GREAT ONTARIO SALMON DERBY 2010

Best Fishing In Years

What an opening day. We came back with the big bin stuffed with big fish. Best opening ever for me. My two chinook fought so hard that I had illusions of much bigger fish battling every inch of the way. Surely I would win a truck or a boat or, at least, bragging rights for the day.

The picture taken by the great Toronto photographer Dick Loek doesn't even show all our fish.

We caught about 190 pounds of fish in just over three hours--seven chinook between 20 and 26 pounds each, two salmon around 12 pounds, (one a coho, and they're smaller than chinooks or kings) and two small beauties which taste great with a little butter and tender care.

Just imagine all the bargain eating! My local store is selling wild Pacific salmon at $6 a pound, so we had at least $800 worth of eating. And yes, you can, and I do, eat fish from Lake Ontario and other Ontario waters. There's a good government booklet spelling out the safety issues.

Ordinarily I would detail the weight of each fish. Yet when you catch so many, and as columnist Joe Warmington wrote in the Sunday Sun, at one point we had three fish on at the same time, it all blurs into a slippery haze.

But I do recall that Warmington once again didn't even catch a cold. And he was being assisted by OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino, a great friend of Warmington's, and a great fisherman, or so he tells us. so even the long arm of the law didn't help.

So Joe's not in the picture. Loek did take one with Joe out front holding one of the baby beauties, but somehow that doesn't seem to have survived.

That's Walter Oster on the left, the chap who runs the derby down to every last hook. He also heads the convention centre and the sportsmen's shows and takes time out for exotic fishing trips for wonders like the peacock bass of the Amazon. And when you get a big fish on and fight it for 30 fatiguing minutes, Walter stands at your elbow and gives you 30 minutes of advice.

Next to Walter is Bob Dickson, a businessman who was so excited about the charter that he couldn't sleep. His two salmon were the biggest fish of his life and a tribute to how he managed to ignore all our advice, even mine.

That's me in the middle with the fish that gave me the toughest fights of my life, and while I'm hardly an expert, I have fished around the world.

The woman is the rookie minister from Brampton, Linda Jeffery, who has just been in charge of the sprawling Ministry of Natural Resources since January. She got a little help (it's surprising how men rush to help a pretty minister, even hugging her to anchor her) but her fish was far from the boat, and she had to crank and crank and crank.

Then Fantino ( on the right in the picture) got a fish on. Then I did. When I pulled my fish close, I found everyone concentrating on making sure the politician in charge of the ministry dealing with Ontario fishing landed the biggest fish of her life.

Then everyone helped Fantino, who, believe me, doesn't need any aid from anyone. He always gets his man...I mean fish. Last year, the commissioner and I had fish on at the same time and he came over and bodychecked me to get more room. (Yes, I lost the fish.)

Vito Cirone, the charter skipper, kidded me about how a retired editor is ignored on such occasions, then deftly netted my first fish of around 21 pounds.

I've fished every derby and already the fish are bigger than we used to get early in the summer. Ten salmon bigger than 30 pounds were boated opening day. And the Sun has always been a loyal sponsor. (Warmington didn't have that in his column. In the old days, one of the stalwarts of our promotion department, like Linda Ruddy and Pat Surphlis, would have been giving him heck before breakfast, but even Pat is gone, thanks to the dummies of Quebecor.

The Sun has always had fun with the derby. Years ago we arrived back at the dock to find a Sun photographer and a $20 Canadian Tire dingy. I was told that our chief photographer, Hugh Wesley, had decreed that the shot for Page One was me floating in the dinghy and holding up our catch. Of course what Wesley really wanted is me falling out of the flimsy craft into the lake and sinking with the fish. I outsmarted him and didn't sink, so my picture was on Page 3.

Fishing is a great break from reality. No wonder it's the top recreational activity in the province.

For example, Jeffery said it had been an awful week for her. Two police forces had to be called to protect her when activists and ratepayers swarmed her Brampton office just the previous day, irate at a development. Fantino, grumbling gently that he really was always working, had to fly out on Sunday to deal with upset natives in northern Ontario. (My problems with cottage plumbing/outboards were tiny by comparison, but a fishing breather is always welcome.)

Generally fishing has long periods of no activity with lots of fibbing about past catches. And then when you do get a fish on, everyone, especially Oster, warns you direly of what will happen if you don't bring it in. Typical fishing barracking! But this year we almost didn't have time for that.

It seems the salmon in Lake Ontario are so big this year you don't have to exaggerate your catch. And they're so many salmon out there that I think even Joe Warmington will finally manage to catch one.

OBSCENITIES OF MODERN SUMMITS

GIVE SECURITY AN INCH AND THEY'LL TAKE THE WORLD

Let me take you back to more civilized days in political summits when the G8 met in Toronto in June, 1988.

It was the final night and I as Editor of the Toronto Sun had been invited to a farewell bash. And so I found myself sharing a table with three men, one of whom I knew because he had been security for a premier. I had spent countless hours with him leaning against walls in several countries, exchanging muttered curses over the more inane ceremonies.

Turned out that this was a summit of sorts too because the three had headed the RCMP, OPP and Metro Police operations for the summit.

There was a big media gripe that summit about a guy who returned home from a hunting trip and as he carried his rifle into his house, a helicopter spotlight lit him up and cruisers swooped up and police pinned him to his driveway.

"Just how far do you guys go?" I grumbled. And one said: "We'll do whatever we think we can get away with."

I've never forgotten that. That top cop was outlining what he considered was one of the fundamentals of policing. It was up to the courts and the politicians and the media and the public to push back when he went too far in the pursuit of crooks or even just to guard a clutch of leaders.

The four previous summits held in Canada were weenie roasts compared to what is being done under a Conservative government that is not conservative. The excuse is that this is a chance to show Canada off to the world. Sure, it is. For several million, you could bring in the travel press and get a lot more bang for your buck that a billion bucks wasted on pols.

I will not waste your time by detailing all the obscene wastes of public funds, the trampling of basic rights and the disregard for reality demonstrated by the security forces involved in this summit. We have been reading about them for weeks. They sound like a deranged Monty Python skit.

There are so many, it is a wonder that some of us don't vomit as we scan the latest news about three-metre-high security fences, store owners having to close shop, condo residents having to endure security just to go home etc.

Just imagine what could be done with that $1 billion in wastage. In fact, wouldn't it have been wonderful if it wasn't collected in the first place. And yet we waste a billion on a PR stunt where little real business will be conducted and any statements were precooked a month ago.

Each decade brings new excesses in security. Premiers and prime ministers have gone from one guard on routi

ne days and a couple of cruisers when they go to a hotel to shutting down the street outside the hotel and even closing highways like 427.

The leaders often aren't comfortable with the cocoons but they go along with it and then their successors aren't given a choice.

I remember a Mountie pushing my wife aside in a Royal York dining room so that PET could pass. "Do that again and I'll deck you," I yelled. Trudeau, walking mere feet away, indicated that I had made a reasonable response. Today, I guess, several decades later, I would end up on the floor and then in custody, getting bruised in the process to teach me a lesson.

Press credentials often aren't a shield. In fact, we often are used to shield the politicians, so terrorists have to shoot over us.

Most of my anger is reserved for all the petty anarchists and professional demonstrators who are the justification for the security. If these yahoos didn't exist, we wouldn't have to waste all this money and energy. Many have little real insight into the real worlds of politics, trade and business, so their silly signs, anarchist agendas and amateurish chants are like paint blisters on an aircraft carrier. I would prosecute every demonstrator for every act of civil disobedience because there's plenty of opportunity to make your views known in this world without trying to harm or shout down those who took the trouble to get elected.

But there is no justification for the Ontario government to suspend the basic right of you and me not to be hassled by police just because we happen to be close to a security fence. There are many who came to live in Canada to escape cops stopping them and demanding identification because they felt like it.

The crazed over-reaction of our police to summit security is rooted in the desire to avoid being embarrassed in front of other police forces if a major incident happened here. I remember going to a royal function and being stunned by all the police on the streets of Toronto. I saw the police chief and said he must have every cop on duty. Why? He was not evasive or apologetic. "I don't want to be known as the police chief of the city where the Queen or any royal was hurt or even killed," he said.

The only good thing about the G8/G20 embarrassing summit is that it is so costly and so intrusive to the life of a large downtown that the politicians may come to their senses and start saying no to such dumb ideas as fencing off downtowns to keep the cattle, I mean the politicians, from the people.

The next summit should be held on a boat, perhaps in North Korean waters. And the rest of the world could enjoy their summers.

Post Script:

After the party was over and the windows fixed, there is confusion about who did what to whom. Yet two things are certain. A big city's downtown is a dumb and expensive place to stage a summit. And demonstrators really don't care about issues. They just want to preen in the media as they burn and trash and act like pretend anarchists with rabies.

I feel sorry for the silly kids who got caught up by the thugs and didn't realize that with all those cops brimming with a mixture of doing your duty and bravado, just being in the vicinity was asking for trouble.

Will we ever get the truth about the burning cruisers and whether they were just decoys? Why could media cameras capture the vandalism but not the cops? And why is it that a few cops always use these occasions to harrass or bash some reporters? Do they really suffer from permanent media envy, like boys looking at a man's penis?

I just wish it had never happened, with all its hype and costs, that Harper and captive cabinet stopped elevating themselves on our dime.

COTTAGE LIFE HELL

LEAKING AWAY ALL LIFE'S PLEASURES

This is a warning. When friends and relatives ask about how opening the cottage went, I curse and wave my fists and deliver a 15-minute monologue until they edge away with a strange look in their eyes.

After all, it only took five weeks, four visits from the plumber, two visits from the back-hoe operator and assorted copper elbows, taps, Band Aids, shower head, water pump etc.

And many many dollars.

It all began the first week of May, a pleasant day as I recall, and it all ended in humid June just before I had nightmares about tearing down the whole damn cottage to find every last inch of diseased plumbing.

My story even comes with a villain. I just wonder if someone hasn't been playing games with me. Sweat and frustration can make you paranoid, you know.

I closed Burnt Point last November just before fishing closed, working all day to clean gutters, store stuff, and to do all the countless tasks of the last cottage day of the year.

And then, dog tired, as evening came on with a cold rush, I pulled my water line out of the Trent River, opened every tap, and pumped all the water out of the system.

Or so I thought. In my most paranoid hours of misery this spring, when leak followed leak followed leak, I just wondered if someone out for a stroll after I left, noticed the water trickling out of the tap at the low point of the system and, helpfully or mischieviously, turned it off. And so water remained and became frozen havoc.

My first warning of the coming miseries came as I marched into the chilly water this May to sink my foot valve and start the torturous process of priming the pump. Pail after pail after pail. In 30 years, it had never taken this long.

Then I seemed to see and hear a pin hole leak underneath the tank beneath the pump. I disconnected the whole damn affair, only to find no sign of the leak. Yet I also found when I visited the local stores that a new tank cost more than half of getting a new pump/tank kit.

So I bought a new pump and tank. After all, the old one was more than 30 years old and some years I had kept it going only through strange parts, chewing gum and prayer.

Then I discovered that the new pump needed a new configuration of pipes to connect to my little system. So I called Bob Emery, the plumber in Havelock, who said he was in the spring rush and I wasn't one of his customers but he would come in a week or two.

Plumber Bob phoned me in Toronto two weeks later. He had connected the new pump but I had a leak in the hot water pipe behind the shower. Did I want to open up the wall and save some money? Sure I said, no need for his carpentry at $50 an hour.

Took down the panelling in the room beside the bathroom and cut a hole, by guess and by god and by ruler, to where I thought the shower pipes were. Nothing. Turned on the hot water. It was down below. So I picked up a new floor and cut another hole.

Plumber Bob came a week later, fixed the pipe under the floor and found another leak behind the shower that I hadn't seen before.

Turned the hot water on again. Now there was a leak far under the shower. There is no crawl space under my cottage at that point, so I called Darrell Brunton, who can open an envelope with his back hoe. But even Darrell with his skill couldn't dig UNDER the blasted cottage. So I did, with a hatchet to cut the roots and a hand shovel. In three feet, down four feet, to find a big rock with a concrete block on top just in front of the leak.

Since I had now destroyed a garden, I went all the way and had Darrell uncover my sewer pipe to the septic tank that has always given us trouble.

Plumber Bob came back, smashed the block supporting the cottage out of the way, and fixed the leak. Oh yes, he said on the telephone, he found a second leak there too but there was now a leak behind the kitchen sink.

So I returned to open another wall and floor. And Plumber Bob returned to fix that leak and then a new leak that appeared behind the bathroom sink. And he replaced my sewer pipe.

So what in the end was the good and the bad, the damage, besides to the nerves of Mary and me? Well, we got a good flush out of it with the new sewer. And the pump is new too, and we probably needed that.

Our modest water system is only one kitchen sink, one bathroom sink, toilet and shower. But the innards of every tap had to be replaced as Plumber Bob mended eight leaks in pipes and elbows. I suspect he regarded me as a bit of an idiot as I counted out the hundred dollar bills, babbling that I had drained my system for 30 years and never had a problem.

Emery departed and Brunton returned to fill the hole just outside the bathroom wall. I dug and pounded and raked and planted grass and watered and replaced bushes. And Mary and I each had a shower and then celebrated the return of water, especially hot water, to our cottage. I promised that I would hired Plumber Bob to turn my water on and off, and carpet the driveway with mines in case someone really was fooling around with me.

The next day, Mary returned from the pump house with the news that every cottage husband loves to hear. "The hot water tank is leaking," she said. And I said put a pail under it and went fishing.

TORONTO PARKING THIEVES

ONLY $4.6153846 A MINUTE

I couldn't believe my eyes as Mary and I walked slowly to our car because there, fluttering in the wind above the disabled parking sign, was the droppings of Toronto's parking bandits, the dreaded yellow tag.

I've never got many parking tickets and that dropped to never in the nearly three years since Mary got the sign for the car, technically a "disabled parking permit," because of bad knees. This means you can park without paying at meters, use the special disabled spots and park in No Parking zones. You still can't park near corners, intersections, hydrants and TTC stops.

We had parked on a quiet Etobicoke side street, Birchview, which runs for two blocks west of the Royal York subway station. No Parking from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., which is understandable because of the commuters who would park there all day and take the subway. But there is an added wrinkle I had never noticed before, a second sign banning something from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.

There is an icon on that sign that I had never seen before. Turns out, after an Internet search, that it was a No Stopping zone. Now I had never seen a No Stopping sign that doesn't say that in words but in Toronto, you shouldn't be surprised at anything authorized by Toronto council and its bureaucrats.

My $60 ticket was issued at 5.47 p.m. Thirteen unlucky minutes to safety. $4.6153846 a minute. I had parked there without guilt figuring that at that hour, I was really not hurting the residents, and it is legal for me to do so with that sign. Seems a strange No Stopping zone, decreed so by the long vanished suburban council of Etobicoke. But the way the majority of politicians are these days, motorists should consider themselves lucky that they are allowed to even drive down a street.

The secret rules for tearing up tags have just been revealed out of the murky underground of city politics. Since I am a senior citizen and my wife, also a senior, has that disabled permit, I probably after a few days of phoning and waiting in line could have had the ticket cancelled. But it's never that simple.

I also could have fought the tag because the parking control officer (or whatever is the official name for the green hornets) had not signed the tickets, just scrawled cramped initials.

Now I suspect that this petty tax collector really does know how to write, which makes me wonder why the legal system no longer requires a real signature on something that is costing a taxpayer $60.

After all, the system requires us to endlessly write our signatures, so this petty indifference to the law does bug me. Just another reason I was tempted to fight the tag. And there does seem to be a black hole into which your parking appeals go, so that you never actually get your day in court and your tickets go into limbo.

You are considered guilty by the system right from the get go, no matter what they pretend about innocent until proven guilty. The bureaucrats, allowed by the politicians, have made the appeal system as arduous as they can get away with. Even when you win, you've wasted so much time fighting parking tickets or minor speeding fines that the system still has exacted its pound of flesh.

Of course these parking officers are also notorious for ignoring the disabled signs. I recall years ago when I had lunch with David Onley, now the lieutenant-governor. Onley parked right in front of the restaurant in a No Parking zone. Legal because he had the sign. But he said he still worried because there had been cases of the police having a car towed, despite the disabled sign, and the driver, with his wheelchair in his car, had a difficult time in getting to the pound to retrieve his vehicle.

It was just a short time ago in the same Bloor-Royal York area that I saw a parking officer park the wrong way on a street, meaning the driver's side wheels to the curb. When I pointed out to her that she had parked illegally, she said sarcastically that she really must give herself a ticket. I told her to park correctly. She didn't.

So what's my point in all this? I think that with 13 minutes to go before the parking is legal for everyone, a parking control officer has to be a king-sized jerk to put a $60 ticket on a car displaying a disabled sign. I complained to the cops at 22 division and they agreed that it really was a silly thing for the green hornet to do on a side street but such complaints are no longer handled by the police.

So I held my nose and wrote out a cheque because life in TO is so much of a hassle these days, you just try to forget the minor annoyances and concentrate on the major blunders.

Many years ago, the beloved Moaner of the Beaches, the late great Ted Reeve, wrote a bit of doggerel for the old Telegram. Let me paraphrase it.

When I was young and in my prime

I used to fight this crap all the time

Now that I'm old and growing grey

I just insult the jerks once a day.

But next time I see a parking control officer flout the law flagrantly when they park, I will stand beside the car until it is moved or towed.

GIVING THE BOOT TO BIKERS

DUMB MISTAKE SAVES MOTORISTS....FOR A CHANGE

Toronto motorists will take a slim victory even if it's caused by absentees and a dumb mistake. Still, the commendable vote turning down bike lanes on University Av. is just more proof that this council and its globe-trotting mayor should be pictured in dictionaries to illustrate the word dysfunctional.

The word means malfunction in structure. And that it is. Verbose, awkward, stupid, bureaucratic, posturing etc. etc. Think of any insult and throw it into the mix. The socialists, gliberals and inept pensioners on this council should all be put out to pasture this fall, but I doubt we will be that fortunate.

My views on bike lanes are well-known. Just in case, I wrote about them again in columns last year on May 22 and June 3 and this year on April 15.

I have always felt the same about bike lanes, an incredibly expensive way to screw up traffic and accommodate a few cyclists for about the half year when the weathe is tolerable. I was accused by one friend/fanatic who rode to a downtown hospital of waiting until my son Brett took his honeymoon to launch one attack on bikes, because Brett often bikes to work.

If you want to bike to work, fine by me. Just don't do it on main streets during rushhour and expect motorists, cops and the bureaucracy to accommodate you with your own special reserved space.

This idea of an experiment this summer with bike lanes on University Ave. - which would have been the ultimate in the cyclist crusade - was almost welcomed by me as a concept so silly that it might actually trigger a successful revolt by council's minority and the public against the costly spread of bike lanes through a city road network that already didn't work.

But it got rejected in a squeaker of vote with Councillor Paula Fletcher, a bike-lane supporter, voting against, blaming fatique and the fact she just doesn't quite know how to operate the two voting buttons that she has pushed for years.

It also got defeated because 17 of the councillors weren't there for the evening vote. I suspect some concocted excuses just so they could duck the issue. For lefties, voting against bikes is a little like kicking a saint, but they must have known in their gut that it was a bizarre misused of road space and that many voters in their wards would be furious.

Ducking a vote is almost as bad as taking a bribe. Hiding in the toilet or pretending that you have to show visiting relatives the town is a betrayal of your voters who expect that for $100,000 a year, you might actually stay in your seat.

It's important for every councillor to vote on such issues, no matter what excuse they can dream up, because bike lanes are almost iconic in their symbolism. Just how far does a city go in contorting its infrastructure to accommodate a mouthy minority when the huge majority of users of city streets, including transit with hundreds of thousands of passengers, will be delayed.

My wife and I drove along Bloor St. at 7.30 a.m. recently for early medical appointments. Normally we would take the subway but I was going on to the cottage, and you can't take transit to the Kawarthas. It's something the lefty bitching about motorists forget. Many people make a number of calls in a day, not just one trip to a job. And you can't deliver couches and cases of pop on the bus.

So there we were zipping along Bloor except for blocks where there were one or two cyclists or perhaps an illegally parked car. You put two people on two bikes in one block of Bloor and effectively you close one lane of traffic. Sure, as the cyclists say, there is only one person in many of those cars but there are far more cars needing to use that disabled lane than there are cyclists.

I won't praise Fletcher for pushing the wrong button to be with the winning 15-vote majority. But I will the others: Ainslie, Ashton, Del Grande, Grimes, Hall, Holyday, Kelly, Lindsay-Luby, Minnan-Wong, Moeser, Nunziata, Palacio, Parker and Perruzza.

The 13 who wanted the lanes (in this case the number really is evil) were: Augimeri, Davis, De Baeremaeker, Gimabrone, Heaps, McConnell, Mihevic, Moscoe, Pantalone, Perks, Rae, Saundercook and Vaughan.

We should also condemn the 17 who were absent. This was a major issue, certainly so in symbolism, and you expect councillors to be around unless they're in ER. Mayor David Miller wasn't there because most of the time he is busy burnishing his image in the world, not this city. Then the rest: Milczyn, Bussin, Carroll, Cho, Di Georgio, Feldman, Fillion, Ford, Jenkins, Mammoliti, Lee, Ootes, Shiner, Stintz, Thompson and Walker.

It would be nice if most of those were absent all the time from council. Same with the unholy 13. Come to think of it, even though there are some bright, hard-working honourable conservatives, it would be useful and appropriate if most of council's 45 members never returned.

What we need is more of them running for mayor, because then we get stuck with only one.

CNIB VISIONS

IGNITING YOUR SENSES

There I was pushing my fingers through the raspberry sorbet at a $350-a-plate dinner and no one at the table was complaining.
In fact, no one noticed. But then they were wearing blindfolds - although a couple were sneaking peaks I suspect - and I was wearing a blindfold without cheating, so I had no idea what part of my dessert I was pawing. A couple of truffle balls slipped away but I managed to grab them before they hit the tablecloth.
It was a culinary treasure hunt. It was also a lot of fun. It also taught all the diners at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind headquarters on Bayview Ave. about what the blind and the partially sighted among us face every day, when not being able to see is not just a temporary lesson from being blindfolded but a fact of life that is to be endured and then to be conquered.
The dinner was titled Visions Gala 2010, the first of what is hoped to be an eternal annual event on behalf of the CNIB. It raised more than $50,000 as the organizers lived up to its theme of "Ignite Your Senses" by presenting us with the Alata Harmonia Chorus of Canada singing the music of blind composers and blind virtuoso performances by pianist Nat Giangioppo and singer Becka deHann.
The food was great, prepared by Compass Group, but the evening only lived up to its billing of "exploration, discovery and delight" - the words of John Rafferty, the CNIB president - when after the black cod and beef tenderloin we had that "trio of the senses' desert served in the dark.
It looks like just another photo opportunity for politicians but when the world that doesn't have a disability is confronted with the hassles of dealing with one, we all benefit.
So it was a few days early when Toronto mayoral candidate George Smitherman trundled around in a wheelchair to experience the dumb hurdles created by the thoughtless. In Ottawa, one of the new senators, Vim Kochhar, was doing the same. And such "stunts" were happening in most Canadian cities.
By now the public is used to the pictures, but they should try to get used to helping our disabled neighbours conquer the barricades which too many of them have to confront daily, whether on transit or in public buildings.
Vim Kochhar is a veteran in these battles on behalf of the physically disabled as the spark behind the Canadian Foundation for Physically Disabled Persons and the Canadian Disabled Hall of Fame. (I wrote about the hall last Oct. 27 as we created it out of the Terry Fox Hall after the Fox family because jealously protective of Terry's name.)
Oh yes, it was the best dessert that I've had in a series of formal dinners, that is if the dry cleaners manage to get all of the spots out of my jacket.

WHERE WILL THE NEWS COME FROM?

WHO DOES THE DIGGING?

It would be a hot topic around the Toronto press club bar but press clubs everywhere have disappeared faster than reporting jobs and media revenue.

Just who is going to cover events in the future and produce the foundation of basic reporting on which the tottering superstructure of bloggers, columnists and commentators rest?

I doubt that some bloggers have thoughts greater than one ungrammatical put-down paragraph. But the poor man's columnists, plus all the hotline hosts and TV talking heads, really can't function unless someone actually goes to the meetings or digs up the dirt or covers the trials or wades through the crisis or interviews the movers and crooks and cops.

Journalism isn't falling out of bed and sitting down at the computer in your undies and firing off an insult about a story you just heard on radio or TV. You just can't take the lint in your belly button and weave together enough of a story to support even a bad rant. There has to be a writer somewhere who actually wrote the first story for a newspaper, because, as is well known, the news on TV and radio is stolen 99.9% from newspapers.

And lately, the poor reporters, the foot soldiers of the media, have become an endangered species as fat corporations figure that a few columnists, wire service copy, inventive editors and some pictures will just be the thing to keep the ads apart. Oh yes, sports too, because it's easy to cover and you can fill a lot of space with action pictures and stories even of practises. Movie reviews are also a cinch, compared to the nitty gritty of winkling the truth out of bureaucracy.

Jon Stewart, the comedian who is one of the best critics of media around, had Jon Meacham, the Editor of Newsweek, on his show the night that it was announced that the veteran news magazine is going to be sold. The graffiti scrawled on the wall says it will fold.

Meacham felt that only the venerable Economist was making money among such magazines and that maybe the best thing is to concentrate on producing good daily coverage of events for the Internet and then package the best of that for a magazine to be printed weekly for those who like to hold news in their hands. After all, reading the computer in the tub is not recommended.

The important part of the interview was Stewart and Meacham worrying about just where the basic fodder in news was going to come from if newspapers and magazines continue to languish and their staffs continue to be decimated as the bosses try to keep afloat.

For Southern Ontario, there are textbook examples of the squeeze on reporters and news coverage. The National Post is so slim some days that you wonder why they bother. The Toronto Sun is being squeezed like a dish rag so that Quebecor can get every last buck out of it to pay for its dismal management.

There doesn't seem to be a month when there aren't major firings and layoffs and closings and mergers as news rooms and press halls and call centres are crimped and shuffled and combined.

The Sun is reshuffing columnists and beats, presumably to cover the yawning absence of reporters. Ironically, it is returning to its roots, before it was cash cow,, when basically it was a paper of columnists and not much else.

The Sun rose like a phoenix out of the ashes of the Toronto Telegram, when the beloved Tely was folded by the Bassett family to make some money. The Tely featured a half-dozen columnists that were often the talk of the town. So the Sun's founders, basically Doug Creighton and Peter Worthington, decided out of necessity to go the Tely one better and make columnists the backbone of the new tabloid. In fact, the legs and arms too.

For example, until 1985, I wrote a daily column on politics on Page 4. I was said to be a City Hall columnist but actually I covered politics at every level, walking between City Hall and the Legislature and flying to Ottawa for throne speeches, elections and budgets. Generally there was no other coverage of the same events for the first few years.

With Worthington, the eternal columnist, and Doug Fisher, the dean of the Press Gallery, completing our political triumvirate, no one seemed to notice that we really had no political reporters, especially with Bob MacDonald functioning more as a bare-knuckle columnist.

In Sports, we had George Gross leading a trusty band of columnists. In Entertainment, George Anthony covered movies and North America like a champagne-soaked blanket. Joan Sutton strutted on high heels around the LifeStyle world and stared down society.

It all worked, and the Sun confounded its critics. But each year reporters were added and in time the Sun resembled a mature newspaper where editors actually had assistants and there might actually be more than just one reporter on a beat.

Now the Sun is setting in that area, and columnists are shouldering more of the hard news load.

But there can be problem when you rely on your big columnists to always provide the major, and sometimes the only, coverage of big stories.

One of the charms of being a columnist is the freedom to pontificate about whatever takes your interest. You don't, or shouldn't, assign columnists. If the editors keep calling up columnists and telling them to write on a specific event, then the columnist is just another feature writer and the job is no longer as attractive.

This will come as a shock to all the kids who show up and tell the interviewing editors that they would like to be a columnist but the best columnists have a decade or so of tough service first as reporters and editors. They should be among the newspaper's best reporters but that doesn't mean they want to function as a reporter. Where's the fun in not being able to call the mayor a super mouth?

We face a challenging time for those of us who like our commentary to come with the icing of real facts. Imagine the despair of all the spielers and bloggers out there if they actually have to do some digging themselves and find that trials can last for weeks and a political debate for an eternity. Journalism isn't just ripping off the facts from others and saying what you think about them.

The free ride can't last forever. The outfits who still employ a few reporters will figure out eventually how to recover some of their costs from the Internet and the death spiral for media will cease.