Random Access

My, how a little distance changes the perspective.
Spending a week at the cottage with the warblers and the grouse (one paraded around the back yard for us Sunday) gives one a greater appreciation of the natural world and fear for what we are doing to it.
The routine of picking up the daily paper from the newspaper box is not only a chance for an early morning bird walk, but an eye-opener when you see the world reflected through different eyes – like those of The Toronto Star.
The Mississauga summit last week was the first event not featuring an airplane crash or a train going off the tracks which was actually able to attract a small cadre of reporters from 1 Yonge St. out to the wilds of Mississauga.
Once exposed to the rarified air west of the Etobicoke Creek, they learned several interesting things. “Funding required to address the social deficit is shockingly below the regional averages — so far below that it is front-page news,” states the paper’s urban affairs columnist.
Translation: after erasing a decade of effort by the Fair Share Task Force from our memory banks, we have discovered that its stepson, the Strong Communities Coalition, really does have a point. Maybe we should have run more of those stories filed by our Neighbours West reporters.
In a sidebar we hear that people in Mississauga really do understand that public transit is critical and they really do want it. Guess those exhaust fumes aren’t as thick out here as we thought.
Then there were a couple of head scratchers in a list of ideas floated at the summit. “Start a Mississauga radio station.” CJMR 1190 Mississauga founded and run by the Caine family, which started running the same year the City was born in 1974, doesn’t count apparently because it has a multicultural foreign-language format. The irony is rich given other goals floated at the summit, such as a secretariat or office of diversity to make multiculturalism a recognized strength.
And, as the Living Arts Centre celebrates its 10th anniversary, we have a proposal to re-market the City as “world-class” (an exercise that would prove it is not) and “build a downtown entertainment complex.” Ouch.
At least nobody proposed having an architectural contest to create a truly unique civic presence in the core that would resonate among the canyon of condos.
(None of the foregoing is intended to detract in any way from the admirable goals of the summit. It is a healthy sign that we want to set markers for our progress for the future.)

There is life after politics, or as Steve Mahoney would prefer to think of it, between politics.
Yesterday, Mahoney delivered the keynote address at the huge annual convention of the Municipal Health and Safety Association at the Toronto Congress Centre in Ontario.
Mahoney demonstrated that he has absorbed his lessons as a City councillor (1978-87), an MPP for Mississauga West (1987-1997) and MP for the same riding (1997- 2004) well.
He was everything you would want in a luncheon speaker. Like funny: “I retired from politics in 1994 for health and fatigue reasons; the voters were sick and tired of me.”
In explaining why he went to Queen’s Park, he managed to advertise his future campaign for mayor of Mississauga while associating himself positively with the town’s reigning monarch: “I had supper with Hazel and mentioned that (Premier David) Peterson had called me. I told her I had always wanted to be mayor of Mississauga and wondered if she was thinking of giving it up at any time soon. ‘You know, Steve,’ she replied, ‘They need good people at Queen’s Park.’”
Mostly though, Mahoney was effective at hammering away with the theme that any single workplace accident is one too many.
Appointed as chair of the WSIB Workplace Safety and Insurance Board last year through his long-time Liberal Queen’s Park connections, Mahoney has pounded away at the public consciousness with the WSIB’s ongoing campaign to make workplace safety part of our everyday culture.
“I have been corrected for saying that our number 1 priority at the WSIB is to protect the injured worker,” said the Erin Mills resident. “Our number 1 priority is to make sure the worker is not injured in the first place.”
In our blame-the-victim mentality, we often fail to recognize a workplace accident for what it is.
Which brought Mahoney to the case of William Wallace Currie, a 47-year-old Sault Ste. Marie man who was blasting rock in 1934 so that Lakes Superior and Huron could be connected. On a rainy September morning, Currie was about to go diving underwater to set dynamite blasts when his son Lockie suggested the weather was getting too nasty.
“I can get wet up here or I can get wet down there and get paid for it,” said Currie, who was fatally injured a few minutes later when lightning hit the diving equipment on the boat and detonated the dynamite prematurely.
The youngest of Currie’s five children, 15-year-old Annie Bernice, received survivor benefits for a single year. “She is my mother and she is still alive and well and living in Mississauga,” Mahoney said in delivering the personal punch line to the piece.
It was only after he became chair of the WSIB that Mahoney learned the full story of how his grandfather, whose picture in his working gear still hangs on the wall of his cottage, had died.
He asked his staff to research the files after his son Matt suggested Mahoney might consider having a plaque erected in his grandfather’s honour.
“It’s a good example of why society doesn’t connect with workplace fatalities,” Mahoney said after his presentation. He and his family had never really thought of the tragic loss of Bill Currie in that light.
The only acceptable number for industrial accidents is zero, Mahoney said in his address. “There is a growing army on the road to zero and I hope you will all join me on that road,” he told about 200 people.
They clapped loud and long for a sober message that was obviously delivered with style and sincerity.

Green Party candidate David Johnston got a good laugh at the all-candidates’ meeting at Clarkson Community Centre last night quoting that authoritative political muse, John Lennon.
After hearing another set of answers from his fellow candidates who are vying to become the next MPP for Mississauga South, answers that were long on polemics and short on specifics, Johnston said, “You say you want a revolution/We all want to see the plan.”
Then, of course, Johnston invited residents to go to the Green Party’s web site to see his party’s blueprint.
It was a clever twist in an evening that proved informative and entertaining, when the gloves finally came off.
The answers tended to be formulaic in the preliminary bout, when ratepayer panellists asked the necessary questions on provincial and riding issues. Having been cautioned by moderator Brian Hurley of the Park Royal Ratepayers not to debate among themselves, the candidates stuck to their policy manuals and their scripts.
But when Hurley sensed the growing impatience of the audience, and opened it up to public potshot .... er ... public question period, things got appropriately heated.
Tim Peterson’s ruddy complexion got a little more robust as he girded for another onslaught from the members of his former Liberal riding executive like the one he faced in Lakeview last week. But the incumbent didn’t demur a second and seemed to relish the confrontation.
When Tanya Zaritzky, communications director for the Charles Sousa campaign began to give him a mock job evaluation for his first term — aimed at highlighting his less-than-stellar 37 per cent attendance record in the House — Peterson couldn’t wait to answer. “I hoped all my life you’d be my boss,” he said, managing to suppress the wolf whistle.
The MPP scored his points – pointing out that it was Elizabeth Witmer who originally signed the death warrant for Lakeview Generating Station, not “Ontario’s greenest Premier ever” as Sousa referred to his leader.
With Peterson, there is no guile. What you see is what you get — a blunt, pro-nuke, floor-crossing kind of guy. A mini-Blenkarn who finally figured out he was at the wrong party.
Sousa was the well-versed, impeccably-dressed slick banker, who is so good at talking the political talk already that he makes people nervous. South residents are understandably reserved about his plan for a waterfront park at the site of Lakeview Generating Station. Especially after Peterson said last night that OPG staff sat in his office before his defection and told him the announcement to go ahead with a 900-megawatt station there was just being delayed because of the election.
The Liberal was ready for an-obviously anticipated question on why his riding association accepted funds from a principal in the proposed gas-fired Greenfield South station. Unfortunately the answer, essentially ‘We didn’t recognize his name’ rang hollow.
If there was a winner in the debate, it was the NDP’s Ken Cole. While the mainline guys sniped at each other, Cole stayed out of harm’s way and injected humour and realism.
His concluding statement was funny and pointed, suggesting Peterson and Sousa are both appealing to the forgetful voter.
“Mr. Peterson wants you to forget all the nasty things he said about John Tory when he was a Liberal and what life was like under Mike Harris,” Cole said.
“Mr. Sousa wants you to forget all the promises that Dalton McGuinty made and he wants you to forget that he forgot to keep them,” said the union executive.
“I would urge you to vote for someone who won’t forget who elected them.”

Watch for a jump in the local “None of the Above” vote in next Wednesday’s provincial election.
It seems to me that you will see an increase in the vote for both the NDP, which only got 10 per cent in one of the local ridings (Bramalea-Gore-Malton) last time around and for the Green Party, whose highest total was 2.8 per cent in the same riding.
It is not that these so-called “alternative parties” have run particularly great campaigns, it’s more like the charismatically-challenged duo of Dalton McGuinty and John Tory has left a lot of people under-impressed and looking for a place to park their votes.
Although it is hard to believe now, the NDP was actually a significant force in local ridings until Bob Rae got elected in the huge upset of 1990. People forget that in 1975, Reverend David Busby came within a couple of hundred votes of winning in Mississauga North and was even declared the winner, prematurely, by CTV News.
When Rae won, the NDP vote took 34 per cent of the vote in Mississauga North (where some guy named John Snobelen collected 24 per cent for the Tories), 29 per cent in the West and East and 23 per cent in the South. The party was second in each riding.
How long ago and far away that seems now. Strategic voting in 1999 and 2003 by NDP voters who would rather vote Liberal than see an extension of Mike Harris’ reign all but wiped out the social democrats in these parts.
The party probably has been the home to the most energetic campaign in Mississauga this time around, that of Shaila Kibria in Mississauga-Erindale. She was rewarded by having her home-away-from-home at UTM selected as the site of Wednesday’s local rally where leader Howard Hampton rallied the troops.
Meanwhile the Greens benefited from having leader Frank de Jong (who is running against Mississaugan and former Dufferin-Peel Chair Peter Ferreira in Toronto Davenport) in town for the Mississauga Matters debate. He was the only party leader who attended and helped the City save face with his presence and helped his party’s fortunes with a solid performance, even if he talked over the heads of his audience on occasion.
Part of the Green’s problems is that many of their candidates have very low community profiles.
It was refreshing to hear the Green candidate in the South, David Johnston, say in his concluding remarks at an all-candidates’ Wednesday that, “I will be around for the next four years whether I am elected or not. I will be representing you, regardless, but I would appreciate your vote.”
Nowhere is the problem of divided non-loyalties more evident than in the South. One veteran Tory, still feeling betrayed by Tim Peterson’s decision to cross the floor, told me today that, “I don’t want to vote for Peterson but I don’t want to vote for McGuinty either.” So what does that leave?
Parking a vote with a third party is tempting in principle, but difficult to do in practice for many voters. Once it is just you, a stubby little pencil and your conscience behind a cardboard privacy wall, old habits are hard to break.
Choosing between Tweedle-Dalton and Tweedle-Tory does make it easier.

What a short, strange trip it’s been, to misquote The Grateful Dead. (It goes without saying that there are a lot of Deadheads in politics.)
“For all intents and purposes, it has been a non-campaign,” says David Brown, the kind of level-headed, community-grounded candidate that any party would be glad to have on its roster.
“People have not been engaged,” says Brown, the Conservative candidate in Mississauga-Erindale, “ and when they have been engaged, it’s just been on the one issue.”
Unfortunately for candidate Brown and his leader, that issue was John Tory’s proposal to fully fund faith-based private schools, an issue that alienated the party’s core voters and handed Dalton McGuinty a pedestal on which to crow about how his party has strengthened public education.
Asked about how Tory’s religious conversion to a free vote on faith-based funding has gone down with the voters in the latter stages of the campaign, Brown says, “it’s generally been good. People are generally pleased that Mr. Tory has changed his stance. The concern is that there just is not enough time for it to make a difference. If it had happened a little sooner, we would be able to get back out and explain it more.”
It concerns Brown that the low voter turnout in advanced polls — despite being open for 12 hours a day for 10 days — will carry over until tomorrow. “The campaign has just been so flat. Not a lot of people seem to be paying a lot of attention.”
Ah yes, the old induce-coma-and-conquer strategy. Incumbent governments would love to patent that, if they could.
Ontario voters may not love Dalton McGuinty, but they respect him and they recognize that — tired as we are of hearing him the mantra that things were a lot worse in a lot of ways under Harris-Eves — it is essentially true. Especially in education, where former school teacher Harris seemed to want to exact revenge for every affront he’d ever suffered at the hands of the system. The result: endless rancour, warfare between the federations and the government and strikes that shut down schools.
The voters were looking for a reason not to support the status quo, but it doesn’t look like they were offered anything they found palatable.
The result of Tory’s faith-based proposal has been, “an overwhelming reaction at the doors in favour of our public education system,” says Nav Mangat, communications manager for Mississauga-Erindale Liberal candidate Harinder Takhar. “There was really not a lot of convincing to do,” says Mangat, a product of the public system. “Even in a city like Mississauga where we are so diverse, the majority of people are against it.”
Tory’s free vote recantation/amendment has not changed many minds either, Mangat says. “At the end of the day, the free vote does not change the position of the leader.”
Meanwhile, NDP/UTM candidate Shaila Kibria — whose reliance on the local student vote seems highly problematic given the history of political indifference of undergraduates to both student and general elections— says she is stealing lots of votes from Takhar Liberals who may have a sign on their front lawn but will register their own private protest vote.
The Shaila experience has been fun to watch. Boundless energy, unfortunately, does not necessarily transfer into electoral day success, however.
And there was one really sour note this week.
Kibria admits she was taken aback by an incident where someone scrawled a message on her campaign literature suggesting she is “a terrorist under the veil.”
“It did take the air out of me for a second,” says the 32-year-old mother of three. “I am so used to Mississauga not being racist.
“What you have to rememeber, though, is that for every racist remark we have to listen to, there’s an army of good people out there.”

Is it me or does that feel like the softest majority government of all time?
At the beginning of this campaign, most Ontarians were searching for a reason not to vote for Dalton McGuinty. Sure, his government was “moving forward” on a lot of important fronts — public education, health care and reversing downloading on municipalities being at the top of the list.
But the government, like its leader, really didn’t seem to have a personality.
You had the feeling that people really, really wanted John Tory to give them a reason to vote for him. A decent man with an impeccable business record. (Anyone who emerges unscathed after being commissioner of the Canadian Football League has earned his stripes.)
He seemed like someone could put the progressive back in the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.
And then along came misery — in the form of his proposal for faith-based school funding. A miscalculation of catastrophic proportions, it alienated the party’s core voters. If it was intended to woo the many voters from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds in places such as Mississauga, it was sadly misconceived.
As Tory candidates across Mississauga found out, those people are putting their children in public and Catholic schools not because they can’t afford private ones, but because they truly value the experience their children receive there.
When Tory listened to all of the dissenters in his caucus and the media, copping out with a “free vote” alternative that everyone saw through, Leadership Matters turned into Leadership Malfunctions.
“It was a killer,” David Brown said last night as he celebrated — quite rightly — a solid campaign that never really had a chance of victory. Brown pulled 33.2 per cent of the vote, more than any PC candidate in the city with the exception of incumbent Mississauga South MPP Tim Peterson.
One local Tory candidate actually asked Tory not to talk about faith-based funding publicly when he was in a local riding early in the campaign. The local candidatdes were all in damage-control mode for most of the campaign.
At the end, Brown sent out a final piece called Setting The Record Straight that stated: “On faith-based funding, it will involve lengthy public consultations, town hall meetings throughout the riding, and a free vote.” It included this quotation from the candidate: “After the local consultations are completed, I will vote the will of the riding.”
There was no question what that will was in this campaign, Brown said, an unequivocal no.
Then there was Mississauga South, a microcosm of Leadership Malfunctions. The price of letting Tim Peterson across the floor was fatal: a revolution in the local ranks that meant most Tories sat out the campaign or went to other ridings and a nasty confrontation with a spurned candidate that painted the leader as autocratic and undemocratic. Not to mention the fact that a re-motivated local Liberal Association was able to rally behind a candidate who was clearly superior to Peterson.
The jump in the Green vote in the South, from 2.4 per cent in 2003 to 8.82 per cent this time around isn’t all a reflection of people’s admiration for David Johnston’s fledgling birding skills. More like some disaffected Tories found a passenger pigeon for their protest.
Finally, a word about the riding-that-time-forgot. Can anyone be a better example of the mercurial magic of politics than Amrit Mangat?
Two months ago she was quietly minding her own business working in her husband’s law firm in Brampton when the powers-that-be decided she fit the profile the Liberals were seeking in Mississauga-Brampton South and she became the chosen one.
You get an appointment, you run a quick little campaign, you collect a tidy little 53.63 per cent of the vote (the second-largest plurality in Mississauga after Peter Fonseca) and you get to play a little MPP.
Who says this politics stuff is so tough?

There are Thanksgiving leftovers and then there are election leftovers.
Too bad there isn’t any cranberry sauce to go with the election bits still left on the plate.

Is there any riding in Ontario, or Canada, that is more Liberal-friendly than Mississauga East-Cooksville? Doesn’t seem like it.
Peter Fonseca collected 59 per cent of the vote and finished 13,520 votes ahead of Conservative Zoran Churchin, who was a relatively strong candidate. Fonseca’s margin of victory was almost as large as the total of the votes cast for all of the other candidates — put together, which was 15,488.
• • •
The Green Party made major local gains this time around, as in about five per cent per riding. Just think how they might have done if they had actually launched a campaign.
In most cases, Green candidates just put their name on the ballot and set up a website. Since the party has virtually no money, it doesn’t really canvas or run campaigns on the ground.
When Harinder Takhar, David Brown and Shaila Kibria were busy pulling the vote from their campaign offices in Mississauga-Erindale on election day, the very personable Green candidate, Rich Pietro, was at work. He got a very respectable 7.8 per cent of the vote.
The Greens are also being significantly helped by the higher profile of the federal party since Elizabeth May became leader. Under federal rules, in contrast to the provincial ones, the Greens actually get their hands on some cash to work with in Ottawa.
• • •
MMP now stands for Mighty Mighty Passé. People did not understand it. Tory candidate David Brown said voters at the door wanted the 30-second version of the system, which was impossible to deliver.
That was the whole problem. Anything that takes 10 minutes to explain is far too complicated for most people. Maybe we better work on getting people to the polls before we start asking them to answer a simple yes or no to such a complex system.
Most people probably voted no because they did not have enough information on which to base their decision, not because they are opposed in principle. The yes forces better start a public education program now, if they want people to support them if the issue somehow manages to make it onto the ballot again in 2011.
• • •
Finally, back to good old Mississauga South, where the most of the action was. One disgruntled Tory, an Effie Triantafilopoulos supporter, described her pain to me today in choosing between the enemy within, Tim Peterson, and the enemy without, Charles Sousa.
Even though she did everything possible to express her consternation at John Tory for hijacking the local nomination process and attended the faux “nomination” meeting where the party made Peterson the official candidate with an announcement from the podium, this long-time Tory ended up voting the party line.
“Some people said I should decline the ballot and some said I should vote Liberal, but after I mulled it over, I couldn’t do it. I am a Progressive Conservative. I held my nose and voted for Peterson.”
In a post-election e-mail to party President Blair McCreadie, who infuriated local Tories at the nomination with his mocking of their rhythmic clapping for Trintafilopoulos, the Tory tried to get the last word.
“I told him that I hate people who say ‘I told you so,’” she said, “but today I’m a proud member of that group.”

Be warned, world: George Watkins is taking up portrait painting.
Well, maybe “taking up” is too strong a term, since the 87-year-old has so much trouble with his eyes now that he can’t really paint the way he once could.
But he did take a course on portrait painting a couple of years ago, the first formal study he’d ever taken on painting, despite the fact he has been selling works all over the world for the past 50 years.
“He’s visited with us five or six times,” says Ray Bechard of the local Knights of Columbus, “and one of the things that caught all of our eyes were the sketches that he’s done from all over the world. He had this little pad and he has water colour sketches, the size of photographs, of everywhere he went. Most people have photographs of the places they’ve travelled. He has his own water colour portfolio.”
Speaking of portfolios, Watkins has a current exhibition at the Texaco Room in Port Credit which is a panorama of Mississauga’s past, and a retrospective of his four decades of painting here. The native of Sydney, Australia, who also had a highly successful career as an interior designer, moved to the City in 1967.
The exhibition includes numerous paintings of the harbour and the boats that moored there, one of his specialties.
His old homestead on Knareswood Dr., the nearby Shipp mansion, the summer and winter views up the Credit River, the splendour of the Toronto Golf Club painted from the 14th floor of The Fairways condominium across the road (where Watkins has had exhibitions), they are all included.
To bring things full circle, there’s even a painting that he did of that first local exhibition he had — also at the Texaco Room — in 1978 with his son in the foreground.
He also has mounted a framed clipping of a feature story of the time from The Mississauga News about that exhibition, with a photograph taken by Chief Photographer Fred Loek, who also took the photo above.
This exhibition has special interest for Fred. One painting from 1968, a view from Memorial Park looking west, shows the Don Rowing Club, where Fred has coached forever, before its expansion, while it was still sharing facilities with the Mississauga Canoe Club.
The show also includes a painting, called Infinity Sailing, which features the boat that Fred’s brother Dick, long-time photographer at The Toronto Star, used to sail.
And when Watkins gets to the painting of two boats, one of which is the Wendy B, Fred has a personal story to relate.
While they were still engaged, he and his wife Liz were at the docks one day. They climbed onto the deck of the Wendy B and wrapped themselves in its oversized ropes. Fred handed his camera to a passer-by who snapped a photo that served as a wedding announcement — with the caption “Tying the Knot.”
The personal and the pastoral coincide again in a couple of paintings of the Red Barns on Eglinton, the barns of the Earl Madill farm, the holdout property that separates the two halves of the Heritage Hills development.
In one little corner, far off on the right, the distinctive yellow slant of the Mississauga Civic Centre sneaks onto the horizon. The message is clear. The farm in the foreground fades against the symbol of our urban destiny.
Watkins may be celebrating more than 50 years of painting and more than 40 years of painting Mississauga, but he is no sentimentalist.
The visitors to the exhibition who are lucky enough to see the real-life portrait of the artist as an older man are cajoled into buying the works, while they can, by their enthusiastic author. Since the mural-like painting shown above of some of the distinctive elements of the City contains a copy of The Mississauga News, Watkins is convinced the newspaper’s publisher will want to buy it and put it in our lobby.
Opinions fly left and right. On Fred Loek: “He’s as well known as Hazel.”
On painting Mississauga’s churches: St. Peter’s (in Erindale), “is the only church in the whole of Mississauga that’s worth painting.”
Also a sculptor, Watkins offers his professional opinion on how Hazel, whom he points out is a year younger than he, should be immortalized: “Her face should be carved out of granite.” He manages to subdue a wink as he says it.
Watkins, who has a half-dozen paintings in the permanent collection at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, doesn’t seem interested, despite a reporter’s prodding, in offering any overarching career assessments. Forward is the only direction he seems to know.
He’s having his eyes checked again by the doctors and a new procedure may be able to clear them up and allow him to paint in earnest again.
Longevity runs in his family. On July 21, 2020, Watkins has a pretty good idea of what he will be doing: “waiting for my postcard from the Queen when I turn 100.”

New Mississauga South MPP Charles Sousa earned major Brownie points last night by showing up at City Hall to listen to Lakeview residents’ complaints about the proposed 21-storey Queenscorp condo on the gas station site at Lakeshore and Deta Rd.
The Lakeview Ratepayers’ Association which was leading the charge against the application, is headed by Jim Tovey. He enraged more than a few Sousa supporters by publicly endorsing Tory Tim Peterson in the Tory’s last piece of campaign literature.
Tovey, as straight-ahead a guy as you’re likely to meet in these parts, has no regrets about his stand.
“I knew Peterson was going to lose but I’m a bit of a loyal guy,” he says. “Tim was wonderful for Lakeview,” and really supported residents in their opposition to the power plant.
“The fact Charles showed up to support us last night was really nice,” says Tovey. It will be even nicer, he says, if Sousa goes to bat for the community when the inevitable announcement comes that a new gas-fired power station will be built at the Lakeview site. “We are the only ratepayer association that opposed all three of the power plants (Greenfield South and Sithe, as well as Lakeview,)” says Tovey. “If anybody in Mississauga knows what power plants are like, it’s Lakeview.”
• • •
Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney has been in town a lot lately, although he hasn’t been making any public appearances per se. Mulroney has been developing writer’s cramp at the Mississauga offices of Random House Canada in the Airport Corporate Centre, signing thousands of copies of his new bestseller, Memoirs 1939-93.
• • •
Isn’t it interesting that the most pressing issue for our brand new provincial government is approving regulations to pave the way for a brand new holiday in February?
Now, of course, there will be a debate about what to call it. There are the usual suspects, of course, Simcoe Day, Heritage Day or maybe Winter Blahs Day.
How about honouring the man who had the political courage to make it finally happen?
What do you think of calling it Dalton’s “I Told You I Could Keep A Promise” Day.

Rattray Marsh is one of Nancy Walker’s, “favourite places to walk and think and marvel,” she says in the liner notes of her new CD, which features photos by Nadia Molinari (above) taken in Rattray and Jack Darling Park.
The music inside her newest – the fifth adventurous straight-ahead swinging jazz release of the pianist’s fine career — certainly makes one think and marvel at Walker’s power to produce organic music that seems to seep into your pores.
Tuesday, Walker took a stroll on her semi-regular 50-minute walking route through the marsh and reflected on her music, her love of nature and the little hiatus that followed the release of her last album, When She Dreams.
That album, released on the major label Justin Time Records, was her reward for winning the prestigious Grand Prix de Jazz award at the Montréal Jazz Festival in 2003. It was filled with the introspective, evocative harmonic and rhythmic shifts that mark her best work.
“That came out right after my Mom passed away,” says the Montréal-born, Oakville-raised musician. “I had no burning desire at the time to write tunes or to do the leader thing.”
In September 2006, Walker was gigging around with her trio — bassist/husband Kieran Overs and dynamic young drummer Ethan Ardelli — when they decided to record some of the tunes she had written. While very happy with the classic trio sound it produced, Walker didn’t actively pursue the record until she hooked up earlier this year with the Timely Manor label, which has widespread distribution through Universal Music Canada.
“The impetus was back and I’m really glad,” says Walker. The CD is called Need Another, which seems appropriate under the circumstances.
The addition to her group of 22-year-old Ardelli, who Walker first met when he was a teen attending one of her concerts at a legion hall in his native Cape Breton, has re-energized the pianist. “He’s really mature as a person and he’s a fantastic drummer. He can do all the dynamic stuff, but he is also intuitive and sensitive and a great accompaniest.”
Of course, Kieran is still the anchor to the trio’s commanding sound. The bassist, who works regularly with Jane Bunnett and Sophie Millman among many others, is definitely more prominent in the trio setting.
As the waves roar up the shore of the beach at Jack Darling Park, Walker says she has always been inspired by natural settings but doesn’t intentionally try to replicate the sounds she hears. Nonetheless, two of the best songs on the strong lineup of Need Another are Camassia, named after a spring bulb the avid gardener is extremely fond of, and The Pine Forest.
Since she’s just moved to old Port Credit just a couple of blocks away from Lake Ontario, there could be even more of that pastoral influence in her compositions in future— once she gets her piano back from reconditioning in a couple of weeks.
Need Another also includes a tantalizing reworking of John and Michelle Phillips’ California Dreamin.’ Although the late Denny Doherty used to live around the corner from Walker and Overs in Lorne Park, the song is not a tribute.
“It’s interesting to do songs that everybody knows,” says the part-time instructor at Humber College. “I just thought it would be fun to do it in 7/8 (time.)”
Speaking of songs everyone knows, Walker was approached last year by Somerset Entertainment to do an album called Rainy Days and Mondays for the Reflections label. They make those Solitudes and nature sound recordings that are available in numerous green and department stores.
It featured jazz-tinged (Overs on bass, Rob Piltch on guitar, Davide Direnzo on drums) takes on Eric Carmen’s All By Myself, Billy Joel, Carpenters etc.
When the 2006 Juno nominations came out, there was Walker’s name in the instrumental album of the year category for Rainy Days. The nomination was based largely on sales.
All the jazz critics started calling Walker up and wondering why they didn’t know about the release.
Such is life. You slug your guts out blazing a trail through the jazz jungle and some little side path lands you at the Junos.
Walker just laughs at the irony of being a “commercial” success.
If there is any justice, she may find herself at the national music awards again, in one of the category that tends to recognize consistent, ongoing artistic excellence.

Should architecture be a popularity contest?
Once it’s on the ground, why not?
For the second year in a row, the City of Mississauga is democratizing its Urban Design Awards process by having a parallel public vote to the one that is carried out by a panel of experts, who toured the 15 nominated projects earlier this week.
The “People’s Choice” awards gives everyone a chance to put themselves in the judge’s shoes and compare apples and oranges. Which is always entertaining, if frustrating.
By going to www.mississauga.ca/portal/residents/choiceawards, you can conduct your own run-off elections between Port Credit Memorial Park, St. Joan of Arch (as in (Arch) itecture I guess) Secondary School and the renovation of the Silverthorn Pumping Station.
Guess which one the engineers in the crowd will go for?
There are some telling things in the nominations. For one thing, more than half of the projects were completed by public corporations, not the private sector. That suggests that our public bodies are putting a premium, as they should, on providing quality development that sets a standard for the private sector.
This, of course, was the theory behind the architectural contest that gave us the Mississauga Civic Centre, which — 20 years on — now seems to be acting as the magnet for development that was intended when it opened.
There are three buildings from the UTM campus in the contest, any one of which could place first in most years. The Recreation and Wellness Centre (RAWC, pronounced Rock) which opened today, the Hazel McCallion (Don’t Call Me a Library) Academic Learning Centre and the Communication, Culture and (No Longer Information) Technology building (see photo.)
The CCT building has already been hailed in architectural contests and in print. Awarding-winning architectural critic Lisa Rochon of The Globe and Mail wrote a public love letter to it and architects Saucier +Perrotte last February calling it, “the thriller among the serious buildings that have gone up at the suburban campus” and saying “it marks a new heroism in this country’s architecture.”
Rochon was particularly enamoured of the way the building is integrated into the surrounding green space — the campus’ overarching asset.
Even the inevitable downtown putdown of the locale was relatively gentle: “It might seem unfair that a building of such tremendous import has been set down on a suburban campus rather than on the main street of a major metropolis,” Rochon wrote. “But remarkable architecture turns up fairly regularly in curious places.”
Even Mississauga.
If you’re into handicapping, put the CCT on the top of the list — at least on the expert panel’s sheet.
By the way, was somebody providing a little subliminal support for a certain provincial campaign candidate via the nomination photos on the city website? If you look carefully at the Marina Cove project in Port Credit, you’ll notice a lot of red signs for the Mississauga South Liberal candidate, who had his office on the main floor. Voting for the People’s Choice awards began the same day as the provincial election.
One of the private projects nominated is the straw bale house on Meadow Wood Rd. just north of Lakeshore Rd. W., a project you can’t even see from the street.
The irony is that the City was not exactly thrilled about the green project when it was proposed.
The owners spent a lot of time, and money, appealing to the Ontario Building Code Commission in order to get approval of the construction method, which City building officials said left too many unanswered questions.
In a decision released almost exactly eight years ago, the Commission allowed the construction, subject to several conditions.
Perhaps the beauty of the Building Code, like the beauty of a building, lies in the eye of the beholder.

When they announce the list of all-time Argos later this week, you are not likely to find Nick Volpe’s name on that roster.
Which simply means they don’t have enough categories.
As anyone who is around the club or its practices at UTM for any length of time is sure to tell you, Volpe epitomizes the Argo organization. He probably bleeds double blue blood twice, just to be sure.
He has been everything to the team over a career that reaches back to 1949. He played for Coach Teddy Morris his first year in the league. Morris, a long-time Cooksville resident, won three Grey Cups as a player with the all-Canadian lineups he truly believed in. Both Morris and Volpe are deserved members of the Mississauga Sports Hall of Fame.
Morris retired after Volpe’s first year as a player to be replaced by another Canadian coaching legend, Frank Clair.
Volpe’s name is forever linked to the famous 1950 Mud Bowl at Varsity Quagmire, where one player was saved by drowning by another alert player.
The backup quarterback and defensive back earned the game ball, not just for kicking two field goals in the 13-0 win, but also for making the saving tackle that preserved the shutout on the five-yard line. Two years later, Volpe ended his Argo career with another Grey Cup in the same stadium against the Eskimos, the last the Argos would win until 1983.
During a distinguished career at the Peel District School Board, Volpe coached the Warriors (blue and gold don’t ya know) to eight league championships and three all-Toronto championships.
He rose to become Superintendent of Special Education for the Peel Board before his retirement.
He has coached in the CFL with the Argos and Ottawa (how was that allowed?), been a spotter for CFRB radio broadcasts, was the isolation director on CTV broadcasts for 16 years, and since 1994 has been the team’s head of Canadian scouting.
Volpe has been around long enough not only to remember when the University of Toronto Blues (naturally) last won a game, but to remember when they were the powerhouse of the league. He won the Yates Cup with them the year before he turned pro.
He even wrote a book on coaching high school football, called Modern Canadian Football, which my grandfather gave to me a long time ago and which I have treasured ever since for its beloved Xs and Os. It’s a practical, down-in-the-trenches, nuts and bolts, here’s how to run a great practice kind of book. As workmanlike and reliable as its author.
So when they announce the all-time Argos’ list this weekend, there will be the usual deserving Jim Roundtrees, Dick Shattos, Pinball Clemons and Jim Stillwagons.
But don’t forget who donned the double blue in 1948 and is still with the organization.
In the heart and soul of the franchise category, there is no more deserving recipient than Nick Volpe.

Hydro One is worried about “regeneration of non-compatible trees.”
Translation on the ground: a two-ft. tall oak “tree” on the property line of a home on Greening Ave. that borders the hydro right-of-way in Applewood Acres, is ripped out by its roots — a sapling that couldn’t be a threat to a power line in anybody’s estimation for at least a couple of decades.
Last night, Hydro One came to a public meeting to explain why it is eradicating every possible tree that could potentially pose any problem in the future to its power lines along its right-of-way that runs through some of the oldest, and proudest, neighbourhoods in the City
Residents turned up to say they hate the results of the Mississauga Chainsaw Massacre so far. Lorne Park residents, who have the biggest trees, the highest taxes and the most political clout of any neighbourhood in the City, decided to draw a line in the sand.
They got Hydro One to stop cutting in their community earlier this summer and now they want it to hold the cherry pickers and the chain saws in abeyance until the community reviews its plans to kill another 62 mature trees in the right-of-way in this, the first of what will be three rounds of environmental cleansing.
If you listened very carefully to what Hydro One manager of distribution, development and lines sustainment George (Vroom, Vroom) Juhn had to say at the beginning of the meeting, you could tell that Hydro is trying to draw its own line in the sand.
It wants to remove every species that could possibly grow large enough to infringe on the 230,000-volt lines and replace them with saucer magnolias and Japanese lilacs and other types of pretty and (key word) short species.
At one point Juhn said, “we are removing a lot of smaller trees that will mature and generate a lot of significant public opposition” when they get bigger. Those were telling words.
Hydro is cutting the problem off at the ground now, so it doesn’t have to fight even tougher tree battles in future.
Hydro is in a tough position, trying to keep the lines clear of potential tree threats through a right-of-way where it is already committed to trimming, not cutting, 40 heritage oaks. That was part of the deal made when it took over the right-of-way back in the 1970s.
How do you justify cutting down some magnificent oaks here, when you are trimming them to keep them away from power lines right over there?
Consulting Arborist Philip van Wassenaer, who reminded hydro gently of the loss of the tree canopy that is a continuing problem in Mississauga (the bigger trees increase in environmental value exponentially), also showed how even large trees can be systematically pruned back over years so that we can have our power lines and our oak trees too.
But Hydro One seems fixed on its target. When Phil Green pointed out that they plan to start cutting in three weeks and suggested they mitigate their public credibility problem by paying for independent consultants like van Wassenaer to review their plans, they seemed insulted.
The old Ontario Hydro may have been dismantled, but the air of entitlement that the once-all-powerful utility epitomized, is as strong as ever.
That was evident at the end of the night when residents demanded Hydro staff either put a moratorium on cutting. They refused to do so but did promise to at least try the idea on senior management and get back to the public.
And how was the response to be passed on with no other meeting scheduled before the work is to start? “At the least, you get another e-mail,” said Enza Cancilla of the communications department.
How about e-condolence cards for all the late, lamented trees that didn’t need to die?

There are football fans and then there was Fred Dorrington.
Fred lived and died every Sunday with his Buffalo Bills.
A former season ticket holder, Dorrington rode through the good teams and the bad, suffering the indignity of four straight Super Bowl losses and just kept on cheering, as every true fan must.
He was still cheering from his hospital bed in the Trillium Health Centre this season, even though two strokes and a tracheotomy rendered that support silent for the first time.
At least the Bills won for him on the last Sunday of his life.
Dorrington, 65, died last night and the people who work at The Mississauga News, and people in the real estate business in this town who knew him and respected him, are in mourning today.
Fred and I were part of an exclusive little club at The News — former employees of The Mississauga Times who moved over here when Torstar closed the wrong paper in 1981 after the two suburban GTA chains merged. Our club was four strong yesterday. Today we are three.
I’m told Fred was a true professional at his job in the real estate section upstairs. If he attacked that with the same passion he brought to cheering his football team, it’s no wonder.
Ninety per cent of the conversations we ever had were held in the parking lot, quick exchanges of vital information about the (mis)fortunes of his Bills and my Browns, conversations filled with misplaced hope in the future.
Fred started the weekly NFL pool at the paper — which still brings a little relief from the long grind — and was a founding member of the Timbers Football League, a fantasy league to which several of us are deeply addicted.
Fred and another former sales rep here, Gerry Telford, a Miami Dolphins fan were partners the first year in that pool. Later Fred got his own team called The Chicken Wings in honour of you-know-who.
That inaugural year, Dorrington and Telford’s joint team was called the Billyfish. Billy for the Bills and Fish for the mammals of Miami.
When informed of Fred’s death today, Telford had a fitting suggestion for the fantasy logo of the long-forgotten Billyfish: “The logo is something like a Dolphin riding a Buffalo with a mustache, wearing a tweed jacket and tie, beer in one hand and a Go Bills flag in the other.”
I’m taking Buffalo and the field goal on the road against the Jets this week Fred, and your team better be good for it.

Helena Stahls seems to specialize in subjects that no one wants to talk about.
She talks a lot about suicide and its stigma. Her daughter Donna Lee Zampieron was just 34 with two young daughters, when she chose to end her life Dec. 15, 1999.
She left “the typical note,” says her mother, one saying that her family and friends would be better off without her. “How terribly wrong she was,” says Stahls in a summary she has written about those dark days and the trauma that followed.
The suicide was devastating to Donna Lee’s husband and daughters, her mother and father, her brother and her many friends.
“I felt that I was going crazy,” says Stahls. “When Donna Lee passed away, I truly thought I was losing my mind. I was so exhausted all the time, I slept 20 hours a day.”
Donna Lee, a talented figure skater who was good enough to be signed by Holiday on Ice for a European tour, had two terrible strikes against her.
Not only did she suffer from depression, but she was diagnosed with Crohn’s and Colitis just before she was to be married.
“It’s a devastating disease because you can’t see it,” says the longtime Mississauga resident. “People look fine and you don’t know that they’ve been in the toilet 30 times a day and vomiting all the time. It is not a pretty disease and no one wants to talk about it.”
Between the Crohn’s and her depression, Donna Lee was on a yo-yo string that kept pulling her back and forth to Trillium Health Centre. She had shock treatments for the depression.
The medication for the Crohn’s and the medication for the depression often clashed, leaving Donna Lee in a fog.
Through all her troubles, however, Zampieron always had a couple of sources of joy: her family and her skating. She taught the Learn To Skate program in Mississauga arenas for years. Even near the end, she would have a friend sign her out of the hospital, go to the rink and enjoy the physical and psychological liberation of skating, then go back to her hospital bed.
To honour Donna Lee’s memory and help make sense of a senseless act, her mother organizes the annual Gotta Skate event at Iceland Arena. It will take place Nov. 11 this year, with free skating, demonstrations, a silent auction and mystery packages available for purchase.
Stahls also uses that event to talk about a subject that makes society squeamish: suicide.
Most people who commit what is technically called “complete suicide” do so because they are mentally ill, says Stahls. “The media don’t see to want to talk about it because they think if they talk about it, people will want to do it.”
Having dealt with her own painful grieving, Stahls now helps others for whom the loss is still too horribly fresh.
She attended a support session at Bereaved Families of Halton-Peel the year after Donna Lee’s death, took the facilitator training, has jointly led numerous groups since then and now works 22 hours a week as part-time program coordinator for the charitable organization.
“It’s a place I can talk about Donna because my friends and family don’t want to hear it anymore,” she says. “It’s not like a cold, though, I’m not going to get over it. It will be with me for the rest of my life.”
All of the volunteers at Bereaved Families, which has its offices on Century Ave., have personal experience with similar loss.
“When I say I understand, I do understand,” says Stahls, who tries to pass on the coping strategies to others that make her life — not the way it was before— but a little better.
“Helping other people takes away the pain a little bit,” she says. “I have a big hole in my heart that will never heal but slowly, it just gets smaller and smaller.”

It’s called the Caregivers Network of Peel (COPN), a group of dedicated volunteers who work for agencies that serve seniors in this region and who recognize the critical need to support caregivers — those family members and friends who make life bearable for seniors and the frail who can no longer completely look after themselves in their own homes.
Don’t know how the group pronounces its acronym but it would only be appropriate to make it a hard ‘O’ and pronounce COPN as if it was Copin’ which is, after all, what it’s all about.
Copin’ with the realities of a system that puts almost all of its resources into the 20 per cent of caregiving that is formal, and very little into the 80 per cent that is not. While people are waiting, and waiting to get home care through official channels, they often get it through informal ones — from the kids bringing meals over, changing the dressings and doing the laundry — to the neighbours dropping by for a coffee every morning and ensuring everything is as it should be.
On Wednesday, COPN released a report funded through the Ontario Trillium Foundation and developed through the auspices of the Seniors Life Enhancement Centres, including the one at Cliffway Plaza where the report was launched.
The official part of the program focussed on the report’s expected recommendations that informal caregivers need a lot more support to help them cope with the stress of providing a service which, it should not be forgotten, would otherwise fall on the shoulders of the taxpayers.
Formal reports are about charts and assessments and demographics and long-term recommendations while caregiving is about flesh and blood. The organizers did not let us forget about that for a moment.
Shirlea Crook helped her mother look after her step-father when he was given just five years to live. A couple that once thought nothing of taking off for Arizona with a pop-up tent for five weeks was suddenly confined to a tiny, scary world. “Their family home that was once a place of solitude became a place of turmoil” with a parade of social workers, nurses, personal support workers, etc. tromping through, Crook said in providing a caregiver’s personal story to the event.
Both Crook and her mother are nurses, which meant that they probably had an over-optimistic view of their ability to cope with the surgeries, the catheters, the pacemaker, the feeding tubes, the hospital visits etc. etc.
Her mother ended up in the hospital suffering from exhaustion and malnutrition.
Crook enumerated the lessons that should be passed along to anyone who may become an informal caregiver — which probably includes most of the population.
Number one is ask for help. Neighbours and friends want to help, “but they don’t know how to ask.”
Get the neighbourhood kids involved. Pay them $10 to cut the lawn or shovel the driveway.
“You will have feelings of anger, sadness and fear,” said Crook. “Get the resentment off your chest.”
Get a will and get a power of attorney approved so you can look after the person’s affairs if they become incapacitated.
Finally she recommended keeping your own journal and making one for the person you are caring for, to help them cope with their experience and express their feelings (and frustrations, no doubt.)
Pat Spadadora, of Sheridan Institute’s Elder Research Centre, wore two hats — explaining both the findings of the report as its chief researcher and her feelings as a caregiver herself.
Her parents were co-dependent in many ways, her mother providing the eyesight for the couple and her father providing the mobility.
“The system is not very responsive to couples,” she said and separating the two in care just exacerbated each of their issues.
“Remember, no matter how much you do, it will never be enough — you will always feel guilty. I think my car could get to Ottawa on its own but I can never get there enough,” said Spadadora who lives in Ancaster.
But it is not all guilt and glumness.
Andrew Ward, a Mississauga Library worker was at the session representing the Trillium Foundation, and after he brought his official message, he brought his informal one: caregiving can still be a lot of fun.
Since he is now ferrying his parents to the AquaFit and the yoga classes anyway, he has joined right in, and he has the sore shoulders to prove it.
“It has opened levels of communication with my parents that I thought I’d never have,” said Ward. “I feel closer to my parents now than I’ve ever been.”
The saddest thing about the whole presentation. Spadadora’s too-true statement that, “We’ve been talking about these same issues for 20 years.”

Dorothea Sheasby has been a dogged and patient partisan for the peace movement in this town, but the burden of the effort —and the great maw of silence that usually greets her efforts — has taken its toll.
Sheasby is the rightful heir to Helen Tucker, the colourful, slightly eccentric one-woman band for world peace and world government who convinced Mayor Hazel McCallion and City council to declare Mississauga a mundialized (world) city Dec. 18, 1979.
Tucker was Sheasby’s mentor and, in her later years when Tucker lived in Sheridan Villa, Sheasby was her friend and the keeper of the flame. She sorted through Tucker’s voluminous papers which were donated to the Peel Archives and can be viewed under accession 2001.032.
Over the years, Sheasby has attended numerous international conferences and for many years has been the chair of the Canadian branch of the Registry of World Citizens.
She also initiated the formation of the original Amnesty International group formed in 1980 at Applewood United Church, Sheasby has made numerous deputations to City council over the years, advocating for a peace statue, announcing the annual sunrise celebration of the Spring Equinox, getting council to proclaim International Peace Day and organizing a little event to celebrate that annual Sept. 21 date, usually at City Hall.
A group of supporters have been invaluable in keeping the Registry going and Sheasby generously opened her home every month to discussion groups where guest speakers talk about many issues, including the concept of establishing a United Nations Peoples’ Assembly which is one of Dorothea’s great passions.
While visions of ladies of leisure jet-setting around the globe to attend Non-Government Organization conferences where these lofty concepts were batted around may come to mind, the reality for Dorothea was more like a 12-hour bus or train ride to New York City and a stay at the YWCA.
Sheasby once again tried to organize a Peace Day event at City Hall this year but ended up getting bogged down in the paper work — which now apparently includes proof of $2 million in liability insurance which was far beyond the means of her small band of supporters. So Mississauga piggy-backed their Peace Day onto one planned by the United Nations Association in Toronto.
World Citizen Susan Zipp, chair of the Global People's Assembly, came by train from New York to be the guest speaker at Metro Hall in Toronto, where there was no charge for the room.
In an interview where she was accompanied by her daughter, Charlotte Sheasby-Coleman, a board member of the World Citizens for the past 11 years, the 76-year-old Sheasby said that the registry in Canada is winding down, although she stressed it is not stopping.
Difficulties finding and keeping board members mean that the group status will revert to a branch of the World Citizens’ Registry, with Dorothea continuing to act as the registrar for the Paris headquarters.
“We’re not disappearing, we’re going a little lower key,” says Sheasby who plans to spend more time writing her memoirs and tending her beautiful garden.
As Professor Harold Suderman, an advisor to the group said after the decision to wind down was made, “tributes to Dorothea’s tireless, totally committed, enthusiastic leadership in steering the Canadian branch are still coming in.”
Working for months to set up a Peace Day celebration and having 20 people show up is demoralizing, says Charlotte Sheasby, who remembers how as a kid she and her siblings thought of their mother’s work as “embarrassing.” Time and maturity have changed that perspective and Sheasby’s four children and nine grandchildren have some to respect, and obviously, emulate her cause.
Unfortunately, too many of us find it too easy to dismiss peace work as the call of the naive.
In announcing the wind-down of the board, Sheasby said she will continue to work towards specific goals such as a peace garden at Riverwood where a peace pole could be erected.
and re-recognition of the mundialization of the City.
In her open letter to supporters she writes that, “for now, we have every confidence that each of you, like each of us, will continue to work in your own way towards positive change in your communities and around the world.
“For as Arundhati Roy has written, this is what life is all about: ‘To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try to understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.’”
The work of promoting peace will never be finished, says Sheasby, who won’t be looking away. “You can just say: to be continued.”

Wow. Every single Mississauga MPP elected Oct. 10 is either a Cabinet Minister or a Parliamentary Secretary, including the successful candidate in the riding that time forgot, Mississauga-Brampton South.
Amrit Mangat is the new Parliamentary Assistant to the Seniors’ Secretariat. The hand-picked, hand-appointed candidate is obviously a poster child for the Liberals pledge to do better in representing minority and female communities. From the street to the ante-room of the Cabinet in a scant few months. It is still the mystery riding in some ways, isn’t it?
Mangat’s appointment is more surprising in a way than any of the others in that, like her candidacy, it comes out of nowhere.
Harinder Takhar treads water in Entrepreneurship and Small Business while Peter Fonseca — a circumspect guy who could be labelled “least likely to ever get in hot water for thinking before speaking” — gets a chance in the safe little backwater portfolio of Tourism and Recreation.
Bob Delaney gets to be PA to the Premier in Research and Innovation which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you do. Since the Premier has other fish to fry, it should give a good chance for “enterprise” anyway. Maybe Bob can concentrate on his favourite subject, researching how to get an innovative guy like him inside the Cabinet doors.
The promising Charles Sousa gets rewarded for dispatching Tim Peterson with the PA’s role in Government and Consumer Services while Dr. Kuldip Kular, who keeps busy with a part-time medical practice can get first-hand policy advice at the same time, from Health Care Minister George Smitherman.
By the way, if anyone has a description of a Parliamentary Assistant’s job, please forward to the neophyte PAs asap.
. . .
Wonderful Port Credit jazz singer Carol McCartney who released her first CD A Night in Tunisia under her own name earlier this year, has a chart topper.
The vibrant singer, a favourite of fellow musicians, is number 1 on the Jazz/Blues charts put together at Chart Attack www.chartattack.com/charts/specialty/jazz/
“It’s thrilling,” says the veteran singer. “It really is. You send all these things out to these mysterious addresses and you hope somebody is going to receive them and play them.” She credits Sonja Tran, the partner of saxophonist Bob Brough with whom she recorded a fine earlier CD, Like A Spring Day, for much of the leg work. Tran called station managers on McCartney’s behalf, and prepped them for the release.
Don’t look now, but there’s another Mississaugan on the list too. That’s drummer Jay Boehmer whose new work Autumn Afternoon, his first in nine years which features the sensational Pat LaBarbera on sax, sits at number 7.
McCartney’s CD also stood at the top of the Earshot charts earlier.
By the way, the newxt couple of Thursday swill be Mississauga days (unofficially) at Jazz.FM91 which is in the middle of Begging Weeks — the necessary but nonetheless tortuous semi-annual appeal for funds to support the station’s sound work.
Mississauga’s own Terry McElligott, who hosts Mid-Day Jazz on the station, will have the City’s first couple of jazz, pianist Nancy Walker and bassist Kieran Overs on his show Nov. 8 from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Thursday. McCartney joins Larry Green this Thursday from 4-7 p.m.