THE FORD-SMITHERMAN DEBACLE

Do Voters Care About The Media's Choices?

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

Did they ever?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

editorial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PUTTING THE H-EX ON ONTARIO PLACE

Let's All Go To Ontario Exhibition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE RUDE SIDE OF COTTAGE LIFE

Going To The Dogs In Cottage Country

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nope!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GREAT ONTARIO SALMON DERBY 2010

Best Fishing In Years

What an opening day. We came back with the big bin stuffed with big fish. Best opening ever for me. My two chinook fought so hard that I had illusions of much bigger fish battling every inch of the way. Surely I would win a truck or a boat or, at least, bragging rights for the day.

The picture taken by the great Toronto photographer Dick Loek doesn't even show all our fish.

We caught about 190 pounds of fish in just over three hours--seven chinook between 20 and 26 pounds each, two salmon around 12 pounds, (one a coho, and they're smaller than chinooks or kings) and two small beauties which taste great with a little butter and tender care.

Just imagine all the bargain eating! My local store is selling wild Pacific salmon at $6 a pound, so we had at least $800 worth of eating. And yes, you can, and I do, eat fish from Lake Ontario and other Ontario waters. There's a good government booklet spelling out the safety issues.

Ordinarily I would detail the weight of each fish. Yet when you catch so many, and as columnist Joe Warmington wrote in the Sunday Sun, at one point we had three fish on at the same time, it all blurs into a slippery haze.

But I do recall that Warmington once again didn't even catch a cold. And he was being assisted by OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino, a great friend of Warmington's, and a great fisherman, or so he tells us. so even the long arm of the law didn't help.

So Joe's not in the picture. Loek did take one with Joe out front holding one of the baby beauties, but somehow that doesn't seem to have survived.

That's Walter Oster on the left, the chap who runs the derby down to every last hook. He also heads the convention centre and the sportsmen's shows and takes time out for exotic fishing trips for wonders like the peacock bass of the Amazon. And when you get a big fish on and fight it for 30 fatiguing minutes, Walter stands at your elbow and gives you 30 minutes of advice.

Next to Walter is Bob Dickson, a businessman who was so excited about the charter that he couldn't sleep. His two salmon were the biggest fish of his life and a tribute to how he managed to ignore all our advice, even mine.

That's me in the middle with the fish that gave me the toughest fights of my life, and while I'm hardly an expert, I have fished around the world.

The woman is the rookie minister from Brampton, Linda Jeffery, who has just been in charge of the sprawling Ministry of Natural Resources since January. She got a little help (it's surprising how men rush to help a pretty minister, even hugging her to anchor her) but her fish was far from the boat, and she had to crank and crank and crank.

Then Fantino ( on the right in the picture) got a fish on. Then I did. When I pulled my fish close, I found everyone concentrating on making sure the politician in charge of the ministry dealing with Ontario fishing landed the biggest fish of her life.

Then everyone helped Fantino, who, believe me, doesn't need any aid from anyone. He always gets his man...I mean fish. Last year, the commissioner and I had fish on at the same time and he came over and bodychecked me to get more room. (Yes, I lost the fish.)

Vito Cirone, the charter skipper, kidded me about how a retired editor is ignored on such occasions, then deftly netted my first fish of around 21 pounds.

I've fished every derby and already the fish are bigger than we used to get early in the summer. Ten salmon bigger than 30 pounds were boated opening day. And the Sun has always been a loyal sponsor. (Warmington didn't have that in his column. In the old days, one of the stalwarts of our promotion department, like Linda Ruddy and Pat Surphlis, would have been giving him heck before breakfast, but even Pat is gone, thanks to the dummies of Quebecor.

The Sun has always had fun with the derby. Years ago we arrived back at the dock to find a Sun photographer and a $20 Canadian Tire dingy. I was told that our chief photographer, Hugh Wesley, had decreed that the shot for Page One was me floating in the dinghy and holding up our catch. Of course what Wesley really wanted is me falling out of the flimsy craft into the lake and sinking with the fish. I outsmarted him and didn't sink, so my picture was on Page 3.

Fishing is a great break from reality. No wonder it's the top recreational activity in the province.

For example, Jeffery said it had been an awful week for her. Two police forces had to be called to protect her when activists and ratepayers swarmed her Brampton office just the previous day, irate at a development. Fantino, grumbling gently that he really was always working, had to fly out on Sunday to deal with upset natives in northern Ontario. (My problems with cottage plumbing/outboards were tiny by comparison, but a fishing breather is always welcome.)

Generally fishing has long periods of no activity with lots of fibbing about past catches. And then when you do get a fish on, everyone, especially Oster, warns you direly of what will happen if you don't bring it in. Typical fishing barracking! But this year we almost didn't have time for that.

It seems the salmon in Lake Ontario are so big this year you don't have to exaggerate your catch. And they're so many salmon out there that I think even Joe Warmington will finally manage to catch one.

OBSCENITIES OF MODERN SUMMITS

GIVE SECURITY AN INCH AND THEY'LL TAKE THE WORLD

Let me take you back to more civilized days in political summits when the G8 met in Toronto in June, 1988.

It was the final night and I as Editor of the Toronto Sun had been invited to a farewell bash. And so I found myself sharing a table with three men, one of whom I knew because he had been security for a premier. I had spent countless hours with him leaning against walls in several countries, exchanging muttered curses over the more inane ceremonies.

Turned out that this was a summit of sorts too because the three had headed the RCMP, OPP and Metro Police operations for the summit.

There was a big media gripe that summit about a guy who returned home from a hunting trip and as he carried his rifle into his house, a helicopter spotlight lit him up and cruisers swooped up and police pinned him to his driveway.

"Just how far do you guys go?" I grumbled. And one said: "We'll do whatever we think we can get away with."

I've never forgotten that. That top cop was outlining what he considered was one of the fundamentals of policing. It was up to the courts and the politicians and the media and the public to push back when he went too far in the pursuit of crooks or even just to guard a clutch of leaders.

The four previous summits held in Canada were weenie roasts compared to what is being done under a Conservative government that is not conservative. The excuse is that this is a chance to show Canada off to the world. Sure, it is. For several million, you could bring in the travel press and get a lot more bang for your buck that a billion bucks wasted on pols.

I will not waste your time by detailing all the obscene wastes of public funds, the trampling of basic rights and the disregard for reality demonstrated by the security forces involved in this summit. We have been reading about them for weeks. They sound like a deranged Monty Python skit.

There are so many, it is a wonder that some of us don't vomit as we scan the latest news about three-metre-high security fences, store owners having to close shop, condo residents having to endure security just to go home etc.

Just imagine what could be done with that $1 billion in wastage. In fact, wouldn't it have been wonderful if it wasn't collected in the first place. And yet we waste a billion on a PR stunt where little real business will be conducted and any statements were precooked a month ago.

Each decade brings new excesses in security. Premiers and prime ministers have gone from one guard on routi

ne days and a couple of cruisers when they go to a hotel to shutting down the street outside the hotel and even closing highways like 427.

The leaders often aren't comfortable with the cocoons but they go along with it and then their successors aren't given a choice.

I remember a Mountie pushing my wife aside in a Royal York dining room so that PET could pass. "Do that again and I'll deck you," I yelled. Trudeau, walking mere feet away, indicated that I had made a reasonable response. Today, I guess, several decades later, I would end up on the floor and then in custody, getting bruised in the process to teach me a lesson.

Press credentials often aren't a shield. In fact, we often are used to shield the politicians, so terrorists have to shoot over us.

Most of my anger is reserved for all the petty anarchists and professional demonstrators who are the justification for the security. If these yahoos didn't exist, we wouldn't have to waste all this money and energy. Many have little real insight into the real worlds of politics, trade and business, so their silly signs, anarchist agendas and amateurish chants are like paint blisters on an aircraft carrier. I would prosecute every demonstrator for every act of civil disobedience because there's plenty of opportunity to make your views known in this world without trying to harm or shout down those who took the trouble to get elected.

But there is no justification for the Ontario government to suspend the basic right of you and me not to be hassled by police just because we happen to be close to a security fence. There are many who came to live in Canada to escape cops stopping them and demanding identification because they felt like it.

The crazed over-reaction of our police to summit security is rooted in the desire to avoid being embarrassed in front of other police forces if a major incident happened here. I remember going to a royal function and being stunned by all the police on the streets of Toronto. I saw the police chief and said he must have every cop on duty. Why? He was not evasive or apologetic. "I don't want to be known as the police chief of the city where the Queen or any royal was hurt or even killed," he said.

The only good thing about the G8/G20 embarrassing summit is that it is so costly and so intrusive to the life of a large downtown that the politicians may come to their senses and start saying no to such dumb ideas as fencing off downtowns to keep the cattle, I mean the politicians, from the people.

The next summit should be held on a boat, perhaps in North Korean waters. And the rest of the world could enjoy their summers.

Post Script:

After the party was over and the windows fixed, there is confusion about who did what to whom. Yet two things are certain. A big city's downtown is a dumb and expensive place to stage a summit. And demonstrators really don't care about issues. They just want to preen in the media as they burn and trash and act like pretend anarchists with rabies.

I feel sorry for the silly kids who got caught up by the thugs and didn't realize that with all those cops brimming with a mixture of doing your duty and bravado, just being in the vicinity was asking for trouble.

Will we ever get the truth about the burning cruisers and whether they were just decoys? Why could media cameras capture the vandalism but not the cops? And why is it that a few cops always use these occasions to harrass or bash some reporters? Do they really suffer from permanent media envy, like boys looking at a man's penis?

I just wish it had never happened, with all its hype and costs, that Harper and captive cabinet stopped elevating themselves on our dime.

COTTAGE LIFE HELL

LEAKING AWAY ALL LIFE'S PLEASURES

This is a warning. When friends and relatives ask about how opening the cottage went, I curse and wave my fists and deliver a 15-minute monologue until they edge away with a strange look in their eyes.

After all, it only took five weeks, four visits from the plumber, two visits from the back-hoe operator and assorted copper elbows, taps, Band Aids, shower head, water pump etc.

And many many dollars.

It all began the first week of May, a pleasant day as I recall, and it all ended in humid June just before I had nightmares about tearing down the whole damn cottage to find every last inch of diseased plumbing.

My story even comes with a villain. I just wonder if someone hasn't been playing games with me. Sweat and frustration can make you paranoid, you know.

I closed Burnt Point last November just before fishing closed, working all day to clean gutters, store stuff, and to do all the countless tasks of the last cottage day of the year.

And then, dog tired, as evening came on with a cold rush, I pulled my water line out of the Trent River, opened every tap, and pumped all the water out of the system.

Or so I thought. In my most paranoid hours of misery this spring, when leak followed leak followed leak, I just wondered if someone out for a stroll after I left, noticed the water trickling out of the tap at the low point of the system and, helpfully or mischieviously, turned it off. And so water remained and became frozen havoc.

My first warning of the coming miseries came as I marched into the chilly water this May to sink my foot valve and start the torturous process of priming the pump. Pail after pail after pail. In 30 years, it had never taken this long.

Then I seemed to see and hear a pin hole leak underneath the tank beneath the pump. I disconnected the whole damn affair, only to find no sign of the leak. Yet I also found when I visited the local stores that a new tank cost more than half of getting a new pump/tank kit.

So I bought a new pump and tank. After all, the old one was more than 30 years old and some years I had kept it going only through strange parts, chewing gum and prayer.

Then I discovered that the new pump needed a new configuration of pipes to connect to my little system. So I called Bob Emery, the plumber in Havelock, who said he was in the spring rush and I wasn't one of his customers but he would come in a week or two.

Plumber Bob phoned me in Toronto two weeks later. He had connected the new pump but I had a leak in the hot water pipe behind the shower. Did I want to open up the wall and save some money? Sure I said, no need for his carpentry at $50 an hour.

Took down the panelling in the room beside the bathroom and cut a hole, by guess and by god and by ruler, to where I thought the shower pipes were. Nothing. Turned on the hot water. It was down below. So I picked up a new floor and cut another hole.

Plumber Bob came a week later, fixed the pipe under the floor and found another leak behind the shower that I hadn't seen before.

Turned the hot water on again. Now there was a leak far under the shower. There is no crawl space under my cottage at that point, so I called Darrell Brunton, who can open an envelope with his back hoe. But even Darrell with his skill couldn't dig UNDER the blasted cottage. So I did, with a hatchet to cut the roots and a hand shovel. In three feet, down four feet, to find a big rock with a concrete block on top just in front of the leak.

Since I had now destroyed a garden, I went all the way and had Darrell uncover my sewer pipe to the septic tank that has always given us trouble.

Plumber Bob came back, smashed the block supporting the cottage out of the way, and fixed the leak. Oh yes, he said on the telephone, he found a second leak there too but there was now a leak behind the kitchen sink.

So I returned to open another wall and floor. And Plumber Bob returned to fix that leak and then a new leak that appeared behind the bathroom sink. And he replaced my sewer pipe.

So what in the end was the good and the bad, the damage, besides to the nerves of Mary and me? Well, we got a good flush out of it with the new sewer. And the pump is new too, and we probably needed that.

Our modest water system is only one kitchen sink, one bathroom sink, toilet and shower. But the innards of every tap had to be replaced as Plumber Bob mended eight leaks in pipes and elbows. I suspect he regarded me as a bit of an idiot as I counted out the hundred dollar bills, babbling that I had drained my system for 30 years and never had a problem.

Emery departed and Brunton returned to fill the hole just outside the bathroom wall. I dug and pounded and raked and planted grass and watered and replaced bushes. And Mary and I each had a shower and then celebrated the return of water, especially hot water, to our cottage. I promised that I would hired Plumber Bob to turn my water on and off, and carpet the driveway with mines in case someone really was fooling around with me.

The next day, Mary returned from the pump house with the news that every cottage husband loves to hear. "The hot water tank is leaking," she said. And I said put a pail under it and went fishing.

TORONTO PARKING THIEVES

ONLY $4.6153846 A MINUTE

I couldn't believe my eyes as Mary and I walked slowly to our car because there, fluttering in the wind above the disabled parking sign, was the droppings of Toronto's parking bandits, the dreaded yellow tag.

I've never got many parking tickets and that dropped to never in the nearly three years since Mary got the sign for the car, technically a "disabled parking permit," because of bad knees. This means you can park without paying at meters, use the special disabled spots and park in No Parking zones. You still can't park near corners, intersections, hydrants and TTC stops.

We had parked on a quiet Etobicoke side street, Birchview, which runs for two blocks west of the Royal York subway station. No Parking from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., which is understandable because of the commuters who would park there all day and take the subway. But there is an added wrinkle I had never noticed before, a second sign banning something from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.

There is an icon on that sign that I had never seen before. Turns out, after an Internet search, that it was a No Stopping zone. Now I had never seen a No Stopping sign that doesn't say that in words but in Toronto, you shouldn't be surprised at anything authorized by Toronto council and its bureaucrats.

My $60 ticket was issued at 5.47 p.m. Thirteen unlucky minutes to safety. $4.6153846 a minute. I had parked there without guilt figuring that at that hour, I was really not hurting the residents, and it is legal for me to do so with that sign. Seems a strange No Stopping zone, decreed so by the long vanished suburban council of Etobicoke. But the way the majority of politicians are these days, motorists should consider themselves lucky that they are allowed to even drive down a street.

The secret rules for tearing up tags have just been revealed out of the murky underground of city politics. Since I am a senior citizen and my wife, also a senior, has that disabled permit, I probably after a few days of phoning and waiting in line could have had the ticket cancelled. But it's never that simple.

I also could have fought the tag because the parking control officer (or whatever is the official name for the green hornets) had not signed the tickets, just scrawled cramped initials.

Now I suspect that this petty tax collector really does know how to write, which makes me wonder why the legal system no longer requires a real signature on something that is costing a taxpayer $60.

After all, the system requires us to endlessly write our signatures, so this petty indifference to the law does bug me. Just another reason I was tempted to fight the tag. And there does seem to be a black hole into which your parking appeals go, so that you never actually get your day in court and your tickets go into limbo.

You are considered guilty by the system right from the get go, no matter what they pretend about innocent until proven guilty. The bureaucrats, allowed by the politicians, have made the appeal system as arduous as they can get away with. Even when you win, you've wasted so much time fighting parking tickets or minor speeding fines that the system still has exacted its pound of flesh.

Of course these parking officers are also notorious for ignoring the disabled signs. I recall years ago when I had lunch with David Onley, now the lieutenant-governor. Onley parked right in front of the restaurant in a No Parking zone. Legal because he had the sign. But he said he still worried because there had been cases of the police having a car towed, despite the disabled sign, and the driver, with his wheelchair in his car, had a difficult time in getting to the pound to retrieve his vehicle.

It was just a short time ago in the same Bloor-Royal York area that I saw a parking officer park the wrong way on a street, meaning the driver's side wheels to the curb. When I pointed out to her that she had parked illegally, she said sarcastically that she really must give herself a ticket. I told her to park correctly. She didn't.

So what's my point in all this? I think that with 13 minutes to go before the parking is legal for everyone, a parking control officer has to be a king-sized jerk to put a $60 ticket on a car displaying a disabled sign. I complained to the cops at 22 division and they agreed that it really was a silly thing for the green hornet to do on a side street but such complaints are no longer handled by the police.

So I held my nose and wrote out a cheque because life in TO is so much of a hassle these days, you just try to forget the minor annoyances and concentrate on the major blunders.

Many years ago, the beloved Moaner of the Beaches, the late great Ted Reeve, wrote a bit of doggerel for the old Telegram. Let me paraphrase it.

When I was young and in my prime

I used to fight this crap all the time

Now that I'm old and growing grey

I just insult the jerks once a day.

But next time I see a parking control officer flout the law flagrantly when they park, I will stand beside the car until it is moved or towed.