Random Access

Someone remarked after John Tory outlined his party’s platform on education this morning in Mississauga that Tory sounds and acts a lot like Bill Davis.
Not a bad role model or campaign strategy, of course, replicating Brampton Billy’s voice of stability and reason, a calm and collected persona that helped the Conservatives maintain an amazing 42 years in power.
After Tory spent 20 minutes sketching his party’s plans in education: matching the Liberals’ spending this year dollar for dollar, adding $2.44 billion over the next four years, fixing the funding formula that McGuinty keeps purporting to fix and setting up a school-building repair fund to reach $100 million at the end of the Tories’ first term, he was the guy who sounded like he wanted to be remembered as the “Education Premier.” That is, after all, how McGuinty keeps trying to bill himself.
The question is, which leader’s Bill Davis impression will the public prefer?
Davis, who couldn’t have had a better mentor in the art of grassroots politics than T.L. Kennedy, the long-time Minister of Agriculture and short-lived Premier of Ontario that he so greatly admired, acquired the amazing ability to be all things to all people by the end of his reign.
Davis was a small c-conservative who was able to project the unbeatable image of a rock-solid fiscal conservative who had a progressive social conscience. He is best-remembered for his politically bold decision to extend public funding for Catholic schools to the end of high school.
While that flew in the face of prevailing public opinion at the time, it was a response to both an incredibly well-organized campaign by the Catholic community (a key block of voters) and a logical step to deal with parallel school systems, one of which suddenly ended at Grade 10. That caused a disruptive march of thousands of students from the Catholic to the public system for their last two or three years of school.
It also had a constitutional basis dating from creation of separate schools at the time of Confederation.
John Tory’s misguided desire to extend public funding to all religious schools may be an attempt to make a similar Davis-style decisive blow for equity, but it does not enjoy the same broad political support. The timing — which is everything in politics — is all wrong as people increasingly worry about the political implications of providing a narrowly-focussed world view for children that can skew their moral axis.
Today, Tory was again asked if he intends to abandon that policy. He replied that it was part of his platform when he sought the leadership and it will remain part of his party’s platform. “When all is said and done, one day I believe people in all parties and, people who have no parties, will support this policy and say that every child will deserve and receive a public education in Ontario.”
The problem is that they can already have one by going to their friendly neighbourhood publicly-funded school and mixing with the rest of the world regardless of race, colour or religion.
Mr. Tory is a solid, decent man who would make a good Premier. His motivation in promising religious-school funding is honourable but it may be just as destructive in its own way as the slash and burn policies of the Mike Harris era that his party is still trying to live down.

When he went to work for Me To We Responsible Style this summer, 17-year-old Kyle Crawford of Mississauga knew what he wanted to pitch to his new employer: sustainable school spirit.
Crawford is a student at Cawthra Park Secondary School who organized a “Responsible Shopper” event last fall where members of a school club called LEAP (Leaders Empowering All People) tried to show their fellow students that they can make a difference with the consumer decisions they make.
As part of that program Crawford, who attended Ashgrove Public School, then Hillside and Allan A. Martin (in the business and tech program) invited a representative of Me To We Style to attend and talk about eco-friendly clothing before Christmas.
You may not have heard of Me To We but you have probably heard of the group from which it sprang, Free The Children, the charity started by Toronto teen Craig Kielburger and his brother Marc to bring the issue of child sweatshop labour to the fore.
In the course of the Responsible Shopper program, John Mullally, marketing director of Me To We, asked Kyle is he would like to work with the group this summer.
On the last day of his employment this summer, the Cawthra Park drama student said, “it has just been incredible being exposed to this cutting-edge business model. Not a lot of youth get exposed to that.”
Me To We markets clothing made of bamboo from Turkey, which can be renewed in just a few years, and organic cotton. Manufacturing is done locally in the GTA.
One of the most popular T-Shirts sports the motto “Be The Change,” referring to the famous quote from Gandhi that, “We Can Be The Change We Wish To See In The World.”
We To Me is the commercial application of Free The Children, allowing people to buy ethically manufactured, quality goods made from sustainable sources.
“We want to Be The Change in business,” says Crawford, a member of the Team Ontario baseball team who is hoping to combine a political science major and an Ivy League education after he graduates from Cawthra this year. He showed off his stuff this summer against the Ivy Leaguers in something called the Honour Roll Baseball Camp in Virginia.
The beauty of We To Me is that half of the profit from the clothing sales goes to support the work of Free The Children to end the misery of children who work in Third World sweatshops.
The T-shirts, available at www.metowestyle.com, cost $24.99. “I think people will pay a premium because you are not just buying a shirt, you are buying sustainability and the idea that we, as consumers, can vote with our wallets,” says Kyle.
This fall, as a result of the idea he took to Me To We, an information package has been developed for high schools. When schools are hosting their spirit days, or holding special events where they give away or sell shirts and hoodies, they will have the option of putting some of their newly-learned principles about social justice into action.
“Now they can have their school spirit developed in a way that is responsible,” says Crawford.

This sitting Liberal government is way out of control when it comes to making public pronouncements and announcements.
It seems that every day for the past month, three “media alerts” have arrived via e-mail explaining that Health and Long-Term Care Minister George Smitherman will be in Wawa or Winchester to make “an important health care announcement.”
Smitherman appears to be well on his way to announcing the details of every penny spent on health care by the province in every community where it was spent. And the campaign hasn’t even started yet.
The only thing worse than government by press release is government by photo opportunity. We have been cursed by both in record number with this McGuinty McGovernment.
A scan in the past few days of the front page of The Toronto Star, which never met a Liberal election promise it didn’t feel was worth the line story, is revealing: Liberals Promise New Holiday, Liberals Woo Parents With Plans for Preschoolers and Undergrads, Liberals to Promise More Help to Students.
The McGuinty government is like a puppy dog who wants to be loved so much, he keeps whacking you in the face with his tail, as if to say — see, I’m really, really glad to be here.
Somebody should point out to the Premier and his friends that leadership does not mean trying to be all things to all people by throwing money strategically at every cause on the horizon. The public is already suffering from promise fatigue.
Having broken his commitment not to raise taxes shortly after taking office in 2003, you’d think the Premier would not be so prolific in his profligacy this time around.
• • •
Chalk up one for the good guys.
Yesterday at general committee, City councillors refused to allow Hydro One to continue to use a piece of property on Mavis Rd. near the railway tracks, where the utility has been storing the wood chips from the trees it has been systematically eradicating from its right-of-way which that traverses the City’s south end.
That is obviously scant comfort to the residents who have watched the trees behind their homes — which appeared to be no threat whatsoever to hydro wires far away — be completely flattened.
But the good news is that the cutting has apparently stopped while Hydro removes the wood chips it stored without council authorization.
When Ward 2 Councillor Pat Mullin met with Hydro officials at the home upset Lorne Park resident Larry Steinman in August, she proposed that they stop the chain saws and start the dialogue with residents, a suggestion Hydro has apparently taken to heart.
Mullin has asked Hydro One to provide detailed maps showing which trees it plans to completely remove, and which can be trimmed. There are a lot in the latter category.
A scheduled meeting next Monday has now been postponed to Oct. 22 and the trees may have a reprieve until then.
The pile of tree remains on City property are obviously being used as bargaining chips, you should pardon the expression, to try to get hydro to sit down with the angry residents.
Self-described “tree-hugger” Carolyn Parrish says, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat. I was not about to aid and abet their butchering of those trees by letting them have a burial ground in ward 6.”

You would be justified in asking why Carol McCartney, such an accomplished jazz singer, with such a marvellous set of pipes and such a vast array of experience gigging with scads of Canada’s best players, is just now putting out her first CD under her own name.
“Well, it matters what the powers that be think of your work so you might as well make it the way you want,” says the Port Credit singer. “It’s what I wanted,” she said of her new record. “I think I really wanted to feel ready to do it.”
If the singular enchantment of virtually every track on the new CD, A Night in Tunisia, is any indication, McCartney is more than ready for prime time.
Although it has just hit the streets and will be released officially at a release concert Sept. 19 Live@the Courthouse at 57 Adelaide St. E., Tunisia has already garnered a boatload of glowing reviews. (See www.carolmccartney.com/reviews.php.)
The genesis of the record goes back a couple of years when McCartney did the vocals for Like A Spring Day, fronting the Bob Brough Quartet on a record filled with songs by Brough and his lyrical partner Sonja Tran that sound like they could have been written in the heyday of Tin Pan Alley.
On that outing, Dennis Patterson was the engineer. He moved to England, then came back to Canada where McCartney met him again when she and the Brough quartet recorded a concert for Katie Malloch’s excellent CBC jazz program in Studio 211 at the Mother Corp’s headquarters downtown. “I was extremely comfortable working with him,” says McCartney.
Last January, she went into the same studio with Patterson co-producing and recorded a set of ten standards that frankly have no right to have any life left in them.
McCartney persuaded pianist John Sherwood to resuscitate everything from The Shadow of Your Smile, to East of the Sun and I Thought About You.
It is no mean feat that McCartney, who has one of the most disarming voices in jazz belying a muscular technique, makes these songs her own. Literally hundreds of interpretations of each precede hers.
“I knew it would be a tall order but I also knew that if we did it right, it would appeal to people across the board,” says the part-time jazz vocal instructor at Mohawk College. “I just like singing these tunes and I felt comfortable with them. I thought we could put our own little twist on them so they would be different.”
And, oh yes, one other little thing: she was playing with some of the best players on the face of the planet, several of whom she has worked with extensively in the past: i.e. Peter Appleyard whose vibes adorn East of the Sun, Chase Sanborn on whose records Carol has done numerous vocals, Reg Schwager whose beautiful intro kicks off I Concentrate on You, John MacLeod, who delivers a sumptuous solo on You Don’t Know What Love Is, world-famous master of the flugelhorn Guido Basso, and the rock-solid rhythm section of Terry Clarke on drums and Dave Young (shown above with Carol) on bass.
McCartney and Young perform a duet of Bobby Timmons’ Dat Dere, a song too contrived by half in its baby-talking sentimentality. The vocalist even manages to make that number near-tolerable.
“It was important to me to be with musicians I feel solid with, and I’ve known and played with these guys for a long time,” she says. “The musicianship is out of this world and it’s critical to have that kind of camaraderie, especially when you’re doing it basically live off the floor.”
Most of the band will be on hand when McCartney performs at 8:30 p.m. on the 19th.
The highlight of a record filled with them is the evocative closer, Every Time We Say Goodbye which is, perhaps, Cole Porter’s greatest ballad.
The way McCartney sings the ascending series of goodbyes at the end will give you goosebumps — every time.

You could forgive the candidates for the federal Conservative nomination in Mississauga South for being a little cranky these days.
After all, some of them have been running for well over a year now and seem to be getting nowhere.
In fact, the four declared candidates were asked to virtually start over again recently by the party, which is requiring them to resubmit their applications, complete with duplicate copies of almost every piece of personal information they’ve ever collected about themselves.
You’ll recall that the forces that govern political parties from their all-knowing, all-seeing perches in Ottawa decided earlier that Phil Green, who had put in two highly credible campaigns against incumbent Liberal Paul Szabo, was no longer a suitable candidate.
That, of course, prompted a lot of people to express interest in running in the riding that sent Tory Don Blenkarn to Ottawa for 16 years.
Lawyer Tom Simpson of Clarkson was the first man in the race and has since been joined by financial consultant Hugh Arrison, Ward 2 Peel District School Board Trustee Don Stephens and Raya Shadursky, a credit union manager.
They have been selling memberships like mad and constantly asking for a nomination meeting which never comes.
The ongoing delays have raised rumours that the Tories want to keep the decks clear in the South for a superstar parachute candidate they may have in mind. May be sheer political paranoia, of course, but the slow process in naming an opponent for Szabo is adding fuel to the speculative flames.
Arrison, who has lived in Mississauga-Oakridge for 16 years, is sanguine about the requirement to reapply. “We were all caught in the middle when they changed the rules,” he said today. “We had to redo a whole bunch of paperwork which is a pain in the neck.”
It is a good thing that the party wants to delve into the background of its potential candidates to avoid any embarrassing revelations during campaigns, Arrison believes. On the other hand, “They want your first-born and your fingerprints,” he jokes.
Asked if he thinks the Harperites are keeping a seat warm for a special friend, Arrison demurs.
“I think that would destroy the whole riding,” he says. “That was done by the provincial Conservatives (in Mississauga South) and it has caused a tremendous angst. Two (nominations dictated by the party) would be a killer.”
Although he has never run before, Arrison isn’t surprised by the bumpy rode to nomination. “I’m just one of their toys at the moment,” he says. “I wish there was more communication but I guess there are reasons for it. I’m not discouraged.”
One thing that concerns all the candidates is the looming deadline of Dec. 31, when all the memberships that have been sold to date, will expire.
That could leave everybody up in the air.
Which will, at least, be familiar territory.

It was one of many intriguing images that Danish architect Helle Søholt showed last night at Clarke Hall: four baby carriages double-parked outside a café in downtown Copenhagen.
If you looked carefully, you could see the young mothers who owned the carriages sitting beside the glass walls on the inside of the restaurant, monitoring their babies while they shared coffee and laughs with other young mothers.
“There was a Danish woman who did the same thing in New York and she was arrested,” Søholt told the gathering of residents last night at Clarke Hall in Port Credit, where she was delivering a talk on the lessons that former town can learn from what has worked in other cities, and what hasn’t worked. “She was separated from her child for hours. You do not leave your baby outdoors in New York.”
How’s that for a dramatic demonstration of the difference between a liveable city and a city where lots of people live?
In fact, Søholt masterfully showed us how all planning must begin with consideration of what it is to be human.
Put a bench in the middle of a sterile square and no one will sit there. Put benches along a sunny wall up against a building, invite the local farmers to sell their produce in the square and watch the crowds show up to people-watch.
Understanding successful cities means understanding how humans interact and building from there. We put enormous energy into designing and building public spaces, then provide no resources to program them to attract people, the architect said.
In most places in the world, we get it wrong more than we get it right, repeating cardinal errors: letting the car dictate the rules, promoting gridlock during the day and creating an “empty, useless city centre” at night.
A couple of Søholt’s slides provided dramatic evidence that, even in a City like Mississauga where the battle might seem lost on many fronts, there is always hope.
A square in Copenhagen was once a vehicular roundabout with a solitary booth in the middle. Today, it is a huge square with markets, cafés and sitting areas. The 75,000 daily pedestrians now exceed the daily vehicular count on the adjacent Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard.
In an even more dramatic example, the architect showed a photo of grubby back lanes in Melbourne which were once home to garbage bins, graffiti and air conditioning units. The “after” shot shows how cafés with multi-coloured umbrellas, restaurants and art shops have turned a detriment into a showcase.
The audience last night included a number of representatives of ratepayer groups from Port Credit, Lakeview, Clarkson-Lorne Park and Park Royal, who are going to be part of a new umbrella super-group being formed in southern Mississauga, to be called VIVA (Village Inspired Vision Alliance.)
The group was born in part from disillusionment with the review process for the Fram/Slokker application that prompted the ill-fated proposal to move Port Credit Library and resulted, ultimately, in the demolition of the Gray House.
Dorothy Tomiuk, one of the organizers, says Soeholt (seen above during yesterday’s tour of Fram/Slokker’s Port Credit Village development with Gil Penalosa, Executive Director of Walk & Bike for Life) provided, “a really uplifting, hopeful message.”
The main thing Tomiuk took away was a message that Port Credit, which is just about to enter a placemaking exercise to make it a vibrant destination point, has a right to seek the best.
Or as she put it, much more succinctly, “We should be asking the question: ‘Why the hell not?’ about all the things we want to see here.”

Is campaigning for a political party what the Ontario government had in mind when it introduced the requirement that secondary school students should do 40 hours of community service before they get their graduation diploma?
Michael Travers, a 38-year resident of Mississauga, certainly doesn’t think so.
He was “outraged” this week when, while driving through the Fieldgate Dr. and Burnhamthorpe Rd. area near his home, he came across signs posted by Mississauga East- Cooksville Liberal candidate Peter Fonseca that invited students to sign up with his campaign team to fulfil their volunteer commitment.
“Handing out leaflets for a political campaign doesn’t cut it (as volunteer service) in my opinion,” Travers says. “If a kid doesn’t feel like going to the old folks home in his neighbourhood, he can just hand out some literature. This is an easy way out.”
School boards don’t allow political activities on their properties, and candidates can’t campaign there. But they do allow students to volunteer with political campaigns, as per Ministry of Education directive.
If you go to the Peel District School Board web site, in the Your Time Counts section that deals with the community hours, you’ll find a volunteer job board (http://www.peelschools.org/student/time-board.htm.) At the top of the list, above the Canadian Cancer Society, the SuperWalk for Parkinson’s and Community Living Mississauga, you’ll find a volunteer opportunity from Sept. 11-Oct. 10 with Brampton West-Mississauga MPP Vic Dhillon.
Something about that just doesn’t sit right.
All of the postings include a disclaimer which says that the volunteer organization meets the criteria for community involvement. “This posting is provided as a service to students--it is not intended to be an endorsement by the Peel District School Board of any specific organization or program,” it states.
The school board is simply following the provincial guidelines for eligible activities, says the board’s director of communications and strategic partnerships, Brian Woodland. Eligible groups include, “any club, religious organization, arts or cultural association, or political organization that seeks to make a positive contribution in the community.”
The rules, “are all based on the ministry requirements which are designed to promote good citizenship and the role that students can play in their community,” says Woodland.
Peel Board Chair Janet McDougald believes that, “getting young people involved more in the political process would be a good learning experience” for them.
It’s like all such volunteer opportunities, McDougald says. It could be very good if the student is answering phones, learning about organizational management, watching strategic decision-making and acquiring valuable people skills, or it could be bad if they are just stuffing envelopes and licking stamps or dropping literature in mailboxes.
“It’s admirable that people want to get involved in the political process and learn about it and isn’t education all about choices?” she says.
Point taken, but I have to agree with Mr. Travers that there is something that clearly rankles about giving as much weight to working on a political campaign as organizing a food drive for a charity or coaching Special Olympics.
Speaking of which, Travers himself knows something about volunteering, having served with Special Olympics for 25 years and participated on the boards of Orphans’ Hope and Canadian Food For Children.
“I think the politicians are taking advantage of a grey area of what volunteer hours are for,” he says. “If you go back to the spirit of this thing, this was supposed to be a way to get students involved in charity and the community.”
Think the problem is that politics is partisan by nature and volunteering in the greater community should be non-partisan in the broadest sense.
You can’t blame the school boards or the MPPs for abiding by the rules but as Mr. Travers succinctly says, “it has an odour to it.”

Lakeview lost one grand old lady with the demolition of the Lakeview Generating Station, and it is about to lose another.
The once-magnificent American beech tree that was used as a benchmark when the first-ever survey of Peel was done in the first two years of the 1800s, is on its last legs.
Located on the lakefront estate once owned by the late, renowned Canadian architect Anthony Adamson, the former reeve of Toronto Township, the beech has experienced a difficult last few years.
Instead of being allowed to spend those years enjoying its magnificent view of the waterfront, the tree has been forced to fend off vandals, the ravages of age and drought.
In May 2005, someone lit a fire in the large cavity which has developed at its base. That likely would have been the end of it right there, if not for the quick action of Mississauga firefighters.
City arborists put a beautiful wrought-iron fence around the tree after that, to keep people back. They have been keeping a watchful eye ever since.
Staff recently were forced to trim more branches to preserve its core stability says Frank Buckley, manager of parks for the City’s south district, in an attempt to keep the tree going as long as possible.
But it is quite evident that it is coming to the end of its life cycle and will succumb sooner or later. Probably sooner given the drought conditions of the past few years which have, “had a horrendous effect on the trees across the City,” says Buckley.
The beech has been trimmed so often because of fears that its branches might come down that it has taken on a rather lopsided look.
This week there was a changing of the guard on the site. As Mississauga News photographer Rob Beintema documents in the photos above and below, City workers planted a young beech, about 70 mm. in thickness, nearby.
When the inevitable happens, there will now be a new young, sturdy replacement ready to emerge from the shadow of its predecessor.
“It’s a way of acknowledging the existence of this original tree,” says Buckley.
Unfortunately, the beech may not be around long enough to make it onto the candidate list of “heritage trees” that forestry staff is developing for council’s consideration.
Given the decimating swath that Hydro One crews have recently cut across their southerly right-of-way in Mississauga, maybe they should be invited down to the Adamson Estate to show how a 200-year-old tree can be respected.

Remember those long-standing rumours back when John Tory was still deciding if he would run in Dufferin-Peel-Wellington-Grey or try another tougher riding in the GTA?
The ones that had him running in Mississauga South where the lifetime Tory (generic version) reign was still intact until Tim Peterson upset Margaret Marland by the slimmest of margins in 2003?
Well, maybe they weren’t wrong after all.
Tory looks suspiciously like the candidate for Mississauga South judging by the number of appearances he has made in the riding so far, announcing a major plank in his education policy outside Byngmount Beach Public School, opening the campaign office of his prodigal son, Tim Peterson, who wandered home from the wilderness of the gritty red badlands and, coming up this Friday, holding a rally of all the Mississauga PC candidates at Peterson’s Clarkson offices.
No wonder every list of key ridings in Ontario includes Mississauga South.
It’s as if Tory has staked an emotional claim on the riding as the beachhead in the critical 905 battle for seats that will almost certainly hold the key to power in the Oct. 10 vote.
Now, Tory has anointed Peterson as his surrogate in Wednesday night’s “town hall” meeting at the Mississauga Civic Centre, where the City will try to impress its agenda upon the provincial parties.
None of the Big Three will be in attendance because they are rehearsing for the leaders’ debate the next night. The Liberals are sending the provincial treasurer, Greg Sorbara, and the Tories were rumoured to be sending hot shot Erie-Lincoln MPP Tim Hudak.
Instead, Peterson will carry the spear for the Conservatives in what could be a fatal strategic error. The MPP is being put in the highly uncomfortable position of attacking policies he (at least theoretically) helped create for three-and-a-half of the past four years when he was in the Liberal huddle.
Even at the annual provincial post budget dog and pony show the Liberals put on for the Board of Trade, Peterson was always the comic relief, telling a few jokes and skipping over the details of the programs, suggesting that the audience had no doubt read the relevant bits already in the morning papers. A policy wank, he ain’t.
The good news is that the questions are available beforehand.
Maybe Tory is in town so much because Peterson is having some trouble finding locals to work for him. After the disaster of the floor-crossing and the bitter rift that Tory’s none-too-deft handling of the situation caused in the local association, it’s hard to find South Tories who are actually working in the riding. Nina Tangri in Mississauga-Streetsville has been one of the main beneficiaries of the exodus.
The wound is just too fresh for many Conservatives to work for him and his ex-Liberal friends are more likely to be sitting this one out than following Peterson across the road.
A lot of Tories just aren’t enamoured of the Peterson “good-old-boy” school of charm, either. Especially after 18 years of decorum from Marland.
Maybe telling the former MPP to “shut up” as Peterson did at a July 9 executive meeting, according to the minutes of the association, wasn’t such a great idea.
“Tim Peterson told Margaret Marland to ‘shut up’ at one point, which created an outburst of anger and disgust from a large portion of executive members,” read the minutes.
Trying to get the remark expunged — unsuccessfully — at a follow-up meeting may not have been such a great idea either.

Good for John Tory for raising questions about the form of the Mixed Member Proportional Representation system that we are being asked to pass judgment on in the referendum question that will be on the provincial ballot Oct. 10.
Yesterday, Tory said he had reservations about a system that could create “second-class MPPs” and allow 39 people nobody actually voted for to potentially sit in the Legislature.
There are obvious benefits to having our government at Queen’s Park more accurately reflect the actual support that parties receive across the province.
But we had better be very careful about how we tinker with the old first-past-the-post system that has generally served us well for a great many years.
If people get so upset now whenever the will of the local community is thwarted and candidates are appointed by party leaders (as in the case of the Liberal candidate in Mississauga-Brampton South in the current election), why would we want to officially enshrine that approach in our so-called democratic system?
Wouldn’t the corollary of “one man, one vote” be, “one MPP, one riding.”
Under the proposed system, the number of seats where MPPs would actually have to go to the public to ask for support would be reduced, so that 90 would be elected in the traditional method. That means fast-growing urban municipalities, such as Mississauga which are already traditionally under-represented in our ‘we’ll catch up with the actual population at a later date’ redistribution system, would be losers again. We would have five seats rather than six.
In a very Canadian approach that would allow you to actually vote twice and spread the glory around, you would mark your ballot for your candidate of choice in your local riding and then again for your party of choice across the province.
The additional 39 seats would be divided up depending on how the party vote was distributed, with the idea being that smaller parties could have a seat in the House although they could never get anyone actually elected in a single riding.
Pardon the broken record but, again, isn’t there something inherently wrong with putting people in government when no one marked a ballot for them?
And when we learn that the parties will fill out the party lists from which the additional MPPs will be chosen, we should get even more nervous. The temptation to mine the cult of celebrity in putting forth instant politicians who have done absolutely nothing to earn their political stripes will be much too tempting for the parties. All the media types who have always fancied themselves as politicians but never had the stomach for the actual work, will be lining up for a freebie.
So your ears perk up when you hear even party leaders disparage the idea.
Tory said yesterday that the MPPs not directly elected, will be “answerable only to the party establishment” and will, in effect, be appointed. If that gives one of the party leaders the jitters, surely we should all be concerned.
In trying to perfect democracy, we’d better be really, really careful not to violate its basic tenets.

Mississauga has a lot of nice public parks but few of them can match Rhododendron Gardens at the height of blooming season in May.
The lakeside park, at the western entrance to Port Credit, fairly bursts with pinks, lavenders, reds and whites when the rhodos are in their glory. It’s a riot of colour that would make Don Cherry blush with envy.
There’s a long story about how the special plants came to be on public property. Here’s the précis: In the late 1980s, Credit Valley Conservation wanted to do some work to channelize the Cooksville Creek in the backyard of the late rhododendron hybridizer Dr. Joseph Brueckner. He had spent years crossing rhodos that grew in the arctic with other breeds so that the glorious plants would bloom in Canada.
His backyard was filled with fantastic plant material, much of which would have been destroyed by the creek work. Councillor David Culham, who was sitting on the conservation authority, brokered a compromise that preserved the rhodos and a grateful Dr. Brueckner offered to donate several hundred plants to create a special park.
What was then called Cranberry Cove Park was ideal, since it was on the waterfront and had plenty of pine trees. The plants need high humidity and benefit greatly from the acidic soil conditions found in pine forests.
The picture above shows Dr. Brueckner in the middle, Culham on the left and then-Ward 1 Councillor Harold Kennedy in May 1990 in Brueckner’s backyard when the plants were just about to be moved to the park.
Over the years, the parks person who nurtured the rhodos, Wayne Graham has moved on, some plants have died and “we’ve started to see a degradation of the collection,” says Frank Buckley, manager for Mississauga’s parks south division.
On Saturday, the City and Ward 1 Councillor Carmen Corbasson (if she is feeling up to it after her recent fall), members of the Cloverleaf Garden Club and Culham, who retired recently as an Ontario Municipal Board member, will be at the park from 10 a.m.-noon for the kickoff for a new volunteer-based stewardship effort.
Buckley says the session will be an introduction to the refurbishment plan for the park, which includes trail maintenance, removal of invasive species such as garlic mustard and re-development of the large flower bed on the edge of the park, which will be used to create floral themes to promote events in Port Credit such as the Waterfront Festival and Southside Shuffle. “The objective is to make it more brilliant and entertaining,” says Buckley, who’s working with the BIA on the idea.
There is a new gardener assigned to the park, Para Kanp, who just happens to be a master gardener. “His expertise is a perfect fit” for Rhododendron Gardens, says Buckley.
Students looking for a way to fulfil their 40 hours of community service, service groups looking to adopt a worthy cause and ordinary folks who’d like to help are all invited to come out and sign up.
But be warned: One of the duties that volunteers will be asked to do is to remove the dead seedheads from the rhodos, which must be done a few weeks after they bloom each year to reveal the tiny buds that will provide the next year’s growth.
Being the proud owner of exactly one rhodo, I can assure you this is not a job for the faint of heart or the weak of back.
If you doubt that the effort is justified, however, just take a drive along the Lakeshore in the middle of next May. You’ll see why Dr. Brueckner’s perennial gift is well worth the labour.

On vacation next week. Back for the stretch run of the election.