What Could Have Been

As faithful readers will know, your humble scribe ran for office in 2003 for the illustrious position of trustee on the Catholic school board. I was respectably trounced, but now it seems that I might have dodged a bullet, as the Dufferin-Peel Catholic School Board was recently stripped of much of its power by a provincially appointed supervisor for refusing to balance the budget. Now, the trustees maintained this posture through the fall (and the municipal election) presumably to show the voters how tough a stance they were willing to take with the province, but it seems to me that their ongoing intransigence is disenfranchising their constituents. If the budget has to be balanced (and eventually it will be, even if more funding can be negotiated from the province), wouldn't it be better if the local representatives made those decisions?

I'm not saying that the voters of Mississauga's wards 1 & 3 made a mistake in not electing me when they had the chance, but... Anyway, all is forgiven.

Perhaps if I had won, I wouldn't have written my novel The Ideal Candidate, which continues to cause ripples in Mississauga. In my capacity as president of the Mississauga Arts Council, I recently made a presentation to City Council, and afterward a woman who'd been in the gallery came up to introduce herself to me (hello Ursula) as a regular reader of the Nine Inch Column, and to let me know that she's reading the book. A bona fide fan encounter. I only hoped I lived up to expectations.

I also received a request from Carolyn Parrish's office for a copy of the book. Evidently it's getting some buzz in the hallways of officialdom. And an interesting coincidence is that Parrish may be one of the few Mississaugans to have had contact with the mysterious real-life inspiration for the literary hero Timmy Niblet.

Speaking of ShoHu (Were we speaking of ShoHu? Maybe not.), new contributor Michael Balazo is featured this week.