Random Access

In an ideal world everyone would live ten minutes away from work — saving time, energy, costs, and stress.
Needless to say we in the GTA do not live in an ideal world, as thousands of commuters probably think about daily as they sit on the QEW between Hurontario St. and Cawthra Rd. or on Highway 403 where it "bunches up" — to use a favourite phrase of traffic spotters — around Mavis Rd. and Hurontario St., or in any one of another 10 familiar bottlenecks you care to name.
There are people trying to do something productive about the problem, however, other than making speeches and drawing lines on the pavement for HOV lanes.
One of them is Strac Ivanov, a Toronto resident who has just launched a new web site for Peel Region residents at http://peel.vicinityjobs.com.
His idea is incredibly simple, as most good ideas are.
He has created a job search site on the net that will allow people who live in Mississauga and Peel to search for jobs in their own communities.
"It's a business.... but it's more like a non-profit organization at this point," says the 31-year-old who has three other similar sites including the first successful one he started in York Region, which just happens to bear a lot of demographic similarities to Peel.
When he was getting his MBA at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration before he came to Canada, Ivanov built the technology behind the search engines that is now being used to cull information from numerous websites to put together a Peel-centric job board. His thesis was on "regional and topical classification of information from newspapers and magazines."
The concept sat on the back burner for several years until Ivanov moved to Canada got thinking about "what a serious problem commuting is."
When he began seeing how some job recruiting agencies use the Internet and giant search engines to their advantage, the idea of Vicinity Jobs came to him.
"Most employers look for people on a national basis, so they can get as many applicants as they can," he points out. In many cases, there are suitable candidates right under their noses — but there was no ready forum to get them together.
Ivanov and his wife and others involved have full-time jobs and run the service on a break-even basis as a sideline at the moment, with no charge to employers or job seekers. Revenues come from ads on the site and some premium charges for things like posting a company logo on a site. They also make money through related activities, such as providing reports on the local job market to clients such as the Region of York, who have a significant interest in keeping track of such trends.
Although it is hoped the service will become more than just self-sustaining in future, Ivanov says he gets real pleasure from knowing that he is helping to curb commuting, which has few benefits unless you are a major oil company.
"I am happy to see this technology that I built being put to use in a helpful way that actually benefits people," he says simply.
Instead of wasting our natural resources fuming in their cars, parents can get home early, have more time and energy for themselves and their children, get some exercise or devote their newfound time to volunteering for a good local cause.
"If you are commuting less," says Ivanov, "It benefits not just you, but everybody — your whole community."
To paraphrase an old phrase from the 50s: The only good commute is a dead commute.

Almost exactly 20 years ago this week, Sukhdev (Dave) Toor bought a small motel, 26 rooms in size, in St. Catharines, Ont.
He didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of a climb to the penthouse of the hotel business.
Yesterday, Toor beamed as he held the groundbreaking for Mississauga’s — and probably Canada’s — first “green” hotel.
Mayor Hazel McCallion presided as ground was broken for the new 224-room Hilton Garden Inn on Caroga Dr. The picture above, by Fred Loek, shows Toor a few minutes after the ground-breaking standing in front of the Toronto Airport Hampton Inn and Suites, which is two doors away from where the new hotel will open about a year from now.
In her remarks, the mayor called Toor, “a shining example” of what immigrants can do for Canada.
His first hotel was the then-Howard Johnsons in Meadowvale which Toor bought in 1994. The Hampton Inn at Hurontario and Derry Rd. opened in 2000. The Hampton Inn at the QEW and Southdown Rd. (where he will also be building a future Residences by Marriott) opened in 2000, and the Toronto Airport Hampton in 2003.
The hotels in Mississauga account for about half of the $350 million portfolio of Manga Hotels, a business named for one of Toors’ residents forebears.
When the Hilton opens, Toor figures he will be providing about 500-600 jobs in the City and paying some $2 million a year in property taxes.
Not bad for a guy who quit Canada in 1984 in the midst of a recessios and went back to India because things were too tough here.
A civil engineer by training Toor happened to land in Canada when times were trying and jobs were scarce. Fortunately for Mississauga and Canada, things in India weren’t as rosy as Toor remembered, and he was back here within two months, eyeing the purchase of the motel.
Toor is a guarded man. In an interview the day before the groundbreaking, he basically put his remarkable success down to hard work and a passion for the business.
He got noticeably more animated a couple of times in our conversation.
Once was when he talked about his obviously-gifted children. His daughter Neelu, 23 born shortly after the family returned to Canada, got her BA from Cornell, her master’s from Stanford and is now taking international law at Oxford.
Daughter Avneet, 21, is at Queen’s studying law. Harleen, 18, is at McGill and she is aiming for medicine. The youngster still at home, 16-year-old Gouravjit has his eyes on Harvard.
Must be kind of like playing Monopoly for Toor. You put up another couple of hotels so you can pass GO and pay next year’s tuition.
The 48-year-old obviously still has a passion for politics. A former co-chair of the Ontario Liberal Party, Toor lost by 3,950 votes to Tory Raminder Gill in Bramalea-Gore-Malton-Springdale in 1999.
In 2003, he was the clear favourite to win the federal Liberal nomination in Mississauga-Brampton South until an unknown young man named Navdeep Bains came along. “I don’t like to lose,” says Toor through slightly-clenched teeth.
He would have been the second or third choice on a lot of ballots but “on E-Day we couldn’t deliver.” Bains got the majority he needed on the first ballot.
Asked if he is still interested in politics, Toor says, rather unconvincingly, that he isn’t at the moment. (The only openings for would-be Liberals in Mississauga seem to come when a member crosses the floor.)
He hesitates and says a second later, “but you should never say never.”
His work is not done yet but Toor is already considering succession planning for Manga Hotels and would like to slow down, maybe even retire in five or so years.
Don’t be surprised if there isn’t a political Toor of duty somewhere in his future.

It’s funny how lives and paths cross on the road of political protest.
If you look up the results of the 1997 municipal election on the City of Mississauga’s web site, you’ll see that Mayor Hazel McCallion collected 65,678 votes or 94.34 per cent of the popular vote.
Donald Barber was second with 2,084 votes, or 2.99 per cent of the vote. Third was James Girvin, the Malton resident activist (and long-time passionate basketball player) who collected 1.53 per cent of the ballots.
Girvin, then a policy analyst for the Ontario government was a guy who always liked tilting at windmills and liked to point out that policy and planning vision weren’t exactly the mayor’s strongest suit.
Fast forward to this morning in a Brampton courtroom almost exactly a decade later, where a rather beleaguered, very wan-looking Donald Barber — self-appointed current chief windmill-tilter of the municipal world in Mississauga — is about to face two criminal charges of assault.
Striding in to defend him comes the lanky, lean frame of one James Girvin, now a lawyer and willing to defend a difficult client like Barber, because, “Donald’s heart has always been in the right place.”
After a morning of mini-conferences, adjournments and deferrals about the possibility of Barber entering into a peace bond, (which he clearly does not want to do) Mr. Justice J.D. Wake cuts to the heart of the matter.
With Barber refusing to voluntarily enter into a peace bond, to provide a promise to keep the peace and not contact the female security officer at City Hall he is accused of assaulting, the judge says, “before Mr. Barber is asked to embark on what is essentially a civil proceeding, I think he should know the extent of his jeopardy. Are the Criminal Code charges going to be proceeded with by the Crown or withdrawn in any event?”
The moment of truth finally at hand. That’s when crown attorney Darylinn Allison reports that the charges — laid almost 17 months ago — are being withdrawn because there is no reasonable prospect of conviction.
Outside the court room, Barber insists there was never any case against him and, with the confirmation of the court that there is no publication ban in effect, you will be able to read all the intimate details in the coming days on his web site. The case obviously boiled down to his word versus the guards. He says the guards’ statements stories did not corroborate each other.
While Barber is hardly the innocent lamb of political witch hunts that he likes to paint himself, the capitulation by the crown without a fight raises a lot of questions.
Was it ever really the conviction that the City was after, or was it the the bail conditions that banned Barber from attending City Hall or contacting councillors? Those, in effect, created a comfortable Barber-free zone for the incumbents leading up to the municipal election.
Girvin says that a review of the tape of the council session — at which Barber and Roy Willis asked perfectly reasonable questions about a change in policy that restricted the rules of public question period under which the City had operated for years — included nothing that could be remotely considered “disturbing the peace.” That was the first charge laid, and the first withdrawn.
“I can’t speak to the intent,” of the bail conditions imposed on Barber said Girvin, but he did speak to their effect.
“Mr. Barber has been put through quite a bit of hardship,” said the Malton native. “He has been restricted from playing his usual role as a vigorous advocate of the community since June of 2006.”
Maybe that was the whole idea.

Vic and Betty Pinchin have roots so deep in Mississauga that they probably come out on the other side of the globe some place.
Vic was born on the property that used to be the gravel pit between Mississauga Rd. and the North Service Rd. east of the Sheridan Centre ... before it became the North Sheridan Way landfill site and ... before it became the Region of Peel-owned open space filled with stacks releasing methane gas that it currently is.
Vic is 87.
Betty grew up in Streetsville and spent almost all her life there. Everyone knows their pick-your-own apple farm — which the City has owned for years and they have leased back — which is on the east side Mississauga Rd. at what is now Highway 403. (It’s the property where the historic Leslie Log House now rests near the road.) Betty is 82.
When they moved from the farm in 1971, they built a house on the east side of Mississauga Rd. north of Eglinton Ave., a couple of doors north of the historic Barber House, which is now a restaurant.
The Pinchins, you understand, are not complainers. But they have a problem that they would like to bring to public attention.
Because they live on busy Mississauga Rd. and there is no sidewalk in front of their property, they have always experienced some problems with passersby, garbage and vandalism.
But it has grown to the point that it is intolerable. So, in exasperation, Betty picked up the phone and called the local newspaper.
People, almost always younger people, have walked indiscriminately through their gardens, trooped their muddy feet across the lawn (and then told the Pinchins it isn’t their property when they complain) smashed beer bottles on the decorative stones and even pulled out prized perennials.
The Pinchin house is especially known for its super spring Clematis (like the prize Jackmanii in the before photo above.) People have posed for their wedding pictures in front of them. But not even they are sacrosanct. Someone has hauled some of those out too.
The coup de disgrace came a week ago Friday, when the decorative rail fencing at the front of the house was ripped apart in a pre-Halloween prank.
“I’m fed up to the teeth with it,” says Betty. “Maybe other people get vandalism as well but nobody seems to talk about it.”
Her husband is afraid that by talking about it, the Pinchins could become even more of a target.
“I think enough is enough but I don’t want a big thing made of it,” says Betty. She hasn’t called the mayor or the councillor for (and from) Streetsville, George Carlson, because, “they’ve got things to do other than worry about our little problem.”
Which is exactly why vandalism is so insidious and does not tend to get addressed. How are you going to deal with it when even the victims feel sheepish about complaining?
“You shouldn’t be a target just because you keep your place nice,” says Betty. “It’s done for no reason that I can tell. There isn’t any profit to mess up our place.”
But ignoring it won’t make it go away. There are lots of Betty and Vics out there suffering in silence while young men (it’s almost always young men) take their frustrations out on their property.
Trying to make sense of it seems fruitless because it makes no sense in the first place.
Guess the vandals can’t imagine what it will be like to be 80-years-old some day and still caring enough about your home and your community to make the effort to keep your home and property as clean and neat as possible.

One of the reasons Mississauga has been so financially successful over the years is because of its innovative approach to budget financing.
Going back to Town of Mississauga days, the municipality negotiated the Big Three agreements with Erin Mills Developments, Markborough Properties and S.B. McLaughlin Associates — forward-thinking agreements that set out levy payments and committed the developers to pay for some of the “soft costs” of development, such as arenas and libraries, as well as the traditional roads and sewers. That deal mitigated the effect of growth on ratepayers, if not on the landscape, then at least on their tax bills.
In the 1980s and 90s Mississauga began placing a small surcharge on the operating tax bill of residents to pay for needed capital projects. Although budget purists complained that the property tax bill should only technically be for operating expenses, the advantages were obvious.
Instead of borrowing millions of dollars to pay for new projects, and paying the cost three or four times over in interest charges on debentures, the City adopted a pay-as-you-go principle.
When Doug Lychak became city manager, the City even issued a special two per cent capital levy to pay for five specific projects: the sports complex, the arts complex, the public gardens, the City Hall annex project (which was supposed to go on the east side of the square in front of the Central Library) and the Transitway, which is now known as the Bus Rapid Transit line.
It was the smart way to do business and taxpayers could see the logic. Collect a nice pool of money up front with a small surcharge each year for big projects and save big bucks on wasted interest charges.
The City has used this philosophy for years and built up a good quantity of reserve funds for the rainy days it knows are coming: when growth stabilizes and lot levies and tax assessment no longer provide an annual buffer against tax hikes.
In retrospect, Mississauga probably should not have instituted that decade-long moratorium on tax hikes which made it and a certain tiny perfect wrinkled mayor so famous. A one or two per cent hike in each of those years could have been set aside for the infrastructure crunch the City knows is coming: when all of those roads built in the 1970s and 80s have to be rebuilt and the community centres refurbished.
Which brings us to yesterday’s 9-2 decision (Councillors Corbasson and Mullin opposed) by Mississauga City council to approve in principle a five per cent special levy to be set aside for infrastructure repairs.
“The feds have shown their hand,” says Ward 7 Councillor Nando Iannicca. “They are absolutely flush with cash. They have all this money and they didn’t give the cities a dime.”
So Mayor Hazel McCallion and the City are launching the Cities Now campaign
to fan the flames of discontent with the Harper government in advance of the pending federal campaign. Or, as the City's press release puts it, "Council has no option but to step in and take a portion of the tax room created by the federal government's income tax reduction announcement."
This could be a case of wise men (and women) rushing in where fools have failed to tread.
Even if Ottawa comes to the table, Mississauga will still be staggeringly short of the $75 million annually that it will need to maintain its infrastructure. This money will be needed in any event and is more prudent long-term planning.
If Mississauga, a relatively young municipality that has been fairly well-managed is in this kind of shape, what does it mean for the rest of the country’s municipalities?
Will Mississauga taxpayers accept an 8.9 per cent tax hike next year when they already pay a lot more taxes than those whiners to the east of us?
If Hazel says it’s good for us, history says we will.
Ward 11 Councillor George Carlson says the calls he gets aren’t generally complaints about how high the taxes are, they’re complaints about the services that are lacking.
"Politicians are gun shy about how well informed the public really is,” he says. "All the people who understand, and there are lots of them, they don’t call you."
Having driven last weekend through the desolation that is downtown Detroit, Carlson says he doesn't think anybody should be too concerned about paying another $50 a year to be assured no bridge you drive across in Mississauga is ever going to fall down.

Mike Orpen is the kind of guy who doesn’t like to complain about pain and doesn’t like to take any medication when he’s not feeling well.
If you ask him what it was like to be violently thrown from the back seat of a van and crack the centre console or to have a half skid of bricks land on him, he’ll tell you that it hurt ... and not much more.
When he would go to the hospital to get a shot of morphine injected straight into his back because he hadn’t slept for two days, his wife Lisa recalls that he would be in absolute agony. When the doctor would ask him how the pain was, his response would be, "Not bad."
When they would take him to triage and ask him to assess his pain on a scale of 1 to 10, he would answer "8."
"You were in so much pain, you couldn't do anything," Lisa chimes in. "You were a 10 if there ever was a 10."
When it comes to pain — physical and bureaucratic — the Orpens and their extended family know, unfortunately, whereof they speak.
It all started with the van accident in 1990, then the work-related accidents that the self-employed mason, who specializes in fireplaces, suffered.
He was diagnosed with neuropathic back pain. That’s a technical way of saying he was in agony because of stabbing pains in the small of his back and the rear of his thigh.
Despite his antipathy to medication, Orpen has taken some 24,000 pills since his ordeal began. We know because his sister, cum guardian angel, Caroline Dion, has kept track.
At the Orpens' home in Port Credit, where they live with son Quinn, who is almost 11 and daughter Remy, 12, the family sits down to try to explain to a reporter what life has been like since the pain started.
Because Orpen couldn't work and Lisa had to work full-time at her corporate sales job for Metroland Media, Caroline took on the burden of advocacy for her brother.
"She's my champion," says Orpen, who grew up in Erindale Woodlands, attending St. Gerard Elementary and then St. Martin's and The Woodlands.
Caroline has a binder several inches thick that is full of the details of Mike’s story. She developed his own time sheet and story line to save time explaining it to various doctors and medical authorities.
After back surgery that didn’t do the job, Mike did get some temporary relief when he discovered, through his mother’s chance reading of a Reader's Digest article, that there is something called neurostimulation therapy that could help him.
That involves implanting a unit that sends electrical pulses that block pain signals to the spinal cord. But that stopped working after about two years when the wires moved.
Orpen recalls with a laugh (You wonder how he still could do that) that desperation led him to try all sorts of quacky and quirky remedies, including being suspended upside down in a chair for an hour and sitting in a country garden near Guelph while a holistic healer played soft background music.
For the past six years, the Orpen clan has been trying to get a new unit implanted. Medtronic Inc. of Mississauga makes them. A recent study published by the international journal called PAIN found that patients can benefit significantly more from neurostimulation than conventional treatment.
You don't have to tell the 46-year-old Orpen that. Thanks to the persistence of his sister and his doctors and no thanks to a government policy that treats chronic pain sufferers like lepers because they aren’t going to drop dead of their pain in the next few months, Orpen got his surgery on – ironically enough — Oct. 10. Yes, that was the day of the provincial election.
Dion was particularly incensed during the process when her MPP, Kevin Flynn of Oakville, suggested to her that her brother consider out-of-country surgery.
The device is operating at only a fraction of its capabilities but, as he lies in a familiar prone position on the couch in the family living room, things are already a lot better for Mike.
For one thing, the meds have been significantly reduced and his head is clear. Maybe lying awake for two hours while they wiggled the wires around in his back to find exactly the right spot to do the maximum good was really worth it. The batteries are supposed to last nine years so it’s possible doctors might not have to go in through the large incision in his stomach (see photo) for that long, if it keeps working properly.
As his son Quinn gives him a big hug on his return from school, Orpen is thinking about things he hasn't dreamed of for some time: throwing the baseball around with Quinn, cycling with Remy and skiing the deep powder out west with Lisa.
Asked what price the family has paid because of her husband’s debilitating condition, Lisa Orpen who grew up in old Erindale Village, refuses to answer. "We try to focus on the positive things," she says.
Happily, there are a lot more of those to think about now.

It was an inauspicious debut.
When Mississauga’s Smita Chandra gave her first cooking lesson for the LCBO at the Manulife Centre in Toronto many years ago, she was asked at the end of the demonstration what beverage she would recommend to go with the cuisine.
While the audience might not have been surprised to hear Gewurtztraminer or Pinot Grigio as a response, it’s safe to say that the answer she provided — “Coke” — wasn’t in the product consultant’s handbook.
“I don’t like wine and I love Coke. I have Coke for breakfast,” laughs the irrepressible Chandra during an interview in the Meadowvale home where she and her husband have lived since they came to Canada from Ithaca, N.Y. 18 years ago.
When the Chandras arrived in the United States from their native India five years before they moved to Canada, Smita had no work permit and her husband, Sanjeev was a student. Smita had degrees from India in journalism and psychology.
Sanjeev was getting his PhD in mechanical engineering. He’s now a professor of mechanical engineering at the St. George campus of the University of Toronto.
“I had no work permit so I thought, ‘What the heck, I’ll write a cookbook,” says Smita. From Bengal to Punjab — the Cuisines of India (1989) was really a record of her family’s culinary heritage. Gathered from old recipes on scraps of paper and hand-me-down letters, cobbling together the book became a very emotional thing for Smita. “Someone should be in charge of family recipes. Otherwise, they die.”
Many Indians are vegetarians and, since the flavour in many dishes comes from the spice mixture and not the fat, most are more healthy than much north American fare.
Smita knows because she put the family recipes to the Sanjeev test. “He tried all the recipes in the book and didn’t gain an ounce.”
Chandra was put to a stiffer challenge earlier this year when the Ontario Potato Marketing Board asked her to develop some Diwali recipes using potatoes.
“When you look at southern Ontario and you see the large part of the community that is south Asian,” says Farah Tayabali of Mississauga’s Healthcomm Inc. which does public relations for the Potato Board, “you see why we asked Smita to show new ways to use the humble potato. Smita was chosen because of her knowledge of Indian cooking and her creativity.”
Chandra came up with several new recipes including a Chinese-Indian fusion dish called Hakka Chili Potatoes, Tandoori Potato and Paneer skewers and, most surprisingly, a new take on the sweet Diwali delicacy gulab jamuns. “They’re addictive and irresistible,” testifies Smita of the sweet and spongy dish.
First she made a call home to her ultimate cooking authority — her mother — and then she started experimenting on her foolproof GE Profile stove.
By subsitituting potatoes for the traditional cottage-cheese style thickening agent called khoya, Chandra developed gulab jamuns that are lighter and easier to make, holding their shape better without sacrificing a bit of flavour.
“They’re absolutely foolproof,” says Chandra. “My 14-year-old son could make them. Heck, my cat could make them.”
Unfortunately, judging by the size of Kit-Kat, he has been eating the traditional gulab jamuns.
Chandra is a contributor to the food section of The Toronto Star, to Desi Life magazine and makes the rounds of cooking shows on radio and TV, having appeared on Christine Cushing’s Cook With Me, Anna Olson’s Kitchen Equipped and Dr.. Marla Shapiro’s Balance.
She also has a classic “my big break-that-never-quite-happened story.” When her third cookbook, Cuisines of India — The Art and Tradition of Regional Indian Cooking (co-authored with Sanjeev who has developed a keen interest in food history) was published in 2001, no less a personage than Martha Stewart expressed interest.
A video of Smita giving a cooking lesson was sent to Martha and she was quickly scheduled to appear on the show. Unfortunately, as they say, events intervened. After the attack on the World Trade Centre, the appearance was cancelled.
Chandra is doing famously, nonethless. She quit her full-time job in the food industry last summer and is so busy with cooking school lessons and recipe development that the idea of writing another cookbook will have to wait.
She’s pitched the idea of The Smita Chandra Show to The Food Network but, surprisingly, given the obvious interest in south Asian cuisine in these parts and across Canada, the gauntlet has not been taken up.
That’s too bad because, as Farah Tayabali says, “Smita develops authentic recipes that would pass muster with anyone’s Indian grandmother but are also quite accessible.”
And then there’s the natural sponsor: Coke.
Here’s her website: www.smitachandra.com.

You might think that receiving a Juno nomination out of the blue might make you just a little bit conservative about the next big thing to do in your musical career.
Not Lori Cullen, who must be getting sick and tired of being a "critic's darling" and a "songwriter's songwriter."
If you were lucky enough to be listening to Canada Now on CBC Radio Two last night when they replayed Lori's Mother's Day concert from May at Harbourfront , then you got an idea what all the fuss is about.
Cullen, who grew up in Erindale Woodlands and lived in Mississauga for 24 years before moving downtown to launch her musical career, is a special writer who marries inventive melodies and subliminal lyrics that have a habit of folding back the layers of human artifice to provide a peak at the heart of matters.
Unfortunately for her, the 33-year old is also a superb interpreter of other people's great tunes. The first time I ever heard her, she was doing her remarkable version of Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh's The Best is Yet To Come from her So Much album.
It sounded absolutely fresh and perfect. Someone who can take a song so closely associated with Frank Sinatra and put her own distinctive stamp on it, has a special talent.
So Much was a tune of covers (Janis Ian's At Seventeen and a surpassing version of the jazz standard Folks on the Hill were highlights) and Cullen returned to that format with Calling For Rain last year. It was as close to a perfect mood album as you could find.
From its grey and stormy cover, through the dark and dank musings of some of Canada's best writers, Cullen took us on a late-night journey through the back alleys of our own psyche.
The temptation must have been great to emulate that success, but the thought never really crossed Cullen's mind.
She had been thinking for awhile about recording with a small brass section to create the layered "buttery" small band sound she loved in so much music, including the music of Chris Dedrick and The Free Design.
"I didn't think he'd be interested in working with me," says Lori but when he showed up at the release of Calling For Rain, Dedrick agreed to co-produce the new CD. It came to be called Buttercup Bugle, in reference to that smooth sound Cullen was seeking.
The just-released CD, which Cullen and a dozen of her friends will be launching Friday and Saturday at 8:30 p.m. at Hugh's Room in Toronto, couldn't be more different than Calling From Rain, which was nominated for the Best Jazz Vocal Juno.
In fact one song, Clearer Weather, is written in direct response to it.
"I took the chance in not making another Calling For Rain. I wanted to make this record. You never know what you're going to end up with when you try something new but I'm really proud of it," she says.
It's no coincidence that it's filled with happy-sounding songs. This is the "Lori in Love" pop album, a result of her off-the-bandstand relationship with Kurt Swinghammer, who plays guitars, ominchord, autoharp and synthesizer on the record.
One song on the album, probably the singer's favourite, is especially brilliant at capturing the first blush of love. Cullen describes Grass on the T-Shirt as a "Joni Mitchelly kind of song."
It was written after she and Kurt visited a Thai food restaurant after they'd been together for a month. They watched another couple in the restaurant who had obviously been together for some time and were no longer talking or connecting. "It's about the period at the beginning of love, about stretching it out and revisiting it," she says.
One of the memorable lines refers to the "lay-around sounds of Sunday noon when the day sits so young." The singer asks: "Can't we just save it and seal it and stay?" knowing full well the answer.
After blowing the budget on Buttercup Bugle (which is available at iTunes or in stores or from www.maplemusic.com/artists/lcu/default.asp, ) the ever-adventurous indie artist says the next album will be a walk on the minimalist side.
"It's going to be a harp record: just voice and autoharp and synthesizer."
The last number on this CD is called Waiting. It's about how people sit back and wait for the world to come to them instead of going out and grabbing it by the bugle.
We can rest assured that Cullen the artist will not be biding her time. Cullen's music and her muse will undoubtedly take us in another delightful direction next time out.
Until the rest of the world tunes in to her talent, we still have the delicious pleasure of being part of the Lori Cullen Under-The-Radar Fan Club.

Mississauga's environmental advisory committee is slowly figuring out what its mandate is going to be — mostly by deciding what it will NOT do, says its chair, George Carlson.
One of the obvious things that residents were expecting the committee to seize upon was a bylaw banning pesticide use on private property. But that isn't on the agenda and isn't likely to be, says the Ward 11 councillor.
"There's no use passing a bylaw that doesn't work," says the chair. While the bylaws passed by numerous other surrounding municipalities such as Oakville and Toronto have stood up in court, Carlson says they aren't working on the ground, where it counts.
A recent investigation on CBC's Marketplace by Wendy Mesley and crew found that despite bans in 135 municipalities, pesticides are freely available almost everywhere. Local retailers are happy to sell the poisons, knowing full well that it is illegal for the homeowner to use them. Halifax, where the first of 135 municipal bans began seven years ago, still has tons of chemically-enhanced useless perfect green lawns.
"Sure, we can pass a feel-good bylaw," says Carlson, "but I think we're going to take a different tack: by encouraging people to voluntarily quit using them and by pushing (Premier Dalton) McGuinty to get this stuff out of the hands of the uninformed homeowner."
Mississauga will push the Liberals for a province-wide ban – similar to its strategy to have a comprehensive smoke ban imposed across all municipalities — and will volunteer to be one of the first pilot sites.
OK, but is that really enough to change anybody's behaviour? The imposition of a bylaw would also offer a chance for extensive public education.
The sad experience of the cooking oil down the sewer and the ducks drenched with it in Lake Wabukayne this week proves once again that loads of people don't understand the basic connection between their own behaviour and environmental degradation. They pour poison on their lawns and wonder why the birds are always feeding on the lawn next door but not on theirs. And they can’t figure out why the drinking water needs all those chemicals in it.
Having a bylaw in your back pocket to deal with the people who just don’t or won't get it, wouldn’t necessarily be such a bad thing.
• • •
Speaking of not getting it, Meadowvale resident Emma Ford wonders why she has to endure Mississauga Transit buses idling and idling at the transit loop at the Meadowvale Town Centre, often with no driver in site. "People are prisoners there, waiting for the bus and inhaling all that crap," she says.
The 65-year-old has suffered from asthma since she was a child. The City launched a highly-publicized anti-idling publicity campaign a few years ago that targeted school bus drivers and Moms and Dads waiting to pick up their kids.
Maybe they should have started with their own Transit fleet.
“Where's Hazel on this?" wonders Ford.
• • •
Anybody else look at the chart in The Toronto Sun this morning that explains how much tax you pay if you own a home assessed at $400,000 in different GTA cities?
Mississauga, at just over $4,000 is almost smack dab in the middle. The glaring number was in Toronto, where residents pay $3,411, thus confirming what Mississauga staff and politicians have been saying for years: Toronto has been undertaxing its homeowners for years and overtaxing its business, driving them into the waiting arms of municipalities like Hazelville.
The highest tax bill, by the way, was in Oshawa at $6,840. Should it really cost twice as much to live there as in downtown Toronto?

The decision this week to uphold the 1997 firing of English teacher Paul Fromm by the Peel District School Board brings us a little closer to the end (appeal is still possible) of a dispute that is not nearly as clear-cut as it might first appear.
Fromm taught English for 19 years at Applewood Heights Secondary School and taught it extraordinarily well, according to all accounts.
At the same time, he was pursuing his own right-wing political activities, which as he continually points out, is not a crime.
But what is a school board to do when someone who is a teacher appears on the stage with the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and other known white supremacists, founds organizations that actively fight to close the borders to new immigrants, appears publicly at meetings of skinheads and co-sponsors a 1990 meeting which ends with the guest speaker giving a Nazi salute and yelling "White Power" while he applauds?
At a forum in 1991, the Mississauga resident referred to refugee claimants as "hordes of criminals, scam artists and welfare collectors."
Complaints from the B’nai Brith, which supplies video of some of these incidents to the media and the school board, prompted the board to take Fromm out of the high school classroom and put him into the adult education centre on Elm Dr., the former home of Britannia Secondary School.
He was warned in a letter to cease and desist. When Fromm attended a memorial service for renowned American racist Revilo Oliver where he publicly lauded Oliver as a giant in his field, the board did what it had to do and fired him in 1997.
Fromm's case could be described as Malcolm Ross Lite. Unlike Ross, who spouted his bile in class and clearly violated curriculum guidelines, Fromm scrupulously avoided expressing his politics in class. No student ever made a complaint.
The arbitration appeal hearings on his dismissal began in April 1998 and ended in Oct. 2000. The decision was issued 16 months later.
In a 2-1 ruling, Arbitrator Kevin Burkett wrote that the school board’s failure to take action against an employee speaking out against its adopted principles of multiculturalism and racial tolerance would have been, “a betrayal of the community that it is mandated to serve. This is especially so in the case of a teacher who has been warned and put on notice and who, in direct disregard, persists.
Getting to the heart of the matter, the decision said, "It can reasonably be assumed that any student of colour, or of the Jewish faith, who became aware of Mr. Fromm’s views or his involvement in these off-duty events would have difficulty accepting Mr. Fromm as role model, mentor or confidante."
Fromm, who spent much of the past few years helping Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel's fight his removal to Germany, saw himself then, and still sees himself, as a victim of political fashion.
"The Board's accusation is basically that I hung out with the wrong sort of person," he told me at the time. "If I hung out with homosexuals and Communists, they would have thought I was a fine fellow. They didn’t like my friends. I think this sets some very dangerous precedents."
A more dangerous precedent would have been set had his firing not been upheld.
When Fromm ran against Peel Board Chair Janet McDougald in 1997 in wards 1 and 7 after his firing, he exercised free speech and the public ruled on it. He finished fourth in a four-way race and MacDougald was returned to office.
Teachers, judges, politicians and police officers are held to a higher standard of personal conduct for good reason. They hold positions of trust and we expect more of them. When their conduct flies in the face of the principles the institutions they work for espouse, they must be held to account.
Fromm exercised his right of free speech and his profession ruled on it.
In an interesting switch-about last year, 25 members of the Anti-Racist Action Toronto group showed up outside Fromm’s Mississauga home in Erindale, shouting "Show us your Aryan gonads" and "Nazi, Nazi, Nazi/ out, out out".
Fromm's comment at the time was: "They do have a right to protest. But they don't have the right to protest on private property."
Even he recognizes that, in a democratic society, there are always clear lines defining reasonable conduct.

When any of Jeanene Luckhart's six kids let their little troubles get the best of them, she always had a way of helping them see the big picture.
They would dutifully be dispatched to the Lakeshore Rd. E. warehouse of Canadian Food for Children for a little reality therapy.
When you realize that you are packing up food for someone in Honduras or Guatemala or Tanzania who might not have eaten for a few days, it helps put things in perspective.
Last night, the 52-year-old serial volunteer — with her children's schools and Canadian Food For Children and Caring and Sharing and Compass among others — was recognized for her work in a special ceremony held in her honour at the Mississauga YMCA in the city centre. She was the only Mississaugan among 13 recipients of the YMCA peace medallion which recognizes people who contribute to social change through personal effort.
That's Jeanene second from the left in Rob Beintema's photo above.
When she spoke today on her lunch break from her job as a physiotherapist at Credit Valley Hospital, the 22-year resident of Park Royal wasn't really interested in talking about herself.
"I work there with people who've been doing this for 20 years and more," she said of the agency founded by Dr. Andrew Simone, which sends food packages to the needy all over the world.
When her friend Pat Rogan — one of those many long-term volunteers deserving recognition — finally asked Luckhart the question she had been longing to hear after a few years on the job, Rogan didn't even get to complete her query.
Luckhart had been hoping to make one of the trips abroad to actually see the value of the enterprise.
"One day she looked at me and said, 'Would you like to..' and she didn't even get to finish the sentence," laughs Luckhart. "Where are we going?" I asked her.
To lots of places, it turned out. The one that struck the deepest chord with the native of Australia was her trip to Honduras, where one priest was looking after the needs of 200 families. "They rely entirely on the food that we provide," she says.
The peace medallion winner is obviously deserving of more than the regulation 15 minutes of fame, and she's determined to use her moment in the sun to best advantage, proselytizing for the many worthy causes she supports.
She's also a volunteer with Caring and Sharing, a local weekly emergency program that provides food orders for families in need.
When the group gets a call from the Compass food bank or social service agencies or Peel Hospice or the school boards that a family is in need, a charitable pyramid scheme goes into effect.
A designated person in a group of volunteers calls everyone else in the group to ask them to provide a single food item from a list of needs the family provides. The participants drop the food off on the doorstep of one member. "It just happens to be my front porch this week," says Luckhart.
"It works really well," she says of the Park Royal chapter, which has some 70 members now. "It's low cost and low-tech but it gets the job done."
At the end of the conversation, the talk inevitably gets around, through no assistance of the award recipient, to the honour bestowed upon her. "Last night was very nice," she says of the medal presentation. "I was very happy, but I do have mixed feelings about it."
No time to bask in the glory. Too many other good causes need the attention of Jeanene Luckhart and the other good people who offer their help just because it's the right thing to do.
Bless them all.

Glenn Harrington's plan for fixing what ails Rattray Marsh boils down to two key things: getting the carp out and getting the crap out.
Last night at Green Glade Public School, Harrington, the consultant who is doing the environmental assessment that will allow Credit Valley Conservation (CVC) to put the shine back on its jewel of a wetland in Clarkson, presented the consensus recommendations of the steering committee guiding the Rattray restoration project.
"Getting the carp out of the marsh is the most important thing," Harrington said this morning. The fish breed in the marsh, stir up the sediment, prevent small plants from growing and eat some of those plants.
The CVC plans to increase its carp "exclosures" in the marsh to keep the big fish out.
If a concurrent Sheridan Creek Watershed Study by the CVC is as successful as hoped in improving the water quality and reducing the water quantity feeding Rattray, then the pike should make a comeback in the marsh. They will eat the small carp and help restore the natural predator-prey balance.
The presence of the carp is one of the reasons that Rattray has so much open water and no longer looks like the classic marsh it once did.
Getting rid of 200 years worth of sediment that has washed into Rattray from the creek (the crap) won't be quite as easy as excluding the carp.
Here is how it will work:
Crews will isolate different areas of the marsh, one after another, by placing sediment cloth around them. This will likely happen in the fall to keep turtles and amphibians from crawling into the mud and then being harvested along with the foot to 18 inches of chemical sediment that is to be removed. A pump will be placed to remove excess water.
Large excavating equipment will be used to pile the material in a corner of the chosen section, so it can dry out and/or freeze. For two or three days in the dead of winter when the area is dormant, a long line of trucks will move across oak mats or the ice to collect the crap and truck it to the appropriate spot.
Experts will be on hand when the excavation is done to ensure that the beautiful, original peaty layer at the bottom is disturbed as little as possible.
The sediment will be tested and, depending on how toxic it is, it may be disposed of in local landfills or — worse case scenario — have to be shipped to the only landfill site in Canada that takes the really toxic stuff, in Saskatchewan. The latter option (ouch) will cost $2,000 a tonne.
The beauty of the plan is that it will be done in stages. While that clearly increases the cost of trucking, it provides flexibility just in case things don’t work quite the way they are supposed to.
The idea is to restore the original depth of the marsh so that it is no longer the shadow of its former self that it currently is.
In his presentation last night, the personable Harrington never once mentioned the 'D' word, the dirty word in conservation work called dredging.
Although technically that is what is being proposed, dredging is associated with the exercise of deepening the mouths of river beds with huge buckets, Harrington said. "While the intent here is exactly the same, we will be doing it in a much-more controlled way," he said.
You can be sure that Jean Williams and the Rattray Marsh Protection Association, the citizen group that has tirelessly carried on the work begun by Dr. Ruth Hussey to first save and then support the marsh, will be watching carefully.
According to Harrington, once the peaty layer of organic material is revealed through sedimentation removal, there could be some amazing regeneration.
"There was a bog in Wainfleet where they did bog extraction and they got species growing again that had been extinct in the Province of Ontario," he said. "Whatever seeds are buried deep in that peat could grow again."
To be totally anthropomorphic about it, what a nice gift that would be from the marsh to the people who have been so dedicated in protecting it over the years.

Heather Kirk says that while writing her new book speculating on Mazo de la Roche's inspiration for the fictional characters, the property and the home that became the world-famous Whiteoaks of Jalna series, she "felt a little bit like Hetty Wainthropp."
Scholarly research is probably 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration. The real detective work is in slogging through archives and land registry offices and perusing old newspapers until you can't see straight.
After weeks of finding nothing, something critical will turn up.
That happened a couple of times for Kirk, the Barrie freelance author who has been fascinated with Mazo since she started working on her doctorate some 20 years ago.
Of course Mississauga lays some claim to Mazo because she wrote much of the first books at her summer home called Trail Cottage, not too far south of the Benares Museum on Clarkson Rd. N.
That house, now Province-owned and City-run, has long been suspected of being much of the inspiration for Jalna. The Harris family which owned Benares is commonly assumed to be the model for the Whiteoaks.
While examining the will of the grandfather of Caroline Clement, the cousin and life-time companion of de la Roche, Kirk discovered that he had owned 1,000 acres of property in Innisfil Township on a real-life property that bore a startling resemblance to the farm of the Vaughan family. They live next to the Whiteoaks in the Jalna novels.
The resemblance was amazingly striking, right down to the fact that both the real and fictional farms featured houses lying in a shallow basin on land rising from a ravine.
"That was the beginning. Slowly other parallels began to emerge," Kirk says.
Over 135 pages of maps, photos and comparisons between the fiction and the fact, Kirk slowly beats the reader down — even we Mississaugans who want to lay emotional claim to the Jalna stories. (We do have the street names, after all.)
By dint of the weight of her research, we are duly convinced by the end of proceedings that Jalna and Whiteoaks are, indeed, a clever melding of the many places de la Roche and Clement lived and the people they knew.
Less convincing is Kirk's attempt to minimize the importance of the relationship between de la Roche and the Harris family.
It's fair to ask why this theory is being advanced some 46 years after de la Roche's death and several biographies.
"She was secretive, protective and evasive," says Kirk plainly. Previous biographers weren't diligent enough in following the clues or were sidetracked by the phony ones. Many of the answers lay in de la Roche's biography, Ringing The Changes. "It took me a while but I finally began to trust her more," says Kirk.
In one of the jacket blurbs for the book, Professor John Lennox of York University, calls the effort invaluable for scholars and, "probably the definitive piece of work on de la Roche's family connections and on their possible links with her fiction."
It was back in a graduate course Kirk took from Lennox in 1986 that students were asked to select and write on a Canadian author.
"When her name came up people were pooh-poohing her," says Kirk. "She was a popular writer and therefore, not worthy. That's when I decided – I'll take the long shot."
She read Jalna and realized, "I recognize these people. They were my family."
Literally, as it turned out. Kirk discovered she was a fifth cousin, twice removed of de la Roche's.
One thing still hasn't changed from those days, which is the underestimation of the novelist's skills and importance and the public pooh-poohing of her legacy.
"She was a forerunner of Margaret Laurence and Margaret Atwood, writing about her childhood from Canadian memories. She was the first generation of writers born here to write from the Canadian experience," says Kirk.
"She made a substantial contribution. Not all of the novels are great but the first two are solid, first-class novels. Many would include a third novel, Delight. Many of her short stories are outstanding. She achieved a level of popularity unheard of in Canada.
"Her books represented Canada to the world for a generation and that's why it's so important to understand this complex person."
The book is available at Chapters and other local stores.
• • •
On vacation next week. Back Dec. 3.