson. “He’s resting and relaxing,” and plans to perform again in the new year with his superb quartet featuring David Young on bass, Alvin Queen on drums and Ulf Wakenhuis on guitar.
That is the best news jazz fans around the world could hear.
Celine, by the way, got the chance to stand in for her Dad earlier this year when the new Oscar Peterson Theatre was opened in the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo. Oscar delivered his thanks via a recorded message at the event, which was presided over by then-Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay.
One of the performers was Oscar’s old friend from Montreal, who knows his way around the keyboard a little himself, the much under-appreciated Oliver Jones.
There were a lot of highlights for Celine but none much bigger than walking in to see a life-sized ice sculpture of her Dad in the lobby.
“One man did that all by himself,” an obviously-impressed Celine said. “I was ready to bow at his feet.
“That was the first thing I saw when I walked into the room,” she said. The hands of the sculpture were posed up in the air as if Peterson was just about to pounce on the keyboards. “The fingertips were dripping,” laughed Celine.
How ironic, because her father is obviously NOT from the cool school of jazz. It’s actually the keyboards that are in danger of melting.
• • •
The fog is starting to lift a little in the mystery riding of Mississauga provincial politics: Mississauga-Brampton South.
You remember poor-old MBS. It was the patchwork riding thrown together from what was left after the electoral boundaries commission carved up the rest of the City based on the requests of municipalities, ratepayer groups, the parties etc.
It’s the Rodney Dangerfield riding.
Despite the fact that there is no Liberal incumbent, the mainline parties are taking their own sweet time getting to their candidates in place.
There was no shortage of prospective candidates willing to meet the criteria for the Liberal nod (female, preferably young and South Asian. In other words, Rudy Dhalla clones) but the party decided, in its wisdom, that an appointment would suit best.
And here she is now.
Have it on good authority that the name of the Liberal candidate, who will be introduced to the party faithful tonight, and likely officially anointed on the weekend, is Amrit Mangat.
Wish there was more to tell, but at the moment there isn’t.
No one seems to know much about Ms. Mangat. But then, why should we start spoiling the mystery of MBS now?

They’re calling the “town hall” meeting that the City is hosting Sept. 19 Mississauga Matters, but it could more properly be called Mississauga Mutters — about the state of the union of the province. As always.
Hazel McCallion and company have invited the leaders of the provincial parties to drop into the council chambers that night, where a hand-picked audience of ratepayers’ association presidents, business people and community groups, can watch Dalton, John and Howard squirm under the McCallion microscope. If they choose to show up, that is.
If they don’t, their designates, who may or may not be local MPPs and/or candidates, will answer in their stead for McGuinty, Tory and Hampton.
The City has prepared four background papers on “key issues” such as transportation and transit, current value assessment and downloading. Those will be the basis for the questions that will be posed to the party representatives that night.
Those papers set out the City’s shopping list of Things That Need To Be Corrected.
All of the provincial candidates in each riding will be issued an invitation and each councillor has been given the opportunity to invite several representatives from their wards.
The moderator for the evening, who will pose the questions and keep order, will be Francis D’Souza, a Mississauga resident and a newsman at CITY-TV.
Gary Kent, the City’s director of strategic initiatives, says the objective is to make residents aware of the critical issues for municipalities in the campaign that ends Oct. 10. The details of the whole process, including the backgrounders, are set out at http://www.mississauga.ca/portal/cityhall/mississaugamatters.
“We’re going to be presenting facts on the issues that affect Mississauga and asking the party representatives where do you stand?” says Kent.
It won’t be one of those unwieldy giant all-candidates’ meeting and only the designated representatives of the parties will speak. (Methinks the mayor just might do a little summing up/interpolation/thank you, however.)
After the meeting, when the parties have supposedly made their positions clear on the issues, the mayor will be sending a newsletter out to residents. It won’t tell Mississaugans whom to vote for, of course, but it could indicate which party policies are more city-friendly and which less so.
None of the party leaders have committed to the event yet, although the City has been talking to their offices regularly.
The concept is, as Arte Johnson used to say on Laugh-In ..... “verrrrry interesting.”
It has obviously been set up so that the party leaders won’t fear that they are walking into the Shootout at the Post-Modern Corral.
But will they attend?
We can only hope so. Anything that educates and engages voters is a good thing.
The City clearly misleads, however, in billing this as a “Town Hall” meeting. It is not a chance for Everyman/woman to storm City Hall to ask any questions that they might like about their municipal operations, which that term implies. In fact, there will be no open mike at all and you are not guaranteed a seat unless you are blessed with an invitation.
Perhaps in response to the strident semaphore signals of a certain blub-blub-blub blogger, the City is, at least, setting up an overflow room where the meeting will be broadcast. It will also be available on Rogers Community Television and will be streamed to the City’s web site.
One major caveat: although it will be instructive to know where the parties stand on the issues that affect cities, it seems highly unlikely that information will sway the votes of any more than a tiny fraction of voters of the electorate.

If ever there were a man cut out to mount a mullet tour of Mississauga, it is George Carlson.
The man has the pedigree for one thing: he wore a modified version of the haircut known as “business in the front, party in the back” when he was doing his Don Johnson impression in his younger days.
He ran a body shop in Streetsville in the ’80s where the majority of the clients sported the look — that is, of a hair style put together by a committee of schizophrenic clip-do-maniacs.
One of his clients had the hairdo, but couldn’t get the name right. He kept calling it a “Mullock.”
It turns out the Carlson family even has property claims to the name mullet. The Mississauga councillor’s great-great-grandfather originally owned much of the land in Streetsville that straddles the Mullet Creek.
So it was inevitable, in retrospect, that the young Scotsman who is trying to visit all of the places in the world with the word “mullet” in them and Carlson would get together.
And that, they did, in Streetsville this morning when Simon Varwell spent the second day of his first-ever visit to Canada getting the low down from Carlson on the mullet highlights of Mississauga.
Over breakfast at Ari’s Restaurant, the Ward 11 councillor recalled how, as a kid, he and his friends used to camp out in the area and fish and swim. “In the spring, the creek would fill up and become like a lake and we would go iceberg jumping — that’s what we called it. We would jump on and ride down the creek on these icebergs.”
His great grandfather insisted that, at one time, you could once walk across the creek on the backs of the breed of fish from which the creek takes its name.
“It was six ft. across in those days,” laughed Carlson. “It was the mighty mullet then” and ran red with the clay from some of the 14 brickyards in the village.
After breakfast, we drive west along Tannery St. where Simon gets his first look at the Canadian Mullet Creek, not to be confused with two he has already visited in Australia.
We stop at Mullet Dr. and stroll along the Mullet Walk, which stretches from McFarren Blvd. to Hillside Dr. We look for a nice big sign so that Simon can pose for the entry that will inevitably appear on his web site, www.simonvarwell.co.uk, as he counts down his visits to the 27 known mullet sites in the world.
No sign.
We drive up to Mullet Creek Park, which stretches from the 401 south to Argentia Rd., where Simon poses for the photo above. We try both ends of the park.
No sign.
As we say goodbye to Carlson — who dubs his Mullet Tour — “the most unusual request I’ve ever received in my political career” he vows to get the roads department to do something about the missing Mullet signeage.
Varwell has come half-way across the world to bag the most Mullet sightings he’s ever collected in a single day and, except for one tiny street sign on Mullet Dr., he has no photographic proof of his success.
We head down to UTM to find the spot where the Mullet meets the Credit. The fact that we get to take a lovely walk through Principal’s woods and enjoy the sight of historic Lislehurst on company time is just coincidental. We find the confluence, but it must be viewed from the banks of the Credit far above. Simon can barely get a shot of the water through the trees.
But all in all, it’s been a good day for a mullet hunter. A creek, a street, a park and a personal history from a man who once wore a “semi-mullet.”
How would Simon sum up Mulletdom in Mississauga?
“No signs,” he answers.
“Other than that, it’s been lovely. It’s great to see things in the context of how this city has grown, the history and the environment. This one has been much more educational than the other ones have been.”
Oh, and if anybody knows of any other Mullets that he can visit, what would Simon recommend?
“Don’t contact me,” he says. “I don’t want to know.”
It seems even mullet mania has its logical limits.

A week ago we had no candidates for the three major parties in the riding-that-time-forgot, Mississauga-Brampton South. By next Thursday night, we should have all of them in place.
The first puzzle piece dropped Saturday when Liberal candidate Amrit Mangat was unveiled at a Mississauga hotel as the appointed candidate of the party in power.
The 54-year-old Brampton resident said this morning that she is “very happy to be the candidate. The (Liberal) party followed the process and I am very pleased because there were several other very qualified people. I’m a woman. I reflect the diversity of the riding and I have experience because I have been a small business woman and a teacher.”
Born in India and trained as a teacher there, Mangat came to Canada in 1992. She has taught as a supply teacher, managed several small businesses and is now an office administrator with her lawyer-husband’s law firm, which moved its offices from Mississauga to Brampton 18 months ago.
Asked if being appointed rather than chosen in the open nomination that many other would-be candidates wanted, Mangat said, “in my opinion, that won’t be an issue. There were other candidates (who applied) and I followed the process. The leader has the legal power,” to appoint.
The party was clearly looking for a young female face to reflect the many shades of Mississauga-Brampton South. “One of its greatest strengths is its diversity,” says Mangat. “We need to celebrate so many different cultures. We are a model for the world. We are a beacon for the world and we need to move forward.”
Being appointed a little more than three weeks before the campaign is to be launched would normally be a distinct disadvantage, but maybe not in M-BS – as some smart-alecks have taken to calling it.
Masood Khan, who has been the front-runner all along for the Conservative nod had a meeting Sunday afternoon with Party Leader John Tory and is deeply disillusioned that the nomination he thought was well in hand will now be an open contest. The nomination is set for next Monday night at 7:30 p.m. at the Living Arts Centre, but Khan is considering withdrawing.
“I told John Tory and (Party President) Blair McCreadie all along that I don’t want to create a problem for the party and I would step aside the moment they felt they had somebody who was better,” said Khan.
A new candidate, Mortgage Broker Ramdyal Singh, has applied directly to the party and is the other contender for the post.
Khan doesn’t think the newcomer, whom he does not know, is better and believes he has more votes than Singh. He is considering withdrawing, however, because he feels he has already earned the post. “It’s a matter of principle,’” he says.
The 11-member riding executive apparently agreeds. They resigned Sunday evening, confirms local nomination committee Chair Charles Piper. They are apparently upset, as Khan is, because the local candidate their search committee found is being allowed to be challenged at such a late hour by someone they know almost nothing about.
Meanwhile, the NDP will nominate its candidate, Karanjit Pandher, August 30.
It appears that the Conservatives kept hoping a “star candidate” would run onto the stage to grab the nomination, but it hasn’t happened.
With Khan’s likely withdrawal, you will be hard-pressed to find any candidates with any significant local profile at all in M-BS.
Welcome to the City’s no-name riding. It’s starting to look like generic politics in its basest form.

For the second time in the past decade, the heritage plaque on the site of the former Credit Mission native village, on what is now the Mississaugua Golf and Country Club, has gone missing.
When it happened the first time in the late 1990s, there was a happy ending. After months of appeals to the vandals who might have stolen the plaque, which commemorates the aboriginal community which was built on the property in the mid-1820s, the plaque was discovered to be in the City’s possession. Oops.
A crew had accidentally knocked it from its base and it was discovered months later on a warehouse shelf in a recreation and parks storage facility.
This time, Heritage Mississauga Historian Matthew Wilkinson has done the due diligence, checking the warehouses and other likely municipal sources. “We’ve searched every City yard with no luck,” says Wilkinson.
It looks like someone simply decided the plaque, which mentions the contributions of Revs. Peter Jones and Egerton Ryerson to the Indian village, was a great keepsake.
Or the plaque — one of 100 or so across the Province (there are a dozen in Mississauga) that has been vandalized — may be a victim of the value of its scrap aluminum.
There is evidence on the site, located right outside the entrance to the golf club just south of the Queen Elizabeth Way, that someone did it grievous bodily harm. “If you visit, you can see that it looks to be physically broken,” explains Wilkinson. “If you look at the pole, there’s a portion of the sign mounting still there. It looks like it was reefed on, to pry it away.”
The sign went missing late last year.
Heritage Mississauga asked the Ontario Heritage Trust, which administers the 1200 plaques around the province, about replacement but the response from Beth Anne Mendes, provincial plaque coordinator was not encouraging. “As the Ontario Heritage Trust is a not-for-profit agency of the Ontario Government our resources are very limited with regard to the replacement of plaques that are stolen, damaged or vandalized. At present, the cost to produce a new plaque is approximately $3,750. Ideally we would like to be able to attend to all of these cases but are simply not able to so, due to financial constraints and a lack of
field resources.”
The plaques are replaced when the local municipality or heritage body absorbs most or all of the costs. Even then, only three or four are replaced each year.
Heritage Mississauga plans to replace the plaque, but will have to raise additional monies to provide security to ensure it does not go missing again.
It is considering moving the plaque to a spot on the shoulder of the road a little farther north, where there is more space. “We are thinking about some kind of cairn, which would provide more security, perhaps with a garden feature,” says Wilkinson.
If the heritage board, the City, Ward 8 Councillor Katie Mahoney (a keen heritage supporter) and everyone else agrees, fundraising could begin this fall.
Which is good, in a way, but really irksome in another since it should be totally unnecessary.
What kind of person is so thoughtless and so callous that they would knowingly destroy a memorial to the people who settled this community and gave us our name?

When Erin Bearse was born 22 years ago, her parents planted a tree to mark her birth outside the home that her great-grandfather had purchased when Applewood Acres was first developed by Gordon Shipp,
When Erin’s sister Amie was born nearly 28 years ago and her brother Michael was born nearly 26 years ago, maple trees were planted for them in the front yard of the family’s home on Greening Ave.
Because it was getting crowded in the front yard, Erin’s “birth tree” was planted behind the house in the hydro right-of-way.
Sometime later this week, even though “her” maple tree is no more than 25 ft. tall and seems no threat whatsoever to the 230,000 volt-transmission lines that tower above it, Hydro One plans to chop down the tree.
A total of seven trees have been marked on the right-of-way behind the Bearse home, which is just east of Stanfield Rd. across the hydro field from St. Edmunds School.
“There’s a small white pine that is no more than five ft. tall,” Bearse (pronounced Beers) says as she provides a tour of what is soon to become demolition alley. A couple of hundred metres east, the chainsaws are already whirring.
When a huge chestnut tree in the backyard of one of the neighbours got too big and messy, it was removed. Bearse rescued a seedling that was growing nearby and planted it in the right-of-way just behind her house. That’s the tree she is sitting under in the photo.
Yesterday, when she saw the big orange H marks on the trees which pronounced their death sentences, Bearse responded by writing a little personal note about each tree and duct-taping it to them for the forestry crews.
“My note about the chestnut explained how I planted it when I was 11 years old,” she says.
When Hydro One wanted to cut down 25-30 per cent of the trees in the same corridor five years ago, Bearse’s father George alerted Mississauga South MPP Margaret Marland and most of the trees were saved.
Hydro has safety concerns about trees that infringe on the 15 ft. safety zone below the huge wires.
Al Manchee, spokesman for Hydro One, said this afternoon that, “the intent is to remove all trees that will eventually threaten the lines.” There was an agreement made in the 1970s, Manchee believes, which did protect certain trees along the corridor, which cannot be removed. They are trimmed instead.
The fact that agreement exists severely undermines the credibility of hydro’s current clear-cut policy. It’s exactly why Larry Steinman and the residents of Lorne Park are fighting so hard to have a huge red maple tree, a clear candidate for the new heritage trees program that is being launched in Ontario, trimmed rather than chopped.
When the chain saws started along the right-of-way this week, residents came out of their homes in Sherway, Applewood Acres and everywhere else along the line to question the wisdom of the chainsaw massacree.
Dave Ross, who lives on Wiseman Crt. in Park Royal was incensed. “They’re tree killers,” he said of hydro. “They are removing all of these nine, ten and 12-ft. trees because they say they are dangers to these lines that are hundreds of feet tall,” Ross said. “They’ve just butchered everything.”
Manchee says residents can come out to a meeting Sept. 10, place and time to be announced, where they can have input into the landscaping plans Hydro One is developing for the new trees it intends to plant to replace the ones that are being removed. The news species will not pose a future danger to the lines because they won’t grow as tall. They include magnolia, hawthorn, cranberry, cedar and, irony of irony, apples.
It’s unlikely residents of streets such as Russet Dr., Snow Cr., MacIntosh Cres., Courtland Cr., Melba Rd. etc. will be in a laughing mood.
In Applewood Acres, where families like the Bearses hand their homes down generation to generation and there is still a strong core of original families, there is a palpable sense of rage at the slaughter of vegetation on the right-of-way. “This place is like a time capsule,” says Erin Bearse. “They preach and preach to us about global warming and air quality and the environmental impact that trees have and they’re just coming in and taking them all down. If we don’t fight for them now,” she says, “there will be nothing left when my kids buy this house.”

In the early spring of 1976, Douglas Campbell stood up in front of Mayor Martin Dobkin and City council on behalf of the Cloverleaf Garden Club and made a bold suggestion: Mississauga should emulate several other Canadian cities and establish a major conservatory on 100 acres of land near the heart of the municipality.
Campbell had a light voice and a gentle, somewhat bemused speaking manner and he did not seem to be taken very seriously by all of the politicians that day. Some councillors quite clearly thought the whole proposition far-fetched. There were some snickers when the Cooksville-Munden Park resident suggested that an ideal location would be along Mississauga Rd., not far from Erindale College (now UTM.)
The cost of land there was obviously prohibitive.
Thirty-one years later, largely because of the persistence of Doug Campbell and other members of the Mississauga Garden Club, who never stopped pushing the idea, we have our fledgling public gardens on a beautiful piece of property called Riverwood in the heart of the centre — not far from Mississauga Rd. and UTM.
Douglas Campbell lobbied both the politicians, and the local press, for the gardens over many years.
His own garden, on Lorelei Rd., was spectacular, especially in spring. An eclectic collection that featured hundreds of daffodils, begonias, hosta, and native plants, it was featured in numerous magazine and newspaper articles, usually with Doug standing on a little arched wooden bridge that stood in the middle of the garden.
In an article in The Toronto Star in 1994, garden writer Charles Oberdorf said, “no professional landscaper would ever design a garden like Campbell’s. It’s more a collection of plants than a designed landscape, and clearly the work of an obsessive.”
The last time I visited his garden in 2001, Campbell was in poor health as a result of a series of strokes. He was as keen as ever to show off the fruits of his many years of labour. He vowed that day (see picture) that he would be on hand at the opening of the garden park. “I’ll be there one way or the other, even if it has to be with my walker,” he said.
Unfortunately, he was in Trillium Health Centre for that opening. But six months before his death last year, Campbell was able to get to Riverwood for the dedication of a sundial, and an accompanying garden, which honours his enormous contribution in making the park a reality.
As is only appropriate, some of the outstanding heritage perennials from Campbell’s garden are now going to be viewed in that garden created in his memory.
The family is selling the house and have donated the contents of the garden to Riverwood. On Tuesday, volunteers from the Garden Council and a two-man crew dedicated by Sheridan Nurseries will remove the plants. Sheridan has donated the soil, pots and transportation to move the garden.
“This is an exciting project that is really going to add to the horticultural heritage of Riverwood,” says Douglas Markoff, executive director of the Garden Council who approached Sheridan when it was obvious that moving the garden was beyond the council’s resources.
Many of Campbell’s plants are perfectly suited to the arts and crafts theme garden that is being developed.
Not only is the family generously donating the contents of his garden, which will be added to several different locales in Riverwood, but they have also donated his huge library of gardening books and papers, which includes his own account of the History of Trees in Mississauga. “It was a staggeringly generous offer,” says Markoff, who says it took him 45 minutes just to load the cartons into his car. The library will be set up in the historic Chappell House at Riverwood.
Markoff first met Campbell a quarter century ago or so, when he was the manager of Hassall’s garden centre on Burnhamthorpe Rd. E. near Dixie, and Campbell was one of his best customers.
“He invited me over to his gardens and to see Riverwood and that was the first time I ever saw it,” says Markoff. “I remember walking around this place with him as he explained his vision of what it could be.”
Always planting was Doug Campbell: hardy perennials in his own garden and fertile ideas in the public realm.
Now the two will come together in that central, special place that Campbell envisioned so long ago.

At about one in every dozen doors she knocks on, Shaila Kibria gets the “speech.”
“They say, ‘You guys are all the same. You’re just in it for yourselves. You don’t care about us.’”
Kibria says that comment stops her in her tracks every time. She has said the same, or worse, many times herself. “I’m the biggest critic of bureaucracy and all the paperwork,” says the NDP candidate in the provincial riding of Mississauga-Erindale.
“It strikes me in the heart when they say that. It hurts. I just tell them, I have nothing but my face to give you. Read the track record on my brochure and see what I’ve done for the community.”
That’s the culture shock of moving from political attacks, which Kibria has launched many times as a 32-year-old student and community activist best known for her work at University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), to defence of the “profession” of politics on the front lines of candidacy.
Kibria stands out from most of the other candidates of various political persuasions in Mississauga because of her ardent passion for her various causes, which include women’s rights, the fight against racism, and the rights of mothers to have child care while they attend university.
It took the mother of three a dozen years to get her BA from UTM, during which time she became president of the part-time students’ union, had a children’s book published, volunteered at libraries, mosques, churches and schools and found time to organize Toronto events such as the Day to Stop Sexual Abuse, the Black Youth Coalition Against Violence and National Aboriginal Day.
Her success in establishing a child care centre at UTM is an example of her persistence.
When the administration was less-than-enthusiastic, she and other child care zealots rented their own premises in the Student Centre and proved they could make it a going concern. Now there is a waiting list and the administration is refurbishing two units in a campus residence to house the program it will now take over and run.
The move from backroom political hot-button pusher to the face of a political party has been difficult, concedes Kibria. “I’m more of a behind-the-scenes person but you can’t be humble.”
It bothers her that the (larger) immigrant community from which she comes gives the Liberals a free ride, automatically voting for them out of gratitude for being allowed to come to Canada. She was a Liberal once herself, until she started reading the history and discovered that it was often the left-wing CCF and NDP who were the catalyst for the policies the Liberals still get credit for at the polls.
Being the underdog (the subtitle for every NDP candidate in Mississauga) is nothing new to Kibria, who has already spent all but $1,000 of the $19,000 she raised at a kickoff fundraising banquet. The campaign operates out of doughnut shops and friend’s houses, although another fundraiser is planned which could actually result in an office opened.
On her campaign brochure, which was delivered to half of the riding this weekend by 54 volunteers, Kibria is pictured in open-toed high heel shoes,
a brown-striped business suit and a pink hijab, with her trademark electric smile. It’s a rather disconcerting combination that seems to sum up her unconventional appeal.
“They told me to wear a suit and that’s the only one I own,” laughs Kibria. “They told me to wear a beige hijab because nobody takes you seriously when you wear pink. But I said, No I can’t. That’s just not me.”
Well, she’s wearing pink and, given the propensity she has shown for mobilizing people to date, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for Kibria’s opponents to start taking her seriously.

We’re # 6.
Peel Region, that is, ranks sixth out of 27 municipalities in Ontario in the “sustainability snapshot” that has just been released by The Pembina Institute, a respected west-coast think thank that keeps a keen eye on things environmental and urban.
The 2007 Ontario Urban Sustainability Report looks at three broad categories, smart growth, liveability and equity and economic vitality based on 33 different indicators. Then it ranks the municipalities, which include Toronto and all of the regional governments around it.
“The objective of the report is to inform and provide a basis of measurement for communities and the province for urban sustainability policies and program development,” says the Institute.
Larger, older municipalities tend to do well when measuring sustainability because they have more concentrated populations, more mature transit systems and more diverse forms of housing. Thus Toronto is number 1 in the rankings and Ottawa is second.
Halton is the only GTA regional municipality ahead of Peel at number three while the medium-sized, highly liveable towns of Stratford and Guelph come next.
Like most of these reports, it tell us mostly what we already know — that the population in Toronto is stabilizing, the population in 905 is skyrocketing without the same community supports Toronto enjoys and, essentially, sprawl is king of all.
“Unsustainable development patterns in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, particularly the 905, threaten to undermine the economic vitality of these communities in the long term,” says lead author Ray Tomalty. “Long commuting distances, the lack of commuting options, traffic congestion, and low housing diversity and affordability could strangle the long-term prosperity of these regions.”
Ontario issued its much-ballyhooed Places To Grow report in Mississauga more than a year ago but the Pembina academics clearly suggest it won’t be enough to stop the hollowing out of Toronto which has already started.
“The overall picture that emerges, particularly the concentration of population growth in areas where unsustainable, urban sprawl dominates, is one of more serious challenges than assumed in the province’s recent Greenbelt and Growth Plan initiatives,” said York University Environmental Studies professor Mark Winfield in the press release issued with the study. “More aggressive interventions by the province to curb sprawl and automobile dependence are needed to ensure the sustainability of communities in the Greater Golden Horseshoe.”
How about more aggressive interventions by the planners and people who are in charge of governing those communities — in other words, the people we elect every four years and the staff they employ?
The only reason that Peel and most of the other GTA regions rank so highly in the poll (York was seventh, Durham 11th) is because of the equal billing for economic vitality with the other two factors. “High economic growth and poor urban form”, they name is 905.
Peel was third in economic vitality (measuring factors such as median income and unemployment) but just 13th in liveability and 15th in the smart growth index.
Some of the indicators for those indices are intriguing. Peel was dead last, 27th, in the heritage homes category which measures the age of the housing stock which is “a proxy for the number of heritage homes and sense of place that a community possesses.”
We were also close to the bottom in providing affordable housing, supplying recreational spaces per 10,000 population and physical activity. On the other hand, we had the lowest crime rate and were third lowest in the number of accidents on our roads.
In the smart growth category, Peel did very poorly in pedestrian-friendly street layout, commuting distances and providing work close to where we live.
But, believe it or not middle of the pack on smart growth was way ahead of Niagara, Halton, York and Durham which were four of the bottom six.
“In general, these rankings reflect poor land use mixes, low levels of intensification and long commuting distances,” says the report, which you can see at www.pembina.org/pub/1512.
When they paved paradise, who knew the parking lot would ever go on so very long?

How would you feel if you spent 12 years creating a garden, sourcing more than 200 natural plants, nurturing their development through drought and deluge, only to have someone cut it down in a single day?
How would you feel if that someone was your local municipal government?
Unfortunately, Deborah Dale, the past president of the North American Native Plant Society, knows how it feels.
The City of Toronto decimated her garden this week after what was apparently a lengthy series of complaints from neighbours.
My first reaction to this story yesterday in The Toronto Star was to look at the date to see if I hadn’t accidentally picked up a newspaper from a decade ago.
Surely we have long ago left behind the stereotype of the natural approach to landscaping and gardening as creating an unsightly mess.
When the City of Mississauga began leaving large swaths of its parks in their natural condition many years ago (largely for economic, not philosophical reasons, it should be pointed out), The News received countless phone calls from citizens outraged that areas outside their pristine backyards were being sacrificed to the laws of nature.
The City should prune everything within an inch of its life, and pour pesticides on anything that even looked like a weed, they believed.
Thank goodness we have come a long, long way from those days. Where once we engineered watercourses, lining them with concrete and gabion baskets that actually made the erosion problem much worse downstream by accelerating devastating runoff, we have learned to mimic the natural systems of filtering shrubs and tree buffers along streams. Now they not only look a lot better with the creation of a green corridor but they work better at holding back runoff too.
If you look carefully around Mississauga, you’ll see a lot of people extending their gardens onto the City-owned lands between the sidewalk and the road allowance and creating front-yard gardens that leave no space for boring, brush-cut grass.
Reduces maintenance. Creates biodiversity. Slows runoff. Provides nesting and feeding places for birds and small animals. Exhibits four-season interest. Attracts butterflies and photographers. Repels neat freaks.
Just don’t forget to tell your friendly neighbourhood bylaw control officer, not to mention your neighbours, that it’s all part of the grand plan and not just an act of civic indifference.

Sarah had a good question, as nine-year-olds often do.
She had watched her Dad ride in The Healing Cycle event last year, which raises money for the palliative care program at Credit Valley Hospital.
After it was over, she sent an email to one of the chief organizers, Heather Campbell, and asked why all of the money was going to adults in palliative care, and none going to children who are in the hospital to spend their final days.
“I had the idea that kids need the same amount of attention that adults do,” Sarah explained this week.
Heather listened, as adults sometimes do. Now guess who is the captain of a new section of the ride next Sunday, Sept. 9 called Kids 4 Kids that will raise money for youngsters too?
Captain Sarah handed out letters to her classmates on the last day of school telling them about the event and has solicited contributions from family and neighbours amounting to more than $500 already. She will be leading the Kids 4 Kids team around the 10 km. race course that starts from the Meadowvale Delta next week.
Asked about her motivation, Sarah says, “I’m doing this for a good cause because if I ever get sick, I would want to know there is stuff out there for me.”
She pauses thoughtfully when asked to imagine what it must be like for children suffering from leukemia and other fatal diseases who are confined to hospital because of their medical requirements. “It would be upsetting. I would be scared... and sad.”
Sarah’s father Tony, who doesn’t want the family’s surname published, heard about the ride when he overheard a conversation about it in the Re-My Sport bike store a few years ago.
The new wing to be built at Credit Valley includes a proposal for a 10-bed palliative care unit and the money raised by the Healing Cycle will go towards that construction, says Tony.
“Palliative care is the forgotten child when it comes to fundraising,” says Tony. “No one wants to think about end-of-life care.”
When his own mother was dying at CVH, “we said goodbye to her in the basement, with all kinds of construction material around us. She was oblivious to it and, honestly, so were we.”
But it would be a lot better to say goodbyes in a more appropriate place.
A survivor of prostate cancer himself, the 71-year-old says the funds raised will go towards a number of projects, including a cart to provide a number of special supplies for kids, including red towels that do not show blood stains, and a room decorated like a child’s bedroom where kids and their parents can really feel at home while they visit.
“When I heard about The Healing Cycle, I had just been diagnosed, so I was well-motivated to get involved and so was Sarah,” says Tony.
After a slow start, The Healing Cycle is slowing getting into gear and clearly has the people and the passion to be Mississauga’s late-summer equivalent to the highly successful Gears 24-Hour Spin for cancer.
For more information or to donate, visit www.www.thehealingcycle.ca