The Mississauga News

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.