IS CASINO AT THE EX LEGAL?

COURT CHALLENGE WOULD BE INTERESTING

With no due respect, I wonder if the city lawyers are right when they say that a casino can be built at Exhibition Place and its tangled history has been cleared by city legislation.
The reason I wonder is at least one muncipal law expert wonders what would happen if some citizen or councillor took the issue to court. Admittedly, back in 1879 when it all began, casinos were more of the Wild West, redeye-at-the-bar variety. So the federal government couldn't have envisioned that much of the public land known as the Garrison Common that the cabinet was giving the city for fairs, demonstrations and park was going to be consumed by a giant foreign casino complex where the object is not to entertain but to extract tens of millions from Torontonians.
I'm sure that skyscrapers filled with lawyers billing hundreds per minute will say that it's all just peachy legally. But not all lawyers will agree. After all,  a Canadian bank  refused to finance entrepreneurs who wanted to build a major project at the Ex because its lawyers didn't like the grey questions around  three versions of the city acquiring the land for fun and parks.
And these entrepreneurs were rich and could have paid for it themselves. Except that's not the way these entrepreneurs got rich.
I have raised these questions over the years as a governor of Exhibition Place (EP) and a director of the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) . When I was vice-chair of EP and CNE president, the answers were the same as when I was just one of the guys. No problem,  I was told. But what about the legal opinion given the entrepreneurs? Since EP was run by a lawyer on loan from City Hall, I would have accepted the reassurances except they were general and vague and not specific and definite as if they were carved in stone.
Alan Tonks, then Metro chairman and now Liberal MP, went off to Ottawa to talk about the ownership and various uses. I wondered why he had to clear the air, so to speak, when  the city legal report this year dated Feb. 6 insists that since 1954, when the downtown council gave the Ex to the Metro regional government because it didn't want to pay for it,  the city can use the park, now legally called a place, for any purpose.
 That's in addition to a list of stated uses including parks, exhibitions and fairs in addition to sports and public entertainment. Ironically, this latest version of city council is compelled by its own act to hold an annual fair. Since the city through EP management keeps making this difficult, it will be interesting if EP covers most of the site with buildings that the fair can't use, what the city will then do for a fair.
Of course the fair became independent from the city on April 1, April Fool's Day, which certainly captures how the fair directors felt they were treated by the city.
I'm hardly opposed to casinos. I moved the motion for the fair to have one and was involved in the early discussions with Queen's Park over this, since the city officially was and still is opposed to year-round casinos.
A casino on the waterfront would be great. There's plenty of locations for one without jamming it in EP, which would kill the fair. It's not important to me whether any reader ever goes go to the Ex, or says stupidly that there's never anything new there. The key question is why ruin a fair that doesn't cost the city a cent, in fact pays millions to the city in rent and various charges, when there are expanses of land where even a pothole would be an improvement?
Remember that I'm not a lawyer. Thank God. But I hate reading a city legal report that pretends that there hasn't been major concerns and that if the city really screws around with the place, anappeal could go to the courts or the Commons.
The picture above of the Princes' Gates is a symbol to me of the BS and downright rudeness that has been turned on the CNE for daring to point out that a casino complex would kill the Ex and that the only reason there is an EP today is because of an entire century when directors drawn from all over Southern Ontario built the Ex and ran the Ex while Toronto councillors pleaded for free meals and passes and drinks. They  interfered so much with the politics of the Ex that Paul Godfrey, the Metro chairman who now presides over lotteries and overpays his staff,  and Bill Davis, one of our best premiers ever, changed the provincial act about how the Ex is run just in case they wanted to build a domed stadium there free of city opposition.
The confusion over who runs what down there, which baffles too many directors and governors, should be blamed on those Tory Twins who took a fine organization and crippled it.
Lately, of course, casino propagandists have slapped this image on their proposals and then some jerk councillor got upset when the CNE complained legally that no one had any right to presume to use the images and history and reputation of the CNE without the fair's blessing.
The fair may be the only outfit at the table with clean hands. Ironically, too many governors, EP brass and city councillors are the ones acting like carnies.

SURVIVING THE BLOODY MARATHON

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

It was going to be one of those nice achievements where the parents feel as good as the son who accomplished the feat.  John Henry was running the Boston Marathon.
Who knew that at the end of the fabled race that he and his wife and son would be dancing with the devils. The Boston Marathon will now be remembered as the bloody marathon.
They survived, intact,  except for memories of the bloody marathon they will carry forever. It was 2.50 p..m. on April 16 when life changed for them and for Boston.
I gave his background on Jan. 18 in a blog titled Marathon of a Vanished Life. My son was celebrating his 51st birthday by running with the Leukemia team in memory of my mother who died from the disease 21 years before he was born.
So there he was, tired, in the final stretch, with the finish line almost in sight, where his wife Marie and son John Henry Francis, 22, waited loyally, to hug him and congratulate him on his best time as an experienced runner, and then take him to the hotel where he would ache and decompress like a deep sea diver.

Marie describes the picture which was taken by my grandson seconds before the blast, one of his pictures given to the FBI.  She has her back turned,  left of the centre under the South African flag, a red bag over her shoulder, checking the official clock.
 Off to her right,  there are the three yellow balloons, significant in the investigation because videos showed they are being carried just ahead of the terrorists.
This is what she wrote a day later, at times flashing back to the middle of the agony: "The first blast occurred about six flags down from where I am standing. I was extremely lucky as I was about to move there. My son was about 20 feet away, having just taken this shot.
"Then.... I hear a cannon blast and everything starts changing.The power of the blast knocked me to the ground. The smell was of gun powder . The smoke was engulfing the crowd.
"It took a couple of seconds before I could get up. I was disoriented and confused. I looked to my left, everyone was running away, looked to my right, and saw carnage and blood. Blood was everywhere. What sticks to my mind are the bloody foot prints leading away. I have no injury, except for the ringing in my ear and a sore scalp from the explosion blast. I can't understand why I cannot hear my own screaming. I am screaming my son's name over and over.
"He was running in circles, trying to locate me, because he could not see me. Once we found each other, he turned back to help the victims, some of whom were in pieces. The cops were screaming for us to leave ASAP as there might be other bombs. They were as forceful as if they were on adrenaline. Then they started tearing up the barrier trying to get to the victims.'
"My son took charge, manhandling me away, I was screaming my husband's name in hysterics, thinking I would see a crater in the road from the blast. I knew he was moments away from the finish line and in real danger. We tried phoning him several time, but the cell lines were overloaded. We finally found out he was okay through an iPhone app called 'life 360'.
"My son  told his dad to stop running and to meet us at the hotel. Took us 30 minutes to walk to our hotel. John joined us within 15 minutes. Was beyond relief to see him."

John Henry didn't need his son to tell  him to stop running towards the wounds and confusion, an instant  wall of police stopped all the runners. He finished by hobbling along a parallel street, Commonwealth Ave. His time is a personal record, 23 minutes ahead of all his other races. A time he hopes to beat when he runs in his final marathon near  his  home south of L.A. in a few weeks.
Marie phoned to tell me they were okay while the smoke still drifted. I knew nothing of the bombing but I could tell from her voice that it was really bad.
Then my grandson took to the Internet to write "me and family ok in boston."
The next day, John Henry and Marie went to the finish line that the bombers and police had prevented him from crossing. And he got his medal.
They didn't know yet just how close it really had been for Marie. Luckily my grandson wasn't hunting for a better vantage point to get a good picture of dad because he would have gone into the area of death and destruction.
My son Brett, a programming expert who can dazzle with what he can coax out of computers, co-ordinated scene pictures from every source with what my grandson had taken. He calculates there were just three people between Marie and the hail of amateur but deadly shrapnel that sliced through the crowd just to her right like battle axes.
These Downings don't believe in premonition but the flight from Orange County in California had been the kind you want to forget - a roller coaster ride so rough, the flight was aborted like a bird with a damaged wing and they spent much of a day in Washington instead.
After all the training and planning and fund raising, the bloody marathon almost seemed a happy routine just over four hours into the race. The special digital clock that Marie was checking was about to read  4.09.49. All around her in the picture the expectant crowd craned to see "their runners," their loved ones. As Marie wrote later: "The victims are in this crowd, their lives about to change within seconds. Why?"

     

Ch

TORONTO SUN COLUMNIST JEAN CHRETIEN???

                       FORMER PM DEPLORES DECLINE OF COMMONS

The other night, the Liberals were honouring the 50th anniversary of Mike Pearson becoming PM, which gave me a chance to chide another former PM, Jean Chretien, for turning me down when I asked him to be a Sun columnist.
Chretien took a break from "earning a living'' to spend time at U of T with academics and Grits remembering Pearson. Then he was at a private dinner also remembering the baseball nut who became PM before he flitted off again. At 79, there's no sign the "petit gars de Shawinigan" is slowing to a retired pace.
I fetched him a drink at the private function which I can't describe because it was off-the-record. So I can't tell you that he gave an impromptu witty speech which managed to lament the passage of the nicer days of Parliament while taking a swipe without names about MPs not being able to speak out whenever they wanted.
I would continue but it was off-the-record, which wouldn't have stopped all the Grits from shooting off their mouth about the event to all their friends who weren't lucky enough to make the cut.
Fortunately we were chatting before the cloak dropped.  I was surprised that there was no need to refresh Chretien's memory about the job offer because,  I suppose,  he first hought it strange at the time and faithful Sun readers would have been apoplectic.
I hasten to add it hadn't been my idea but it grew on me. Chretien had just retired because of that defeat by John Turner and he was riding the crest of popularity over his unlikely bestseller Straight From The Heart.  So his publisher Anna Porter had a party for the book he wrote with Ron Graham at the old Campbell House on University.
It was Doug Creighton's idea when he found out that I was going to the reception that Chretien as a Sun columnist would be like a rock through a stained glass window for our readers but it might actually get more Liberals to buy the tabloid they loved to hate. So he told me to make the pitch.
As the new Editor, I wasn't about to say no to the founding publisher but I was mortified at the prospect of being made to look like a fool when an agile parliamentarian rejected me with ridicule.
I agonized over the approach because Chretien was always ringed by admirers. But by some miracle, we ended up at the end of the bar at the same time looking for replenishment. So I introduced myself and said we thought he would be a provocative addition to our barrage of columnists.
He laughed and laughed. He turned away and shouted at some party workers that "Downing here wants me to be a Sun columnist. How ridiculous is that?"
The hell with this,  I thought. But in for a penny, in for a pound. So I persisted, pointing out that I doubted he had really retired from politics and this would be a useful way to keep his name and his thoughts before the people. Much better, I pointed out, than if he was in the Star because people wouldn't find that remarkable.
This gave Chretien pause. His amiable scorn started to evaporate. He was thinking about it, egged on by two insiders he had roped into the conversation who thought it was a "helluva idea," providing I wasn't pulling a stunt.
Then Porter called on him for a speech and he left me. He promised to think about it and call me from Montreal. He never did.
Except it turns out the idea didn't die. Chretien told me the other night that there had been a proposal to match his new Liberal column in the Sun with a new Conservative column by Peter Loughead, who had just retired as Alberta premier.
And then I remembered that the Porters - Anna, the publisher, and Julian, the noted libel lawyer and   son of Tory royalty - for years hosted receptions in their home for all the big shots of Alberta.  So that must have been the hothouse for the Chretien-Loughead duet in opinion.
It has always surprised me that Chretien's book was such a huge success. Was it due to him or Graham?So I asked how it all came about. He said that Anna, the head of Key Porter Books, told him she thought he had a good book in him. "I told her Madam I am not a writer. She asked again. I said Madam I don't write books. And she asked again. I said Madam I am a lawyer. And she asked again. I said Madam I am retired from politics. And she wrote a cheque. And I wrote a book."
It would be a mistake to think Chretien disliked everything about the Sun because he had a special relationship with Doug Fisher, the legendary Sun political columnist after he defeated a Liberal giant, C.D. Howe, and become an MP.  Chretien said when he arrived on Parliament Hill in 1963 as the nervous rookie MP from Saint-Maurice-Lafleche, he was the uncomfortable outsider from small-town Quebec in an English city. "The very first person I saw was Doug Fisher. And he took me everywhere and showed me everything. He didn't speak much French and I didn't speak much English but I never forgot that."
Chretien is proud of how many books he sold. When a Canadian book sells at least 2,500, it's called a best-seller. Chretien boasts that his book sold several hundred thousand. I wonder how many extra papers his column would have sold for us. I certainly wouldn't have looked forward to the mail.

WHEN TORONTO MAYORS BOMBED AND GOT BOMBED

VETS MADE THE BEST POLITICIANS

I read all the nice comments about Fergy Brown, who deserves any praise that anyone has to offer, but all I could think of after his death was the day he bombed a pub.
No, he bombed it, he didn't get bombed in it. No, not that day....
Fergy, the veteran York politician and mayor, was an agreeable delight at the big regional council of Metro. He knew political BS when he saw it. After all, he was from a very modest suburb that didn't have time for grandiose politics. But unlike too many Toronto politicians  (insert any name, there are hundreds) he would not explode into verbal histrionics but contented himself with a few cutting sentences
And a few bitter asides. He would make sure in the City Hall lounge tthat I had heard the crap too. Oh yes, he appeared a gentleman, and he sure was, but privately he had seen too much nonsense over the years from politicians who didn't give a damn for any voter. Everything was aimed at self-promotion so they could con the voters for another term.
Life wasn't easy for the immigrant kid who dropped out of York Memorial High School but, like many dropouts, rescued his life through military service. He joined the RCAF in 1942 and became a bomb aimer, what many call a bombardier. He was with 189 Squadron, 5 bomber group, when his crew went out on a training mission.
Decades later, Fergy would give an embarrassed laugh when I would coax him to tell the story again. He never went into detail but what he did that day was drop the practise bombs on a pub. No, not just any old pub but the one near the Lincolnshire air field. He wasn't exactly popular the next time the chaps went for a brew.
I joked that among his medals there should be a miniature beer stein.
And Fergy's medals were not exactly forgotten around the drug store he started after the war which became a neigbourhood centre where Fergy dispensed medicine and advice.
After all, York was the kind of place, from Mount Dennis up to the leafy streets of Weston, which was a great place to go to high school, as I did, where there were the kind of feuds and dynasties that you usually find in a town. There were the Tonks and the Nunziatas and Fergy vs. Phil White.
 Chris Tonks was a good mayor for several years until an undeserved scandal tarnished him and cost him the family home. His son Alan became York mayor and then Metro chairman and now is the area's Liberal MP.
Fergy kept tangling with Phil White, also a pharmacist. And White was one of the great jerks. I wrote a few times that when Fergy was off in the RCAF, White had removed himself to South America to avoid service. Not exactly a popular thing in the eastern area of York with the big synagogues of Beth Tzedec and Holy Blossom.
But White shrugged off my criticism of his war by saying I hated him. Which was true.  He lasted for eight years. Then Gayle Christie and Fergy, mayor from 1988 to 1994, made us forget the odour.
It turns out, however, that Fergy wasn't the only mayor from Toronto to accidentally drop bombs.
That came out when I was trying to unearth the details of one of the strangest flights from the Island Airport.
Allan Lamportl. Don Summerville and Eddie Sargent liked to get together and have a few "pops" and argue about the war and political idiots and just shoot the shit.
Lampy, of course, was the famous city politician who was mayor and is remembered now for his Lampoonisms and his name on a second-rate stadium.
 Summerville was briefly mayor before he died playing goal in a charity hockey game, and is remembered with his name on a big east-end pool. (His name is generally misspelled in flashbacks.)
And Sargent was mayor of Owen Sound before he became a Liberal MPP who kept getting expelled from the Legislature and is remembered with his name on a parkway. A picture of the pepper pot is on the right.
The trio were, as they say, overly refreshed one day when they rented a plane from the Wong brothers and proceeded to fly east without paying much attention to air traffic controllers while arguing about who was the better pilot. Apparently there was the occasional laughing scramble over the controls of the Cessna.
They spotted Petawawa and decided to plop in for a visit. They landed and found "Pet" virtually deserted. A point that Sargent made the next day during Question Period while the Tory benches kept pointing out that the government had nothing to do with military bases. Then Sargent was challenged for proof they had actually landed there. He produced the formal sheet of "Orders of the Day" which they had stolen off the main bulletin board.

The story didn't get much coverage by news reporters but to a daily columnist this was a tasty fruit cake. I kept probing Sargent, a stormy figure out of Grey County, and he finally, with a malicious grin, told me to ask Summerville about bombing the Ex.
Summerville confessed that on a bombing practise run in Toronto before he was sent overseas he did accidentally trigger the bombs too soon and dropped them on the Canadian National Exhibition rather than out in Lake Ontario. Fortunately the Ex was not on.
Summerville wasn't even mayor for a year but when he died, he got a rare state funeral, City Hall version. His bier was in the old council chamber, and even the Star, which didn't think Summerville was their type, said there was an extraordinary viewing. His wife Alice was an alderman for years because of the power of the Summerville name in the eastend where they had owned two theatres.
I talked to these four convivial mayors by the hour. What a rich life they had had. An hour with Lampy sipping his favourite champagne and me with a rum and coke was a delightful way to cover politics. But the only time the mayoral mad bombers got rather vague was when I asked about what damage they had inflicted and what discipline they received. But then they may not have been disciplined at all because the C.Os. were laughing so hard. Besides, they were practise bombs that didn't explode but were rather heavy to replicate aerodynamics. Still, they were the last thing you would want to come down on you while ordering another draft.

POTSHOTS AND POLITICAL SKEET SHOOTING

 
                                   WE NEED MORE ITEM BLOGGERS

During those days when I felt like a caffeinated hamster running in a wheel - having to find six columns a week can do that for you - I  got a memo from Doug Creighton, the amiable but tough critic of every last bit of writing in his Toronto Sun.
"Liked your column today. It would be great if you wrote more item columns," he said.
I fought with Creighton regularly in his role as founding publisher of the Sun and indeed the whole Sun chain. Even when we were drinking. But I didn't respond to this hint because I knew he was right. And I also knew, as any columnist does who has to dance naked daily before the readers, that there would be few item columns from me, also called three-dot columns because of the usual typographical device to separate the  paras, because any daily columnist who figures they can stretch an item to a full column isn't going to waste the opportunity.
After all, tomorrow beckons with skeletal fingers.
Most columnists know they stretch and repeat, and it's better to shoot as if the targets are political clay pigeons. But except for the entertainment department's recycling of press releases and movie guff,  and the humorous bits cobbled together by Page 6 performers like Dunford in his glory, few do it. Look inside the item sports columns and you see that some items are serialized
You may have only one jab or nice turn of phrase on the subject. Still, you still stretch it out.  Like too many news stories. My job used to be to do "follows" on the final edition so big stories would have a fresh angle for the next day's paper.  I certainly learned from experience that most  stories are 95% old stuff and, if you're lucky, a provocative icing on top of the old fruit cake.
If only more bloggers acted more sensibly than to give us repetitive harangues.
If only the Star didn't use every opportunity when Mayor Ford steps into another cow flap to recite everything he has ever done wrong, from an ancient drunk driving conviction to, perhaps, cheating in the sand box.
Before I take potshots, for a change. let me get into the Star vs. Ford and drinking and appearing spaced out or whateverinhell is his latest boo boo is supposed to be.
I am sensitive on the subject of booze accusations, not because it is so common in the news business but because I once overheard the whisper that one reason the Toronto Telegram failed was because Creighton and Downing, two of the bosses, drank so much.
The fact the gossiper was a woman I've known since we were in Grade 1 really made it sting. All she was doing was repeating some malicious comment by someone that either Creighton or I had disciplined or fired. As the managing editor and the assistant managing editor, we found it difficult to keep everyone happy, especially when the ship was listing.
The casual observer might think that the two of us spent a lot of time partying or at lunch. But the same observer would not know that we came to the Tely at 6 a.m., worked until about 12.30, then went for a nice restorative lunch, probably at the old Franz Josepf Room or Swiss Bear in the vanished Walker House,  came back to the office about 2 to put out the latest fires, and the final edition, and then worked and planned until 6 or 7.  In addition to that 50-hour work day, we often were out in the evening and weekends on must occasions like boring banquets.
There often was rum in my diet coke, but often there wasn't, and no one knew except bartenders. And unless you get falling-down drunk and drive, it's no one's damn business. I could be on the wagon for a month and no one knew, which is the way it should be. Many of us who work and play hard and love a cold one take pauses from time to time. And the mayor certainly is under constant pressure and often under a hostile microscope which records his every fart and belch.
Occasionally Ceighton and I went to the early races, and had a great time, often with Toronto Star editors who relaxed the same way even if the Star has always had some sanctimonious executives.

                                                                             .......

       Now some potshots, which are a lot more fun than anything about the Star.
                                                                            ......
Isn't it about time that critics and bloggers and bloated letter writers retired or trashed that stupid comment by Conrad Black that all journalists are either lazy or intellectually dishonest?  After all, there are legions of North Americans who were cheated by Black and his cronies because he was so lazy and intellectually dishonest that he lived on our money, not his.    
The Establishment figured out Black before the rest of us did. But they had a head start because of his cheating at Upper Canada College. As one Establishment pillar, Hal Jackman, the former lieutenant-governor, said famously, Conrad was a friend of his but he never dreamed of investing in one of his companies.
 I think it is bizarre, considering his dismal record and court losses, that Black gets published in the Post, and I told Paul Godfrey that in person. He didn't even blush when he said Black got the highest  rating in readership surveys. Shame on Post readers? I'm with the financial community of stock brokers and furious investors who sent in petitions saying Black should be stripped of his Order of Canada.
Ironically, if reporters acted the way Black has through the years, they would never be able to keep a job.

                                                    .....................

Don't all transit funding stories sound the same?
Can you image in this over-taxed land that anyone sane would regularly propose new taxes to help subsidize transit riders who already cost city taxpayers an annual fortune.

The local board of trade is a well-meaning stuffed-shirt outfit and I can say that as someone who turned down a lucrative job there. Which came with free golf membership, but then they sold the golf courses.
When the board, composed of fatcats who can pick their own times to come and go, thus avoiding the rushhours, recommends a 1% regional sales tax and a 10-cent tax on each liter of gas, it's ignoring the fact that all of us who don't have tax lawyers on their speed dial already lose half of our income to taxes.
The existing excessive tax on our gas was started originally to pay for road and transportation improvements only. And that was the widely publicized excuse. Now it is used to bail out governments when they're going bankrupt on their latest wet dreams. There's more than enough collected there to fund a subway to Hudson Bay with all those nice new trains that look so great when they're not jammed like railway cattle cars.
If you want more proof about how gasoline taxes used to be justified by politicians, consider that when  when President Dwight Eisenhower built the mighty interestate highway network in the U.S., he said  this  may cost a fortune (hundreds of billions in present dollars) but it wouldn't be paid for out of income tax but by taxes on the gasoline used by all the motorists who would use roads like I-75 to drive the width and length of the country.
I'm sure that the same arguments were used when the 400 highway network was built in Ontario.
I actually tried to get around the U.S. and Canada before all the super roads were built. The trips were longer, indeed we now drive the same distance in half the time.
It was big news when the Davis government eliminated the last tolls on roads in Ontario. Now the idiots want us to this again? C'mon, tolls were originally collected by workers who got their jobs through politics. So now we avoid more government workers in booths  and go to electronic devices like transponders. And then we hire a lot more people to look after the balky gadgets and collect the payments, an  operation which, as has been shown from the stupid operation of 407,  can be inept and infurtiating.
The public is smarter than the pols since polls show that there is wide skepticism on transit taxes even though everyone knew that we were supposed to tell the pollsters that we really did believe it was fair and intelligent to let governments steal a lot more  bucks out of our wallet .
                                                             
                                                                ......

Another story about another chief planner who walks downtown and takes a short subway ride to work. Maybe we should only hire major planners and transportation officials who face gridlock daily and don't ignore or write off the concerns of the millions who chose not to live downtown with the comfortable and the young not smart enough yet to reduce their overhead by not paying a ransom to own or rent condos.
Let's have less crap about the virtues of walking and cycling and more serious study on improving the existing network by removing the kinks because most people and all commerce move around by vehicles while also paying hefty subsidies to the transit riders. And, oh yes, hefty fuel taxes.

                                                         ............

Ralph Klein was an untidy hard-drinking Tory populist mayor and later premier, exactly the kind of man who would have bothered the hell out of the Toronto Star and the semantic egotist, Conrad Black.
After all, he started life as a City Hall reporter. And somehow despite the sleazy laziness that Black tars all journalists with,  even before they reported his convictions and court defeats with relish,  he managed to become the legendary King Ralph who was one of the most popular politicians ever to hoist a beer in Calgary.
Golly, you think the reason the Star hates another other overweight populist so much is because it fears he may also go on to be a premier several times. Have to nip these people politicians in the bud so they can't become politically incorrect Grit-haters who scorn the phoneys and pretentious.
No, that is not another reference to Black, but it could be.
Of course the Star chose to run a picture of a fat, sweaty Klein with a drink in his hand on its Internet front page after Ralph died.  Assholes!

THE OSCARS OF CANADIAN JOURNALISM

WE USED TO JUDGE BY THE NNAs

When I was a kid reporter surrounded by what I considered the giants of Canadian journalism, the annual National Newspaper Awards were a really big deal.
The Toronto Telegram got more than its share of NNAs. And when I left my decorated colleagues and went out into the trenches to do battle with the Star in one of the toughest newspaper fights in North America, I was facing more award winners, although, as we crowed, not as many as the Tely's.
The NNAs were handed out on a great weekend that was the Toronto Press Club's not-so-humble celebration like the Oscars  in L.A. Invitations to some events had to be earned. Politicians on the make made sure they were there. It was the anchor in our claim to be Canada's best newspaper town.
It all began with the Byline Ball on Friday night, then a Saturday brunch for the Canadian News Hall of Fame, then the presentation banquet with a famous speaker like Walter Cronkite. Survivors would struggle into the Sunday brunch thrown by Toronto firefighters where they handed out their awards.

 I remember Mayor David Crombie giving a speech there lambasting most of the press in the room and then giving me as press club president a set of gold cuff links with the city crest. (Today that would be scandalous.)
Upstairs in the Royal York were the roaring hospitality rooms of companies like INCO which figured it was a smart idea to wine and dine the press, just as the firefighters did to ensure they got paid as much as the cops. Room numbers were prized.
Now mostly just memories,  except for the NNAs. And there are some, particularly at the Toronto Sun, the Tely's phoenix, who claim an official cold shoulder by the NNA committee, although Andy Donato has been nominated this year. Yet with his incredible production record, you would have thought he would have won more than once.
The ball featured a Miss Byline contest, which may seem quaint now, especially to feminists. But many beauty queen winners, such as Judy Welch as Miss Toronto, found it launched great careers. And Carol Goss Taylor, went from Miss Byline to Miss Toronto to head of the CBC and B.C.'s finance minister. The night of the ball, she was just this lovely shy thing from my old high school, Weston, and her parents said she needed a chaperone. So Mary and I looked after her, although if her Dad had known some of my thoughts, I wouldn't have been acceptable.
The ball is gone, along with the Press Club, the hall of fame and most beauty contests. The banquet wanders the land, demonstrating, I guess, that the NNAs are  truly national even though the idea was born and nurtured in Toronto which remains Canada's best media town. Firefighters have a separate lunch.
I look back on all this with some bemusement as someone involved in every part of the weekend and press club and later as a NNA judge. And I remember, as many of us do, my entries that I think should have won the NNA instead of that #$%*$##@ one.
That was as a columnist. My record as an editor is much better because I like to think that I was responsible directly for two winners, indirectly for one, and then there was my advice to Donato in 1976 that he was putting in the wrong three cartoons in his entry. So I made the final cut, he won, and for several years, I was pressed into service each January as his advisor. When that didn't work, he went back to ignoring any advice I might try to give him, especially if it was a cartoon idea.

Peter Geddes was a brilliant but moody two-way man at the Tely (both writer and photographer) when he left us for a sabattical in his native Australia. He had been back only a few days in 1964 when the Star came out with a Page One scoop that Bob Reguly had found Hal Banks in the Brooklyn navy yard..
 Reguly won an NNA for the story but not for the picture he took with a cardboard camera he bought in a drugstore. (When thugs spotted him and pursued, the cab saved him by speeding away. Reguly was so grateful, he took the film out and gave the driver the camera. Legend says the Star wouldn't reimburse him.)
Geddes was dispatched to Manhattan without knowing the slightest detail about this huge search that Canading authorities had been making for the crooked union boss
He phoned to tell me he was got one picture of Banks on the deck of a tug before goons had chased him. I relaxed. At least we had something. Then the darkroom technician brought me the dripping picture. I phoned Geddes to say he had photographed the wrong guy, that Banks, in casual clothes, was in the background, out of focus, while the guy in the gangster suit, sharp as a tack, was unknown to us. So Wasyl Kowalishen returned to the darkroom, with me standing over him giving unwelcome advice, and worked with the enlarger, dodging and using all the old tricks, until he rescued more of Banks.
And Geddes won that NNA even though it should have also gone to Reguly. Afterwards he turned his back on the business even though he had fluked into the top award. He said if he had continued, it would have cost him his marriage and turned him alcoholic. He never came to collect the award or cheque.
 Years later,  after Margaret Sinclair and Pierre Trudeau had just married and went skiing at Whistler, we discovered Geddes running the ski lift. He said he had sold all his cameras. I urged him to go to a drugstore, like Reguly, buy a disposable camera, shoot a roll and I would have it collected. He refused for any amount to scoop the country. In those days, not everyone had a camera in their phone.
When Michael Popovich won for the Tely in 1970, it was almost as strange as the Banks affair. He had written, sort of, the account of a drug addict shooting up in the grimy washroom of a restaurant on Dundas near Jarvis before he died.
The tale was all there, mangled, So I rewrote it, completely, from lede to death. Popovich never thanked me, submitted it to the NNAs, won, never thanked me again, and left the business to become a GTA councillor.
In 1989, I was the Sun Editor and determined to get more photographs into the paper.  I loved pictures, as do most readers, and we were a tabloid, daily discarding many pictures taken by one of the finest staffs of news photogs in North America. So I started two pages of pictures each Sunday in the Comment section. Some were photo essays, unrelated to hard news.
 One day I was brought a compelling array of pictures taken by Sun and other photographers on a private project to capture the gritty side of downtown. Sleeping on subway grates or in cardboard boxes etc. The gifted Fred Thornhill won the NNA that year because we ran his picture in that section that the  bosses grabbed away from me months later. The Sun has never repeated on a regular basis.
I was so impressed by a series of political gems by Doug Fisher that I urged him to enter the NNAs. When I found he hadn't at the deadline, I put in the entry for him. He won a Citation, and sat uncomfortably at the presentation because he didn't believe in that sort of thing.
But most of us do. It was wonderful to work with all the stars who won NNAs at the Tely and Sun  And I include on my list all those who won before or after they worked with me. I'm looking forward to Donato winning for a second time because he earns it for his wit, his pen and his longevity as a cartoonist and painter. Not bad for a golfer!
My list is a Roll of Honour:  Lubor Zink, Peter Worthington (4 times), Judith Robinson, Ken MacTaggart (2), Andrew MacFarlane (2),  John Fraser (3).  David Billington (2) Bill Dampier, Dorothy Howarth, Laurie McKechnie, Del Bell, Val Sears, Wayne Parrish (2), Jean Sonmor, Bill McGuire, Marilyn Dunlop, Bill Stevenson, Linda Diebel, Bob Hesketh, George Gross, Scott Young, Bob Pennington, Al Sokol, John Robertson, Al Strachan, Russ Cooper, Yardley Jones, Ralph Hicklin, Ted Reeve, Trent Frayne, Barry Gray, Allan Fotheringham,  Peter Dunlop, Stan Behal, Mike Cassesse (2), Christie Blatchford, Bob Reguly (3)  Ron Haggart, Bill Sandford, Tim McKenna, David Cooper, Sean Browne, Michael Peake, Veronica Milne........
I've probably forgotten some but the list is quite incredible, especially when you consider the bitching that the Sun is ignored. Just look at what its photographers have done, although that staff has shrunk  to a pale shadow, along with the space, and the photographs are processed in India.
However,  I'll always be quick to add more names from the Sun, and other former colleagues, because every winner should be special to colleagues and readers and be eternal despite any chill in the business.

ORDER OF CANADA: THE RIGGED AWARD

JUST WHO THE HELL ARE SOME OF THESE PEOPLE?

For those deprived people who don't read the Toronto Sun but pick up a free copy of the Star or Globe,  let me tell you that things can still get interesting with The Little Paper That Grew Up And Then Was Drowned By Crazies From Quebec.
Mark Bonokoski, a veteran columnist and editor, has nominated, in effect,  Peter Worthington, the first Sun editor and marathon columnist, for the Order of Canada, the second highest honour in the country.
Good for him! Bono knows how to lead with his heart. (As he demonstrated months after this column was written when he spoke at Worthington's funeral.)
A week after Bono's boost, Worthington declined, listing what he has done and covered in his incredible career,  like a veteran describing a chestful of medals and ribbons. His experiences were worth more than the honour, he said.
Of course Worthington should have been given the national honour years ago, far more deserving than the media hacks, dubious pols and industrial dictators who routinely are given the Order. But Worthington, I suspect, has been critical in a few of his thousands of columns and other media commentaries about the process and some winners, and the Establishment remembers these slights.
There is the problem that he was never a member of the Annex/Mount Royal axis of power that reveres CBC anchors, Globe columnists and Trudea in his canoe.
I am a veteran of selection committees for various honours, and the experiences have left me cynical about how too many people and their buddies push themselves forward with CVs that are longer, and just as strange, as any novel. They'll list every speech they gave, even if it was just to the kennel club.
I chaired Toronto's civic honours advisory committee before Mel Lastman abolished all that kind of stuff after amalgamation because he thought the suburbs would be jealous if a downtown tradition continued. I thought we did a good job, for example honouring Murray Koffler, the Shoppers founder,  when he had been slighted for years. And Jewish Torontonians notice those kind of things.
I was a director of the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, although a little baffled when the board installed the entire Canadian hockey team that beat the Russians in 1972. What happened to picking and choosing? Then the board took the hall to Calgary after the feds, Jean Chretien and Sheila Copps, screwed the old hall out of millions by grabbing away promised space in Ottawa. I suspect Copps' secret plan was to put it in Hamilton. All she got later was one of the finest fighting ship ever for Canada, destroyer G62, also known as Haida, which had a fine home already beside Ontario Place.
I have been a director from the start of the Canadian Disability Hall of Fame which used to be known as the Terry Fox Hall of Fame before the family grabbed the name back because they said it might interfere with their fund raising. This Hall is packed with wonderful and deserving recipients but the selection process can be arduous because of all the material that is sent supporting a few flimsy candidates.
I was there at the end of the Canadian News Hall of Fame. The board was spread across Canada and  wanted me to head it from Toronto but my secretary refused to help. And then no one else wanted to do it either.  There had been some controversial choices, like the committee member who didn't do much work until he stepped down to get the award,. There were obvious winners, like Worthington, and modest winners, like Doug Fisher, who only accepted because his columnist son Matthew told me he didn't want to embarrass me after I nominated him.
Fisher just didn't believe in these honours or in competitions like the National Newspaper Awards, the most important media awards in the country.   In fact he was only honoured in the NNAs because I sent in his entry. An honourable man who towered literally above his colleagues as Dean of the Ottawa Press Gallery, a title we at the Sun gave him, and it stuck.
Fisher never got an Order of Canada. His absence is embarrassing, and it must cause some of the media chuckleheads who did get one to squirm, that is if they are capable of embarrassment. Of course Fisher started life with the CCF-NDP and defeated a Liberal giant, C.D. Howe, in a win that rocked the country. In his gritty decades as a columnist and TV commentator, he used his files to unmask and excoriate politicians and policies across the spectrum. Many in the Establishment feared him, and didn't like his home, the Sun, for the same reason.
Worthington was a bigger thorn, but as his four NNA awards and one citation, in categories ranging from feature (1962) corresponding (1969) to editorial (1972) and enterprise (1978) demonstrate, he has been a major media figure for half-a-century.
I was one of the leaders in the campaign years ago to get an Order of Canada for Allan Lamport. A high point came when Hal Jackman, the former lieutenant-governor, took off his Order of Canada white pin at a dinner honouring Lampy and said he wouldn't wear it until his old friend got one too.
 I was told by Esmond Butler, the haughty private secretary to the Governor General, that it was unseemly - "it's just not done" - for anyone to campaign for anyone to get the honour and, in fact, it would kill any chance.
 I became irate, pointing out that Lampy was approaching 100. And he should be honoured for having been an MPP, Toronto mayor, veteran Toronto councillor and chair of the Toronto Transit Commission (when it meant something.) He launched a gale of change that ended the stuffy Sunday when nothing was open and blinds were down in store windows by getting Sunday sports approved. The fact that you can dine out or drink or go to a movie or shop on a Sunday in Toronto and later in Ontario is due to the Sabbath changes that Lampy started. He bulldozed through using language so contorted and colorful and apt that his Lampoonisms are still quoted by those who were in their diapers when Lamport stood astride urban politics like some colossus. Remember "you can't lead a dead horse to water."
If you want to know just how difficult it was to do anything on a Sunday, a bylaw had to be changed to allow for the Jays to play on Sunday afternoons, and that was in 1977.
It is just nonsense for any imperious aide to the GG to deny that there isn't fierce lobbying with the advisory committee. A senator sighed when he told me about how many people plead with him to put in a good word. Then there are campaigns organized by leaders (?)  who have been pushed into it by friends and constituents where dozens in public life are asked for letters of support,
A group of us organized that dinner for Lampy as part of our campaign to get him the honour. My heavens, we even got editorial support from the Toronto Star, which unnerved us a bit.
The galling fact is that there are too many recipients each year. It diminishes the honour.  The same thing happened in grandiose fashion when thousands in 2012 were given the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal. That was nice for recipients, and I pick my words carefully because I got one too. But it would be nicer if there were fewer, and I believe Worthington, who also got one, made that point too.
 It took years but Lampy finally got the Order in 1994, almost half a century after his colourful career exploded on the front pages of newspapers. Fortunately, he was still around, holding court every noon at the old Hot Stove Lounge at the Gardens like a genial emperor.
But this was ignored by the Sun even though it had been the leading media voice demanding that Lampy should get it when even convicted fraudsters like Viola MacMillan had one. (Obviously the process can be weird since Conrad Black and Garth Drabinsky got them even though questions had swirled for years around how they did business. I'm not mollified now that they've been cancelled.)
To demonstrate just how dumb it was when the Sun didn't print a story about Lampy, another recipient in that announcement by the GG was Lionel Schipper, a really nice lawyer and contributors to charity when he wasn't busy as chair of the board of directors of the Toronto Sun.
And the Sun forgot to mention him too. In fact, the Sun never even ran the list, with the excuse, perhaps, that it's not big news because too many get the Order. True, but a few do deserve it, like Peter, and he might even stop writing columns long enough to accept.
Not bad for an army brat!