SO HARPER HAS A SENSE OF HUMOUR

WHY I LOVE POLITICAL ANECDOTES!

I love the stories of history. It puts a human face on all the nuts and bolts and facts of statesmanship.

Thanks to Maureen Dowd, the great columnist on a great newspaper, the New York Times, we now know that inside the austere facade of the Canadian PM, there may be a glint of fun.

Dowd is writing about George W. Bush's book, Decision Points, which gives the ancedotal side of his eight years in the Oval Office.

Obviously W. had a great ghost writer and editor because the book is great and his administration was a costly disaster, sticking Obama with a tsunami of crises.

W. writes about a visit to Russia where Vladimir Putin shows him his black Labrador Koni. Putin bragged that Koni was "bigger, stronger and faster than Barney," which was W. pet.

Later W. is telling this story to Harper who drolly noted: "You're lucky he only showed you his dog."

Golly! Not only does Harper play the piano and write hockey history, he can also make a memorable quip to the most powerful man on earth.

Unfortunately, some of the readers won't know where Canada is.

MPAC'S RUINING OF COTTAGE LIFE

ILLEGITIMUM NON CARBORUNDUM

That's a mock Latin expression just above, probably created during the Great War To End All Wars. What it means in its various versions, especially for Harvard students who have it embedded in their campus liturgy, is don't let the bastards grind you down.

Which brings me to the Municipal Property Assessment Corp., the bureaucrats who have drawn criticism from the premier to the lowest cottager.

We can't let MPAC grind us down, and the technocrats certainly try. In fact, I suspect they think we're trying to do that to them.

Appealing the process is a little like running the gauntlet must have been when the natives were restless. It reminds me of the expression about figures lie and liars figure.

I have just fought MPAC successfully, sort of, on both my Etobicoke house and my Trent Hills cottage. It's taken a couple of years and probably a week's work. And that doesn't include the $75 cost of each appeal or the help of my son Brett, the computer expert, because my Mac

doesn't fit with the MPAC system of PCs (which is just another frustration about MPAC.)

My victory is that I've had my assessment reduced by $107,000 on the two (asssessment is the key in determining your municipal taxes.)

I wrote about my cottage assessment jumping by 300% in my blog (blog.johndowning.ca) in a column on Dec. 14. 2008. Just Google Failure To Subtract While Adding In Cottage Taxes. I also wrote Taxes For The Future While Living In The Past on Dec. 20, 2008.

I detailed the rotten foundation of figures which was MPAC's justification for a huge jump of my assessment in three years from $76,000 to $226,000. The assessment apparatchiks wanted to make my cottage the highest taxed in the neighbourhood.

I conceded that MPAC had a complicated and controversial job in assessing more than 4.7 million properties, which the pencil pushers claim is the largest such operation in North America. This caused some readers, such as Penny Caldwell, the Editor of Cottage Life magazine, to think at first that I wasn't critical and annoyed. I guess my fire was banked like a dormant volcano. But by the end of all the research and forms and letters and calls and inspections, I would like to erupt all over the baffling bas...and I don't mean bassets.

What complicated the cottage process was that the first renovation I had made in my 30-year-ownership was finished largely after Jan. 1, 2008, which was the date when the new assessment clicked in all over the province. Yet the suits added the $52,000 cost of my big new room to what they claimed had been an assessment of $92,000.

So I appealed. I sent assessment figures for the neighbours - which my son had to get - and a letter detailing mistakes in their description of my cottage - which included, for example, a well when I don't have one.

Then a letter came knocking $16,000 off. Nope, I said. So a hearing by an independent arbiter was scheduled. I said June was bad because of medical appointments. So the date was set for the same day as a specialist's inspection of my innards. I then said that everything was clear for the summer, but not after Sept. 15 because I would be in Europe. So the hearing was scheduled while I was cruising on the Danube.

The date was then set for late November, but a "valuation review specialist" showed up before that for the first examination of the property that has ever been done to my knowledge. She measured and we argued and she inspected and we argued. She was convinced their accounting of past assessment figures was correct even when I showed her the actual bills. She argued that the well wasn't that important in assessment, and I asked if she would prefer a cottage with a well to one that didn't have one.

A week later the offer came at $190,000, which is 16% lower than the first figure. Still too high, but I didn't fancy wasting a cold November day and $40 in gas to keep fighting the system. Surely a crushing indictment is that it took more than two years.

My city battle was as complicated but I never got as close to the hearing. This time the "valuation review specialist" and I argued about the drawbacks in my 1 1/2 storey house where I've lived for more than 40 years.

The Sunnylea area just south of The Kingsway is great and hot. But the home has the normal sloped ceilings upstairs and low basement ceilings. The "specialist" said that the factors she considered didn't include sloped ceilings being a drawback. I said to hell with her factors and formulas because what was essential in assessment is the price the property would bring on the market. And since I was over six foot, I knew that tall couples wouldn't be rushing to my house.

There were other arguments, like the idiot parking by yuppies taking their kids to the school just one house and a road away. So the "specialist" offered to reduce the assessment by just over 10% to $603,000, which seemed fair to me.

What bothers me about my fights over the two properties is just how complicated it was. As a columnist and editor familiar with red tape, I should have been able to manoeuvre much easier through the process. Much of this was done by computer. What about those without computers, or those who find computers frustrating or baffling? What about those without the time and inclination to deal with the forms and arguments? What about seniors who can't handle the latest contrivances of the paper mills?

Are these people well served, or do they in the end let the regulators grind them down?

You don't have to be a careful reader of Cottage Life magazine or listen to the latest bitchings on the dock to know of too many horror stories about taxes. The young couples who give up their dreams of owning a home or cottage because they just can't handle the taxes. The old couples who sell because they just can't pay the taxes on top of the Hydro and upkeep.

There is a revolt against the McGuinty government over the HST. (Unfortunately we need such a tax but the reach of the tax into every service and purchase is obscene.) We also need a revolt against how MPAC takes more than $130 million annually from us just to fashion a bureaucratic mystery. We can't let the bas...sets grind us down.

WORTHINGTON, DONATO, AND THE TORONTO SUN

Memories Of A Hard Birth And Great Child

It is to be expected that the 39th anniversary of the Toronto Sun would pass almost unnoticed, except for those who bear the joys and scars of the birth blazed across our memories.

The newspaper itself seems to have mentioned it only in a dozen words. It's not surprising if you missed it because even the indomitable John Cosway, steward of the interesting "Toronto Sun Family blog" missed the tiny mention in the Sun, and TheCos misses few things about the newspaper whose miraculous start revolutionized tabloid publishing in Canada and confounded the supposed experts.

I say it's not surprising because the Sun media brass seem determined to make life difficult for the Sun survivors as they repudiate the fun and irreverence that reverberated from the Sun pages in its early years. There is also a tension between the Day Oners and early loyalists with those who still work there. They're not shy about saying they're tired about all the crap about the good old days and what glories there used to be because they're working there

and the old farts aren't, and they're producing a good newspaper despite the handicap of Pierre Karl Peladeau and his sycophants.

I suspect the tension is only natural because I'm sure in all the newspapers with a glorious past that there is a feeling among young staffers that the old timers still hanging around or yarning have exaggerated the good and forgotten the bad.

Peter Worthington, who writes as many columns as he breathes, and Andy Donato, the artist, cartoonist, golfer and story teller (particularly about his score and how he just won the Iron Man Tournament at his Hunt Club, not bad for a guy who's 83) and I gather each year to celebrate those tempestuous early days.

We don't spend much time on the shrinking of the Sun, whether we're talking staff or the work space which is now a closet on the second floor of the six-storey building that flourished during our better days when we were one of the largest newspapers in the country and marked the anniversary warmly with columns from the usual suspects.

We spend a lot of time telling stories. Of course we do. We've been doing it for our entire lives. I suspect Worthington, the army brat, started with the soldiers when he was a kid at Camp

Borden, and Donato was probably the class clown. (I was always more shy.)

We talk about the lean days. Donato had an $80-a-month apartment while he waited for his house in Bramalea to be finished. The landlady was paranoid about his electricity usage. He discovered his oven didn't work because there were no fuses. So he put some in. A few days later the oven didn't work again. He found the landlord had snuck in and loosened the fuses. He was happy to tell her he was moving out.

Worthington and his wife, the formidable Yvonne Crittenden, always talk about their family while Andy and I try to get a word in edgewise about our kids. Of course the Worthingtons have a son-in-law, David Frum, who appears on TV shows like Stephen Colbert's, which I guess tops the Downing blogs and tweets.

There was a twist to our latest Sun anniversary celebration because Worthington was only hours away from treatment because his chest had been leaking blood. Worthington's adventures with his heart's plumbing are familiar topics with friends and readers (and they've won awards too.) This spawned a lot of gallow's humour, as you can imagine, but also a certain admiration for a tough chap who must be at least a decade older than Donato.

The Worthingtons brought guests, the famous artist, George McLean, who has 90 wonderful wildlife paintings featured in a book that was launched just hours before our dinner at Tommaso's Trattoria on Eastern Ave. (A great unpretentious spot for a party.) And it quickly became obvious why Peter likes McLean, and his wife, Helen, because not only is he a great painter, he's an even tougher irreverent talker than Peter. We killed a lot of sacred cows.

Of course we're going to do it again next year, on the Sun's 40th anniversary. And we're inviting all Day Oners and their families who often had to pitch in too, and not just because we seldom made it home.

And the original directors, some of whom would be capable of paying for the party themselves, and have enough left over for the national debt.

We will call it Doug's Party after the beloved first publisher and soul of the early Sun. Doug Creighton was famous for his entertaining. The highlight was when he rented SkyDome ( I forget its new name) and told the Sun's Trudy Eagan and SkyDome's Dave Garrick to spare no expense to honour our 20th anniversary. So in moved a circus and they even let off fireworks inside for the first time. (The Jays and Argos continue what the Sun pioneered.)

We also will have 20-year veterans (or Bono and Les Pyette would kill me) but the details would be up to a committee which would include Eagan, Donato (who with Peter is still at the Sun,) Tom MacMillan and great organizers like Tom. Part of the ticket price would go to Doug's causes like fighting Parkinson and helping Variety Village.

To heck with letting another Sun anniversary pass with just a few words. The Day Oners were there when we launched The Little Paper That Grew into a huge newspaper chain that can yet be salvaged. And we want to celebrate that. Just don't let Peter and Andy get theirs hands on the mike.

YOU CAN'T KILL POLITICAL ZOMBIES

They'll Be Back

Elections can resemble bad Halloween movies. Or one of those endless action movies where the bad guys survive again and again and again. Cats have nine lives: movie villains use up nine lives in the first reel.

Most losers, whether in the U.S. or Ontario, will pop up again panting for our attention in the next election. Many of them can't do anything else.

If you could follow all those talking heads on CNN, there were many U.S. races where the winners and losers had lost before. (This is the third major defeat in a row for Christine O'Donnell, the anti-masturbationist who had to declare she isn't a witch.)

And, of course, it's not just the candidates with names on the ballots who keep popping as if they were in a Whack-A-Mole game, it's all the support staff of aides, consultants and advisers who work on the supposed political side of the bureaucracy... until their guy runs again. Eventually, they run too.

Closer to home, we have famous examples of politicians who lost several times before they managed to get lucky. David Miller, for example, ran three times at three different levels before he first won. Same with Joe Pantalone, who appeared to be an invincible councillor before he ran for mayor.

And speaking of Joe Pants...Do you really think he's through with politics, with a provincial election next October and a federal election at any time?

Do you really think that Carolyn Parrish, who said as a Liberal MP that she hated "those bastards," meaning Americans, is through now she got defeated as a councillor in Mississauga? Do you think that Sandra Bussin, the councillor who wanted to be east-end queen, won't be back in some race?

George Smitherman now has huge name recognition in a city where he got nearly 300,000 votes. Don't you think that the Liberals of Queen's Park or Ottawa are salivating at the chance of getting him as a candidate, despite the turmoil of Smitherman in the health ministry and as a deputy premier. The fact he and Premier Dalton McGuinty weren't a "fit" would be considered a plus in an election where McGuinty's leadership is an issue.

Many years ago, my father, a family doctor in east Toronto, was acclaimed as a school trustee and became the board chair. The trustees serving under him went on to be a mayor, judge, federal finance minister, aldermen, MPPs and MPs. Even then, when elected reps were not full time and often had a job or profession on the side, it was expected that trustees would work up to alderman and then further up the political ladder and be around for decades.

Dad was supposed to become the Greenwood MP but was asked to step aside so a neophyte from one of Canada's royal families, the Masseys, became an MP. He then would be appointed senator while dad became the MP. But dad died and derailed that process.

In the six decades since then, our politicians have become full-time pros with perqs and pay to match. There are some, such as lawyers and farmers, who still do some private work. But the blunt reality is that when a man or woman finally gets the nod from most voters, their elected position becomes their identity and their job. When they get defeated, they will be a consultant or adviser for a year or two, then it's back to the political wars.

Once upon a time, politics at the basic level was a glorified New Year's Day town meeting where everyone in the hamlet gathered to pick a guy to look after the roads and another guy to ensure the taxes were collected and so on. There was no idea of pay. (I had a brother-in-law who was a trustee on a small rural board because it was his "turn" to make sure the one-room school was maintained and that the teacher wasn't an idiot.)

Now, of course, the school boards and municipalities and councils and ridings are giant in comparison and it's no longer a neighbour taking their turn in running the school. As part of the process, we now have legions of politicians and candidates and their people who never ever disappear.

At least the zombie movies end.

BILLY JAMIESON AND HIS SHRUNKEN HEADS

What A Home For A Halloween Party

On the morning after, I suppose that everyone from Moses Znaimer to that mummy expert boasted about being at Billy Jamieson's Halloween party.
In fact, within hours, I was reading a Maritime doctor/traveller on the Internet who was preening about having made the list.
So Mary and I can be forgiven for saying for the second year that if you want to celebrate the feast of ghosts, zombies and vampires, there's no better place than in a large lovely loft surrounded by real shrunken heads, war clubs, death masks, Egyptian mummies and the freak stuff that Jamieson acquired when he bought the Niagara Falls museum, founded in 1827 as the first museum in Canada.

(There may even be a real ghost hanging around the fish tank fitted in the back of an old hearse. As an old ghost chaser, I have volunteered to sit all night watching the fish, drinking, and waiting for he/she/it to appear. What if it is a pharaoh wanting to tell me where he was buried, along with ancient riches, beneath the desert along the Nile!)

There are thousands of Canadians, including me, who remember as kids surveying the wonders, from two-headed calves to Midway relics, in the old Falls museum. You can get a taste of Jamieson and his museums, old and new, by reading blogs I wrote (blog.johndowning.ca) which detail how Jamieson owned the mummy of a famous pharaoh, Ramesses I, and sold him for $2 million at the start of his repatriation to Egypt.

That money helped build his intriguing collection that ranges from Polynesia to South America.
I wrote a blog on Feb. 1, 2009, titled Come Smell My Shrunken Head. (Just Google that headline.) The occasion was a police expert fingerprinting one of Jamieson's mummies ( it worked.) Then there was last year's party I wrote about on Nov. 2, 2009: Shrunken Heads And Great Explorations.
That reference to exploring is based on the fact that if you come early, you are part of the presentation of the Stefansson Medal (the famous Arctic explorer was born in Manitoba) to Canadians who have distinguished themselves in the remote corners of the world. It's the annual meeting of the Ontario-Nunavut Chapter of The Explorers Club of New York, the legendary club founded in 1904.

It can boast its members were first to both poles, first to the top of Mount Everest, first to the bottom of the deepest ocean, and first to the surface of the moon. Wow!

The members love to explore and love to boast about the records of their stars. Who wouldn't.

Jamieson's exploits with the great pharaoh were detailed in a PBS show on Nova called The Mummy Who Would Be King. Currently he is worked on a series for History TV which meant he didn't want us photographing his fabulous collection which will play an important role in the programs.

That's one of the reasons that the picture to the left is an earlier circumspect one of Jamieson, who dresses appropriately at Halloween as midway barker, and not one of my pictures that show his collection in marvelous colours. He's part barker, part entrepreneur, part ethnologist and part antique tribal art collector.

The party that he presides over with his lady, Jessica Phillips, is an affair where people don't talk about Jamaica beaches and package tours but about months in Antarctica or skiing alone to the South Pole.

In fact, a Canadian major who did just that, after falling in a crevice on the second day and having to be rescued, received the club's Steffanson medal.

Mary and I were chatting at the buffet with a young couple. We wondered what they did. Oh, George Kourounis said, I chase storms, And he presented his card showing that his company called Furious Earth specializes in weather and disaster videography/photography.

I guess George never says it was just an ordinary day at the office.

I wondered on the drive home what happened to my boyhood dreams of climbing mountains and sailing to remote islands. Oh, I did climb a big mountain once, in the Yukon, and at the peak found garbage left by American military pilots who landed helicopters there on dates. I have been to 70 countries and visited remote spots like Easter Island. In January, I will be fishing for peacock bass more than a thousand kilometres up the Amazon. I enjoyed it all, but it doesn't match my aspirations as a boy. And the party that I had just left was filled with men and women who didn't just read National Geographic.

ALL POLITICIANS SHOULD BEWARE

Toronto's Revolt Was Merely The First

The downtown lefties haven't got it yet. After spending the year smearing Rob Ford, now they are insisting the new mayor better listen to them or else.

If any mayor ever won a mandate to ignore the outstretched palms of the gliberals, socialists and mushy activists of central Toronto, Ford did.

If any mayor ever won a mandate to insist that bureaucrats no longer treat the motorist as the enemy, to be harassed the minute they drive south of Eglinton between the rivers, Ford did.

If any mayor ever won a mandate to insist the homeless and those needing help be sorted from all the freeloaders and phoney beggars, Ford did.

And this is only the start. Time for a change, the most compelling of all slogans, is stampeding through the world, particularly North America. From the U.S. Teabaggers to the suburbs of Toronto, business as usual just doesn't cut it with the voters.

Consider the giant crowd that overflowed from the Mall in Washington when Jon Stewart, a fake newsman/comic who has the sharpest knife in the U.S. when it comes to ridiculing Fox News and other media excesses, and Stephen Colbert, the over-the-top patriot, had their rally for moderation, against the crazies who spout garbage.

That was the Silent Majority fed-up with the angry rhetoric of candidates and pundits who see every person who doesn't agree with them as evil. In Toronto, we have many examples of that, from Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallice, to give her the nickname hung on her by former colleagues, to those who talked more about Ford's fat and sweat than they did about his policies that so resonated with the voters, especially suburban voters.

Now we turn to Queen's Park, which resembles a kindergarten run amuck, with the Liberals and NDP quick to accuse the Tories and Ford as bigots because they don't fawn over the politically-correct vote.

There will be another record turnout next October when the McGuinty Liberals limp to the finish line. The best they can hope for would be a minority government if the Hudak Tories falter in the final weeks.

They don't deserved to be re-elected, considering the scandalous waste in health and their failure to deal with such festering problems as native demands and barricades.

A federal election can come any day since the opposition parties aren't exactly brilliant in dealing with Harper's Tories. They're liable to goof any day. Even if you dislike what the Conservative government has been doing, consider the alternatives - Michael Ignatieff, who's still learning on the job as a "new" Canadian, Jack Layton, incapable of appealing to most voters, and the traitors from Quebec who know only how to make a good living from the threat of separatism.

The Toronto results are heartening, but we can't rest. There's always a mouthy minority out there, whether unionists, social activists or party stalwarts, who don't want new faces to be elected because that could bring change and that would upset their cushy world of fat contracts, grants and patronage.

To give just one huge example, under the policies of David Miller and the council majority when he was mayor of Toronto, it was impossible to cut spending because under the city's fair wage policy, no company could come in with a bid on a contract that was drastically below what the competition made.

After all, every company had to pay 95% of what a few bureaucrats decreed was the prevailing wage for that work. And in too many cases, non-union companies weren't even considered, although provincial legislation exists to protect all workers from sweat-shop conditions. The fair wage policy is more than a century old, rooted in a past where unions and labour legislation had no clout.

The provincial government's fair wage rate is lower than the city's, and the feds rate is much lower. Labour councils and union presidents insist that most workers are unionized so what are critics grumbling about, but the obvious truth is that union membership is declining, except for public service unions, and with the horrible example of how the auto worker contracts caused the North American car industry to collapse, workers aren't rushing to become unionists. (Written as a former union steward and bargaining chairman in the newspaper industry 50 years ago when reform was needed.)

I have written for years about how costly the city's fair wage policy is, but Toronto council has never had a real debate on it. For several months, Mayor Ford, to union horror, has promised one. And a change would save millions since this would affect nearly $200 million a year in city spending. Yet we already have new councillors saying they want to keep the fair wage policy before they have heard the facts and figures of a complex situation. They don't seem to realize that workers now have legislated protection which never existed at the birth of the policy.

There can be real savings to the taxpayers if they insist to their politicians that they just can't let the gravy train continue where everyone benefits except the general public. Every nook and cranny of an obese City Hall must be re-examined, from fair wage policies to the weird ban on herbicides to the moratorium on safe incineration rather than burying it in expensive landfills.

The only thing that should be buried is business as usual.

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.