BURNED OUT OR FED UP

SENIORS DESERVE TO BE CROTCHETY!

I was the kid editor in the discussion on whether we should hire an older reporter when Doug Creighton,  my agreeable boss, voted no on the grounds he was "burned out."
I blurted out that he wasn't burned out,  he just wouldn't take the shit any more.
Creighton, who was the best publisher I have ever seen, regarded me thoughtfully and said I was probably right. Both Doug and I when we became older were bosses, so we didn't have to take the crap that newspapers, and indeed a lot of businesses, routinely dish out to their older employees. But we could see what was inflicted on veteran employees who are given crummy assignments and have their hours and vacations routinely changed by kid/editors who were probably still in diapers when these reporter got their first bylines.
I was 25 when I became an editor and then was an editor in some form or other for more than 30 years.
There is nothing like confronting a reporter twice your age who was killing Germans when I was in public school to make you tread carefully.
Newspapers in Toronto are rowdy competitive beasts that trampled egos and shred tempers. So I thought a little civility in the middle of the battles was the decent way to survive.
 Perhaps I went too far. When I was City Editor of the old Toronto Telegram (and that is a key position on any major paper)  I was gently sending a grumpy beat reporter out to do a "much better job" when he snapped at me about why I was being so polite when obviously I was unhappy. So I said that if he wasn't out the door in the next five seconds, he was fired.
Occasionally there should be steel inside the velvet .
I am not sure my family would agree with what I have just written and indeed anything I would say  about being diplomatic in the face of someone screwing up.  They would claim I have a short fuse. And I would argue in return that I just won't take the shit any more.
BUT!!!! The waitress, the receptionist, the builder, the mechanic etc. are entitled to expect that I will not explode at the first goof. But don't keep it up.
Unfortunately, it has become difficult during this incredible period of poor service not to become someone perceived as a crank, a crotchety old geezer prone to snapping at people because they keep screwing up routine chores.
Don't you become cranky when.....
You wander a store looking for a clerk....
Find the dentist's receptionist has screwed up an appointment three different times...
The clerk supposed to help you decides to answer the phone when you have taken the trouble to be there in person....
The bank at the noon rush has only two tellers, and they are deep in conversation about their dates...
The phone call just at the critical point of the TV movie is from some jerk ignoring the do-not-call ban...
The best part of the TV movie is edited to make it fit into the assigned time...
The TV commercials continue to blare, despite the government ban insisting they can't be louder than the programs...
The lout lounging in the rear exit of the bus calls you a stupid old man when you squeeze by and then some woman objects when you tell him to f.... off...
The idiot who has just put a lure into your boat tells you he has the right to fish your dock even if you are standing there...
Wrong number at 4 a.m.....
Renovation crews that place their big steel bins almost across the road....
That is when I become a crotchety geezer who remembers that the good old days some times were actually better and service staff were not armoured with righteousness and expected to be told off when they goofed.

TO HELL WITH BEAVERS

NUTS  AT THE BEST OF TIMES

So you wanted to know what happened to my beaver....
My reply is dedicated to the grandson who regarded the beavers who set up light housekeeping in my boathouse as being as cuddly as a kitten and gave me a picture for Christmas of one sleeping on its back with its paws in the air as if it were a hamster.
All this is prompted by a recent story about a crazed beaver attack near Washington. It is not clear whether the beaver was driven nuts by the presidential election campaign or just was rabid, the beaver that is, not the presidential candidates as far as we can tell. It would be tough to pin one of them down long enough to test, for rabies that is, not the truth.
An elderly woman was bitten by a beaver weighing 33 pounds (that's 15 kilos in that strange foreign measurement) and the beaver just wouldn't let go even when it was battered for more than 20 minutes.
She was seriously injured with a huge chomp  out of her calf and a thumb nearly bitten off. Naturally she has to have those painful rabies shots.
The beaver is dead. It was shot after it was not deterred by having two paddles broken over it in repeating beatings by a friend, a rescuer and paramedics. It just kept attacking as paddles splintered and its eye was gouged with a stick.
What was really frightening about the story detailed in The Washington Post is that authorities were said to find the attack rare and the first in the Fairfax County area in nearly a dozen years. Good heavens! I've been attacked by a squirrel that was probably rabid and a fox that was acting strange, which is generally a warning, but I thought I was safe from beavers as long as they just stuck to cutting down my trees.
This story is food for thought for all those who think the beaver, the industrious pest, should be a national symbol for the country that was developed largely on its skins.
I have been busy at the cottage wrapping my trees in wire and coating bark with all the old pepper spices that I can find. The wrapping in the fall and the unwrapping in the spring has none of the joys of Christmas giving and all of the hassles of wire cuts in hands, arms and legs.
But every time I have been lazy and not bothered with a few trees, they are dropped by beaver even though there are woods all over the place filled with succulent trees. I have lost at least 12 mature trees,  including a lovely stand of silver birch. Last winter, despite my precautions, I lost several willows and bushes. The main toll lately was a lovely 12-year-old evergreen because I hadn't put metal protective shields high enough around its trunk. The beaver just stretched and ate.
I have written about how disconcerting it is to go in your dark boathouse and as you are about to stand on what appears to be an abandoned old rug, it moves. So you retreat to the door and a very large beaver shuffles by you to the water. Next day, a smaller mate was there.
Nothing worked. I played classical music 24-hours a day. Apparently the beaver liked the classics. So I tried rock. Probably the beaver played air guitar at the sound.   The beaver kept showing up. I left lights on. Nothing. Just the usual insane charges of Ontario Hydro.
One day I was in a rush, forgot about the beaver and charged into the boathouse, stepping right on it. I was so mad and off balance that I grabbed an old oar and hit it. It ignored me and moved slowly to the water. So I ran to my gun safe, took a very old, very reliable Cooey .22 and ran back. The beaver was swimming slowly in the middle of the Trent River. I deliberately shot lower than the beaver,  not wanting to skim a bullet into a fisherman. It may have skipped into the beaver because there have been no beaver sightings in the boathouse for months.
But, in a sight that can turn a cottager's blood cold, last weekend there were two big sticks floating in  the boathouse slip, both stripped of bark with the telltale gnawed ends.
A warning, a calling card from nature! So I went out and wrapped more wire around my trees.
In my 32 years at Burnt Point, I have cut down six dead trees and the beaver have brutalized 12 big ones and many saplings. I have planted 10 trees, eight of which have survived, and then there were the 20 fast-growth experimental trees I got from the provincial government, none of which survived my sons cutting grass and winter.
So far it's been a draw with the beaver.  So I hope that rabies in beaver stays south of the border, along with their presidential politics.
                                                               ..........

P.S.  My cottage neighbours at Burnt Point have listened to my beaver stories with amused tolerance....until now.
Beavers have been leaving their lodge across the Trent River, which is surrounded by acres of wetlands and bush on Nappan Island, swimming across the strong currents of the river, waddling through the cottages that line the point, and cutting down trees behind the cottages.
I have lost none because I have been, as I wrote above, armouring all my trees with wire fencing, even barbed wire. But in the last two days, beaver have dropped two poplars in two days across the cottage road. The neighbour that used to have those trees is now down to one out of a grove of six.
So our beaver may not have rabies but they are nuts. Can you imagine going to all that work when with a lot less effort, they can cut down trees closer to the lodge, stripping off some of the bark as if it were candy, and abandoning 95% of the tree?
So this is an open appeal to all hunters and trappers (and trappers are still around, my brother-in-law used to trap only 50 kilometres from Toronto) to come to Burnt Point and rid of us all the beavers and, just to really make the trip pay for itself, go after all those flying manure spreaders, the other great symbol of the country, the Canada geese that leave little mounds of excrement as their calling card.

SNIDERMAN'S RECORD EXASPERATIONS

 A FAN OF LIFE AND STORIES

I knew Sam Sniderman before he was Sam The Record Man. And then there was the other side beyond records and music -  his love of the downtown city and of old days along College St.
I don't know who told me 60 years ago but I heard that the place to buy really different records was Sniderman's Music Hall on College St.
So I made the long TTC trek from Weston Rd. near Lawrence to Sam's first music store on the stretch of College west of Bathurst,  familiar to such famous Torontonians as Ed Mirvish, Johnny Lombardi and Mel Lastman.
It was his brother's radio store but Sam, who already had lost his hair, sold me a Stan Kenton Innovations in Modern Music record. I had only change for money in those days, and no record player, but I still have that record.
I attended Ryerson Institute of Technology before Sam moved to Yonge and Gould in 1959. That stretch of our old main street was dominated then by A and A, which had a soda fountain at the back behind the stands filled with texts we needed at Ryerson. It was the first Ryerson book store.
There was rivalry but Sam became the dominant figure at the corner, and in records, because he was a showman, a great supporter of Canadian talent, and he could be crotchety as hell in arguments. He was larger in life than his huge neon signs.
I remember him calling me up at the old Toronto Telegram when I covered City Hall to complain about stupid city bureaucrats and not being able to be open on Boxing Day. And that was the start of many calls over the years dealing with everything from garbage collection in the lane behind his store to the plight of the homeless, one of whom froze to death near his back door and caused him to attack everyone in sight for the savage irony of someone freezing in the downtown of a bustling city.
Sam was one of my more difficult friends. He disagreed with everything I said and wrote and would start a call with "you know Downing, you really screwed up....." and you can fill in the rest because it seemed to Sam that I was wrong, and my papers were wrong, and my friends were wrong, on just about anything.
Sam had a great friend, Derwyn Shea, and he was a fixture at any party that the Anglican canon (and former councillor and MPP) had at his nice house on the western height above Grenadier Pond. And when you came in the door, or the Fileys or Garricks or other threads of the rich city tapestry showed up, Sam was sure to greet you with a quip, a beef and his latest scheme.
He was a great fan of the Canadian National Exhibition and of course would have fit right in at any booth on the Midway. We sat together on CNE boards and committees and argued over his great idea that the fair should be free and we would get the money back on sales. We would point out to him that the millions that we raised through selling tickets was useful in running the fair, but we could never convince him.
In the final days a decade ago, the record chain ran into the vinyl wall of modern competition, and all the music that people could steal instead of flipping through the bins at his creaky music Mecca.
He retreated to the Maritimes and a wine business. Ryerson got his huge neon sign and the Ex has a smaller sign which has yet to be hung on a wall of honour. Ryerson hasn't put its sign up either.
He may have been gone after nine decades from the city life and the calls became few indeed. But Sam really was an original, much more than a record huckster, a giant of his craft, and a mentor and supporter to many.
The legends like Gordon Lightfoot remember his support in their lean days. Lightfoot basically played for beer money at Steeles, a second floor tavern just over from Sam's. Ryerson students used to listen to Lightfoot and nurse their drinks. Around 1960, it would not have been a rare sight to see Lightfoot performing, and in the audience would be Neil Young and his father, Scott Young, the author and famous sports journalist, and Sam.
The old record business may be gone, just like Tin Pan Alley. As ancient history as the little booths that we used to  play a 78 in before we bought it.  But the thousands with pleasant memories of the great gabber, Sam The Record Man,  will remember him long after new technology will no longer play the records that he peddled with such enthusiasm.
He was an original. No greater tribute can be made

NEW TRENT SEVERN TAXES A GOOD IDEA?

 ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND!

Like a dead fish stinking up the dock, the idea floated out again in June about a special new tax on those rich SOBs who live along the 386 kilometres of the Trent Severn Waterway and enjoy themselves.
Of course the politicians are never really happy unless they are pickpocketing us.
Some MPs were said to be about to recommend around now to the federal government that waterside cottage owners be taxed extra - that is in addition to the extra taxes they already pay municipally because of their better locations on the water.
A few years ago I phoned a top waterway official and asking him about the persistent rumours that Trent-Severn docks were to be taxed. He said they had only looked at commercial docks and that had been shelved.
Then there was talk about licence fees for all boats kept on the Trent Severn.  And, for all I know, for the air that we breathe from the rivers and a foliage fee for the weeds.
I think any dumb MP who recommends this should be aware that I for one, and my neighbours around Burnt Point Bay south of Havelock, would expect something for more taxes.
 Like services.
I live at the end of a private road maintained by the cottagers. We run our own sewer and water infrastructure and many of us have no garbage collection, snow removal or anything else. There are general services such as policing, fire protection and hospitals, and of course we have the wonderful advantage of Big Brother bossing us on everything and generally charging us hefty permit fees.
Just try building anything bigger than a bird house and watch the bureaucrats descend.
Since my assessment is higher because I am on the water, a reasonable bureaucracy would leave well enough alone and take any necessary maintenance money for the waterway from the overcharging in municipal taxes. Have they not heard of user fees to cover the costs of the locks?
But, oh no, the Tories (I refuse to call them Conservatives because they are not conservative in their spending) are now sniffing around like a skunk at the outhouse for extra money.
Let's return to the benefits we would expect to get if we have to pay new cottage water taxes. And don't give me any crap about jurisdictions. I don't care whether it's a federal, provincial or municipal responsibility, I just want bureaucrats to ante up and improve the tiny bits of help we get now.
I would expect weed harvesters to be bought and operated along the great stretches  of the Trent-Severn that are now plagued with weeds. There would be no charge to cottagers because the growth of weeds is fed by the government failures in controlling the chemicals that are excreted into the water supply.
I would expect real patrols by the OPP who now flit through every two weeks and let the cottagers deal with all the speeding yachts who send waves of water over our docks and shores.
I would expect a return to fish hatcheries since the provincial government already collects more in fishing licence fees than it spends on fish management.
I would expect payment to be made to cottagers for the use of our rivers in the production of electricity. Or they could tell Ontario Hydro to lower cottage Hydro charges to reasonable sums if Hydro is going to continue to use public water
Governments have never reduced taxes, despite the promises, and are constantly searching for new and occasionally illegal taxes. (You want an example. Printed material, including religious books like the Bible and Koran, were free of taxes from before the invention of moveable type. Now they're taxed. It was considered improper and immoral for a government to levy a tax on a tax. It has become routine.)
Governments always pretend that new taxes and permit fees will be used for a stated purpose. For example, gasoline taxes were levied to pay for road construction and repair. Now they're just dumped into general revenue, and the taxes collected are more than the total spent on road construction and repair.
Fish and hunting permit fees were started to raise money for hatcheries, wardens and wildlife management. Now most of the money is dumped into general revenue and game wardens are as scarce as hatcheries. It is up to individuals and clubs to nurture the trophies that bring visitors and their dollars into the province so there are more people around to pay the taxes and fees.
Remember when it all began. Ottawa started a temporary income tax to pay for Canada's military costs in World War 1. But income tax has stayed along with every other tax that was started for a specific purpose and ended up generating revenue that the politicians could fritter away on their cockeyed schemes.
Let me warn Ottawa that if there is a new tax on the Trent Severn Waterway,  the MPs stupid enough to recommend it will be defeated and will have all the time in the world to cottage and fish and hunt and pay all of the hot new ideas in taxes and permit fees.
Any new monies would be wasted. Of that I am certain. The present situation is that the governments can't evenfigure out how to smooth out the fluctuations in water levels that can either have your dock flooded or your boat grounded. They can't even control any new menace that  comes along The latest is Water Soldier which can ruin a shoreline even as it cuts any kid that gets near it. And it's spreading like the flu in January.
Government are inept but cottagers aren't. We do more maintenance of the shores than they do. Why should we now be punished for their incompetence?
Many cottages started as mere shacks in the woods. Government ignored them until officials figured they could make some money even as they didn't bother to help them very much.
Today, many cottagers cost more than small houses in towns and cities, yet the small houses get the services that cottagers can only dream about.
And now there are politicians talking about going after one group of cottagers along a waterway, and if that works, Lake Simcoe will be next, and the Rideau, and Wasaga Beach etc.
There's an expression about letting sleeping dogs lie. Good advice. If the governments wish to poke this dog, it will turn out to be a wolf which will tear at them even as tax revolts and class action suits are considered. After all, why wouldn't we sue? Taxation without representation is undemocratic and improper. Surely it is also undemocratic and unfair to levy taxes and give nothing in exchange.
 The MPs are running a new version of a costly shell game where there are no services to be found under any of the shells.

GOING OVERBOARD ON JACK LAYTON.

JUST A POLITICIAN, NOT A SAINT

I have kept my mouth shut for a year but this has become ridiculous. I come to bury Jack Layton, not to praise him, because he was just another politician, although his early death was unfortunate.
Ringing a John Lennon song on the Peace Tower carillon on the anniversary of his death! Chalking messages about Jack on a wall in Nathan Phillips Square. The media's fawning coverage!
My guess is they really didn't know him.
Not everyone swooned at the first anniversary of his death. Chris Selley in the National Post wrote a good comment under the headline The Wrong Song For Layton. Chris had better watch out. All you have to do is tackle some new mega-hero of the people and some nervous media hacks will use it as an excuse to fire you. I know.
For a decade I did a weekly commentary on CBC Radio in Toronto. My contract was not renewed - they said they were trying different voices - after I grumbled that John Sewell, then the darling of the CBC and the left in the media, was just a mayor, you know, he doesn't walk on water. The controversial mayor was being excused for yet another stupid stunt.
I guess as a fallen Baptist I should not have got into Biblical language, but I seemed to recall that Sewell was raised in a wealthy Baptist home and he certainly carried himself as holier-than-anyone.
Then I did a regular commentary on CFRB back when it was the giant among radio stations. I was called about the death of Princess Diana and made the mistake of saying that I thought she was a horny driven attractive woman and the song that Elton John rewrote for her was not that great.
I actually came to like the song, Candles in the Wind, which was first written for Marilyn Monroe who knew all about a public pretence of shyness and a inner desire to do anything she damn well pleased. But after I didn't participate in the international mourning for a spoiled brat, my regular spot on CFRB was filled by someone who would kowtow more to the public's latest hot heroes.
My knowledge of the former NDP leader is greater than most. I covered him as a columnist and cheerfully donated my time to a Ryerson Open College course on municipal politics that he taught as a professor.
It took several days out of my life because my recorded comments were used in most lectures but no one, not Layton or his associate or the university, thanked me. An honorarium would have been nice.
Jack always greeted me quite cordially although he disagreed with everything I wrote or said, but that didn't stop him from suing me and the Sun. One of the suits involved a Sun box which he argued was in the wrong place and hurt him when he was cycling. (As if the box jumped out at him.)
I think there was a libel suit or two but they didn't go far and I remember nothing about them.
I wish that everyone that has rushed to canonize him would remember his history as a pol who often lost a vote in Toronto council and lost elections too. He was hardly a popular alderman but was one of those named by opponents as leader of the " crazies' on council. There was the 1990 scandal when it was discovered that he and his wife, Olivia Chow, who is hardly a great thinker, had been living for years in a government-subsidized co-op despite their combined $120,000-a-year salary from taxpayers. They protested wildly but then paid $320 more a month for their three-bedroom apartment that they got for a bargain $800-a-month. Hardly a good example for the people but then Jack and Olivia never shirked from living well off the taxpayers.
He ran for mayor of the downtown city in 1991 and even though the inner city is a hotbed for the NDP and Liberals, he got only 32% of the vote. The winner, June Rowlands, a Liberal who became the city's first female mayor, got 113,993 votes to his 64,044.
And if the vote had been held after amalgamation, and included all the suburbs which definitely don't like the anti-car socialist views of the left, he would have lost by a bigger margin.
In the municipal election that year, another lefty, David Miller, had one of his three defeats. Miller also went on to become a darling of the left and the gLiberals who never admit that their heroes, these great political "statues," really have feet of clay that go right up to the thighs.
Layton  certainly became a good NDP leader, that is if you like the NDP, and I don't, and his fight against cancer was inspiring. Selley seems to have liked Layton more than I did. He wrote a great conclusion. He said that Layton wasn't a hero or saint but he didn't begrudge anyone a nice vigil. "But ringing bells in a tower for a nice guy and very good politician just seems a bit ....much. Sorry."
Don't be sorry, Chris, You nailed it.
                             

                                                                ................
Now it turns out that the Canadian government spent more than a third of a million dollars on the state funeral for Layton. Ridiculous!  Usually the NDP would take the lead in ridiculing and attacking such an expenditure. What a strained silence from them.
That amount, by the way, was more than the money spent on each of the last two state funerals for governors-general.

POWER OF PRAYER

HUMBLED BY THOSE WHO PRAYED FOR ME

Mary and I drove along the once familiar roads because my big sister, Joyce Long, was celebrating her 80th birthday in the gym of the Listowel Baptist Church.
It was supposed to be a surprise with family and friends but there was a picture and notice in the paper. That's the nice way things happen in Ontario towns.
My big sister took me into the church kitchen to meet the "babysitter" for the day, a congregation member taking her turn to watch the church while there was an outside function.
"She was one of the ladies who prayed for you," Joyce said.
I was stunned. I didn't really know that there was a church in Listowel praying for my recovery during my three months in four hospitals in the spring of 2011.
Joyce, my sister Joanne, and I started our church life in the tiny Baptist church on the north hill of Chesley, a town of 1,800 near Owen Sound. Our church would have fit into the gym in Listowel. We didn't even have a washroom or hot plate. There was a big mortgage and we had to share a minister. The Downings were most of the choir. And now Joyce went to a big church with no debt and three ministers. And a congregation that prayed for a profane back-sliding journalist who watches the Gaither Gospel Hour on TV instead of going to church.
Later, Joyce introduced me to another lady who had prayed for me. And I tried to explain to her that I wasn't much for church these days after a boyhood when my sisters and I lived with Dutch grandparents who read a chapter of the Bible (but not the Songs of Solomon) and knelt in prayer after every meal.
It was overkill. And I couldn't get over some of the murderous and strange acts of the Old Testament. So Mary looks after church going for the family, faithfully attending mass and ignoring my youngest son Mark (who is founding his own religion) and my views on the Bible after extensive reading.
My boyhood has marked me, however, The Toronto Sun became famous for the replies at the end of the published letters because no big paper then did it. One day I met a minister who commented that I must have been raised in a Christian home because often the replies I wrote had a Biblical flavour.
As I drove back to the Big Smoke from Joyce's party, I kept thinking how moving it had been to meet people who prayed for my recovery without knowing anything about me.
I was telling about my humbling experience to friends who now live in Warkworth. Connie and Glen Woodcock. Connie is a great columnist and Glen, the Sun's former Associate Editor, has a big band show on Sundays on 91.1 FM and writes knowledgeably about cars.
Both are active in the Anglican church in Campbellford. And after I told them about Listowel, they told me, for the first time, that they had their church pray for me in the Intercessionals which are a nice part of the Anglican service.
I was touched again. Maybe I had survived and then learned to walk again because of forces beyond my understanding and beliefs. After all, deep down where my childhood nestles, I do believe that prayer works,  even if I now wear the crusty facade of a heretic.
Connie said that they had also prayed for Hec Macmillan, for nine years the mayor of Trent Hills (which includes Warkworth and Campbellford.) Macmillan has recovered from a savage bout with esophageal cancer which has transformed his life, his eating ( a noted hand at barbecues who can no longer eat his ribs) and carved his weight in half. And Hec had come to their church to thank them.
So I set off to see Hec at his service station in Campellford which has the cheapest gas in town.
I almost didn't recognize him behind the counter until he spoke to me.
I told him that I was moved by the news that after his recovery, he and his wife, who hadn't been great churchgoers, had attended each of the seven churches in town to give thanks for the prayers. Now that was something I hadn't done.
Hec said that I had got only part of the story from the Woodcocks. The Macmillans had gone to services at every church in his sprawling municipality over the pleasant hills of Northumberland County
Some 27 in all. They had even waited for the little church in the hamlet of Trent Hills to open for the summer months.
And Mayor Macmillan has a story to tell, with some tears. There is a mystical edge to it but then he is entitled since he beat one of the new and growing killers of the murderous cancer world.

He says that he never really believed in anything before until he had tangible proof.  Then came his surgery and the ordeal of intensive care that no survivor ever forgets.
.As he told Pete Fisher, his friend and reporter at the newspaper Northumberland Today,  "I got shown something that I can't explain. I can't prove it, but I can say that nobody will ever convince me that the power of prayer doesn't  exist or that it doesn't work."
The mayor says that he wasn't overly religious before all this but he has always believed in God.  Now his Sundays have been transformed. "I haven't missed a Sunday at church since I got home and I go to a different church every Sunday because there were so many people pulling for me, I don't know how to repay them.
But Hec Macmillan being Hec Macmillan, and the mayor, found a way this spring to honour the churches even though he has always been a believer in the clear division between church and state. He gave his Mayor's Civic Pride Award to all the churches, faiths and congregations of his municipality.
The minister at the Campbellford Baptist Church, Lionel Pye, was pleased at the honour and said it had been a "priviledge" to pray for the mayor. We're delighted that the Lord heard our prayer and answered our prayer.''
Those are the words of my youth, when all I was allowed to do was pray and read the Bible and everything else was the work of the devil. Words I haven't though of for decades.  But they now have a new meaning, thanks to the prayers of strangers.
And I have churches to visit.

GIVE FORD A BRAKE

CHAUFFEURS MAKE MAYORS EFFICIENT

If Rob Ford was a lefty driving a rusty Ford, there wouldn't be this fuss.
But Mayor Ford is a righty driving his very own brand new Caddy.
So we have the squealing over him being photographed apparently reading while driving on the Gardiner. Apparently the traffic was actually moving for a change,  the anti-car policies of his opposition, the socialists and gLiberals, not working for one blessed moment.
Let me make observations as someone who has ridden a lot with chauffeur-driven politicians and CEOs because of 50 years of journalism. And I think the drivers are worth their weight in stock options. I've seen the evidence.
Shouldn't we thank the mayor for driving himself in his own car when he was entitled to follow in the tire tracks of many mayors and major politicians in being driven around by a chauffeur and car provided at taxpayers' expense?
Since we don't know just how long he was reading, or what he was reading, he may be guilty only of doing what many of us have. A glance. If you disagree, then you boast that you pull over to the side of the road every time you look at a map or an address. Which is a lot of hooey!
I suspect he was briefly at a speech or some report to refresh his memory. After all, the mayor has many faults but let's not pretend he doesn't pay attention to the traffic around him.
And to dig up an old offence for drinking and driving in Florida strikes me as meaness by sanctimonious citizens and media who believe in not hanging murderers and giving thieves a second chance but not, bigawd, that plump mayor who believes in driving himself to reduce the costs of city administration.
I agree with the law against hand held cell phones. I believe in cops pulling over drivers who are shaving or doing their makeup or are otherwise distracted from the task at hand, not running over me.
So I am not trivializing the incident, but it was an incident and not an accident.

I have fumed behind too many drivers meandering across lanes or driving too slowly not to think that drivers should concentrate on driving, not on any other task. So use cell phones with the hands-free gadgets which are simple and inexpensive and let's not being texting or reading text or generally being a distracted jerk.
But back to the main point, Ford isn't doing us a great favour when he scorns this useful trapping of power, the free car and driver. As I have written before, politicians and bosses with huge responsibilities SHOULD use a car and driver because it makes them more efficient and the public benefits in the long or even the short run. They can read background documents while the rest of us seethe in traffic jams. They can make more visits, just plain do more work.
In the early days of the regional city, the first Metro chairman, Fred Gardiner, had a tiny staff. So he spent every evening being driving around by a secretary/bookkeeper monitoring the vast infrastructure improvements. The same big car used to carry Big Daddy, reporters and anyone who wanted to hitch a ride between our offices in old City Hall and where the Metro meetings were held in an old York county building.
Big Daddy, a nickname from the comics, retired to a job as hydro commissioner where he took a car and driver as his main compensation. We benefited from his enormous knowledge.
Nathan Phillips, the Mayor of All the People, who was mayor of  Toronto longer than anyone except for Art Eggleton, used to have the limousine stop at Avenue Rd. and St. Clair in the morning and ask people at the TTC stop whether they wanted a ride downtown in "their" car.
The four controllers, who along with the mayor formed the council executive, each had a car and driver. That old Board of Control functioned better, as one result, than the current bloated city executive.
Paul Godfrey, who is famous for dealing with calls and problems on the same day, used a car and driver as Metro chairman and newspaper and baseball boss and still talks about just how much more a person can do when they don't have to worry about driving and parking. (His driver, an old school friend, had to be directed by Godfrey in the early years because he didn't know downtown.)
Doug Creighton, the Sun founder, rode up front with his driver/friend and scorned anyone who didn't. Since Doug was a regular on the social scene and spent long hours at work and play, not even the greenest of our reporters questioned how the boss moved around town.
The drivers hardly sit around during long meetings. They are often used as couriers and take over some petty chores for the boss. Their uses are as different as the city streets.. I even remember the time Big Daddy's car and driver delivered a drug addict to hospital after she got the shakes testifying before him at a Metro Licensing Commission meeting.
Ford is hardly the first mayor to have police say he should have a driver. Police demanded that Hazel McCallion get a driver out in Mississauga, thus easing the anxiety of all the people hosting late night events that McCallion loved to attend. She drove the way she avoided conflicts of interest. Not very well!
Ford suffers because he doesn't look mayoral, more like the bully/fat guy in high school who can't get a date. He has the right philosophy towards spending but is awkward, to say the least, at implementation. He just hasn't thought enough issues through.
 I think he too often stumbles from gaffe to mistake, because his wing man, his brother, has the political instincts of a beaver. It should have been obvious to both of them that it would be better for all of us if the mayor was driven by someone. The only people who criticize a major mayor or politician for a car and driver are those who don't know a damn thing about how the real world, and Toronto traffic, works.
May they be doomed to forever live at King and Yonge at 5 p.m. on a hot summer day. Then their objections will melt along with the pavement.
Of course in the end Ford will be given a driver. And this fuss will die down... until he puts his foot in it - or his mouth - again.
There is another good result, according to the quip from a former Ford colleague who wishes to remain anonymous (CNE  president Brian Ashton.) "At least now we know he can read!"