TAXING FOR THE FUTURE WHILE LIVING IN THE PAST

UNFAIR, UNREALISTIC, INACCURATE.....

Three ways of describing municipal assessment in Ontario today. And if you want to disagree, say because you work for the Municipal Property Assessment Corp., be warned that one of those words is from Premier Dalton McGuinty.
Indeed, there is such an aura of stupidity, arrogance and sloppy arithmetic about MPAC and how it has screwed up, again, that I didn't feel it necessary to bellow.After all, even the premier doesn't think the latest barrage of numbers from MPAC are realistic. Of course, ever since the provincial ombudsman, Andre Marin, ripped to shreds how MPAC flopped at its task in 2006, MPAC has no defenders, other than a few profs who want to explain in Dick-and-Jane fashion how market-value assessment works.
So I was gentler than usual in a blog about the latest calculations from MPAC. And I conceded their task isn't simple. But observers like Penny Caldwell, the editor of Cottage Life, seemed to wonder about my restraint in a blog she writes.But I believe in the old lawyers' maxim. If you have a strong case, state it calmly. If you have a weak case, shout.
It's possible Ms. Caldwell has nerves scraped by all the incidents reported to her from cottage country about inane assessments. Yet I figure this time our case is so substantial, there is no need to bellow that these assessors may set a record as the stupidest bureaucrats on Planet Earth.
After nearly 6,000 columns and several thousand editorials, I am used to turning up the rhetoric. But when this fog of unreality hangs over an issue, let them stew in their own miscalculations.
In a blog, I said the assessment on my cottage on the Trent River has gone up 300% since Jan. 1, 2005, even though the only improvements made came after the MPAC deadline of Jan. 1, 2008, for the next round of tax increases.

Torontonians are also furious about their latest jumps in assessment, one of the two factors in determining your municipal taxes. (Councils set the other factor, the mill rate.)

And in the city, I've been hit again. But miraculously it was only a 27% increase. Of course my neighbour's house sold for $50,000 less than the asking price - and that was before the real estate market blew apart in this recession/depression - but the assessor once again ignored such pertinent info.

Up in cottage country around Burnt Point (where the Trent River curves south of Havelock) my neighbours are up in arms about increases far smaller than my cottage's 300%.

When the key people in the North Seymour Ratepayers Association get together to talk about what's happening with two massive developments that would ruin our area, they are furious about 55% and 60% increases.

The irony, of course, is that in columns for the Toronto Sun, and in pontifications on various TV and radio shows, I have predicted for several years that a slump in real estate was coming.

That was the "bust" part of the best-selling book by David Foot of U. of T. And cottage country faced huge problems in gasoline costs and cottage taxes. The spectre of pervasive unemployment hung over everything. This depression/recession didn't hit out of the blue. For several years if you went to the annual financial meetings of companies like the giant Fairfax insurance conglomerate, run by Prem Watsa, Watsa warned you that the perfect storm was going to hit the world economy.

It arrived right on schedule, but I don't think even Watsa realized just how many dumb jerks there were who could waste a billion dollars as if it was used gum.
Yet MPAC, plus more senior over-paid bureaucrats, didn't prepare for it. So major budgets were incapable of dealing with the emergenices. And all the assessment calculations for the coming years have been rendered meaningless because of the collapse of the real estate markets. We are supposed to pay taxes for years based on calculations that no longer make sense. Profs and politicians may argue that it really doesn't matter what the new market-value calculations are as long as everyone is treated the same. But, of course, they aren't all being treated the same when you have the assessments for some properties set below what the properties just sold for on the open market, and then there are all the properties where the assessment is higher than the taxpayers just paid.
What madness is this! When assessments are set too low on your property, your neighbours are screwed. When the assessments are too high, you're being screwed.
Where cottage assessments differ from those in the city is in the added value placed on water frontage. Yet around my cottage, and indeed in many stretches of shoreline in southern Ontario, there are now so many weeds due to zebra mussels, it's difficult to swim and some cottages have been up for sale for years. The carefree days when you couid romp or work in the water without water shoes and gloves is now just a memory. It's a regular battle against the snarls of weeds, and one you face with the active opposition of governments. There are gauntlets of permits, and if you do finally get permission to use a herbicide, it costs more than Channel No. 5.
Of course, cottagers hardly are given municipal services to match those routinely provided within even villages. The nearest real public road is 1.6 km from my cottage. The municipality sort of looks after another kilometre, leaving the vital final link up to us. We have, of course, no sewers, potable water, street lights and garbage collection, and, as we've found out during city strikes, don't even think of putting a child into the local schools.
Yet councils really don't appreciate all the revenue they get from their seasonal residents. Cottage taxes are useful to pay for improvements to infrastructure that benefit year-round residents most. But heaven help you if you have the gall to protest some local's scheme. Then you hear all about the NIMBYs who don't care about local jobs.
A councillor wrote the Sun after my column about this saying that I didn't have the right to criticize when I hadn't lived there year-round for years. The Trent Hills mayor mouthed similar malarkey after many cottagers had the audacity to show up to complain about a massive local development.
I proposed twenty years ago that Queen's Park stop this nonsense where cottagers were good only to be plucked as if they were chickens rather than golden geese. I said a royal commission should examine the fairness of cottage taxation and determine if they were paying more than their share, The commission could have been headed by someone like Frank Miller, a former premier and treasurer who owned two resorts. After all many hearings into taxation have produced some startling findings, such as the one chaired by Willis Blair, a prime-rib Tory and former senior councillor, who found in the late 1970s that there were thousands of properties in Ontario that paid no municipal taxes at all, due to corruption or stupidity.
Now that we face years of taxes based on unreal assessments, but the one man who could stop this does nothing but say he as premier hopes that councils will be gentle when they rape their taxpayers. And we're certainly not going to be aided by councillors like Toronto's budget chief, Shelley Carroll, who points out that homeowners don't pay that much towards the cost of services. (Of course, the way Toronto's council has sold out to the unions, the cost of those services has become obscenely bloated.)
When McGuinty asks councils to be reasonable, it's like putting a big steak in front of a pit bull and expecting it not to gobble it up if you ask nicely. Taxpayers will be lucky if their arms aren't chawed off.
The sad thing about all this is that it's only going to get worst. These MPAC estimates for what our properties are worth now for taxation purposes will seem like the cruelest joke ever perpetrated on the residents of Ontario who are no stranger to the jests of the clowns in government.

FAILING TO SUBTRACT WHILE ADDING IN COTTAGE TAXES

SCREWING UP A DIFFICULT TASK.....

There are few things more contentious than the assessment on your property, which is a key part in determining your municipal taxes. It's so difficult, the Ontario agency is almost in a lose-lose situation before it tackles, and fails, to determine accurately all the market values for all the properties in the 321 municipalities.
After all, there are around four million properties, so it's a formidable task for people who seem to have failed basic arithmetic. Or they may be just sloppy.
The problem is that if some bureaucrats screw up the assessments in your neighbourhood, every neighbour suffers because your property is judged by the value of all the other nearby homes, condos, shops and cottages. And if the assessments are too low on some homes, it means that home's owner is a freeloader on our taxes.
I have plenty of support for my argument that the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation is not doing a good job. Nope, not just the anguished stories that explode out of our newspapers and speciality publications like Cottage Life. MPAC, a non-profit agency, is just a decade old but has already been found wanting and condemned by its customer, the provincial government, thanks to damning examinations by its officials, and then came the scathing report of the independent ombudsman, Andre Marin.
But someone has to do the job. And, heaven knows, MPAC takes enough money from Queen's Park, more than $130 million annually, which helps run an elaborate appeal system. Is it needed! Too bad if you use a Mac, you're out of luck using any Internet links.
They err on both sides, too high and too low. I know of examples that will curl your hair even if you're bald.
Toronto's a mess, and cottage country is worse. Ratepayer groups are furious. I know of one property that sold a year or so ago for nearly $200,000. Obviously establishing a market value for that home is not hard, and that's a major fact in considering value at the crucial MPAC-decreed time of Jan. 1, 2008. Yet assessors, who knew that sales price, say the property is worth around $160,000. Then there's the house where the owners got a valuation a year ago of $330,000, but MPAC says the property is worth $100,000 less.
There are far more big increases, of course. On my cottage, of 300%. No, you didn't read that incorrectly. 300%!
Before I explain my horror story, let me emphasize the unreality about this entire process, which will determine the taxes we will pay until 2012. The foundation for what MPAC is doing rests on the assumption that the value of Ontario properties will stay the same or increase over the next four years.
Do I really have to point out that the value of 99.9% of the properties in Ontario has been sliding since Jan. 1, 2008, the point at which they fixed our assessments. Not only have the value of sales slumped dramatically, so have the number of sales. And it's only going to get worse when such giant employers as GM will either be closing or downsizing dramatically.
In my cottage area near Havelock, where many have commuted to GM jobs in Oshawa, not only will those homes and cottages be selling at lower prices, so will the homes dumped by city residents who won't be able to afford two properties when they're struggling to pay for one.
MPAC may want to argue that this won't matter since the same is true for all properties. Except councils will be slow to reduce the mill rates, which is the other factor for our taxes. Like almost all governments, those extra tens of millions will stick to the hands of the civil (?) servants and not come back.
Oh yes, about my own explosion in cottage assessment, which matches the horror stories in Cottage Life magazine. My assessment for Burnt Point on the Trent River was $76,000 on Jan. 1, 2005. I have the records. Except MPAC says it was $144,000. It appears this weird calculation is based on an assessment of $92,000 plus a new addition I built worth $52,000. Except MPAC knows that the addition was built and occupied after the crucial date of Jan. 1, 2008, because I had already appealed the occupancy date to MPAC and won. So the addition can not be used in the Jan. 1, 2008 calculation.
Yet MPAC decrees my cottage is now worth $226,000 for taxation purposes for the next four years. I have appealed, of course.
If I had made a string of basic mistakes like that as an editor or columnist, I wouldn't have lasted five decades in the media. The assessors shouldn't be free of the same performance demands that the rest of us face. Base part of their pay on the only market-value assessment figure that really counts, what properties actually sell for. Every time a property sells for less than what MPAC says is its market value, the assessors for that area are penalized and the taxpayer gets a rebate.
That's only a dream but it's better than this nightmare.

TORIES FACE LIBERALS AND NDP PROPPED UP BY TRAITORS

KEEPING ACCORD IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE IN COALITION OF JEALOUS MPs.....

An old wound ached the minute the Liberals and NDP fell into a passionate embrace in bed.

And afterwards the Bloc Quebecois smoked and said the coupling was a victory for separatism.
I remember when that happened provincially, fortunately without the BQ using the Grits and socialists in a coalition against our country.
It was early May in 1985 and the revolt was flourishing in Ontario over too many years of Tory rule.
Frank Miller just couldn't swim as premier with all that baggage on his back. So the Tories won only 52 seats with the Liberals under a new streamlined David Peterson coming close with 48. And the NDP were out of it. But...
Barbara Frum and the National needed a couple of "experts" to pontificate on national CBC TV on election night. So I agreed, even though I knew this was dangerous in only my fourth month as Editor of the Toronto Sun. I knew that Doug Creighton, the boss of Sun Media, hated his experts giving their views away on TV, especially the CBC, right in the heat of battle when they should be in the office.
I even knew when it all began, when Bob Frewin, the football expert for the Tely and Sun, was so busy with the electronic media that he couldn't file during the Grey Cup, leaving me to write the play-by-play of the biggest game of the year.
But I went to the studio convinced I would be back in an hour or so. But the election was so close, we did one National for the Maritimes, then a second for Ontario, then a final one for the West. And I returned feeling guilty.
At that time, the Sun was the largest Conservative paper in the country. And I wasn't about to jettison Miller when he was four seats ahead. After all, the Tories were masters at minority government. So I wrote the editorial that, of course, the Tories should continue in power.
Then my world collapsed. I was in the composing room putting in the final comment when Ed Monteith, the powerful news boss, said with a smirk that Creighton was furious and wanted to speak to me ASAP.
Creighton insisted my editorial say that the Tories had blown it, and Peterson, with whom he was friendly, should take over. I said no, that parliamentary tradition gave first crack at governing to the leader with the most seats. He insisted. I refused.
Creighton hung up in a fury. So I, as the new Editor, enlisted the help of the new publisher, Paul Godfrey, only eight months in the job. Godfrey was calm and sympathetic when I roused him in the middle of the night, saying I was right and he would talk to the boss.
That didn't work. Creighton was still furious the next morning but I only found that out through others. He rdidn't talk to me for days. I had worked with him and for him since 1958, but I might as well have been in an igloo.
Two days after the election, I was drowning my concerns about my perilous position at the Toronto Press Club. We were honouring the latest inductees in the news hall of fame. We had persuaded the Lieutenant Governor, John Black Aird, to preside.
Afterwards, Aird, a Bay St. lawyer with the bearing of a leader of the Establishment, took Knowlton Nash and me aside
Everyone knew Nash, the most famous voice in the country, and I had met Aird over the years primarily at functions organized by Creighton. But then Creighton, a Conservative, knew everyone, even Liberals.
I raised the growing controversy over the minority government and asked if Aird had seen it coming. I didn't expect a complete answer. But Aird then began a remarkable candid talk about what he faced.
He said he sensed it would be minority and several days before the election, had asked his lawyer, the legendary John J. Robinette, to come see him the morning after.
He then asked what we though about the need for another election. I said that Ontario voters had been averaging an election a year since the 1970s, if you added the federal, provincial and municipal elections, and were election weary. Nash agreed. And then, to our surprise, Aird said he did too.
So we chatted amiably about letting the Tories have a chance and then, if they floundered, letting Peterson become premier. And we had another drink.
Nash said later that he was astounded Aird had been so open about seeking our opinion and telling us what he was thinking. Then he asked whether I was going to write about it. After all, Aird hadn't said it was off-the-record. I said that the press club had an understanding that things said there stayed there. And I wasn't going to write about it because I thought Aird treated us as gentlemen who wouldn't run to the nearest phone. Nash agreed, which was important to me. After all, he wasn't just a talking head but a shrewd author who had been a wire service reporter and Washington columnist.
So there were at least three people not surprised weeks later when Aird ignored a possible election and gave the Liberal-NDP Accord a chance to work because of Tory turmoil. But not all our colleagues agreed. Bob MacDonald, the acerbic Sun columnist, said Aird had reverted to his days as a Liberal bagman and it was disgraceful.
The column was so rough, I expected a vice-regal call. But Aird never mentioned it. But then he was that kind of guy. A born leader who performed brilliantly in his post because he was a natural populist. He played floor hockey with the Variety Village kids despite the pain of a chronic bad back. He learned sign language. And when he left the job, I wrote an editorial that he had mounted in plastic and kept on his desk at the law office. Maybe there was some extra praise triggered by his forbearance when the Sun writers belted him around like a puck.
I'm sure he consulted widely, and not just with Canada's most famous criminal lawyer, the national TV anchor and a newspaper editor. I'm sure Governor-General Michaelle Jean did the same. One of the reasons they have the post is because they know how, like Mark Twain, to take soundings of their surroundings.
I was reminded in the Dec. 10 issue of the useful news letter called Inside Queen's Park (founded by that amiable expert, Graham Murray) about the negotiations in 1985 between key Grit and NDP members to work out the Accord and a Throne Speech etc.
They were fascinating days at Queen's Park. Of course the Accord didn't last, Peterson won big in an election, then got too cocky and abandoned his huge advantage for another election in 1990. And that spawned the horrible NDP government led by Bob Rae, who is still so tarnished by his record that some academic/journalist who has been wandering the world as an intellectual carpetbagger can easily win over the national caucus against him.
There are some who think back to Queen's Park and 1985 and say that if this coalition thwarts Stephen Harper, they should be given a chance to govern because voters again are election weary. Except the huge difference is that this coalition is propped up by a cabal of traitors despised by English Canada. Their blackmail makes an election so attractive, the Grits and socialists should be careful in their opposition or they will be decimated.

IT'S OKAY TO SAY CHRISTMAS EVEN AT SUNNYLEA SCHOOL

CELEBRATING CANADA'S FUNDAMENTAL HOLIDAY......

About 40 years ago, when I first started going across the street to the Christmas concert at Sunnylea Junior School, some prof in the United States invented a black celebration that he called Kwanzaa.
He was jealous of Christmas, you see. Too many white people dreaming of a white Christmas.
Who would have thought four decades later that the Christmas party across the street can no longer speak its name. Now the politically correct folk have called it December Traditions. And Kwanzaa is right up there with any celebration of angels watching their flocks by night.
The phone rang the other night just when I planned to veg in front of the TV with a mug of tea. My son and his wife wanted to know if we were going to their sons' Christmas party. No, I said. Then I asked what the grandsons were doing and it turned out that Matthew, 10, was the MC and Mikey, 9, was playing a chicken.
So that is why I was the first person sitting in the auditorium to make sure we could see Matthew strut his stuff.
It was fun watching the kids' faces. They even snuck in a few references to Jesus, I think. Though it was almost submerged under all the other stuff, such as a Yiddish play in honour of Hanukkah.
The Jews I know are almost embarrassed that the PC folk have elevated one of their religious events to a major status when it used to be rather a minor occasion. As for Kwanzaa, it really is a superficial challenge to the centuries of religion and tradition that have created the modern Christmas.
But I come not to denigrate the other celebrations, no matter how artificial. Celebrate them and God bless you as you do so.
But they really aren't a match for Christmas which has certainly exploded into the secular world far from its roots as being a mass for Christ.
I have noticed in the annual de-Christianizing of this holiday season that the defenders have grown ruder as the attackers become stupider. All this stuff about whether it's a Christmas tree or a holiday tree has become laughable since its Christmas roots are so obvious and come from pagan times..
But this year I'm not going to waste energy on the jerks who so obviously don't get the basic message of Christmas which is acceptable to all religions. That is all religions that aren't busy killing their neighbours.
Nope, I'm off to sing some carols and drink some rum nog. And don't bother arguing with me that in this secular country we have no business letting a religious event dominate our calendar. I will defend your right to argue about that, just as I am happy to call you an idiot who doesn't understand that Christmas outgrew the Church and Santa Claus some time ago.

COMING OUT OF THE KINGSWAY COLD

THE KING'S WAY......

I don't got to church much - blame Richard Dawkins - but I love gospel music, particularly at Christmas.
The Christmas concert has a special niche in my nostalgia and to hell with those who ban them.
Life wasn't exactly great for my sisters Joyce and Joanne and I when we were kids, but the Christmas concert in the little Baptist church on the hill was a highlight of the season.
Mary is a faithful Mass goer and ignores my idiosyncratic approach to religion where I listen to the Gaither gospel hour on TV but church is for weddings and funerals these days.
As Editor of the Toronto Sun, my intense evangelical past was no secret to faithful readers who not only perservered through my defenses of Christmas but also noticed that the replies at the end of our letters - a Sun tradition that became so popular, polls showed more read the replies than the letters - often had a Biblical flavour, thanks to my boyhood where we read a chapter of the Bible after every meal.
I'm reporting to all who figure I'm backsliding towards hellfire that I've already attended my first Christmas concert of the year. And I hope it won't be the last.
The local Anglican church, All Saints, like other wonderful Toronto churches, has an out-of-the-cold program every Friday for the homeless. The first twenty get a bed for the night, and there's a hearty meal and free warm clothing for another 60 or so. They start lining up at 3 p.m.
Other churches, families and groups help the 100 or so volunteers at this Kingsway church. And then there is the annual Christmas concert, now eight years old, held in Our Ladies of Sorrows church where five other churches gather in the Catholic church to listen to a combined choir of 120 voices, reinforced by the Kingsway Ringers and an orchestra called The Talisker Players. And of course we sing too.
The Kingsway business association supports it all, and so does Etobicoke"s Guardian newspaper, which means there is free chocolate and doughtnuts after, plus a chocolate Santa in tinfoil, and the offering during the concert, which last year was around $8,000, goes to the out-of-the-cold program.
It is a community effort, and feels like it too, in all its warm and hearty detail. There were mistakes during the program, like the troupe bringing gifts during a play came down the aisle too soon, but we all laughed as if a neighbour had just said something funny over the fence. ( And I remembered as a child soloist that I discovered half-way through that I had screwed up the hymn and I stopped in awkward silence.)
I've lived near Royal York and Bloor since 1963 - the longest I've lived anywhere after bouncing between 13 addresses as I grew up. But it's only because of such events that I feel like I really belong on these familiar streets, that the Kingsway really is a grand name for a place to call home.
The city may be 2.5 million strong, with another 2 million just outside. But it really is a mass of neighbourhood and villages, and it is possible to go to a big church on a busy street near the subway, and there sing the glorious music of Christendom in an event that is possible because the doctors and restaurants and shops I patronize - even the local pool hall - unite to help an honourable program during a wonderful holiday season.
And then there are jerks who want to cloak the Christmas in this holiday. How dare they when surely all religions believe its fundamental message of peace on earth good wiil to all. Humbug to them, and not to us.

SINGING ALONG WITH JOHN MCDERMOTT

FIGHTING WAR WITH MUSIC

I will never forget the first time I heard one of the greatest anti-war song ever written. The memory floods in every time I hear John McDermott sing And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda as if he was looking into the face of a mother yearning for her fallen soldier.
So when I heard McDermott sing it the other night, with its composer Eric Bogle sitting off to one side staring at the floor, it was a magic moment. Bogle had never heard McDermott sing it live before, for various reasons, and tried to shrug away the emotion it must have stirred in his soul by saying the experience was "better than sex."
Then he added "more profitable too." Of course it has been recorded by at least 80 singers, although the best of them can only tie McDermott.I first heard it on a downtown trip to celebrate a family birthday. I missed the start on the car radio but insisted everyone wait in the car until it finished. But I didn't know who was singing it and who had written it. Joe Lewis had played it on his Saturday show on CJRT and when Lewis came to the Sun office on his rounds as a ballet publicist, he filled in the blanks. It had been sung by an Aussie group the Bushwackers and composed by an Aussie named Bogle.
( Bogle grew up in Scotland and still sounds like it despite decades of living in Australia. But Australia and its pubs have given him a certain bawdy charm when he sings and yarns. )
Of course I immediately told McDermott, at that point the Sun's staff troubador, about this great song. But I didn't know any more. So he searched and asked and finally a CBC producer gave him a copy, and the song became almost as much of his program as Danny Boy.
Bogle also wrote another great war song to tug out your tears called The Green Fields of France. And soon, I predict, we also will be listening to a new song called "Buddy's never coming home" which McDermott and Bogle will be singing to all the American troops overseas on a simulcast from Boston on Dec. 12.
And that will complete a musical trilogy. Bogle didn't want to denigrate the soldiers from the States and Australia who fought and died in Vietnam when he was writing a song about war. So he set the message from And the Bands Played Waltzing Matilda around the great Australian slaughter in Turkey in the Great War. The Green Fields of France is set in World War Two. And the new song, Buddy, which has not yet been recorded, is about the grim American toll in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bogle and McDermott are touring and did two nights at Hugh's Room on Dundas St. W, which is a great place in its acoustics and sight lines to watch music. (And the food's good too. Have the steak.)
This is a warm-up for McDermott's annual Christmas concerts in Toronto. (This year at Roy Thomson Hall on Dec. 22 and 23.) Bogle is busy writing for the concert because McDermott explains that the Christmas songs that Bogle has already composed are decidedly too risque. It must be all those years in the pubs.
McDermott now has 20 CDs out for his fans. I love Christmas music and when McDermott sings the queen of carols, Silent Night, I am carried back to my childhood and the charms of Christmas even if you were living in modest circumstances. I'm still playing his music on Boxing Day.
Yet it's the CD that doesn't have his signature song Danny Boy that has a special place on my shelf. There are 17 songs of war on this CD titled Buy Victory Bonds. And I studied the history carefully of each one before I wrote the liner notes. It was a frustrating experience because how can mere written words match the nostalgia, passion and pathos as a great singer doesn't glorify war but makes its wistful waste a trifle more tolerable.

FISHING FOR UNDERSTANDING AND BASS

RIDDLE WRAPPED IN ENIGMA....

I'm amazed at the increase in illegal sports fishing in Ontario. But when you try to figure out the fishing regulations, some of it is understandable.
For 28 years I've had a cottage on Burnt Point. Because the current of the Trent River sweeps around my point after it circles Burnt Point Bay on its way to Seymour Lake, fish love to hang out just off the point with their snouts stuck in the flow to feed.
It's long been famous for fishing. Before I came in 1980, my shoreline was reinforced with flagstones to reduce the wear from all the fishermen. It's not just the family and friends, there's are always some sneaking in. The rumour was that the point had been mentioned in an European fishing magazine, which was probably a myth, but it seemes the point is discussed whenever fishermen get together to drink and fib.
I have a ringside seat, unfortunately, on local fishing since it's normal rude behaviour for people to fish within a few yards of my shore all daylight hours. So I see boats keeping everything from big minnows to stringers fat with catches beyond the limit. When the family sat down for Thanksgiving Dinner, I looked over their heads and saw four boats so close I could talk to them without raising my voice.
And I used to raise my voice. In fact, Dave Garrick, a friend and bass fishermen, gave me a birthday gift of a sign with a comic fish standing on its tail with the circle symbol for prohibition painted on top. Underneath it says The Dog Is Fine... Beware of Owner. I don't have a dog, and, of course, the sign only can stop legally those fishing on the point and leaving their garbage behind, occasionally taking anything that isn't nailed down.
But I've stopped doing that, after encounters with drunks who threatened to come ashore and beat me up. And then are the drunks who are bright as boards. And then there was the jerk who boasted about all the people he employed and said that he could tell I had the Big C and would die within the year.
Not exactly nice people, which you can tell from their manners, curses and peeing on top of my water line.
What I do now is watch them carefully, although this year I didn't have to be that attentive to see all the fishing a day before the walleye season opened.
My score for the last three weeks shows the sad state of fishing in cottage country.
I asked one chap where he lived, since I thought if it was close by, I would go and sit in front of his home for a few hours. By his own admission, he had been fishing in the same spot within 10 yards of my shore most days since Labour Day. I asked if he was fishing with two lines, which, of course, he was. No. he sad flatly, without explanation, but disappeared when I walked away.
I took a picture of three men in a launch who had been around most days. Since there were several other boats nearby, I thought the picture would illustrate an article I'm going to write on manners in cottage country. Two days later, one of the men was stalking my cottage and when a neighbour asked, he said he wanted to see me. She gave him my phone number in Toronto and he used it to trace my home address through the Internet. He drove 200 km. and knocked on my door to apologize, in a stumbling fashion, for the fact they had been fishing with illegal bait. He said they had thrown the fish back and he couldn't sleep and would never do it again. But he's returned, with his brother, fishing just off my shore although he promised never to do it again.( I will keep checking his bait if he stays.)
The worst example came from three men who acknowledged they had fished off my shore for two weeks and caught their limit each day. They said they were from Ohio and one of them had been coming for 40 years to fish there. I said they must be lazy if they come all that way and just sit in the same spot. Sure, one said, this is where the fish are. You must like to eat bass, I observed. They became suspicious and slow to reply. I pointed out they were saying they had caught 252 bass, and the possession limit allows them only six bass daily, and that includes what they have in storage. I asked if they were pretending they had eaten 18 bass each day for 14 days. One said they had had three fish fries back at the camp. (But fish you give away is included in your possession limit.) I told them they could explain it all to the game warden. When I turned away, they skedaddled. (Of course the neighbourhood knows that wardens are rarely seen.)
Because of these encounters, I double-checked the rules, first the paper version of the Ontario fishing regulations and then the Internet version. Once again I cursed how complicated it is to figure out basic rules regarding the main fish of my area of District 17.
I Googled bass closing for my area, which was Nov. 15. And that's what I confirmed after 10 minutes of punching keys. (But I also found a date of Nov. 30.) One problem is that I kept getting listings for brook trout when I searched for bass.
Many of us get our info about fishing from friends and neighbours because our fishing regs are as murky as the bottom of a swamp, I tend to check with a cousin, a retired banker who is so precise on the rules of everything from golf and fishing to cards that he's been an official at the Canadian Open and is often consulted by friends.
But I've just discovered that even he and I once broke the rules on fishing for pickerel, which have now been reduced to a catch or possession limit of only four daily, and only one can be over 18". It was a few years ago and it was a surprise to both of us that the rules had changed, although I'm not about to go further. After all, the punishment is extreme, or so I'm told, not that I've seen it written down in the booklet of fishing regs or the Internet. But perhaps the rules were different then. It's hard to tell.
Trouble is, the fishing regs are put together by insiders. You have to wade through info that is only interesting to biologists. And then there's the old stuff that should be pruned, like press releases that are two years old. So it all clouds changes, such as the one that you can now only keep four walleye a day, and only one can be over 18.1 inches. This is news to most people I've asked.
Years ago, I watched a Toronto City Hall committee trying to demystify bylaws. Karl Jaffary, a brilliant lawyer, said that what was needed was not something that would be a guide for the guilty and a trap for the innocent. David Crombie, later the mayor, who is gifted in communications, and Bill Archer, another great lawyer, agreed.
And that's what we have with Ontario's fishing regs, a trap for the innocent, who just want to catch a few fish, and a guide to be ignored by the jerks who want to catch 252 small mouth and large mouth bass off my point for 40 years and never expect to be challenged.
I called Walter Oster, head of the Toronto Sportsmen's Shows, who I know through such great projects as the Great Ontario Salmon Derby. Good person to give advice. He gave me the name of a Ministry of Natural Resources official for whom I left a message. That was weeks ago, but then my experience in 50 years of newspapering is that civil servants seldom rush to call you back, if they do call.
So I will complain to the minister, Donna Cansfield. A blog I wrote on July 11, 2008 describes how she ended up on page one of the Sunday Sun holding the biggest fish she has ever caught, thanks to Oster and kibitzers like me. She comes to her ministry as an outsider, not indoctrinated in hunting and fishing. Just the minister to cut through the gobbledegook and bafflegab that you face when you're just trying to check on provincial rules, even on such simple things as the minimum length of fish that you keep.
Government is filled with windy reports. In order for senior officials and the media to understand what it all means, someone produces an executive summary, a short, hopefully clear precis, without all the ifs and buts and don'ts.
That's what we need here. The basic rules for the main species that we catch in the front of the rules booklet. A synopsis. We don't need mating habits and biological history. Just the facts, ma'm. After all, there are enough people fishing illegally. We don't need more cheating by accident.

On Jan. 29, 2009, in a blog titled A GUIDE TO ONTARIO FISHING, I give Natural Resources Minister Donna Cansfield's answer.