The Mississauga News

Highway 61 revamped

When Bob Dylan comes to town and we children of the '60s go to hear him perform, we necessarily visit Our Back Pages.
We were so much older then... but, unfortunately, we are not younger than that now.
He was the voice of our times, the man whose songs embodied the questions of a generation about why Medgar Evers, Emmett Till and Hattie Carroll had to die, how injustice and racism could abound in a world of riches and why the answer was always blowin’ in the wind or drowning in a hard rain.
It is a shock to find oneself at the Air Canada Centre last night and to realize that the troubadour of your prime times is now a 65-year-old senior citizen.
Dylan long ago rejected the mantle of “spokesman of a generation” and, it would seem, has been actively working for decades to alienate his own fan base.
Despite his own best efforts, we refuse to let him go.
Lord knows he tried his best to dissuade us at times last night.
It is disillusioning indeed to stare into the vacuum of his voice. Let’s just be kind and say that when his Bobness opens his mouth these days, he sounds an awful like Broderick Crawford gargling with steel wool.
Many people object to the fact that many of his classic songs are unrecognizable in performance, rearranged, turned inside out, and rejigged to the point where only a few snatches of familiar lyrics (when you can hear them) give clues as to their identity.
I was on both sides of that argument last night. His version of Positively 4th Street, one of his deliciously vitriolic anthems against a former lover, was rendered impotent by a lifeless arrangement and vocal emphasis that never hit the mark. Dylan waited so long to come in at times that you were convinced he’d forgotten the lyrics. All I can say is... you got a lot of nerve to sing that song that way.
On the other hand, his new rockabilly setting of Highway 61 was brilliant, thanks largely to superb lead guitar work by Denny Freeman, who led a typically tight Dylan back-up unit. The man actually sang on that one, instead of slur-speaking.
You have to admire Dylan’s chutzpah. Other people in his situation might just replay the old songs people know, hire a bunch of background singers to drown out his voice and take the money and run.
Bob wrecks his own songs and reassembles them, makes every new version an adventure in listening, as well as performance, and doesn’t care whether we like it or not. We like it because the songs are still the anthems of our youth and, through all the decades, his lyrics still have the power to reach out and clutch you by the throat.
One song alone was worth the (extravagant) price of admission last night. Masters of War (1963) was as powerful as ever and Dylan just as sinister as the man following the casket of the death merchant and standing over his grave until he is sure he is dead.
He can’t sing anymore, but the man still speaks volumes.

Say cheese

Running in the municipal election?
How would you like to use a photograph of a vibrant octogenarian with a — shall we say — unconventional fashion sense and an authoritative manner, on your campaign brochure?
Could appeal to the mature voter. True, you might have to use a step stool for the photo shoot and there could be a lot of reflection off the shiny necklace she likes to wear around her neck but I can assure you, the response would be worth it.
For someone who is not running a campaign, Mayor Hazel (Please Redirect Your Campaign Donations to Charity) McCallion makes an inordinate number of appearances on campaign brochures and web sites for various candidates in the current campaign.
When one is the human vortex of Mississauga politics, this unsolicited attention is not unexpected.
The public or private disapproval of the former Queen of Sprawl (Thank you Ann Mulvale and Susan Fennell) is perceived as critical to one’s electoral success, so it is not surprising that the mayor’s favour is curried at every opportunity.
As everyone knows, McCallion has un-elected more than one councillor with the monumental power of her disapproval. The power of her implied approval is considered just as powerful, obviously, because all kinds of candidates over the years have included her pictures in their materials in the vain hope that voters might believe they are the Chosen One.
Back in June, the mayor sent a letter to The News noting that the unauthorized use of her photo had already begun in the current campaign. “The use of my photo requires my authorized permission,” she said. Good luck enforcing that.
“I do not endorse the use of my photo in election campaign material produced by candidates and the use of my photograph should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any candidate.”
The photo issue came to a head in the last campaign when Ward 3 council candidate Peter Ferreira used a photo of Hazel, taken at the opening of the Streetsville library when he was chair of the library board, on the front of a brochure that included the slogan, “Supporting Visionaries That Embrace Change.” Oops.
An angry McCallion claimed the photo was doctored. (Ferreira insists it wasn’t and says he has the negatives to prove it.)
Speaking of negatives, the mayor issued a statement complaining that a candidate had used a photo without her permission which incumbent councillor Maja Prentice used in an ad in The News shortly before election day.
Ferreira is still smarting over the incident. The mayor is a public figure and if he is involved with her in a public function where photos are taken, he does not need her permission to use the photo, he maintains.
“Nowhere did it say she endorses me,” said Ferreira. Not explicitly, no, but it clearly implied so.
A not-so-sorry but wiser Ferreira has no pictures of the mayor on his flyer this time around, although there is a photo on his web site of the pair of them smiling together at St. Francis Xavier high school.
Prentice has two photos that include McCallion on her brochure, both at community events in the ward, which is perfectly kosher. She got the mayor’s permission for those. Which is interesting in light of the mayor’s earlier statement that, “I do not endorse the use of my photo in election campaign material produced by candidates.”
Ferreira says he has no problems with the mayor and realizes that she, “has a thing about protecting any member of her team” from being knocked off council.
He still thinks that Photogate ’03 involved, “making a mountain out of a molehill.”
Where photos of Mt. McCallion and the enormous shadow she casts are concerned, there are no such things as molehills.

CSI Cooksville

The gloves are off in Ward 7 and the bare knuckles are starting to draw a little blood.
The rancour of last week’s all-candidates’ session seems to have ratcheted up the ill will between incumbent Councillor Nando Iannicca and his chief opponent, Beju Lakhani, who has been running hard — with a lot of assistance from former Ward 4 Councillor and long-time NDP stalwart Larry Taylor — since June.
Lakhani’s ire was raised when Iannicca handed out material last week which he says proves that the councillor has been using City staff and resources to fight his campaign.
In response to factually inaccurate statements from his opponents about councillor’s salaries, the ownership of municipal community centres and the size of tax increases, Iannicca wrote to City staff to ask for the facts. He took those memos, which are on City letterhead, photocopied them, then stapled a campaign piece to them and handed them out last week at the ratepayers’ meeting.
“He’s taken something that was produced through City resources and attached his flyer to the front,” complained Lakhani, who works as fundraising director for Foodpath. “He should have gone and done his own research. I just want a level playing field,” the challenger said.
“Absolute nonsense,” replies Iannicca. “Staff were correcting his errors and others’ errors. This is Nando following the letter of the law. I have a right to ask for the correct information as an elected official. I photocopied and disseminated the material at my own expense. I know what bothers Mr. Lakhani and that is the truth.”
One can only imagine how much staff looks forward to “clarifying” these issues for the public and/or writing addendums for campaign brochures.
Be that as it may, the stakes were upped (pun intended) over the weekend when campaign signs for Lakhani and Wards 1 and 7 public school board candidate Jeffrey Hui started popping on prime pieces of retail and commercial real estate in Ward 7 that Iannicca has “exclusive” permission from owners to use: many of them prominent developers and landowners he’s dealt with over the years.
Savvy campaigners, of course, stick their election signs on private property, such as plazas and condos, where they know that the City will not remove them. They know there may be confusion about the rules, and that people may assume that the owner has actually given permission for them. By the time the details have been checked, the election is often over.
Iannicca’s campaign manager fired off an email to Lakhani’s, saying that the Iannicca team has been given permission to remove the signs by the owners, but they wanted to give Lakhani team the courtesy (as if there’s much of that left in this campaign) of removing the signs themselves.
We will remove the signs where the property owner has advised us that they are not wanted, came Lakhani’s reply.
This is a negative billing option, says the incumbent, who plans to start removing signs forthwith.
Iannicca has verbal, not written permission to take down the signs, so it is not too surprising that his opponent isn’t just going to take his word for it.
Prodding and poking the good councillor seems to be a specialty of Lakhani and team. According to Iannicca, they plastered his condo with illegal signs earlier and knocked on his door and pretended not to know who he was.
Taylor asks sarcastically whether the incumbent has permission of all of the developers throughout the ward to post only his signs. “Sure, I’m going to believe an opposition candidate that he has that permission. We have put up signs where requested and if an owner says we’ve made a mistake, we’ll remove it. This is typical of the goon tactics that have been going on in Ward 7.”
With all of the forensic investigations likely to follow this campaign (Iannicca is suing candidate Shane McNeil) there may be a new TV franchise in this: CSI Cooksville.
There is one thing good about all this sign mess. We now know how to rid the Mississauga landscape of all those gaudy election signs as soon as possible after the election.
We just need to ask the candidates to keep doing what they’ve done throughout — being responsible for removing their opponents’ signs.

Incumbents and insider trading

Ah, the trials and tribulations of being on the outside of the municipal political process, trying to get in.
The odds are stacked against you in so many ways.
Just ask Peter Ferreira or Brian Hurley or Don Barber, all of whom have complained during the current campaign that they don’t always get a fair shake from the process.
Ferreira is weighing whether or not he should attend Monday night’s all-candidates’ meeting being hosted by the Rockwood Homeowners’ Association (7 p.m. at Sts. Martha and Mary School), because, “I’m afraid I’m being set up.”
The chief challenger of incumbent Ward 3 Councillor Maja Prentice (municipal class of ’85), the current chair of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board feels, “that there’s going to be sabotage on behalf of the incumbent councillor.”
He bases his fears on the fact that his e-mail of several weeks ago asking about the format of the meeting was never answered and the “unfair billing” challengers got on the 3,000 flyers that went out advertising the event.
Under the headline Do You Want a Say in Shaping Mississauga’s Future?, Mayor Hazel McCallion and Prentice are mentioned in bold-face type as being in attendance, “along with other candidates seeking office.” The names of those in the “other” category are enumerated in much smaller type at the bottom, where the incumbents are listed again.
“Why do they get top billing, as if they need the attention?” asks the Ward 6 Catholic trustee. “Am I being paranoid?”
Yes, according to Rockwood Homeowners’ president Boris Swedak who says no slight was intended. The incumbents were listed higher simply because they currently represent the area. “There was no thought to any advantage. I think Peter is out of line,” said Swedak, a 33-year employee of the City’s public works department prior to his retirement.
Ferreira is also upset that McCallion appears in several pictures on Prentice’s campaign literature when the mayor strenuously objected to Ferreira using a photo of him and the mayor together from a library opening (he is the former Library Board chair) on his literature three years ago.
Ward 2 council candidate Hurley wasn’t invited to the West Erindale Homeowners’ Association annual general meeting (AGM) last night, but he went anyway as a guest of a member and sat in the front row while incumbent Pat Mullin spoke of current issues at City Hall. Hurley admits that Mullin did not give a campaign speech, “although she was on the very edge a couple of times.”
Hurley had asked to attend but was told by Peter di Scola of the association in an e-mail that, “We invite guest speakers who are part of the existing fabric of the neighbourhood and who can shed light on issues pertinent to us. We do not hold
forums for political purposes and although it may seem unfair to you to not have opportunity to speak at our agm, especially at a time so close to an election, I trust you understand, we as an Association do not favour any one candidate and are totally neutral politically.”
Maybe so, but the perception of bias is unmistakable.
Randy Skakun, head of the Cooksville-Munden Park Homeowners says it intentionally holds its AGM in May to try to avoid any hint of favouritism. If an AGM is scheduled during the campaign period, Skakun suggests an all-candidates should be added on to it. Makes good sense.
Sherway Homeowners recently held their 30th anniversary celebrations to which the mayor and the sitting councillor were invited. Mayoralty candidate Don Barber wanted to crash the party but was denied. Irene Gabon of the association says it was largely a social occasion for volunteers and the politicians who have served the area over the years and was not political.
Perhaps so, but couldn’t it have been held after the election?
Holding meetings mid-campaign and only inviting incumbents smacks too much of insider trading.
Besides, it’s not good politics. Sometimes, even in no-surprise Mississauga, you could theoretically wake up the morning after the election and find out you have a new councillor — who has a bone to pick with your ratepayer group.

Ward 7 fireworks

Conn Smythe once said that if you can’t beat them on the ice, you can’t beat ’em in the alley.
In the Ward 7 council race, it’s more like, if you can’t beat ’em in the parking lot, you can’t beat ’em at the polls.
Yes, believe or not, two of the main combatants in the all-candidates’ session sponsored by the Cooksville-Munden Park and Gordon Woods ratepayers last night ended up taking it outside at the end of the evening — although both agree that no physical blows were landed.
That’s about the only thing that incumbent Councillor Nando Iannicca and challenger Shane McNeil could agree on last night.
No use getting into the allegations of who shouted what at whom in the parking lot at St. Timothy’s School and what digitally dextrous retort may have been made, because the verbal blows that were landed inside the gymnasium were solid enough in themselves.
You knew that the game was on when council candidate Beju Lakhani opened with a full-throttle attack on the self-described “chosen son of Ward 7” whose, “18-year long slumber is coming to an end.” Then he blasted Rip Van Iannicca for an alleged conflict of interest for collecting $33,000 on top of his $115,000 combined City and Region salary for sitting on Enersouce’s board.
Iannicca, of course, responded in unkind, reminding Lakhani that Enersource is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the City’s. (Interestingly, no one said a word about Hazel sitting on the Enersource board.)
“I have been the victim of an insulting charade perpetrated by Nando Iannicca,” McNeil said in his speech, referring to e-mails he received from someone posing as Rita Forbes, who turned out to be Nando’s older but-not-necessarily-smarter brother Sandro (the one with the PhD.)
Although he had been served with a notice of libel and slander Monday by the councillor, McNeil repeated his contention that the real author of the e-mails was the elected Iannicca, not his brother. He suggested, quite reasonably, that the democratic tradition of debate might be a better way to settle such matters than suing at the drop of a blog.
What set the councillor or his brother, or both, on edge about the McNeil campaign was a series of controversial statements on his web log, some of which were clearly untrue.
For instance, it was Toronto council, not Mississauga, that took a 16 per cent pay hike this year. McNeil complained that Iannicca bought home furniture with City funds, such as a computer desk, but that is authorized by a City policy that allows politicians to communicate with constituents from their homes, which is much more convenient on evenings and weekends.
The blog has since been edited to remove some of the statements and refine others and a homemade disclaimer has been added at the bottom.
Iannicca claims his honesty has been impugned and he will pursue legal action to clear his name.
Maybe more disturbing than anything McNeil said was the pure enmity that his face reflected as he stared at Iannicca each time he spoke.
For his part, the clearly too-tightly wound incumbent made his own accusations, one of which is patently incorrect according to McNeil. Rather than just having moved into the ward as Iannicca suggested, McNeil said he has lived in Ward 7 for close to a dozen years. He was not on the preliminary voters’ list because he recently moved.
No word yet on whether McNeil plans to use the same law firm as Iannicca.
The challengers landed some body blows (especially on the sorry state of the four corners and Cooksville in general) but when it came to content, Iannicca excelled, as the incumbent obviously should.
In all the hubbub, some very good ideas got lost or minimized. Iannicca wants to rebuild the T.L. Kennedy site to make it more urban and add a community centre next door, create a $2.2 million pedestrian and walk system along the hydro right-of-way on The Queensway and close Burnhamthorpe Rd. W. in the city centre on weekends to make it, “our great meeting place.”
He may have three degrees (journalism, political science, economics), skill in three languages and a way with words that few people on council can match, but Iannicca also has attitude.
He’s a hard-nosed streetfighter from Cooksville who enjoys a scrap and isn’t afraid to use the boots when he has to.
The problem is that, too often, he uses them when he doesn’t have to. That’s probably why Iannicca always seems to draw passionate opponents and the battle always manages to get extremely personal.

Re-evaluating school values

The best thing about Education Minister Kathleen Wynne’s announcement at Oscar Peterson Public School in Mississauga yesterday wasn’t what she announced — $1 billion for 100 new schools and revised guidelines for school closings — but the tone she used in announcing it.
Wynne, who already looks very comfortable in a job she is obviously better suited for than her two short-lived predecessors, didn’t seem the least bit doctrinaire in her attitude towards closing schools or combining them with community resources such as libraries or child care centres.
After touring some of the classes in the Churchill Meadows school, which concentrates on the arts and has not one, but two, real live music teachers (and you thought they were an endangered species) Wynne began her press conference with what sounded like a contradiction.
Yes, the media had been invited out so the ministry could showcase the beautiful state-of-the-art building as an example of the investment the government has made in new schools.
“But, as you saw in that Grade 1 class we visited,” said the minister, “what’s really important is the jokes, the teachers and the relationships that develop in classes.” Spoken like a former kindergarten teacher.
A building is just bricks and mortar but a school is the collective effect of dynamic collaboration among staff, students and the community.
You can name any school for Oscar Peterson but it’s only meaningful if people like Principal Caroline Mochrie assemble a talented staff and then execute their vision for an outstanding elementary arts curriculum.
The most important thing the minister said is that she wants to turn schools into “hubs.” And when the time comes to close a school, before that decision is taken a full review of its value — not just to the board but to the larger community — must be completed.
She understands that schools don’t belong to boards of education or governments. They belong to neighbourhoods. In some cases, they may be severely under-enrolled but that doesn’t mean they can’t still be the centre of community activity, especially if they are the only remaining public building within miles.
Those words were music to the ears of Director of Education (and part-time drummer) Jim Grieve of the Peel District School Board.
Under current regulations, boards are punished for every square inch of space that isn’t used for purely instructional purposes. Space used for a community library or child care counts as empty and, as a result, boards lose dollars they desperately need under the formula to build new schools in growth areas.
The minister’s flexibility should open the door to more of the wonderful literacy and numeracy programs that prepare students in high-risk communities for school, such as Success by 6 and the Early Years and reading readiness centres. Those programs will repay their investment many times over down the road in costs that are avoided because students won’t have to use reading recovery and other expensive remedial programs.
Viewing schools as community assets has other long-range benefits, pointed out Mississauga West MPP Bob Delaney. “Within a generation, for every one senior citizen we have in Mississauga now, there will be two and for every one person now over 80 years, there will be three. We have the buildings and the land. Those buildings could be useful as community centres or older adult centres.”
Puts a new spin on the whole concept of local life-long learning, n’est-ce pas?

The disciples play

Oscar Peterson’s influence is so complete on the generations of pianists who have followed him onto the Canadian jazz scene that it is virtually impossible for them to play without consciously, or unconsciously, exhibiting his influence.
“Everything I play is a tribute to Oscar Peterson,” Don Thompson said last night. He was expressing what every other member of the sold-out concert in honour of Mississauga’s most famous citizen was probably thinking, about all of the players.
“I can’t remember ever playing when Oscar wasn’t around,” said Thompson, a master of the bass, vibes and drums as well as a superb pianist. “Oscar Peterson is the level we have to strive for in everything we do,” Thompson told the audience at the latest Jazz.FM91 Sound of Jazz Concert series at the Toronto Harbourfront Centre.
Bill King, a once-upon-a-time former student at Peterson’s Advanced School of Contemporary Music in the 1960s, organized last night’s event along the lines of a 1995 Peterson tribute CD he also produced called From the Heart.
That CD gathered some of the country’s best to honour the master. Thompson played his Thank You Oscar from that recording, Bernie Senensky played OP On My Mind, Dave Restivo played both the old tribute and a brand new one, called Prelude and Blues for Oscar.
It turned out to be a wonderful evening, because it was a wonderful idea executed by tremendous musicians.
Restivo played an emotional version of Hymn To Freedom that seemed to reverberate with the echoes of the booming voice of Martin Luther King, whose work in civil rights inspired the tune.
When he was 14, Restivo’s father took him to see Peterson, then at the height of his powers in the 1980s, playing solo piano at the Troy Music Hall in upstate New York. That performance and the iconic recording of Night Train, whose blues-drenched core was an inspiration to Diana Krall among many other players, set Restivo on the jazz path.
Among numerous highlights last night was a gutsy version of Love For Sale by Mississauga’s own Nancy Walker. Inspired by OP’s version on his Cole Porter songbook album, it was bluesy and bouncy and bold in the best Peterson tradition.
The player who seemed to embody Peterson best was the newest on the scene, Robi Botos, the Hungarian-born, newly-minted Canadian citizen who won the Montreux Jazz Festival first prize for solo piano in 2004.
Hunkered over the keys looking like you-know-who, Botos attacked Billie’s Bounce and a couple of others of Oscar’s favourite tunes in that familiar take-no-prisoners style that embodied the evening’s missing protagonist.
Just like Oscar at his cutting, reckless best, Botos had the rhythm section of Steve Wallace on bass and Daniel Barnes on drums looking fearful of where the next turn in the road might lead.
“This was a long night of magic,” said co-producer King, “a night when great musicians threw themselves into the music and gave all they had.”

Meet your talking head

How are people going to choose between Candidate Flotsam and Candidate Jetsom in Mississauga’s municipal election two weeks from today?
With just a handful of all-candidates’ meetings scattered across the whole municipality, finding out about the policies and background of candidates is problematic.
Most people will be looking at the answers that candidates furnish to The Mississauga News in response to the question of how they would make the City (in the case of council candidates) or the school system (in the case of trustees), a better place. They’ll also be checking this website for those answers.
And, if they want to see their candidate speak to them directly, they can go to the website at Rogers Community Television.
This time around, as well as running three-minute meet-your-candidate blurbs on Cable 10 Television, Rogers has posted those same candidate clips on their website. That makes life a lot more convenient for people who want to put a name, a face and a voice to an election sign but can’t remember when to tune in for their ward information.
You can go to www.rogerstelevision.com/elections, then click on Mississauga to view the candidate pitches.
“We’re getting a good response to it,” says local Station Manager Jake Dheer. Yeah, especially in ward 10, I’ll bet. With 23 candidates, sorting out the field is a full-time job.
One of the most valuable things about asking candidates to participate is that, inevitably, some choose not to do so. Then you can strike them off your serious-about-office list. It’s always amazing that people will go to the trouble of registering to be a candidate, then do nothing about actually trying to get elected.
The candidates who don’t respond to the newspaper questions are almost inevitably the same suspects who do not respond to the opportunity for a free political broadcast.
At least one candidate recorded a message and then had a change of heart and insisted it not be broadcast. That, of course, is the one we’d all really love to see.
As with everything else, the incumbents usually have the advantage of being experienced before the camera and coming off best, though not always.
One of the messages is very refreshing in that someone declares that you don’t necessarily have to vote for him.
Ward 9 protest candidate Antonio Ferreira Baptista, who is charged with uttering death threats against incumbent Pat Saito over a poem he wrote and is running to bring attention to that issue, spends his three minutes slamming the incumbent and then says, “vote for me or someone else who is running” against her.
So much for consolidating the anti-Saito vote, not that there is much in Ward 9.
There are no clips from the mayoralty candidates but Rogers will be recording the portion of the Cooksville Munden Park Homeowners Organization all-candidates’ session dealing with the mayoralty at St. Timothy’s School Wednesday night. They’ll broadcast it the next night at 7:30 p.m.
On election night, Rogers starts its coverage from City Hall, and various local political camps at 8 p.m., anchored by Roger Wardell, host of First Local news.

Hazel’s no angel

Mayoralty candidate Roy Willis always says of his friend and fellow contrarian in municipal matters, Donald Barber, that he means well and that he works hard, that he unearths valuable information and fights the good fight on the right issues — but he doesn’t know where to stop.
Barber proved Willis’ point again Thursday.
Whatever tattered credibility Mr. Barber might have had in his latest run at the incumbent he loves to hate was washed down the drain in one fell swoop, with a single outlandish posting on his website, The Democratic Reporter.
“Hazel McCallion Is Dying” declared Barber in a screaming headline, with the subhead, “This is not a joke or hoax.”
Barber sat in the front row of the audience after he spoke Wednesday at an all-candidates’ meeting at Green Glade Public School.
It was from there that Barber detected the first death throes. Below an unflattering picture of the mayor that he took from this key diagnostic perch,
Barber explains on his site how he was able to glean what the rest of us at the meeting so stupidly overlooked.
Here is his description: “As a person who has seen up close and person (sic) the decline & decay of elderly members of their (sic) family I knew the signs and there (sic) all over Hazel McCallion. Hazel appeared to be up to the task at hand from a distance but not up close, she was struggling to stay alert - aware. If you put aside the perception that it is the great & powerful Hazel McCallion, you can see the human being behind the facade, the person fighting to keep up the appearance of a person just as alert and mentally active as those a haft (sic) her age.
“Many times, her eyes would close and (her) head would shake or tremble as she struggled to keep going on and focused on the task at hand. Seen this many times and it only gets worse and worse till very shortly, she will be losing track of the conversation or what she wanted to say, regularly. To suggest she is good for the next 4 years without even a doctors examination is shear (sic) madness. There is a very real chance she will not even live that long, let alone be mentally up to the task of running the 6th largest City in Canada. If the mind is going, the body is surely following but what good is a Mayor who is physically alive but mentally not all there?”
The parentheses should not say sic, they should probably say sick. I do not refer to the mayor.
Such poor taste; such poor judgment; such inane political strategy.
Barber apparently has scooped the mainstream press again: Hazel is old and will die someday. But that’s not the half of it... she’s statistically closer than most of the rest of us.
Stop the presses!
I thought I was at the same meeting as Mr. Barber, but apparently not. I noticed no deterioration of her mental faculties.
Has it never occurred to Mr. Barber that the mayor’s amazing stamina and iron constitution are an inspiration to the rest of us who would just hope to see a sunrise or two at age 85, let alone run a major city?
Which one of us does not see a glimpse of his or her own potential immortality in a woman who refuses to yield to opponents, physical obstacles or time itself?
Barber does the mayor a big favour by reminding people of her age. When was the last time you got to vote for an extraordinarily competent 85-year-old?
Yes, Hazel McCallion Is Dying: dying to stay on a job that no mere mortal, and certainly not Mr. Barber, can ever take away from her.

Truth and prefabrication

When Donald Barber arrived at the all-candidates meeting hosted by the Meadow Wood-Rattray last night with a copy of the controversial, unflattering portrait of Hazel McCallion that caused a flap in Port Credit earlier this year mounted on a huge display stand, one feared (or hoped) for an incendiary evening.
Not so. While Barber goaded and goaded (“She personally killed the subway and we’ve all had to pay for it/ Word on the street is that she made a deal with the McGuinty government to allow power plants in return for letting Mississauga separate from Peel/ I am the first political prisoner of Mississauga”), the incumbent blithely ignored the bait.
Anyone who knows Hazel knows that there will be a time and a response to each and every poison dart from the Barber of the (Cawthra) Bush. But by refusing to respond to the barrage of inflammatory invective on the public platform last night, the mayor rendered it mostly ineffective. McCallion knows that controlling her temper controls Mr. Barber’s effectiveness.
“It sounds like maybe I should talk about taxes and assessment,” McCallion said when she immediately followed Barber to the podium.
It was a strategic non-sequitur of the highest order. The council candidates had kicked around the tax issue before the mayoralty hopefuls spoke. It was as if McCallion had hit the “rewind” button and we missed Don’s speech. Or more like she erased it from the record.
Behind the scenes, McCallion takes names and numbers for every affront and uses her influence to limit her opponents’ effectiveness. On the platform, Barber and Roy Willis are invisible opponents.
If one is politically invincible, one hardly need acknowledge the natterings of the no-name non-entities. Unfortunately, those tactic devalues the democratic dialogue that elections should be all about, but it certainly is politically effective.
The most striking thing about last night’s session was the uniformally strong field of school board candidates.
Catholic ratepayers are especially fortunate to have three top-rung runners for the Wards 2 and 8 seat. Since they agree on almost all the issues and are all well-qualified to serve, it will be difficult to choose among incumbent Albert Casuga, a retired journalist, writer and editor; Ivana Genua, a former teacher and curriculum designer who has been heavily involved in her local school councils; and Sharon Hobin, long-time parent activist and the most-quoted parent in Dufferin-Peel on the current deficit problems.
You have to be impressed with Hobin not just for her extensive experience and grasp of the issues but for her general effectiveness to date in becoming the voice for parents in the media.
Last week she had a private meeting with Minister of Education Kathleen Wynne, arranged by MPP Harinder Takhar, to try to get the oft-delayed move of Loyola Secondary School to a site at Ridgeway Dr. and Burnhamthorpe Rd. W. back on track. Not too bad for a beginner.
Favourite moment of the night: The bombastic Ed Bavington (former separate school candidate himself) accused Ward 2 Councillor Pat Mullin of ignoring water pipe problems on his street. Taken aback, Mullin said she hadn’t heard from her constituent for some time on the issue.
“That’s a prefabrication of the truth,” sputtered Bavington.
Makes some sort of sense. Everybody knows politicians assemble the truth beforehand, and then try to sell it.
Prevarication, thy name is politics.

Mayor Hazel McCallion speaks during an all-candidates meeting at Green Glade Public School Wednesday night.