X Marks the Spot

I called John Tory's people late in the day yesterday. I'd say, roughly, 5 p.m. I was trying to get Tory on the phone to discuss the rationale behind his plan to fund faith-based education for a feature I'm working on.

It is nearly 24 hours since my first call. I have received return calls from two of his people. I have been assured I will have Mr. Tory on the phone soon, as he and his entourage are just now arriving in Peterborough.

We'll see if Tory, the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, can beat out Rosario Marchese, the NDP Education Critic, who had a 34.5 hour response time.

Now, we wait.

(UPDATE: Success! John Tory responded to my request for an interview in roughly 24 hours, beating out Marchese by 9.5 hours. One point Tory.)

Not this blog entry. This one.

To get the joke, you'll need to know what lolcats are, and you'll need to know the Russians are claiming the North Pole.

Kady O'Malley, a Parliament Hill reporter who I've had a crush on since first seeing her on The National's At Issue panel several years ago, has a blog at Macleans.

It's good, it's clever, it's worth reading.

Kathleen Wynne, the Minister of Education, returned my phone call in 5.5 hours.

That makes her the winner of this week's game of "Who'll Respond Most Quickly?"

I now have my main sources for my first in a series of articles about faith-based schools funding. Keep your eyes on the paper for my epic and informative article.

A lot to cover after a long weekend.

First up, Stephen Harper is up north. Not cottaging in Muskoka or any such thing, but travelling through our country's oft-forgotten north, the one way up there, in that great expanse where few people live, in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.

He's there all week, and expected to drop some cash and plans on the region, hoping to make it appear as though Canadians live up there, and operate up there, and could conceivably scare away Americans and Russians who dare traverse our Northwest Passage and, perhaps, once those pesky ice caps are taken care of, steal our oil.

Also, Harper called two by-elections to fill empty seats in Quebec. They will take place Sept. 17. The seats to be filled: Outremont and Saint Hyacinthe-Bagot. They are expected to be hard-fought and well-covered races. The Liberals, the Conservatives, and the Bloc have a lot to gain by winning, and plenty to lose if they end up defeated.

There are other vacancies to be filled, with a couple in Ontario, but it appears as though the PM will save us the confusion by waiting to have those by-elections after the provincial election.

Nepean-Carleton MP Pierre Poilievre, on the other hand, is trying to inject additional confusion into the provincial election.

He wants Premier Dalton McGuinty to hold Senate elections during the provincial election on Oct. 10.

Keep in mind we will already be voting for our MPPs, and in an historic and heavy referendum on our electoral system.

Poilievre wants to add federal Senate elections onto that. There are two Senate vacancies in Ontario, and Harper likes the idea of elected Senators, even if they're not actually directly elected (winners of the election would still need to be appointed by Harper, who appointed a Senator earlier this year who was elected by the people of Alberta).

I'm no whiz, but I doubt Ontario, this late in the game, with only nine weeks to E-Day, will decide to elect Senators this year.

As of tomorrow, there will be exactly nine weeks until the provincial election. Still, none of the parties in Mississauga-Brampton South has nominated a single candidate, and everyone's staring at the sky, waiting for parachuted candidates.

More importantly, as of today, there are six weeks until the Toronto Maple Leafs pre-season begins.

...and do the Harper shuffle.

Today is my 28th birthday. Getting old.

To reward myself for lasting this long, I'm going to cop out of writing a real blog post by putting up this story I've written for the paper.

---

With only nine weeks until the provincial election on Oct. 10, the major political parties are still yet to name candidates to the new Mississauga-Brampton South riding.
At Politicians Appreciation Day Wednesday, hosted by the Mississauga Board of Trade, few people had any idea who would be carrying the party banners in what is considered a fairly safe Liberal area.
Only one thing is agreed on, that the people who take to the hustings for the Progressive Conservatives and Liberals will be appointed.
There simply isn't enough time to hold a nomination race and have the wounds of that race heal before a fast-approaching election.
"I think the Progressive Conservatives are waiting for the Liberals to show their hand," said Navdeep Bains, who holds the Mississauga-Brampton South seat federally.
Mississauga-Brampton South is also the only riding in Mississauga without an incumbent.
As such, many Liberals were ready to run for their party's nomination in the area. They were told not to bother by party headquarters.
Instead, Liberal HQ has found three possible contenders, sources have told The News.
Iffat Javid, a Peel District School Board educator, and Najma Iqbal, a member of the board of directors at Muslim Community Services, have both been fingered as potential candidates for the Liberals.
Deepika Damerla, an Omni TV reporter, is the most recent addition to the list of potential candidates, though her phone message at her office says she will be on vacation for another three weeks.
The Liberals, sources say, are set on appointing a women to be their candidate.
As for the Progressive Conservatives, no one will even speak of a list of potential candidates.
The NDP and the Green Party are also waiting until the last minute to appoint a nominee.
On the Family Coalition Party, a socially right-wing party that has never won a seat in the Ontario Legislature, put forward a candidate, Paul Micelli.

-30-

I was in Oakville visiting my parents last week, and flipped through the local paper, The Oakville Beaver.

There was an enormous three-page story about Dalton McGuinty's visit to the town earlier in the week.

While in Oakville, talking to the Chamber of Commerce, McGuinty said that the federal government needs to give Ontario more money.

Now, today, he's back in Oakville, this time to announce that, if re-elected, his party will spend $80 million to plant 50 million trees by 2020.

Also today, he's expected to announce that his party will use Roberta Bondar's education review to re-jig the public school curriculum to make it more eco-conscious.

Either Liberal incumbent Kevin Flynn's having some problems with his poll numbers, or Dalton just really loves Oakville. Flynn is facing tough competition in Oakville. Rick Byers, who ran federally in 2000 and 2004, is a worthy challenger.

Speaking of Bondar, McGuinty's expected in Brampton at Roberta Bondar Public School tomorrow morning. One expects he'll use the opportunity to remind everyone of the new Bondar-inspired curriculum.

He's also expected to make trustees at the local school boards very happy, offering them some money to fix some of their problems.

Dalton McGuinty was just across the border in Brampton to announce that he found $309 million in between the seat cushions at Queen's Park.

He's putting that money into education.

Trustees are happy, which kind of surprises me.

The Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board trustees have been told for the past two years that they have enough money to balance their books and that they should stop whining. Now, suddenly, they're getting more money. If they had enough, why are they getting more?

The trustees appear to know better than to complain about getting more money, though.

Now we're off to see John Tory, who's just up the street from the Mississauga News office at about 1 p.m.

Then, later this afternoon, the feature presentation: The Cabinet Shuffle, starring Stephen Harper, and probably not Gordon O'Connor.

That is the best phrase of the election campaign so far: "Magic McGuinty Money."

That was how PC leader John Tory described the $309 million that McGuinty announced for education today.

"Where does this magic money come from?" asked Tory. "He had a budget a couple of months ago and now on the eve of an election he finds this money?"

The first two times Tory simply said "magic money," but after that, his brain found an extra "M" word for a truly great alliteration: "magic McGuinty money."

Fun stuff.

One hour until the Harper Cabinet shuffle.

For the third time in a couple of weeks, Premier Dalton McGuinty was in Oakville.

See my blog from yesterday.

Today he was announcing HOV lanes for the QEW, which will be ready, if he's re-elected, in 2011.

Having grown up in Oakville and driven on the QEW roughly 2 billion times, I can confidently say the QEW needs some work. But 2011? Is that really how long it takes to build highway lanes?

Putting that aside, I have been trying to figure out why the leaders have been spending so much time in Mississauga and Oakville.

While waiting for John Tory today, one PC worker told me he thinks the entire west GTA is in play. That may be wishful thinking on his part, but the leaders are certainly spending a lot of time here.

On the other hand, it might just be cheaper to stay in the GTA, near home base in Toronto, before branching out once the actual campaign starts on Sept. 10. Then, when the actual campaign starts, they can start using campaign cash to fund the trips.

The real indication of how close the parties think the west GTA is will come in September.

If they keep showing up here as they have been for the past four weeks or so, they're going to have to start paying property taxes for their campaign RVs.

So, if you head over to John Tory's website, www.leadershipmatters.ca, you'll find a section called Take Action.

If you go there, you'll be given the opportunity to Pick Dalton McGuinty's Theme Song.

The leaders of the pack so far:

Would I Lie to You - The Eurythmics

Don't forget me when I'm gone - Glass Tiger

You Had Me, You Lost Me - Joss Stone

So far, the list proves one thing: Progressive Conservatives have really weird taste in music.

The whole thing seems weird.

One of the things John Tory seems to really have is dignity. Dalton has it too. They're both respectable people, and not dirty. I keep expecting this campaign to be clean, about issues, without many, if any, personal attacks.

This Pick Dalton's McGuinty's Theme Song thing just feels kind of immature and pointless.

It feels like something more fit for Stephen Harper's people, something like the Kyoto Dog Blog, or the whole notaleader.ca campaign.

Besides, I'm pretty sure this isn't a real contest to find the most voted-for songs. It is, like the entire Take Action area of the site, just a way to get your email address so they can put you on the mailing list and remind you repeatedly over the next couple of months that John Tory is a real leader, and Dalton McGuinty a liar.

My well-connected colleague across the aisle in the newsroom, John Stewart, has the low-down on Mississauga-Brampton South.

The Liberals have finally found a candidate.

According to John's well-placed source, the candidate's name is Amrit Mangat.

See his blog entry (below the Oscar Peterson update) for more information - though there isn't much more information since no one seems to know anything about the candidate.

Now we just have to wait for the Progressive Conservative, NDP, and Green candidates.

Seven weeks and five days until E-Day.

Dalton was in the Hammer today, handing out $30 million for the cleanup of Randle Reef.

According to this government site, "Randle Reef sediments contain very high concentrations of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in coal tar. It is known that the PAHs are re-circulating and moving up into the food chain."

The money for this project only covers one-third of the cost of the cleanup. Dalton's hoping the feds will jump on board with more cash soon.

The point of this post - this is more of what John Tory calls "magic McGuinty money."

Tory says Dalton's taking the cash out of thin air.

In actuality, it's coming from the last budget, which was in March. The money, we're told, comes from that budget, but when the budget was released, it wasn't specifically allocated. The new education money released in Brampton earlier this week, for example, was in the education part of the budget, but no one was sure until earlier this week what that money would be used for.

Dalton could have told us back then what he was going to do with the money, but he decided not to. Why? Because then he wouldn't have been able to march all around the Golden Horseshoe the month before the election begins doling out money to everyone with a hand to outstretch.

Tory has taken the opportunity to bring up the health tax that Dalton instated in his first budget. Tory says we can get rid of that tax and still have enough money to do what we need to do. In fact, if elected, he has promised to get rid of the tax.

The PC leader was saying it again this morning, after finance minister Greg Sorbara announced that the government has a $2.3 billion surplus from last year. Sorbara also said that this year, so far, there's been a $400 million improvement.

The health tax puts roughly $2.5 billion into provincial coffers - that, as you can see, is roughly the amount left over after last year's spending.

(Hard to see the screen shot, but the URL is www.amritmangat.ca, and the page says that it's a Liberal Party of Ontario page and that it's under construction.)

Found this morning, the website appears to offer final and full confirmation that Amrit Mangat is a Liberal candidate.

We're told she's the Liberal candidate for Mississauga-Brampton South, but that's not clear from her website.

Now we just have to find out who this mystery woman is.

John Stewart has the low-down on Mississauga-Brampton South on his blog.

Amrit Mangat (pictured above) for the Liberals.

Masood Khan or Ramdyal Singh for the Conservatives (nomination meeting next Monday).

Karanjit Pandher for the NDP.

Still can't find a Green Party candidate for the area, though the Family Coalition Party has Paul Micelli lined up.

...That's not our prime minister. Our prime minister is the other one, who, for some reason, looks drunk in the MSNBC file photo.

Maybe we should give the other guy a chance.

I've been researching and writing about John Tory's plan to fund faith-based education for a few weeks now.

I've spoken to Tory, Education Minister Kathleen Wynne, NDP Education Critic Rosario Marchese, the principals of several religious schools in Mississauga, a few university professors/experts and the two chairs of the local school boards.

I have written stories that will hopefully appear in the paper nearer the election.

I started out hating Tory's plan. I thought it was going the wrong way, that the state should move further from the church, not nearer the church, and mosque, and gurdwara, etc.

To solve the problem of discrimination in our education system, I would rather see the Catholic school boards folded into the public school boards. Catholic schools are an anachronism, a throw-back to 1867, when their existence was guaranteed in the Constitution and when Catholics were a minority with a culture that needed to be protected (just as Protestants were in Quebec at the time).

Of course, to get rid of the Catholic boards, the province would have to propose an amendment to the Constitution. It would need to pass through the Ontario Legislature, then the House of Commons.

For such a controversial move as getting rid of the Catholic school boards, a party would need to run on the idea in an election, or hold a referendum. If a party ran on that, it would alienate a large chunk of the electorate and could cost the party the election.

I'm still against Tory's plan, but my respect for him has increased. He's trying to solve a problem, a problem that discriminates against all religious people but Catholics.

Both the Liberals (Wynne) and the NDP (Marchese) won't even state whether or not they think funding one religious education system and not others is discriminatory.

It is, in fact, a perfect example of discrimination. The inability of politicians to understand that, and their inaction, makes them appear cowardly.

There needs to be a solution to the discrimination of our education system.

Tory's plan is not the right plan, but it is better than simply allowing the discrimination to continue without acknowledgement.

I have gained respect for Tory for that reason, and lost respect for the leaders of the two other parties for not having a plan to end the discrimination.

First the Ottawa Citizen, a column by Dan Gardner.

Gardner explains that McGuinty's father, Dalton Sr., had a different view on faith-based schools funding than Dalton Jr. does.

"Now, ordinarily this would be the stuff of political trivia. The father held one view. The son believes the opposite. Oh well.

"But this is much more than political trivia because Dalton Jr. has never given any indication that he thinks ol' dad was wrong."

I don't agree with Dalton Jr.'s stance on this issue, and I do agree with the point Gardner's trying to make - that the Premier's stand against funding for religious education is a tad hypocritical since he and his children have benefited from religious education in the Catholic system while denying other religious people the same opportunity - but what Dalton's dad has to do with it, I don't know.

I got quotes similar to Gardner's via email today, from the Parents for Equality in Education Funding, telling me Dalton Sr.'s quotes would be good fodder for a future story.

While I always appreciate tips, I didn't understand this one.

I am against the current system of funding one religion and not others, but I don't care what Dalton Sr. said. Though he makes solid points, Dalton Sr. is not running for office, and Dalton Jr. should not have to answer for disagreeing with his father. I disagree with my father all the time and don't think it would be fair to be held accountable for his opinions.

Showing the two different arguments is humourous but, ultimately, doesn't mean a thing.

Just got back from the Living Arts Centre, where the Progressive Conservatives finally unveiled their candidate.

Ramdyal "Ravi" Singh, a Bank of Nova Scotia compliance manager, will carry the PC banner for the next six weeks, and, if he's elected, for four years after E-Day.

Masood Khan withdrew from the race on Saturday. He was angry because there was an open contest even though he felt he should be appointed.

So, the event earlier tonight wasn't as exciting as it could have been.

There was one thing that was particularly interesting about Singh's coronation: it was ostentatious.

First, as one walked up to the south doors of the Living Arts Centre, there was parked in front of the doors two BMWs, a sinfully hideous, bright yellow Hummer, and a stretched SUV limousine.

Then, inside there was, well, the inside of the LAC, which is cavernous, sleek and still feels very new. I have attended nomination meetings at cheap banquet halls and rented office space, and even a library hallway, but never somewhere like the Living Arts Centre.

It wasn't as if the nomination meeting was happening in one of the small rooms at the LAC, either; it was in Hammerson Hall.

Hammerson Hall, one of the doorwomen told me, can seat 1,300 people.

The Tories at the event didn't number more than 80. The whole nomination meeting could probably have taken place in the limousine parked out front.

There was also the attitude of the meeting - it was smug.

Before the ceremonies, I spoke to Singh and Blair McCreadie, President of the Ontario PCs.

McCreadie described the resignation last week of the riding's executive council thusly: "Sometimes people take their toys and go home, and it is what it is."

Granted, it was a better answer than I got from Singh, who simply shrugged.

Once inside Hammerson Hall, the speeches began. The crowd didn't appear interested.

At least two people were unaware you're meant to turn your phone to vibrate while listening to a speech, and one was unaware that it's rude to actually answer the phone during a person's speech. I'm not sure how heavy the rock you live under would need to be to not know that, but I now know such a rock exists.

I don't think Singh minded, though. He speaks slowly and deliberately. Very slowly. And without any semblance of passion. By halfway through his short speech, he seemed as bored as his audience.

In fact, by the time he got to the money shot - "we are going to elect a Tory government, we're going to paint the province blue" - he had become so monotonous that most of the audience didn't realize it was time to applaud, and when about a quarter of the audience did applaud, it visibly startled Singh.

Khan is not known for his modesty or tact, but, at first glance, he would certainly have made for a much more interesting candidate, from a reporter's standpoint, than Singh will.

I watched the Michael Moore documentary Sicko a couple of months ago. The movie compared the U.S. health care system to the Canadian system, the British system, and the French system.

Moore romanticized each system as a contrast to the horror of the U.S. system.

In France, he found that for the first few months after a woman gives birth, a health care worker drops by the house a couple of hours a day to help the new mother prepare meals, or vacuum, or do laundry.

Sounds like heaven.

The Liberals are picking up on such services, not for new mothers but for senior citizens.

We are now going to go to the homes of senior citizens and cook their meals. We'll drive them around and do their shopping for them.

We'll even shovel their driveways and sidewalks for them.

In fact, there appears to be very little we'll not be doing for senior citizens.

Which is fine, I suppose.

But wouldn't it make more sense to centralize these services? Isn't that the philosophy we've been working on for a long time now?

No one has ever thought of sending teachers out to students' houses, to teach them one at a time, and it has been an awfully long time since doctors came to the house instead of you going to a hospital or doctor's office.

It is kind of the way things work - you go to where the services you need are.

That being the case, perhaps we could erect buildings in which old people that need extra help can congregate and get services together, homes for old people, old age homes. What a dramatic concept that would be. Then, all the services a senior could want can be available, and be more affordable.

If seniors want to stay at home, that's fine. No one's going to force them out. But if someone is having trouble at home, and wants services that aren't available at home, then they can go to a magical place where those services are offered.

Is it doable?

John Tory thinks so.

Find out how here.

Haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it does look like some good weekend reading.