ONTARIANS MUST BE FIRST IN OUR HOSPITALS

 

THE LONG WAITS AND TRAUMAS OF  SUNNYBROOK HOSPITAL

Sequels are all the rage in entertainment. So let me produce one in hospital care, which is never entertaining.
 This is a 2014 follow to my six-page series called Hospital Hell which appeared in the Toronto Sun and my blog in the summer of 2011.  I wish I didn't have more material but damn it...
I didn't plan to write about this because Mary may be long-suffering but even loyal spouses don't exactly like their husbands writing about their bottoms.
Except I just saw a headline that fills me with dismay: City Hospitals Want More Medical Tourists. The first paragraph in the Star story infuriated me. "Toronto hospitals are unapologetic about raising money through medical tourism and international consulting and, in fact, plan to do more of it in future. And Ontario's health minister says that's OK with her."
Well, not with me. And I heatedly discussed this with the minister, Deb Matthews, in 2011 after my difficulties in being flown back to Canada in a medical ambulance because every hospital here claimed there was no bed for me.
 I don't forget $85,000 in hospital bills for eight days in two U.S. hospitals because of that. As far as I am concerned, and no one I've discussed this with, including doctors, disagrees, I really don't give a damn about foreign aid when it comes down to a question of whether a hospital bed is waiting for me and my family, or is occupied by some rich foreigner.
It is important to realize that I have OHIPERs, the people who pay the bills,  on my side. We don't pay over 40% of the provincial budget on health to squirm waiting for non Canadians to get out of our hospital beds. Charity, health care and OHIP must begin at home.
There are too many painfully waiting for "elective" surgery to acccept the idea that foreigners can get to the few empty beds and vacant ORs first because hospitals will make more from them than from what OHIP will pay  for looking after Canadians.
It doesn't reassure me that Matthews insists that Ontarians must come first and that hospital's international work must not compromise their access.
It already happens.
This is my latest bitter proof. More than three months of anguish began for Mary as 2013 ended in frozen darkness thanks to incompetent response from Hydro to winter.
Off we went to emergency at Mount Sinai because of a rectal prolapse, which is as ugly and awkward as the words. The rectum stretches and protrudes, a curse that strikes mainly women.
Not the way you want to spend the penultimate day of the year in an ER overflowing with need. Yet the hospital's ER chief was around, despite the holidays, and Mary was helped after seven hours and armed with dismal info of what the future held.
Except you need a specialist to function as the gatekeeper to check you out and either operate or recommend a surgeon. It took 16 days to see the specialist who had operated on Mary a few years ago on a similar problem. He announced without even looking that he didn't do this kind of operation. It would have been nice if we had been told that before we got the emergency appointment because of the information from Mount Sinai. I wouldn't have had to skid around the frozen University hospital corridor  in rush hour.
At least he gave us the name of a specialist at Mount Sinai. Phoned and despite the obvious need,  Mary was given an appointment two months later. And she was told in effect not to complain because it could have been a wait of four months.

So I appealed to Bernie Gosevitz, our incredibly busy and able GP who is familiar to Toronto because of Andy Donato's cartoons and columns by his many other patients/journalists, particularly around a huge fund-raising dinner in his honour last year.
Bernie put us in touch with Dr. Ted Ross, associate professor of surgery at U of T, and a colorectal expert who may be busier than Gosevitz, which I didn't think possible.
Dr. Ross did valiant surgery on his appointment book and Mary got in to see him early, meaning only a month had elapsed after the dread day when an ordinary chair turned into an instrument of torture.
So the operation was scheduled. Turned out the first delays were a grim harbinger. Surgery was booked for March 25. Dr. Ross gently explained that Mary was lucky it wasn't in late April because he just couldn't get enough time in the operating rooms of Sunnybrook, the health science centre and giant parking complex on Bayview Ave.
Ross' examination of Mary was my bitter introduction to Sunnybrook's parking charge of $4.75 each 30 minutes, where there seems to be more private security handing out tickets than docs in the emerg of Ontario's leading trauma centre.
Some days, the main trauma in that busy hospital is probably in parking.
Back we came 81 days after Mary's miserable experience began to Sunnybrook for the pre-op interviews, anxious questions and tests.
Just before Ground Zero Day, so to speak, Mary went through the nasty cleansing ordeal faced by all patients needing surgery on their bums, or for procedures such as colonoscopies. By the time we arrived in the OR holding pen, 86 days after all this began, she was so tired that she slept after the anesthetist counselled and lines were inserted in her arms. Since she hasn't had uninterrupted sleep since the start, and a simple bathroom visit is a tedious ordeal, her snores were welcome.
I didn't sleep. I had foreboding, as patients  around us may have returned from operations but nurses  talked about delays.  Finally, Mary and I and several staff were alone.  Dr. Ross arrived to say the hospital had decided it had run out of time for the day and shut down all the ORs. Her operation was cancelled. There had been extra delays due to two ORs needing additional care because of contamination from isolation patients with hospital infections, one with the deadly C. difficile, the other with MRSA, which has now become so common that it was inflicted on me for the three months I spent in four hospitals in 2011.
Naturally Mary was frustrated and I felt like punching a bureaucrat. But imagine how Dr. Ross felt! He said he had been there for six hours and only had been able to operate for two.
After $48 in parking charges for the first two visits, I had enlisted my son Mark to bring us to the hospital. Now he was off working because he didn't expect a call until evening.There was no  answer to my phone calls.
Mary wasn't about to wait in the hospital, not when just sitting had become an ordeal. Because of the prolapse and arthritis, she needed a cane or walker just to hobble to the bathroom. So she struggled to a cab and demanded to be taken home.
We just couldn't catch a break! Royal Taxi has the exclusive deal with the hospital and provides small cabs with rude drivers. The cabby didn't help when I tugged Mary into the cramped backseat with great difficulty.  At the end of the $70 ride, he refused my VISA card, then said there would be an additional connection fee if I insisted. By some miracle, I actually had enough cash.
 (I have complained about cabby 2517 to VISA. I tried to do so to the licensing commission. First the special city info number, 311, gave me the wrong number. After I found the right number, I phoned six times over three days and never got an answer. No wonder our cabs are sloppy.)
The operation was rescheduled for April 8, now 100 days after that first grim run to Mount Sinai. By some miracle, that day started smoothly because we had had sort of a "dry" run, Mark had stayed from his job in China to help and we actually made it to Sunnybrook  and back without taking out a second mortgage for parking.
It even looked like the operation could be early. Then hours evaporated. I paced. I listened for gossip, like two weeks before when someone said they had 25 patients in the ER and no beds and Mary was cancelled at the OR door. Now I was getting ready to push her bed myself into the nearest OR.

Thank heavens! They took Mary away and for the first time in 100 days, we had real hope. Bliss was Dr. Ross telling me more than two hours later that everything had gone fine. I felt like kissing him but Sunnybrook probably would have charged me with sexual assault.
My sister, Joanne, a veteran head nurse, was incredulous when I told her they only planned to keep Mary for the night. We hoped Dr. Ross would give a day or so of reprieve. But the hospital phoned at 8.40 a.m. and told me to collect her. By the time I had survived the rush hour, and arrived, nurses had phoned three more times because there had been stabbings and they needed four more empty beds at least for starters.
Yet Minister Matthews lets the hospital establishments say there's plenty of elbow room to let foreigners buy their way in to service. That bugs me more than the fact that the Canadian Medical Association and other groups have said for several years that hospital parking charges are hurting medicare, yet no changes have happened.
Unfortunately, Mary and I may be fans of medicare but we have been victims of what happens when you need a bed or an OR for "elective" treatment where you are not going to expire if medicrats drag their feet.
After my 2011 Hospital Hell series, the health minister phoned to tell me she was having officials and the industry investigate my complaint that Canadians face horrendous medical charges while waiting to return from U.S. hospitals because Canadian hospitals put such patients at the bottom of their wait list because, after all, they already are in a hospital.
Since the vultures that control travel insurance will cheat, steal and prevaricate rather than pay your bills or make you suffer first if they finally do pay, you want to get back to Canadian hospitals ASAP.  They're often better and they're nearly free,  except for the parking.
In my case, TIC Travel Insurance officials dreamed up phoney excuses not to pay my $85,000 American medical bill,  based, they said, on evidence from my doctor's files. Except Gosevitz said they were wrong. It took 55 letters, six months, legal threats, appeals to the ministry and a newspaper series to force TIC into paying. (Those initials still make me feel like vomiting.)
 By the time the ordeal ended, I had two U.S. collection agencies after me and had to wear an awkward  therapeutic air pump every minute of every day for a year. The cost to taxpayers was enormous because I required 129 home visits from CCAC community nurses because of the deep bed sores that inadequate care at St. Joseph's gave me.
 It took 11 months after I was first incarcerated in two American and two Toronto hospitals before the operation at a fifth hospital, Western, and then another one the next day in the sixth hospital,  St. Mike's, tidied me up and restored me to reasonable health.
Believe it or not, it all started when I became ill on the way home from Florida because one of the more trivial body parts, my gall bladder.
There are enough problems for Ontario hospitals to solve before they hunt for "medical tourists." Administrators should be forced to sign a certificate for every foreign patient they accept stipulating that there is no one from Ontario that day waiting for admission.
Enforce it by fining every offending hospital. For starters, confiscate their parking revenue for the day.  As for the minister and hospital CEOs who think everything is okey-dokey, let them wear adult diapers for 100 days as both Mary and I have had to do because of their incompetence.

R.I.P. JIM FLAHERTY, WILLIS BLAIR, VINCE DEVITT

THEY KNEW HOW TO PLAY THE GAME

I have reached the years where my friends read the obits in the papers first.
I don't, because if I manage to get  up, I know my name isn't there.
I write about a trio of passings who were honourable hard workers who wore well on the rest of us because they were decent and able and understood BS without flinging it like a Jays pitcher on a bad day..
Back in the mists, I remember a song that became far more famous than the singer, Kitty Kallen, who made it a huge hit. The key line was "little things mean a lot."
And they do for me because they matter more in politics and journalism and life in general than the big set pieces, the big deal performances, whether the budget speech, the huge scoop of a headline, or some grand formality of camaraderie.
It's how you act when the lights are on someone else that are the measure of the man. I have never forgotten that the legendary Johnny Carson, during the two-minute breaks for commercials, ignored totally his guests with whom he chatted with charm when the cameras were live.
Jim Flaherty would probably have been as good a premier and a better prime minister. Willis Blair was appreciated but should have had a bigger platform. Vince Devitt was the sort of tough experienced veteran that any good newspaper needs in its spine.
I remember one agreeable August morning when we were opening the Ex and I found Faherty standing alone and unannounced to one side of the crowd before the ceremonies. We gossiped about how things were going in the quiet days in Ottawa and at Queen's Park, the circuses he had dominated with the ease of the ringmaster.
I said of course he would have to say a few words, and he said that wasn't necessary, but we both knew that with an election coming, no politician of his worth would ignore any crowd larger than a couple.
Turned out, however, that when I raised this with colleagues running the opening, they were opposed because the invited dignitary was a provincial Liberal minister who had given us a grant.
 I said Flaherty may be a Tory but he was also the federal finance minister, the second most important politician in the country, and you just don't ignore such a man. Besides, I said, he was a pro who would give a short graceful speech and not raise partisan hackles.
 Flaherty performed as advertised. And everyone was pleased that someone of such note who had been coming to the Ex his entire life had said a few words without us having to go through the normal hassles of getting a major operator to the fair.
He may not have been big like Blair, a baron of beef in a blue double-breasted suit who had been East York mayor, but you could imagine a scrappy Irishman dominating Princeton hockey back in his scholarship days.
For Blair, baseball was the game and long after  he had left formal politics, we would chat at Jays game because he had been a loyal supporter from the start and very helpful in the bargain $17.8 million conversion of Exhibition Stadium for baseball. (If only all our stadium deals could be so economical and easy on the taxpayers.)
Blair was into curling too and brought the World Junior Curling Championship to East York in 1975. It produced a sports anecdote I will always treasure. As part of a PR stunt to promote the event, Blair had the reigning champs from Switzerland play Don Chrevier and two CBC types, with me as lead. We won 4-0 and enjoyed watching their supercilious smiles at the old farts freeze to frowns.
Blair and I were in the City Hall cafeteria one day when a man shyly came up to his mayor for advice. He volunteered that Blair didn't know him but about a minute later, the guy would  have thought Blair knew the age of his kids and how many dandelions were on his lawn.
If only all our councillors could have the common sense and good humour that Blair had even in the face of some of the stupider votes and rhetoric of the lefties whom he deplored.
The provincial government knew his worth, had him on the OMB, the supervisory planning board,  and had him tackle municipal assessment, always a thorn in the side of everyone associated with the issue. Blair's shrewd report as a commissioner for Premier William Davis stated baldly on the first page that something like 2.1 million properties in Ontario paid no municipal taxes at all.
Just how the hell does that happen, I demanded of Blair. He said it happened "by hook or by crook," an old English expression meaning by any means necessary, whether that meant crooked bureaucrats and assessors, or just properties that had managed to escape detection.
Afterwards, there were a lot more people paying municipal taxes, although Blair in his agreeable  way never boasted about reforms.
With his encyclopedia knowledge of Torontonians and politics, Blair was a stalwart source, one that as a reporter, columnist and editor I relied on to give me the inside on what was going on without malicious overtones. I would imagine Devitt did the same, as a veteran of everything in newspapering who ended up on the inside as a press secretary to Premier Davis.
Devitt and I went through the wars together, and shared many of the same scars, whether the wounds came from provincial and federal elections and leadership contests,  or whatever  the major story was.
At the end, I was the editor and he was the reporter on whom I had to depend to sort Star blarney from Globe fiction.  On several occasions, thousands of dollars in street sales depended on the advice he gave me minutes before the edition.
For example, the Saturday Star had a headline story during the 1970 kidnapping of James Cross, the British diplomat, about FLQ terrorists hidden inside the wall of a house being searched by police. The Mounties had leaked such a story to the Star but Devitt, the Tely's main man on the story, couldn't confirm it. I finally decided, based on Devitt, not to "scalp" or copy the story,  so the second-largest  edition in the country came out that noon without that exciting angle.
Devitt never mentioned it to me again, although my bosses certainly did because of the loss of sales. He expected that the Telegram would do the honest thing for its readers and not repeat a phoney story.

He repaid me in a way weeks later when I was in Montreal to buck up our troops. We all ended up in the lamented Montreal Press Club, a normal gathering after big stories then.
A Boston Globe reporter announced he was about to beat the shit out of me. As I turned to face him, Devitt inserted himself. I was the biggest and youngest in the coming fight but for Devitt - and Flaherty and Blair for that matter -  you always jump in to help your friends.
The Globe reporter warned that we should be careful because he had been the boxing champ of the U.S. Marines. (Strangely enough, that turned out to be true.) Devitt replied: "Screw you, I was a Toronto bartenders.) (Which he had been to get enough money to attend Ryerson Journalism school two years ahead of me.)
And that was that. We didn't even stop drinking. After all, it was only 5 a.m, and these were the glory days of newspapers when work consumed your life.
These are the things you remember when you sift through the obits,  after you are grateful that you haven't yet made it into print, the faces and events that will never fade.

FAT PAY FOR FATTER PUBLIC SERVANTS

SUNSHINE LIST OF HORRORS

The number of Ontario public employees paid out of taxes who made more than $100,000 last year has grown 11% to nearly 98,000, but public outrage hasn't thundered out against the traffic cops, parking ticket officers, jail guards and assorted civil servants who make a lot more than most of us thanks to overtime and inflated salaries.
In fact, a respected news letter out of the Legislature called Inside Queen's Park has noted the lack of fury and the fact that it wasn't raised during Question Period and suggested the annual list be scrapped because it's not worth the bother.
That would be unfortunate. I have often referred to the compulsory reporting of maximum compensation under the Sunshine Law and suspect that many find it useful, even if they don't foam at the mouth because we have become too accustomed to the outrages.
I wonder what has happened to my old friend Bono, who now advises Tory Leader Tim Hudak on verbal strategy from speeches to questions.
Does the volcano slumber?
Surely Mark Bonokoski, after decades as a reporter, columnist, editor, commentator and publisher with the Sun chain, hasn't mellowed to the degree that he thinks the overburdened middle class accept this guff, especially as they run around pulling together all the info they need to pay too much income tax.
I shared an office with Bono during some chaotic days, when he marched around rehearsing his invective, bellowing into an unneeded phone to his buddies about his latest cause. It was a wonder that afternoon that the murderer could get through to tell him the cops had arrested the wrong guy.
I know his feelings about overpaid civil servants. Wotinhell is going on, Bono, the opposition should be going after the provincial treasurer, Charles Sousa, who was silly enough to say the latest Sunshine listing shows Ontario runs the leanest government in Canada.
What crap! Is that a civil servant thanking him, or do they aim lower down?
Why do I keep thinking of blaring brass bands when I listen to barrages of hot air from some guy named Sousa?
This rich "cream" making more than double the average wage curdles to a nasty total of $12.5 billion. That's disgusting in a province that now has a debt that some said erroneously was larger than California. That would have been obviously wrong in the old days, but it's nauseating that spending grew so gross in Ontario that we would even be mentioned with a state that was so notorious for  financial ruin before its death bed conversion.
There are plenty of  Grit bull's-eyes around to shoot at but the Tories should blaze away at this one too because the New Democrats certainly won"t.
The average guy, according to StatsCan, is struggling to get to $50,000 a year. The average woman is concentrating on just keeping the job where she earns less than the guy.
You think it doesn't bother them that some cop lounging in the back of traffic court, or some parking  ranger circling the glory pits around hospitals, is making more than $100,000 a year when some of the time they'r just struggling not to doze off.
You think it doesn't bother the robbed middle class that the shuffle of incompetents out of political offices, which is greased with platinum handshakes and deals on benefits, is the only time we hear of changes in departments and agencies.
I think we should continue the law forcing the reporting of public pay over $100,000 but give it another name.
Rogues' Gallery.  Most Unwanted.  How You Wasted Your Taxes.

BS AND MYTHS ABOUT TORONTO STADIUMS

THE LEAFS VS. THE TAXPAYERS

For the last 50 years, the most remarkable screwed-up reporting in Toronto has come over the various proposals, dreams, schemes, construction schedules, demolitions and renovations for our stadiums.
You don't have to look hard to find the reasons.
First, the media.  They have the attention span of a gnat and are baffled about history that is more than a year old. The papers, which should know better,  don't seem to understand what incredible wastage of taxpayers' bucks happens right under their snotty noses. They are lousy watchdogs!
Second, the politicians. Stadium proposals have involved councillors, MPPs, and MPs, and any stumblebum antics by Metro council and now city council is matched by Queen's Park, which gets more publicity over the loans/grants than the feds, but still manages to do the wrong thing at the wrong price.
Third, the Leafs, Jays and Argos, with the fatcats from Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment leading the way down the garden path.  Let's not forget all the Olympic and soccer bureaucrats who really don't give a damn what facilities cost as long as they get all their perqs when they come to visit to the fawning attention of the local journalists.
Stir this triumvirate of ineptitude into a stew and you get a mess of pottage that has cost Toronto taxpayers hundreds of millions.
I was reading a Star column on the latest stadium proposal by Royson James. I generally don't agree with his opinions but didn't expect a veteran observer to give such a sloppy history that there's no reason to believe he can be instructive about the latest proposal.
He thinks taxpayers should stampede towards acceptance of this deal like cattle to the slaughter - no, sorry, scratch that  - he thinks it should be a triumphant parade towards a great deal.
Let me give some Toronto pages from the history of the butchering of the innocents throughout the world. It seems taxpayers have been robbed by sports teams since caveman days.
James explains that the city owns BMO Field which is to get a $120 million refit with more seats and three roofs, which is kind of strange for a stadium that just opened in 2007.
 He says the first stadium at the Ex was called CNE Stadium and used for shows during the Ex. The fair, he says, would so tear up the field it was "near unplayable" for the Argos.
Actually it was used for concerts and events from spring to fall and the Ex, while being hard on the playing surface, built a giant moveable stage to minimize its damage during the fair. The field wasn't that bad. I can testify to that since I covered several Grey Cups there from the sidelines, once from the Tiger Cat bench. Besides, the CNE's Dave Garrick rushed off to buy artificial turf right after it was invented.
James wrote:"Taxpayers paid huge amounts to renovate and expand it to accommodate the Blue Jays." Actually, that's BS. The giant stadium, which could hold 54,145 spectators, which is more than double what BMO Field will be able to do even after expansion, was tweaked for $17.8 million.
This was such a bargain that the clever inexpensive adjustment to get major-leave baseball was famous throughout North America. In addition, Paul Godfrey, then the Metro chairman, and his main officials, John Kruger and Ray Biggart, arranged to get all revenue from parking - they bamboozled the Jays into thinking that was normal, when it wasn't - and also had every ticket holder pay 50 cents, later increased, towards the stadium maintenance.
James says that the Jays moved to SkyDome, leaving behind the stadium in 2006 with such few events that it was "again rebuilt" to accommodate Toronto FC. Again he betrays his ignorance.
It would have been easy to revamp CNE Stadium - after all the renovation tax kitty had more than $5 million - but all the eager sportscrats wanted it gone so that it wouldn't interfere with any proposals they floated for an Olympic Stadium that could later be used by the NFL.
I know something about this. I have been to a few games and events at BMO Field, but went to hundreds of events and games at Exhibition Stadium as a reporter, baseball season-ticket holder, columnist and entertainment editor. I also have been president of the CNE directors who run the fair and vice-chairman of  the Exhibition Place (EP) governors who are the landlords.
 I got motions passed at both boards saying that the CNE Stadium should not be demolished. After all, it was a reasonable facility that wasn't decrepit, and a third of the seats were under a vast roof. These were ignored because the idea of some glamorous creation costing hundreds of millions was more seductiver to the badgers of local and international sports who don't care about taxes.
So it was demolished in 1999, and it took all the money collected to repair it to blow it up because it was built so well.
Let's not forget SkyDome in this grisly tale. Now Ted Rogers may have renamed it the Rogers Centre and bought it for a song, but it cost you and me at least $300 million out of its $628 million cost when it opened in 1989. Since most commentators seem to have failed high school math and have no desire to prove it by doing accounting, this wastage is ignored.
 I have gone several rounds with my former boss, Paul Godfrey, one of the leaders who stuck us with it, in arguing costs vs. benefits. I have no doubt that you and I as taxpayers lost a third of a billion dollars on it.
Now back to BMO Field which James seems to think is a renovated CNE Stadium which most people know was blown up. The field is built north of where CNE Stadium was eight years before and unfortunately is an obstruction interfering with use of the grounds. Its field runs north-south while the CNE field was roughly north-east by south-west.
James informs us that "Toronto taxpayers' paid $9.8 million for the latest fixup...." Except it was a new stadium a long pass and punt away from the old. He says the city donated land worth $10 million, MLSE gave $18 million, with $27 million from the feds and $8 million from the province.
He describes the rest of the deal, but somehow doesn't mention the scandal was that MLSE, the outfit that can make fortunes but not win hockey games, actually made money on the deal because it sold naming rights to the stadium for more than $20 million.
So MLSE virtually owns a stadium on city land where it invested not a cent while taking every government in sight for millions. It controls the stadium every hour of every day.
The CNE went out of its way during the approval process for BMO Field to demand that it have full use of the stadium during the fair period, unless there's a soccer game, which is the standard deal for all EP buildings during the fair. For example, the Ex has events in Ricoh Coliseum.
The Coliseum is another example of how politicians and officials representing the city and EP have their minds transformed to mush when sports entrepreneurs come calling.
The first Coliseum proposal to EP was for the rink renovation to cost $28 million.  That was made to the governors, when I was a member. Then a different deal for around $38 million was presented to Toronto council and guaranteed loans became grants in a semantic muddle.  It opened in 2003 with the initiating group tied to the Edmonton Oilers quickly going bankrupt. Then surprise, surprise, MLSE swooped in to take it off the hands of OMERS for its Marlies farm club.
The CNE feels betrayed by the last deal over BMO Field because it really can't use the facility as promised.  I asked a MLSE officials about this at a recent presentation to the CNE directors. Would this problem continue? I concluded afterwards that our difficulties in using a stadium built on public land would increase, and EP would be no help to us.
As a director of the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame,  I bumped into Mark Grimes, the councillor who heads the EP board, at a sports induction dinner just before the council vote on BMO Field. I told him there were a number of basic errors in the background report he had sent me. He listened, said he would raise them, but didn't as he moved approval at council.
By the way, if you wondered about the reference to the Sports Hall of Fame, it moved to Calgary after its building here was demolished to make way for BMO Field.
So I listen to the blandishments of city and MLSE officials and politicians - and the MLSE guys must be politicians too because they sure don't win much at sport - and think we should question every figure and demand a guarantee for every fact.
Why shouldn't I? Millionaires want to seduce us into improving their playpens and for us to borrow money for them when they can pay it out of petty cash. To hell with it.  Renovate your own damn facilities out of all the extra money you charge for what is laughingly called food and drink.
Stop pretending that all this is in the name of sport.  What a laugh! If you're sportsmen and not really corporate scammers, then Al Capone was a sportsman too. Apparently he wouldn't have needed a tommy gun in Toronto, just a hockey stick or a soccer ball.

SEPARATISTS: STOP WHINING AND GET OUT

THIS IS BORING BUT ALSO INFURIATING

Once upon a time, before it got tiresome and the savings became so obvious if the separatists just got the hell out, I kept standing on the ramparts and fighting to keep this great country intact.
I was inclined to quote the line from King Henry V where Shakespeare wrote the grand battle cry of "once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more..."
It was my first exposure to the Bard when I saw that superb movie by Laurence Olivier made in 1944. I didn't understand much of it but who did not thrill at "cry God for Harry, England and Saint George."
 I may well have said "once more unto the breach" when the Editors of the Suns gathered in Edmonton in 1992 charged by the big boss, Doug Creighton, to write a series of editorials for every front page in the Sun chain on the Charlottetown Accord and referendums on Canada's future.
I chaired the meeting as the Editor of the flagship in Toronto, although it was the kind of meeting where if I paused for breath, and I tried not to for at least the first hour, my colleagues swarmed over me with what they said were better lines.
In the end, to save myself from too many knives in the front - editorialists never just stab in the back because they might hit bone - before we adjourned for, ahem, drinks,  I made sure that each Editor had authored their own special baby for the week-long series.
 I saved my effort for the final Sunday when, since the Toronto paper was the second largest in the country and even our Financial Post joined in the broadside of editorial thunder from the largest media chain, we blasted the separatists as if they were the French enemy at Agincourt.
So my stout defence of keeping Canada united was read by millions of voters. But no more!
The separatists have been defeated in narrow votes and they seemed even a year or so ago to have become just a pallid shadow of past indignities.  But hope springs eternal in the breast of those who think their salvation lies in kicking the gullible English out of their "share" of the place and escaping with most of the loot.
 And now they trumpet they even have the Sun's main owner as their catch of the day. Just keep him out of the Sun, guys,  so he doesn't stink up the place like a carp on the beach.
There are clouds of smarmy rhetoric concealing the latest gambit by the separatists, and we're told the vote for the PQ doesn't necessarily mean another referendum on francophone separation.
We're told that perhaps two-thirds in Quebec don't want such a vote.
Fine by me. Good. This is aimed at the separatists and their fellow travellers, even that premier who thinks, naively, that if Quebec does go, they would continue to use the beaverbuck and even play some role in its management.
This is an echo of the garbage in the past that somehow Quebec could separate but also keep our stamp and post office, our army, all the wealth of federal buildings built there to keep them happy, and all the special arrangements.
 For example, the Quebec dairy farmers supply most of the industrial milk in Canada for cheese etc. They enjoy a special deal that keeps the price of dairy products high in the rest of Canada. They expect that this deal would continue. Nonsense!
This is not just a time for tough love but for rough talk. This is a time for English Canada to say that any suggestion that Quebec gets to leave with every last square kilometre of what is presently considered to be part of the province is just a non-starter.
Ironically, some natives, including Iroquois and Cree,  are restless about this separation talk, especially the idea that separatists expect to leave with what natives consider their territory. They also don't think they're really part of Canada either.
Obviously, English Canada will have to change its appeasement and explain reality for natives who keep biting the hands of the Canadian taxpayers and treating us like a foreign enemy. The fact is that we may have been the enemy, the way they see it, but we won, both by force and by legislation, and if they don't like it, join the separatists and take a hike with empty hands.
I don't like the deals that Quebec has always got so it doesn't sulk. I don't like the costly translations that have to be done for packaging, legislation, etc. I don't like being told that only bilingual Canadians should be our PM and top ministers, judges and officials. Even if separatism doesn't return as a powerful force and irritant, I think it is time to say official bilingualism isn't warranted in a country where 80% of the people have other languages and only a few stubborn francophones don't know English.
I started filled with goodwill on this, especially in language. It's not the French that bothers me, it's the way it has been used as a weapon.
 My youngest son, Mark, went through the first French immersion course in Etobicoke and liked it. (He works in China and speaks Mandarin in addition to his good French and English.) We discovered, however, that the way bilingualism works in Ottawa, francophones who have some  English get the job, seldom the reverse.
One daughter-in-law, Marie, was born a francophone just a few houses from the Plains of Abraham, a farm owned by her ancestor, and has another another ancestor, Calixa Lavallee, who wrote O Canada.
Another daughter-in-law, Yolanda, was born in Argentina, and speaks Spanish, of course.  So at a family gathering, it is possible to hear five languages, since Mary's family spoke in Slovenia when she was a girl.
I don't care what language you speak, as long as you can get along in English, the most important language in Canada and the world. And I would just as soon that you call yourself a Canadian without bothering with any hyphens. Since we're stating obvious facts, it's apparent to all but the politically correct and pandering politicians that the cultural mosaic hasn't worked and Canada would be better off if we had stressed the melting pot while expecting and helping newcomers to honour their ethnic roots to a lesser degree.
I would hope that all this guff about separatism that has flared since Pierre Karl Peladeau decided to run for the third party he has fooled around with is just a mini-rebellion full of sound and fury signifying nothing. After Peladeau experimented with Communism (that's when he became Karl and not Carl) and fooled around with the Liberals, he jumped into the PQ bed that his father liked to fool around in decades ago.
Peladeau is arrogant, lousy at newspapering and printing, and is considered a fine catch only by those impressed by inherited riches.
 He did fire me once, but that was trivial. On the day it was to be announced he had bought the Sun chain, I was wandering the executive offices handing out Christmas bonuses dressed as Santa Claus.  When Peladeau, Paul Godfrey and the other brass left for the announcement, they bumped into me. COO Trudy Eagan suggested it would be a gimmick in the Sun tradition if I began the ceremony by saying that Peladeau, like Santa, had come to bring the Sun a great Christmas gift. Peladeau agreed, then thought better of it several floors below.  So I stopped the elevator and got off, while Peladeau laughed that he had started at the Sun by firing Santa.
Unfortunately, he fired a lot at the Sun but not me because I had jumped first and was semi-retired.
Just how large separatism will really figure in the Quebec election remains to be seen. Perhaps it's just an over-reaction in English Canada.
But we in this country just can't continue to allow this illusion to continue, whether it's by separatists, natives or ethnic activists, that you can live in Canada and enjoy all the right and privileges of being a citizen, but also, if you want, you can leave and have your own country but still keep the benefits.
It's time to put up or shut up. Want to make part of Quebec a separate country? Well then, try, but  you will leave behind everything to do with Canada. Want to have your own native government and your own laws?  Either they are subordinate to Canada or you must go and find some territory that your ancestors didn't lose. Want to have dual citizenship but live in your homeland and have your benefits shipped there? No, you cannot serve two masters.
There has been a growing militancy in Canada against those who feel they're entitled to special deals even when they wish to disown the national government.
It is time for us to give a speech like Lady Macbeth did about her King in that dour "Scottish play"  by the Bard.
"I pray you, speak not. He grows worse and worse. Questions enrage him. At once, good night. Stand not upon the order of your going. But go at once."
I hope the door hits you on the bum!

SUNNYLEA JUNIOR SCHOOL BLEMISHED

SCREWING UP A SIMPLE ROOM

You have to hand it to the Toronto school board. The province really doesn't allow it to do much but trustees and educrats can be dumb, dumber and dumbest when they fumble to a decision.
The routine task was to build a room at the end of an old elementary school building that had a fame because of its simple but classic lines.
Not only did the contractors start before school ended with noisy equipment beside Grade One and kindergarten classes, which are notorious for being easily disrupted, they kept working all summer and produced a shack of a room that a chicken farmer might consider as an office.
For the time, money and equipment consumed, you would have thought it was a start on City Hall, which is, indeed, what the first architect built.
The dunderheads involved in this would think a pimple on Mona Lisa's face was a beauty spot.
For five decades, I have lived across from Sunnylea Junior School in the Royal York and Bloor area. My sons and grandsons have gone to school there, I have played basketball and volleyball against the neighbours in the little gym, and I've watched as generations of teenagers gobble beer and trade drugs  in the strip parking lot where the stern signs say for staff only.
So much for watching your taxes at work.
Once upon a time, when the original school was replaced in 1947, the creation was hailed as "modernist" and cited as a model for school construction in Canada. Lots of light from all the glass brick. Each classroom with an outside door. Pleasant halls. I have read a critique that called the lean post-war construction the best example of its kind in the province. It resembles an internationally famous school that Eeron Saarinen built at Crow Island in Illinois.
The legendary Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus design school that left it mark on the world,  probably talked about it at Harvard where one of his students was John C. Parkin, who returned to Toronto as an influential architect and planner and formed a prominent firm with John B. Parkin. (Believe it or not, they weren't related.)
Their famous creations dot Toronto, led by famous City Hall. Viljo Revell may have the justified fame as the architect but Canadian regs required him to have Canadian associates. The Parkins really took over when he died before his creation was finished.
John B. went off and founded a California office, leaving John C. to move easily like a tailored baron among Toronto society, particularly the ladies.
 The Sun hired him to design its headquarters, which has now been drawn and quartered like a butchered beef by other companies, and he became a familiar face at the wonderful parties that Doug Creighton gave as the blithe spirit who made the Sun a success.
It was the era of developer paranoia. Creighton boasted to me that the Sun building was going to be only 44' 6" high to get around Mayor David Crombie's 45-foot-bylaw. Except what people kept missing was that council would approve taller buildings if they weren't extreme. I made that argument to Creighton and Parkin but they didn't trust politicians. We added another three stories later.
I had plenty of opportunity to tell John C. about how well Sunnylea worked.. You see, it wasn't that remarkable, a showboat of design. Most have probably never given it a second glance. However, it just made sense in its function, the way teachers and kids used it. It's the highest praise you can give a building!
Ironically, enrolment shrank in the 1980s to such an extent that the school was going to be closed. Quite a fate when it had had fame as an elite "advancement" school. Then it was rented to an Ukrainian group which included some of the worst parkers in the western world.
It returned from ethnicity when the birthrate of the neighbourhood soared along with the incomes, bringing the menace of monster homes, meandering nannies and harried female drivers. When the provincial Liberals hit on expanded kindergarten as an election gimmick, Sunnylea had to grow by one room. So we got a prefab tool shed. Probably took an hour to work up the plans. Too bad there wasn't some hot young architect around with enough sense not to bugger up the clean lines from the hotshot of 60 years ago.
But then these days six decades is considered, stupidly, an eternity for a building. They opened BMO Field in 2007 and now they want to make $100 million in alteration for a team that used to play a few feet away in a stadium that was 50 years old when it was demolished using the $5.5 million set aside for repairs.
 With loony politicians planning like that, it's a miracle that structures like the Colosseum are still around after 2,000 years.
When officials can't build a simple room to match an entire school, they should be sent back to kindergarten and given a remedial course in building blocks.

R.I.P. BILL BALLARD, DUSTY KOHL

WE FEW, WE HAPPY FEW, WE BAND OF BROTHERS.....

Phoned the Happy Hermit, Gary Dunford, who lives in the piney north, about Billy Ballard's death. We talked about the magic restorative times when Gary was T.O.'s funniest writer and would drop around to say he was having lunch "with the rebels."
And off we would go through the slush to meet the guys who knew just about everything that was going on in sports, politics and entertainment and would gossip enough to make a libel lawyer like Julian Porter blush. And we would return to the Sun much later and wonder just how we could get this delightful and malicious stuff into print.

Ballard had enough feuds going to be a Balkan state and he disliked most dunderheads in the media. But he tolerated a few of us. And since he lived like a idiosyncratic legend who could indulge his passions and ignore convention,  it was fun to be around him as he became fabulously wealthy as a concert promoter for whom the prancing elite of show business were as familiar as house guests.
(Ballard would take grim pleasure that the Star, which he sued for libel at least once, made it seem in the obit headline that his big accomplishment was "ex-Leafs boss," which was almost true when his dad was in jail, not as  a key adviser to the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and David Bowie.)
My introduction came at Etobicoke's Memorial Pool when I was watching my son take swimming lessons and wondered who was the stocky loudmouth lifeguard screaming at him. I was informed he was Harold's son from just down the street, and since the father had bellowed his way into the Leafs so that he was known throughout the land, I figured I would be watching this Ballard for a long time too, even though it turned out that he was as quiet as his father was loud.
The "rebels" at lunch could include Dusty Kohl and his cowboy hat taking a run at everyone, Bill Marshall, the wordsmith who elected David Crombie and created the film festival, perhaps even the mayor if he wanted to escape City Hall, and a surprise guest or two who would also be very rich  and very successful and very in.
The location was key. These guys knew the best food, even if it came from a kitchen behind a variety store counter. And Ballard would grill the waiter as to the parentage of the Coco Cola (I didn't write Coke because these days people might get the wrong impression.)  He would sample it, and then have at least eight if they met his standard.  He would ask about the fat on the meat, and the waiter would assure him, but Ballard wanted the fattest cuts, and for several dinners at least.
If I didn't have at least two dinners while Ballard, Cohl and Marshall explained everything that the Sun and I and every other media outlet had done wrong since we last met, Ballard would complain that I had let him down.
There are restaurants throughout the world, from century-old palaces to insider delis, who still think Ballard was some sort of professional eating champ, not a well-connected guy from Toronto who survived a turbulent relationship with an egocentric father to become a generous entrepreneur, president of companies traded on the stock exchange, and sports promoter who even took the first run at bringing the NBA here.
Somewhere along the way, Ballard adopted the Sun's staff troubadour, John McDermott, and became his manager, although there was a falling out once.
When McDermott had a concert at Roy Thomson Hall, and Mary and I joined all the "rebels" gathered in the better seats, we knew we would see them later at the Kit Kat on King even though it was the size of a broom closet, because you just knew it was expected that you would be there because this was an understood alliance where you were expected to honour the unspoken rules determined by Ballard and Kohl and Marshall.
If I was away for a few weeks, I would follow what they had been doing by veiled references in columns by Dunford, or George Anthony, one of the great entertainment writers. You had to keep up, you see, because if you made the mistake of not having seen the latest great movie, you had to listen to one of them tell you what the director or the star had said when they came to their suite at the Cannes Festival. After they stayed with Mick on his island.
They brought a Jimmy Breslin touch to what appeared a stolid town. There weren't enough lunches. Now Billy - he was never William to his friends - joins Dusty and Marshall is a slumbering volcano.
They were fun because they knew how to enjoy life while being a success.
 If only more did.