JAIL THE GRAFFITI VANDALS

An Ugly Cry To Be Noticed

What a shame that graffiti vandals in their desperate pitch to be noticed have smeared their droppings across the lovely old architecture and ageless charm of Eastern Europe.

Mary and I found on a delightful odyssey through ninet countries that too many walls bear a scruffy crust of spray paint markings that make you yearn for a scrub brush...and a gun.

When they paste on the latest posters from the culture huskers and the bargain boasters, the dismal result is an ugly skin for even granite walls.

I no longer remember where I took the picture to the left because it's hardly unusual. My grim conclusion after we floated on the Danube River from Bulgaria to Germany on a Viking River cruise is that the graffiti vandals (I refuse to call them artists) would scrawl their tags across the Mona Lisa if they could elude the Louvre's security.

The so-called experts on gaffiti argue that it has always been with us. They point to many examples going back to cave days. Nonsense!

The red bull drawings in Spain were painted by flickering flame in a cave 15,000 years ago as a wish by hunters to remind their descendants of where they got their food.

The cave at Alta Mira is closed to the public now but I have been there, scrunched down, wondering. One ancient artist even incorporated the swell of the ceiling into his bull.

How can that be equated with punks defacing public and private property with their painted spoor which often is not graceful but just a scrawl.

When gangs "tag" their turf to warn other petty bullies away, it is hardly a deep desire to leave behind a painted memory of their existence.

I have been to Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary and Serbia several times over the changing decades, but this was my first visit to Bulgaria and Romania. The graffiti vandals have laid siege to the Bulgarian and Romania walls, often humble walls left behind by the poverty of the hard times under communism. But it's bad in the other countries, worse than it was in the past.

On my first visit to the two Germanys in 1966, I don't recall any graffiti. Indeed, I found on a lonely visit to the infamous Berlin Wall that there was no markings at all, just the dismal grey concrete. There was a splatter of blood left a week before by a victim stupid enough to touch the western side of the wall. (The wall was built a few feet inside East Germany precisely to prevent people from trying to demolish it or paint slogans on it.) Significantly, when the Wall was demolished finally on that one glorious night, it was covered with graffiti.

Is this the sad price we must pay for the glories of democracy?

I wonder whether graffiti now flaunts its poisonous flowers in former communist states like Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia precisely because authorities are no longer as tough on those who would despoil the property of the people.

I certainly haven't noticed much graffiti in several visits to Russia. The same with China, Turkey and Egypt, but then the policing there is tough against any form of public expression.

Was that his experience, I asked my son Mark, who lives and works in China and is a world traveller. He said: "I don't recall graffiti too much in Russia or in South Korea, and not much in China. For one thing about China, it's not too easy to find cans of spray paint. and they're likely expensive."

Mark is one of the few Westerners to have wandered recently through North Korea. He brought back some wonderful propaganda posters which he has sold on the Internet. But spray paint and marker pens don't smear the walls of the Hermit Kingdom because not only would the cans be too costly if they could be found, there aren't many suicidal enough to become graffiti vandals. Just as in East Germany on my first visit in the 1960s, anything like a poster or a slogan better be state sanctioned or jail was certain.

Mark raised a solution that was famously used in the New York transit system where the bosses set a goal that any graffiti on any car had to be painted over that night. It worked too, because the vandals found it frustratingly expensive to keep buying paint when their markings disappeared within hours. Mark argues that China with its huge work force would find it easy to paint over any graffiti each night.

I asked Mark about my theory that the graffiti of Eastern Europe is the sad result of people flaunting their freedom from police states. His view: "I think idle hands are responsible. When youth have reasonable disposable income and venues like concerts, movie theatres, cafes and safe parks, then they will be less likely to be spray painting. I think the youth in many countries have little to do other than to pick up rocks and throw them at the authorities - from Palestinians to Afghanis. Busy them with proper schools, shopping centres and quality television and they'll become pacified."

Graffiti is often grouped with broken windows when it comes to trying to curb lawlessness. The "broken window" theory of policing is that if you fix the little blotches immediately, like a broken window in a public building, you demonstrate that the community isn't going to let petty criminals get away with anything.

In Toronto, gaffiti is worse than it has ever been. There is a mail box in front of my house that is always smeared within days of it being repainted by Canada Post. Some buildings facing subways are coated from corner to corner. So Toronto is hardly a model for Eastern Europe in this area.

Too bad! If the city got serious, and obviously it isn't now, the fines for these vandals would be increased dramatically, especially for repeat offenders, and would include compulsory community service covering the graffiti. The vandals would have to do a good job or they would just have to keep on painting.

One hopeful sign is that the new Toronto mayor, Rob Ford, has said that one of the things he wants to attack in his city is graffiti. Good, because the cost of it, to both storekeepers and utilities is enormous.

I would consider it a ludicrous failure if centuries from now, an archaeologist unearthed from the ruins of ancient Toronto a slab with mysterious symbols and for decades the experts tried to decipher the language of vanished Canada. They would fail because we can't even decipher those symbols today, whether on the banks of the Humber or the Danube.

VOTERS ARE REVOLTING

Politicians Should Be Terrified

Should be a record turnout for the Toronto municipal election. Good!

I would expect the same for every election at every level in every western country for the next few years because the dislike, if not hatred, for politicians hasn't been this fierce for decades.

City Hall in Toronto, that curvacious iconic building, now seems a symbol for rot and waste. Only the lefties and Grits among the downtowners have not been furious because council has been voting their way. As a result, the downtown-suburban split has never been so bitter and the feud should hang like a spectre over every major decision of Toronto's new council.

Anger with politicians spills over from every media, whether you're watching the haters of Fox TV lauding the Teabaggers in the U.S. or listening to Canadian talk radio filled with contempt for the latest gaffe by the McGuinty gliberals.

Talk to the better politicians and they confess privately that they don't blame the public. Many of their colleagues deserve it. They only remove their foot from their mouth in order to shoot it. They abdicate their responsibility to represent their riding and go along with one-person government, whether it be by a mayor, premier or PM.

As a result of this anger, veteran politicians are in trouble or are toppling. And Toronto may have a new mayor, Rob Ford, who wouldn't have had a chance in the last municipal election four years ago.

The financial calamities intermingle with the ineptness of the bureaucries in issuing even a simple contract. The failure of Canadian and American politicians to deal with the awful mess left by the bankers and financiers surely infuriates us even if we still have a job. The future is so blighted for our children that there isn't a parent who doesn't worry about it in the wee hours when devils dance in the corners of our mind.

At the basic level of our governments, where the potholes expand and the paint peels in the classrooms, along with real schooling, things are a mess.

Under David Miller, the globe-trotting socialist, the infrastructure rusted and weeds carpeted any civic space. Tune to a city council meeting on TV and you ended up cursing the bullshit and wondering why they couldn't spend more time making the city work. The lefty coalition of councillors were like carpenters who want to debate the philosophers rather than fix your door.

Mary and I have a sign on our lawn for Morley Kells. Over the years there have been many signs there for Kells as he has run in municipal and provincial elections. "Elect a New Councillor" it reads.

My friend Morley, of course, is hardly "new" to politics. But he is reaching out to all the voters who are fed up with what they have been getting, which in this case, in westend Ward 5, is careful Peter Milczyn, who is positioning himself as being opposed to what has been going on at City Hall for too many years. So Milcyzn is supporting Ford, who wouldn't be in a dead heat for mayor if there wasn't such a cry from the public for a change.

Time for a change has always been one of the most compelling political slogans. But there have been few elections in the last few decades in Canada where it has been such a dangerous slogan for incumbents.

It would be a smart idea for voters to remember that there are candidates among the new challengers, like Kells, who are hardly new to politics. Morley has been an councillor and controller on Etobicoke and Metro councils. He was a Tory MPP, and a provincial environment minister who ran into trouble because of his tough talk. Then he was the Ontario Olympic Commissioner who resigned because he didn't like how the big boys behind the Olympic bid for Toronto were imposing their plans without public discussion, for example on the Exhibition.

So what we have with Morley Kells is a warhorse who doesn't like the municipal madness of the last two terms and armed with his experience would be a formidable foe of business as usual.

He has demonstrated that he is willing to give up power and salary if he doesn't approve of what is going on.

What we need is more politicians in every position in Canada who are their own person, who won't let party, political correctness or convenience determine their vote.

On Monday, I pray, we all will really vote for change, and not for business as usual.

COPS STILL THEIR OWN WORST ENEMY

A Gentle Answer Turneth Away Wrath

The Officer Bubbles case continues as an embarrassment to cops everywhere. And the case of the surgeon charged with speeding because he was rushing to operate on a patient given only a 50% chance of survival has just been settled, sort of,

And cops wonder why many people don't like them and their neighbours treat them differently. Because too many of them act more foe than friend in any encounter. And the public, who pays their damn hefty salaries, want safety and security but not at any price.

I wrote about the speeding surgeon on Jan. 15 in a column titled Cops And Docs And The Law. I have no intention of again reciting my anger at the lack of common sense shown by the radar trap officer intent on giving him a $300 ticket even though he was rushing to operate on a critically ill patient.

Now the prosecutor has dropped the charge 10 months later, which is a good thing because nothing makes the law-and-order establishment look stupider than a lack of common sense that borders on the criminal. The bad thing is the doc has had 10 months of hassle.

It's actually simple. Cop pulls speeding doc over. Doc uses the emergency excuse. Cop asks for doctor to provide evidence of such an emergency, such as a letter from the hospital administrator. If the letter doesn't arrive within a reasonable time, the doc is given the speeding ticket plus a public mischief charge, and the offence is reported to the College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Sorry, it isn't rocket science to figure out a compromise solution, even though the cop spokesman for the Toronto force talked about how the cops would continue to enforce the Highway Traffic Act and did not apologize for the radar cop not using the discretion which is within the power of all police.

About this point, hothead cops, who love to be petty dictators, will level the usual charge against critics that I am anti-cop. Actually I have received eight journalism awards from the Toronto police association, have served on an advisory committee at headquarters and have had several chiefs and one OPP commissioner as friends.

But as was plain from the attitude of many at the presentation dinners, the police really want the commentators on their activities to be all or nothing. Either you're with us or against us and you can forget all about that objective crap.

And now to Office Bubbles, the constable stupid enough during the G20 Summit in June to threaten a young female protester for blowing bubbles. It's a petty incident that is now infamous throughout the world. Imagine some cop bristling with gear, surrounded by armoured colleagues, telling a girl that if one of those soap bubbles touches him, he will charge her with assault.

Naturally Office Bubbles is being ridiculed in every possible way on every possible form of communication. And instead of taking his lumps over how dumb he is in PR, he's rattling the legal action sword. He should fall on that sword instead. Can't his colleagues and senior cops get through to him that they are mortified that he is a poster boy for over-reaction that stands out even in the over-reaction that was everywhere during the G20 security.

The Officer Bubbles nickname will follow him to his grave unless he smartens up.

THE FORD-SMITHERMAN DEBACLE

Do Voters Care About The Media's Choices?

A veteran colleague from the trenches of journalism wonders whether the media, particularly newspapers, have clout with voters when they say for whom they should vote.

Did they ever?

The answer, in my unhumble opinion, based on fifty years of observation and participation, including too many years writing those newspaper slates, is that a newspaper's urging support of their candidates used to be crucial in the process.

It no longer is as important, but it is still major. After all, why else would major candidates and party leaders have aides or even themselves practically beg for an editorial board with the top editors, especially the person who thinks they control the editorials.

After all, we live in an age where something like 40% of young people believe what they read on the Internet. How disturbing! I used to give journalism lectures on how important it is for young reporters to distrust most of the stuff they read on the Internet and offered some clues as how to sort the crap from the crap.

I go back to the age when Nathan Phillips and Frederick Gardiner were the municipal leaders of Toronto and not just the names on a square and a highway.

While it is easy to dismiss Phillips as ancient history because he last was mayor in 1962, he did serve eight years, and only Art Eggleton served more years since Toronto began in 1834. And I know from watching him in action, and later writing his memoirs, that getting a newspaper to back him was the most important issue in his political life.

So close was the relationship between the Toronto Telegram and Nathan (he hated to be called Nate) that on the night of his first win, when he was devastated because his beloved wife had just fallen down the cellar stairs and was unconscious, his victory speech was written by a senior Tely editor, Laurie McKechnie. It included the phrase Mayor Of All The People, which became his identity.

I learned not to be cynical about newspaper slates when I witnessed many voters carrying to the polls the slate that they had clipped out of the paper. And not just young voters and new Canadians either.

Doug Creighton, the spiritual leader and founding publisher of the Toronto Sun, insisted that we had to have a slate a year after we began. We had absolutely no resources. Just me and an occasional reporter. But we produced a slate in 1972 (which didn't recommend our star columnist Paul Rimstead for mayor) even though there were hundreds of candidates with six councils and six school boards. We even recommended hydro commissioners.

It has been written often how when Creighton, Peter Worthington and I met to discuss Toronto mayoralty candidates, Peter and I said Tony O'Donohue should be the person, though we could be persuaded for David Crombie, and Doug decreed we would support David Rotenberg. Peter resigned for the first time, saying our investors had interfered, but then thawed and wrote an editorial about how Crombie and O'Donohue were fine fellows but we were supporting Rotenberg. Creighton grumbled to me he should have lost the debate but written the slate

editorial.

I survived the strains of composing the slate editorials in the 1970s by seeking the advice, secretly, of Metro chairman Paul Godfrey. I didn't know that Creighton was doing the same thing. When Godfrey came aboard as publisher in 1984, he was an old hand at the Sun slates but he could now dictate, which he seldom did.

Slates have always been controversial within newspapers as senior reporters and editors clash over pets and enemies. I know colleagues who were devastated at our choices because it hurt trusted sources. The Sun, to its credit, always believed that the best slates in party elections were ones where we recommended candidates from every party, although conservatives were our main choices. I even supported a Communist for York school board.

The fact that we were not partisan completely caused confusion and even a great confrontation between Godfrey and me. In a federal election, I wrote a slate which picked Grit Elinor Caplan in North York over Tory Paul Sutherland. Turned out Godfrey was a close friend of the Sutherland family, which I knew, but was also Paul's godfather, which I didn't know.

I was at the cottage when the storm broke. Thank heavens we were friends or I might have been axed. Godfrey finally settled for a contrived Page Two picture the next day of Sutherland planting one of his signs. But Caplan won.

The bottom line about media slates is that they are important because the media and the politicians think they are important. This becomes obvious to any voter really studying the coverage. And many of them are smart enough to realize that the bias of the newspaper plays a major role in the choice.

Of course the Toronto Star would support a downtown Liberal for mayor because George Smitherman is a trendy high-spending gliberal who does missionary work for his sexual orientation. A high school dropout who says he's no longer addicted, ahem, to "party" drugs, who pretends he's really not a pit bull, is the Toronto Star's choice to rescue a city with a devastated infrastructure. Square Rob Ford, who doesn't believe in throwing grant money at all the issues the Star holds so dear, is seen as the devil to be maligned because he is more careful than Star editors with taxpayers' money.

But then David Miller was the Star's kind of mayor. And he was a disaster. For that matter, so is the Star when it comes to politics. Now there's one slate to ignore.

Voters should consider what the various papers say are the best choices but in the end, it's up to you. After all, thank heavens, voters, not newspapers, finally make the choices, and there often is a folk wisdom about the results. Besides, the alternatives are awful.

PUTTING THE H-EX ON ONTARIO PLACE

Let's All Go To Ontario Exhibition

Complaining about the Canadian National Exhibition, and lately, its fun neighbour, Ontario Place, is an annual summer ritual.

Too tired, nothing's new. no fun, antiquated structures. too costly, bad food etc.....

Where are the joys of yesteryear is the theme. Both the Ex and OP must compete with nostalgia, despite the fact that the good old days often weren't that good. But nostalgia is a powerful enemy because the warts are forgotten.

The media have been bitching for so long, the public may actually stop going in greater numbers. Despite the criticism, the Ex remains fourth in North America in fair attendance and is still one of the largest annual exhibitions in the world. And it makes money for the city, which sadly OP doesn't for us as provincial taxpayers.

I have had a ringside seat watching this ritualized gripe from Day One. Actually, often I was playing in the centre ring. This means i come packing a bias but it also means I actually know what I'm talking about. Which is a change for the media.

I was in charge of the Toronto Telegram's coverage of Expo 67 and wrote some of the first criticism about how dowdy it made the Ex look. Montreal's huge success with that Expo became a deep running wound for the Ex and the genesis for OP.

The provincial Tory government was giddy with the success of the Ontario Pavilion at Expo and determined to repeat it at home. It threw up its hands in despair when it was suggested it help reform the Ex and chose instead to create OP on landfill south of the Ex and abandon its building inside the Ex.

OP cost around $34 million, six times the first estimate, and was an instant architectural, tourist and cultural success. I alternated criticism of the Ex with attacks on the waste of OP, but the general reaction could be summed up by a memo from founding Sun publisher Doug Creighton. He told me I could write what I wanted but I was tiresome about OP because it was a success no matter what it had cost.

The Ex muddled along beside its glamorous neighbour/competitor while the Tories at Queen's Park continued to screw it royally. One crushing blow came when Premier Bill Davis and the most powerful municipal politician around, Paul Godfrey, decided that a domed stadium couldn't happen at the Ex because of the savage left of Toronto urban politics and it was safer to put it elsewhere.

But the power twins split the governance of the Ex into two more manageable bodies just in case the stadium still had to be built at the Ex. So the grounds and buildings of Exhibition Place are run year-round by a board of governors and the Ex, the annual fair, is run by a board of directors with much wider representation. It's so confusing, there are governors and directors who still don't understand the division.

When SkyDome was built, to use its best name, it cost an horrendous $628 million and sucked all the money and the will away from creating other major changes on the waterfront. If Davis and Godfrey (two politicians I admire) hadn't been so desperate to avoid the politics of the Ex, and had persevered and built SkyDome at the Ex, the revolution would have already happened there with a combined Ontario Exhibition. The public would have saved tens of millions of dollars and had a stadium spinning off revenue each year while it anchored a wonderful home for festivals, fairs and shows.

Instead the stadium was given away to a telemagnet and we have two places needing help. And the management there is a mess. The city runs the grounds and is the landlord for the fair. And the province runs OP. If you think it makes sense to have two sets of administrators running similar facilities just across a road from each other, then you are one of those deluded people who still think we get good government at Queen's Park and City Hall.

Even the Toronto Star thinks the two should be combined, sort of an Ontario Exhibition, and if even those dunderheads agree with the change, its need must be really obvious.

I have supported the marriage for years. And I did some shoving in columns, editorials and in person. Some veteran CNE bureaucrats were shocked but after a lifetime of being a critic, I became president of the CNE board and vice-chair of the governors.

Let me emphasize that the tragedy is that just about everyone thinks the merger would be good, that it would save money and be a greater attraction. When I lobbied Mike Harris, the premier said he agreed with me but said he had other fish to fry first.

There were meetings a few years ago between the province and the city over a merger. They flopped. Provincial people grumbled to me that the city wanted to control the new board and also be indemnified against any losses. They wanted everything their way. Yet city people told me that the province just wasn't that keen. Bureaucrats told me that the problem came over what officials would stay and who would get severance and who would pay for the packages.

It doesn't matter what the excuse was, it was obvious there was just no fire in the belly to do a deal on either side. After all, the pols felt, they were just wasting money.

Now there is a chance for change because Queen's Park has decided to rethink every part of OP, even tearing it down and starting again. Which would be a tragedy because parts of OP have become iconic, like the pods of architect Eb Zeidler, and should be saved.

The problem with too many bureaucrats and politicians is that they can't wait to demolish grand old structures and build their tacky schemes. If they had been around, one of the first great fun palaces, the Colosseum in Rome, would have been demolished 2,000 years ago. Just look at what the city did in the Ex. It tore down a useable stadium and built a costly one less than half the size which divides the grounds. At OP, the Amphitheatre does the same in hacking the site in two, just another change that Zeidler deplores.

What I'm looking forward to is a summer when the orgy of criticism about the Ex and OP doesn't happen, when the festival home on the waterfront is as big a kid magnet as the theme parks of Florida and Niagara Falls. Wouldn't it be nice to have 270 acres where parking wasn't the main surface use?

And we could fund much of it from an expanded CNE Casino (it now makes a million dollar profit in just a few weeks) No need to have a huge one, just one open from 12 to 12 five days a week. The way it is now, Torontonians just drive to lose their money. If we let them do it here, they can fund our fun.

It would be one of those win-win-win situations. And it could have happened twenty years ago.

THE RUDE SIDE OF COTTAGE LIFE

Going To The Dogs In Cottage Country

The calm before the storm! No dogs yet, or kids. Just an irate crow yelling at the first fishermen or maybe the sun as dawn struggles to push back the night.

It's the start of another summer day in Cottage Country where too many refugees from city hassles revel in behaviour that would have the neighbours revolting if they tried this nonsense back home.

At times this summer, there have been 16 dogs at the eight cottages nearest me at Burnt Point on the Trent River. Only half stayed home. The owners had one or two dogs. The visitors brought dogs. The renters brought dogs. And then there were dogs just passing through.

And the calm you yearn for is punctuated by barking and squabbling, with whining and yelping thrown in when the owners disappear.

Then the kids start having a ball. The other day, I swear, there were screaming contests at two cottages. And around noon, with hangovers ebbing, the older brat kids have launched the first broadsides of awful music, which should drown out the dogs but don't.

It is not unique to have ads and stories in publications like Cottage Life magazine talk about lakes where outboards are banned. And we know about adult-only resorts. Maybe dog-free would be a good idea in a few cottage communities.

I don't give a damn about the noise from all the boats roaring by the point --although I wish they made more of a pretence at obeying the speed limit -- and obviously you really can't ban dogs, brats and loudspeakers, but wouldn't it be nice if more people acted at the cottage the way that the police, bylaw inspectors, dogcatchers and neighbours insist that they behave at home.

One night at the point around 3 a.m., a drunken youth who didn't realize he was no longer a spoiled teenager screamed at his inebriated posse that "we're at the cottage and we can do anything we want."

Nope!

My grandsons have had to wear ear plugs to bed because of those louts. In the city they would have been busted by 2 a.m.

At home, a dog may wander on to my lawn and poop and howl maybe once a decade. At the cottage, every few days.

In Etobicoke, I have lived across from an elementary school for more than four decades. I have never heard the yowelling from the school yard at recess or lunch that is common at cottages.

Mary and I went shopping in the city for 25 minutes and returned to find the cops warily contemplating our basset hound who howled when he missed us. At the cottage we have hounds baying for hours.

Dogs meandering from three or four cottages away to dig up my flowers or snatch a hamburger from my barbeque don't happen every day. Just a few times a summer. But it still bugs me.

It astonishes me just who lets their dogs roam. I had a publisher whose big dumb dog seized steaks off the neighbour's barbeque, who just happened to be a Supreme Court justice. I didn't really mind that because earlier that day, the judge's dog had wandered up to me sunning on the beach, sniffed my foot and then peed all over it. The judge said: "Funny, I've never seen him do that before. " I said: "Funny? Most people would apologize. " But the judge merely patted his Baron.

If the spoiled local dogs aren't bad enough, visitors bring their little darlings. One fat beagle crawled under my new deck within minutes of arrival and got stuck. Her mistress said I would have to pull up the deck. I said "like hell." The master laboriously dug a trench and the dog wiggled out. Then it wandered down to the water and pooped. Neither master nor mistress had a plastic bag.

Why is it that visitors' dogs poop the minute they get out of the car? Is it how they welcome the host? I have other questions, like doesn't it bother the fishermen anchored just off the point when their dogs bark continuously at me as if I were the interloper?

I don't know what the answer is to the barking dogs/yelling kids problems other than basic civility. They should tie up the dogs, and maybe the kids, because cottages aren't just one giant backyard for all.

I could chugalug my first rum-and-coke at 9 a.m. and get a little help in tuning out the racket. But I would turn into a drunk.

You can get a break on your cottage taxes, I'm told, if water weeds turn your waterfront into a bog. I'm going to show up at my assessment appeal with a tape of the barking dogs/screaming kids. Maybe I can get a break from the authorities which I'm not getting from some neighbours.

Or maybe they should have cats as pets instead. Cats are the perfect urban pet. They don't give you dumb doggy adoration but they don't need to be looked after. Obviously too many adults fail that challenge in Cottage Country.

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.