The Mississauga News

Service delayed is service denied

The Province of Ontario’s much-praised long-term, smart growth planning strategy, unveiled in Mississauga last June, was entitled Places to Grow.
It is no coincidence that the study commissioned by the Strong Communities Coalition (SCC) and unveiled at Queen’s Park Tuesday morning was called Growing Pains.
For every growth action, there is an equal and opposite demand for human services — a demand that has gone unanswered for far too long in Mississauga, Peel and the entire GTA/905 where a population the size of Kingston, about 100,000 people, is added every year.
The Coalition, made up of the United Ways in the 905, has joined forces with the 905/GTA Health Care Alliance — formed to fight the good fight for equal hospital funding in the ring of municipalities outside Toronto — and together they have commissioned a $35,000 report by independent auditors Pricewaterhouse Coopers.
Growing Pains tells us what we already knew and feared: Peel has a very limited capacity to deliver human services across the board — in mental health, developmental services, children’s services, child care — you name it.
The government’s policy of giving out annual increases in human services funding of 1, 2, 3 per cent or whatever, to every jurisdiction, for many years severely penalized high-growth regions such as ours.
There are a blizzard of numbers in the report that are alarming. Perhaps the worst realization is that, despite the ongoing efforts of the Peel Fair Share Task Force which first brought this issue to public light 16 years ago and has been lobbying ever since, we are going the wrong way.
The gap between what Peel receives per capita for services and what other areas receive is widening, not shrinking. The faster we go, the behinder we get.
After the press conference, United Way CEO Shelley White said it’s the same old story: when the glory of the press conferences announcing the capital building projects is over, there needs to be the reality of the operating dollars that follow, dollars that allow that infrastructure to be used to provide the services people truly need.
“We have a community of 1.2 million in Peel and one emergency youth centre (Our Place Peel) with 14 beds.,” said White. “They have to turn teens away. We have only three shelters for abused women and their children. That’s just not enough space.”
Mark Creedon, executive director of Catholic Family Services of Peel-Dufferin asked why Peel gets 33 cents on the dollar to provide counselling to reduce violence against women. “In children’s services it’s 50 cents on the dollar” compared to the provincial average.
Even if the current campaign is successful, Creedon pointed out that there’s a backlog of funding deficiencies that can never be addressed. “From 1970 to 1998, we got the same increase as everyone else in the province, even though we were adding 30,000 people every year in Peel,” he said. “It’s like you dig yourself into this huge pit. That pit has never been addressed.”
Despite the expected bad news, Peel’s human services officials are as optimistic as they’ve ever been that this problem will finally start to be addressed.
“No government has ever denied the need,” noted Creedon. “Probably the most responsive government we’ve ever had is the current one.”
It’s time for responsive rhetoric to turn into funding reality.
Correction. Past time. Long past time.

Donald Barber: One Man Electrical Band

“Sign, sign everywhere a sign
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign.”

Not only can Donald Barber read the sign but he can read the sign bylaw too. He probably has it memorized by now.
Like many people, Barber is bothered by the proliferation of illegal signs he sees all over Mississauga. Unlike most people, the mayoral candidate does something about it.
He badgers the bylaw officials to enforce the regulations, he gets in touch with offending real estate companies who have a tendency to flout the rules on weekends when the enforcement staff is reduced or off-duty and, as of the weekend, he augments many of the illegal signs with his own campaign literature.
Barber loosely taped many of his own campaign posters on top of a host of illegal signs over the weekend, an intriguing and high-handed strategy that he says is a product of his frustration getting City Hall to enforce the rules.
When phone calls and e-mails didn’t bring the action he wanted, Barber found a sure-fire method of getting response from City staff. He posted photos on his web site (The modestly titled The Democratic Reporter) of a bunch of illegal signs. “It’s amazing how they react when you put up some photos,” said Barber.
Especially when one of the photos, advertising an open house at a city centre site, was so close to City Hall that you could see the side doors.
Barber’s vigilantism brought only one response from the sign owners, from one angry company that said it had permits for its A-frame signs and would take legal action if he committed any more acts of vandalism.
In his response, Barber said there may have been permits for the signs. However, they were still erected where they were banned. “And, yes, I will be postering your signs in future with notices that they are illegal until such time as you obey the law,” he snorted.
As for the sign-owners whose material he defaced and who didn’t complain, Barber said, “the others see the wisdom in being quiet.”
And you thought that City Hall hired our bylaw enforcement officials.
The stakes were upped Monday when a notice of bylaw infraction was delivered to the Barber residence from the City of Mississauga, pointing out that a pile of plastic bags, tarps, corrugated metal, etc. on the property were in violation of City regulations.
The material is in a spot where no one but a single neighbour would even see it, said Barber. It’s mostly brush that is going to be composted, said the candidate, who finds the timing of the notice, “very suspicious.” He suspects it’s politically motivated.
The mess doesn’t look too atypical of many other backyards, according to photos Barber put up on his site.
Looks like somebody is watching The Watcher.
• • •
When the municipal campaign started, Carolyn Parrish had to abandon her post on the Michael Coren Show Wednesday nights at 6 p.m. on CTS where she dispensed opinions on the issues of the day with her usual verve, as the token left-winger on the daily news line.
Despite the fact the show wanted her to stay on, CRTC regulations prohibit candidates from getting free air time in such a situation.
So it irked Parrish that one of her opponents in the Ward 6 council race, Matanat Khan, a Sunshine Radio broadcaster on ethnic radio, has been on the air throughout the campaign. This week Parrish did something about it. She filed an official complaint with the CRTC.
This comes on the heels of the former MP’s accusation — firmly denied by an indignant Khan — that he was paid to take his campaign from ward 10 to ward 6.
Maybe the pair of them can share a little air time after the election. How about a panel discussion on ethics and the influence of the media in municipal balloting?

Electing trustees: pigs in a poke?

How in the world do people make up their minds about whom to vote for in school board elections?
Peel Board Chair Janet McDougald considers before she answers. There’s a pause, then there’s a sigh. I know what’s coming. She knows what’s coming. It’s the lecture — the same one she delivered in her inaugural address after the last election when she tore a strip off The News for its absence of coverage of trustee races.
“I believe the media does have a responsibility,” she says, “The Mississauga News, Cable 10, The Booster. Somehow they should be profiling all of the candidates.”
Absolutely. In my formative days working for The Mississauga Times for a decade and then The News, it would be unthinkable that there would not be information printed about every candidate. As they announced their intentions months before election day, in fact, stories would appear in the paper about the qualifications, experience and policies of the candidates.
You also knew that each person who took the step of offering themselves for office would be standing up on a platform two or three times during the campaign to explain who they are and to answer questions from the public at all-candidates’ meetings.
Now we are a bigger, supposedly more sophisticated, City and the level of scrutiny of candidates is not a tenth of what it once was. We seem to be rowing backwards in the democratic process.
There are so many candidates that the newspapers do little but provide thumbnail sketches, if indeed they do that. The TV debates on Rogers Community Television, which used informed panellists and were often the highlight of the campaigns are gone now too, replaced with prosaic three-minute monologues that are a test of the will of the viewer to stay tuned or stay awake. And those candidate blips are usually for mayoralty and council candidates, not school trustees.
There are also far too many phantom candidates, who register to run but can’t even make an effort to do the minimum required — tell the local press who they are, what their platform is and/or put up a website that outlines their campaign.
The people who should be organizing all-candidates meetings, just for school board candidates, are the community school councils. They are the parents who already have a stake in the process, are knowledgeable about the grassroots educational issues and share a common interest in ensuring the most capable hands are on the tiller. Problem is, they’re all too pooped from their existing volunteer efforts.
You can only feel sorry for public school electors in wards, like 9-10 and 6, who must choose between people who are largely unknown to the public with only minimal information. The best advice is still to pick up the phone and call your local candidate.
By the way, The News has asked board candidates for 300 words on how they would improve education in Mississauga. The intent is to publish them or put them on this web site. This, if it actually happens, now passes for election coverage.
* * *
McDougald, Vice-Chair Ruth Thompson and senior board officials met with new Education Minister Kathleen Wynne a week ago today in an informal get-to-know-each-other session. The Minister listened intently to the pitch about Peel’s many achievements in the classroom, heard the usual complaints about transportation funding and seemed surprised to learn that the board receives $800 per pupil less than the provincial average for funding across Ontario.
Like the last two ministers, the former Toronto trustee promised Peel would be the first to receive an operational review of busing. “She didn’t promise any major overhauls of the funding formula but she did indicate there would be room for tinkering,” said McDougald. The time for tinkering is over. The funding formula needs a major rewrite.

Eve and unoriginal sin

Third World bully-boy politics have arrived in Mississauga in force this election.
It was bad enough when charges of intimidation, threatening and impersonation were laid against a candidate in the Ward 10 election earlier this week, but the Mississauga body politic suffered a much more serious blow yesterday when we learned that those same tactics have been employed from inside City Hall by an incumbent councillor seeking re-election.
Two young staff members working for Ward 5 Councillor Eve Adams have been actively campaigning for her on City time — at her direction — for several months. In statements they provided to the City Manager, the two staff members say that Adams not only directed them to break City regulations which ban campaigning on the corporate clock, but told them to wear false name tags so that their activities could not be traced.
Worse than that, the councillor told her brother in earshot of her assistants, that if he saw anyone with an illegal basement or a driveway that violated City regulations, he should indicate that the municipality might have to enforce its bylaws to persuade them to take a lawn sign.
This is coercion of the worst kind and unforgivable of any political candidate, let alone an experienced councillor.
Not surprisingly, the young staffers expressed their reluctance to break the rules. When they complained about all the extra time they were spending doing double duty as campaign and Ward 5 office staff and the gas they were using, Adams instructed them, “to start submitting it as a mileage expense through our corporate budget.”
Incredible. The councillor directs her staff to campaign on taxpayer time and, to add insult to ignominy, she suggests that they book their mileage costs on top of that. The mind boggles at the audacity.
Adams has denied that she ever directed her staff to work on City time and insists that an Aug. 21 e-mail that directs staff to “please send campaign messages after hours or on break time only,” clears her. She fails to grasp, apparently, that using City equipment or paid on-duty staff to campaign anytime is wrong.
The City has some e-mail messages too, about 70 of them. In their statement, the staffers say that they kept careful records because of their concern about the councillor’s behaviour.
“In reviewing the e-mails (which are date and time-stamped) that you have on file, it clearly shows that the councillor provided us direction on what was expected of us on her campaign and these e-mails from her were on corporate time,” says the statement. “These e-mails include confirmation of much of the information stated above.”
If Eve isn’t in enough political trouble for her original sins, she may have compromised herself further by denying her actions.
The most ominous note for Adams is that Mayor Hazel McCallion has decided, “to get involved personally.”
Cue the funeral music.
Unfortunately, the City can’t really do much about officially what has happened. The only real punishment that can really be meted out is at the polls Nov. 13.
Those residents who voted for Adams in 2003 to rid themselves of scandal-stained incumbent Cliff Gyles, will be looking at the rest of the current Ward 5 field with fresh eyes today.
They’re undoubtedly feeling angry and betrayed. As are we all.

Ah...ah...ah...ah...staying alive

Donald Barber is one frustrated man.
Which is not unusual, as we know from watching his many appearances before Mississauga city council and his several runs for the mayor’s chair.
What’s got him mighty, mighty miffed this time is the torrents of free, positive publicity that a certain short, crinkly-faced denizen of 300 City Centre Dr., fondly known as Her Warship, seems to be garnering these days in the midst of an alleged mayoralty campaign.
Such as the glowing piece on CITY-TV earlier this week that Barber says, “painted her as this great, wonderful person who can lift a car off a bunch of orphans.”
Or a story in The Toronto Star yesterday which had the low-key headline, “A Mayor for the Ages.”
Barber, of course, would have rewritten the head to say "A Mayor for the Aged."
Every time he runs, the founder of the Friends of the Cawthra Bush tries to make McCallion’s age and health the issue.
“The single greatest issue is her health,” said the pup of 49 years. “By the time of the next election, she’ll be almost 90 years old.
“In that CITY-TV story, the only thing she was promising is that she will try to stay alive,” said Barber. (Cue John Travolta and point Hazel, that dancin’ fool, towards the glitter ball).
Asked what guarantees he has that he will be alive tomorrow, the next day or in four years, Barber replied, “statistically, I don’t have to make that promise.”
Making the mayor’s age and health an election issue, let alone the main one, is a mistake. Smacks of age discrimination. But then, any port in a storm when you’re running against the cult of Hazel.
What concerns Barber most is that this time around, the Hazel worship is happening WITHIN the campaign period, which he believes makes the media a co-conspirator in her campaign.
The man has a point. Would any Toronto media run a big piece on David Miller, saviour of the city, in the midst of the campaign there?
The Toronto media are probably more guilty of laziness than partisanship. It’s a case of: here’s an easy municipal election story to do, everyone loves her and she doesn’t have any real opponents we have to give equal time too. (After Barber complained, CITY-TV is now apparently considering some kind of coverage of McCallion’s opponents).
Even when the mayor hands them an issue, Barber and Roy Willis, the other ratepayer activist in the “race” for mayor, can’t make much mileage out of it.
At a meeting a couple of weeks ago, the mayor made the unusual admission that the City messed up the planning of street layouts so badly that public transit will probably never really work in Mississauga. Both Willis and Barber pounced on the statement but nobody seemed to blink an eye.
The problem for McCallion’s opponents is that they are running against a mythological figure.
Barber would undoubtedly categorize her as Hazel the Hydra, with the body of a hound and 100 snake heads. (Don’t tell Donald, but one of those heads turned out to be immortal.)
Barber, of course, is cast as Sisyphus, forced to roll the rock up the mountain eternally, check to see if the Queen is still sitting on her throne and then watch the rock roll down before he starts his uphill struggle all over again.

It’s getting worse

Expect the mess with Ward 10 council candidate Adnan Hashmi, who was charged yesterday with impersonating a police officer, intimidation and being unlawfully in a dwelling in an attempt to convince another candidate to drop out of the election race, to get even messier.
Council candidate Carolyn Parrish wants to talk to Peel Regional Police about expanding their investigation to include looking into some unusual events in the race for the Ward 6 seat, the seven-way race in which she and former Ward 7 Councillor Ron Starr are the front-runners.
Rumours have been circulating in the Pakistani community for weeks that a candidate was paid to switch from the race in Ward 10 to compete in Ward 6.
Parrish confirmed this morning that she was approached by one of her supporters in the Pakistani community about it.
“I was asked if I wanted to up the ante,” Parrish said. “I was told that another candidate was paid to move into this race.”
The former MP said she quickly turned down the suggestion.
“I don’t get involved in payments, bribes or inducements.”
The candidate who is the subject of the rumours is Sunshine Radio broadcaster Matanat Khan, 50, who registered first to run in Ward 11, switched to Ward 10 and then registered Aug. 18 to run in Ward 6.
“This is not true,” Khan said today. “I have decided myself to move to Ward 6. There are so many candidates in Ward 10, it was not a healthy election,” said the Ward 4 resident, who ran against incumbent Frank Dale in 2003, collecting just over six per cent of the vote in a two-way race.
Khan knows Hashmi (who could immediately not be reached for comment) “very well” and said the two talked in general terms about how it might be better for the two Pakistani-Canadians to run in different wards.
“If only one person can represent the ward, it would be better,” Khan said.
But the 13-year resident of the City said, “I told to Ashnan Hashmi many times that you must keep in mind that you are not in Pakistan. You are in Canada.”
Khan is “running for all the communities,” he said. Her complained that Parrish is spreading rumours about him because they are vying for a similar base of support in the Pakistani-Muslim community.
“I don’t bring religion inside politics,” said Khan. “All these rumours are being spread against me and that is very wrong. I want a clean and fair election.”
Seems like those are getting fewer and farther between.
Last time, it was Cliff Gyles running for re-election while his two-and-one-half-year sentence for municipal fraud was under appeal.
Could we please have an election where the police blotter isn’t the main source of political news?

Declare for chair

Suppose you are an incumbent Mississauga city councillor who is interested in running for the job as Chair of Peel Region that will be up for grabs at the inaugural regional council meeting in December.
Here’s your dilemma: Do you do the right thing and announce your intentions during this current run for office or do you sit back and wait in the weeds until after the election? That’s when years of Hatfield and McCoy squabbling between Mississauga and Brampton-Caledon is likely to finally result in a shootout over the position of regional chair.
It’s a rhetorical question because politicians are creatures of self-preservation and doing the right thing in this case would mean handing an election issue to your opponents. No politician in his, or her, right mind would admit to the possibility of getting elected to City Hall Nov. 13, then turning around and running for the job as regional chair on Dec. 7. Even if the admission is the right thing to do — which it is.
Yet you can bet the thought has flickered across more than a few political radar screens around the horseshoe at City Hall.
Emil Kolb is running again for Peel Chair but relations between Mississauga and the rest of Peel have become so bad that there is a definite possibility that Mississauga might want to put up its own candidate.
That is problematic for several reasons. The veteran politicians who know the ropes are, generally speaking, already sitting around Peel’s council table.
Finding candidates from off council who would actually have any chance of winning the one vote from Caledon and Brampton that would be necessary to win won’t be easy. There are only a handful of truly credible candidates, which is why the same old names, like Steve Mahoney’s, keep surfacing.
This is one situation where being a politician who is out of a job could actually be an advantage.
That’s how Emil Kolb ended up with the job in the first place, if you’ll recall. The good people of Caledon ushered him out of the mayor’s chair and he was available to run for the better job as chair of the Region a few weeks later.
Should one of our city’s incumbent councillor lose, there’s always the nice consolation prize of being Mississauga’s nominee for chair.
If a sitting councillor ran and won, the cost of a by-election to replace them would be $150-$200,000.
Any city councillor who wants to run for Peel Chair with a clear conscience should declare for the job now. We’re not going to believe them when they pretend that they were talked into it by their colleagues after the municipal election.

Putting the e in e-lections

If online voting were available in the municipal election, 82 per cent of residents participating in a poll released today say that it would increase the likelihood of their casting a ballot.
Since just 19.9 per cent of Mississaugans bothered to cast their votes in the last municipal election, that’s information that has to catch the attention of administrators and politicians at City Hall.
Turnouts in municipal elections have generally been dismal in Mississauga (23.25 per cent in 1988, 23.72 per cent in 1991, 24.23 per cent in 1994, 20.9 per cent in 1997, and 25.6 per cent in 2000) but last election marked a particular low.
The Town of Markham is the largest in Ontario to experiment with Internet voting. In 2003 it garnered a 300 per cent increase in the advance poll, where the method was used.
The so-called e-democracy poll released today by Delvinia Interactive contains some other valuable information. Not surprisingly, young people are the least likely to vote at traditional polling stations but the most likely to prefer an online ballot.
One in four of the 17 per cent of Markham voters who used their computers to vote in 2003 had not voted in the previous election, so the process appears to appeal to audiences that municipalities are not reaching now.
Pina Mancuso, who heads the team running the municipal election for the City of Mississauga, says it is keeping a close eye on the e-voting developments.
“The feeling we get is that many people still like the traditional piece of paper for voting,” Mancuso said this morning from her City Hall office. The turnout in Markham was not so dramatically high that Mississauga is considering switching immediately to the system.
There are legitimate security concerns.
“The integrity of the system” must be maintained at all costs, said Mancuso. Since people would register with City Hall, then would be sent Personal Identification Numbers, there is always the possibility that someone in the family could vote for other members.
“You can open up someone else’s mail at home,” said Mancuso.
“We are not in someone’s den to monitor it,” she said.
Then there’s the issue of secrecy. Someone’s vote could be tracked by hackers through the PIN number.
All that aside, Mancuso thinks online voting probably is coming eventually in one form or other. Huge banking transactions are done on the net and security issues are minimal.
She points out that the possibility of fraud exists in every system, including the paper ballot.
Yes, we know all about that in Mississauga. Can you say David Buchanan? He was the phantom candidate who helped Rosemary Taylor beat George Carlson in a school board race in 1994. Taylor was subsequently convicted of fraud and lost her seat.
We’ll probably never completely do away with the paper ballot but the e-ballot is coming sooner rather than later and that can only be a good thing as the computer generation matures into tax-paying, kid-raising folks with a stake in the community and a yen to make sure Mississauga is well governed.
One of the main reasons the City may not be on the e-vote bandwagon as quickly as other municipalities is the fact that it bought its current optical ballot-scanning system for about $1.8 million for the 2000 election and wants to get its money’s worth out of that.
Since we are now moving to four-year municipal terms, surely some type of pilot program for computer balloting can be in place in time for the 2010 go-around.

Tribute to the Lion in Winter

Nancy Walker and the other excellent pianists (Don Thompson, Mark Eisenman, Bernie Senensky, Dave Restivo and Robbie Botos) who will be honouring Oscar Peterson in a special Oct. 30 tribute concert have a dilemma.
How do you choose one or two songs from the musical canon of a man whose first recording, This is Oscar Peterson, appeared in 1945 and whose discography runs to several pages, even in very small type?
“For me, it’s easier than for other people,” says Walker, “because I’m not so Oscar Peterson-like in my own playing. I picked something that I know I could have a chance of sounding OK on,” said the Port Credit resident, who is being too modest by half.
Her choice is a song from the very first OP album she ever bought, Tristeza (Sadness) on Piano, which appeared on the Verve label in 1970.
“It’s not necessarily characteristic of his writing,” says Walker who, like Peterson, is a native of Montreal who has found a home in Mississauga. “It’s a bossa nova and there was a strong Brazilian influence in the writing of the time.”
Bill King, a pretty fair pianist himself when he’s not producing albums, playing with his own band, putting out the Jazz Report magazine, organizing the Beaches Jazz Festivals, and running the National Jazz Awards, is organizing the concert that Jazz.FM91 is hosting at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre. (See www.jazz.fm for concert details.)
The possibility of writing an Oscar tribute tune (there are already a dozen or so) occurred to Walker but the downside was too steep.
“You would want to make sure that the person is really well-reflected in your tune,” she said. Especially if there was a possibility of the legend himself sitting in the front row.
There is absolutely no reason that Walker, whose playing and composing just keeps getting stronger with every CD (the last one, When She Dreams on Justin Time Records with Kirk MacDonald on saxes is nothing sport of spectacular) should feel insecure in her work.
But then again, the good doctor himself had to stop the first time he was playing at a bar in Washington, D.C. and bassist Ray Brown pointed out that his hero, Art Tatum, was in the house.
“I was totally frightened of this man and his tremendous talent,” Peterson later told an interviewer. “It’s like a lion. You’re scared to death, but it’s such a beautiful animal, you want to come up close and hear it roar.”
So how does Walker feel about facing the roar of Mississauga’s lion in winter?
“It’s a double-edged sword,” she says. “On the one hand it’s pretty nervous-making. On the other hand, it would be an incredible honour,” said Walker who places Peterson at the pinnacle of all jazz pianists.
“I would ultimately hope that he would be there.”

The art of co-managing blame

Is it me, or does this Dufferin-Peel deficit thing just keep getting weirder and weirder?
The latest twist is the way Minister of Education Kathleen Wynne has appointed a non-supervisor to rush in and chop the programs that trustees have refused to chop.
Apparently still stinging from the flesh wounds she suffered when she went through the same experience as a trustee with the Toronto District School Board three years ago, Wynne has now decided to try to soften the sting of the supervisor by suggesting that two Dufferin-Peel trustees be appointed to “co-manage” the process.
It’s like inviting somebody to be a pall bearer at their own funeral. It just doesn’t work that way.
First of all, there are logistical problems. Unless she appoints Esther O’Toole, who is acclaimed to office, how can the minister guarantee that her appointees will still be in office Dec. 1, when the new term starts? There’s a little thing called a municipal election coming up Nov. 13.
How is the minister going to determine which two trustees represent the will of the board? If they to be merely observers, what’s the point? The Minister could just direct Norbert Hartmann, the chair of the co-management team (Read: Supervisor in all but name) to keep trustees informed at every stage of the process, couldn’t she?
Then there’s the little problem of finding trustees willing to serve. Talk about wedging yourself between a rock and a hard place. Who would want to be part of such a process, when the board has already spoken clearly on the issue and any changes that the co-manging trustees endorse will be seen as compromising that stand?
Board Chair Peter Ferreira, for one, finds it hard to believe there will be any takers.
“If nobody volunteers, then they’ll just have him (Hartmann) do the cuts,” Ferreira said. “This is just optics, to make it look like the minister wants to involve the board.”
Ferreira, who is running for City council against incumbent Maja Prentice in Ward 3, says trustees have already reduced the deficit from $16.6 to $7.5 million. Trustees feel that going beyond that point will do irreparable harm.
Mind you trustees have already made reductions in the number of vice-principals, secretaries and custodians and not replaced positions which are going to affect the system too.
In a private weekend meeting with Wynne a couple of weeks ago, the chair told the minister that if her staff published the long-awaited new guidelines for school closures, Dufferin-Peel could close a couple of schools that have fewer than 100 kids left and save $1 million in a hurry.
What all this is about, of course, is the I’m-Not-Going-To-Take-The-Blame game. Trustees facing the electorate in a month refuse to leave their bloody finger prints on the knife that performs surgery on their system.
The McGuinty Liberals, facing the electorate in less than a year, don’t want their claim of being the “education government” compromised by a bunch of intransigent trustees who keep pointing out that the real villain in all this is the funding formula, which the party promised to fix. So they are giving Dufferin-Peel trustees yet another chance to hoist themselves on their own petards.
The ping-pong game of strategic offloading of responsibility continues.