Opps

TORONTO - A young woman with a fistful of cash stood at the back of Ralph Nader's speech in Toronto on Monday, handing bills to people as they left.

The money had been donated to Mr. Nader's presidential bid by well-meaning Canadians, but only American citizens and permanent residents can contribute to U. S. political campaigns. As a champion of electoral reform and long-standing paragon of virtue, Mr. Nader would have had a hard time accepting.

The 74-year-old visited Toronto this week as part of his fourth presidential campaign. He told 150 supporters at an event held at the city's former stock exchange that many of the ideas he espoused -- such as single-payer health care, a multi-party political system and carbon taxes -- were already in place in Canada. But the independent candidate was also in Canada to raise funds from the expatriate community. After his speech, Mr. Nader called upon Matthew Zawisky, a 28-year-old supporter, to solicit funds. In a bit of barnstorming, Mr. Zawisky asked if an American in the audience would donate $4,600 -- the maximum amount a U. S. citizen can contribute to presidential campaigns under their country's law.

In exchange for the tiptop gift, Mr. Zawisky said the donor would receive a copy of Mr. Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed.

When nobody stepped forward, Mr. Zawisky dropped his request to $2,300, then $1,000 and finally $500. As the dollar amounts fell lower and lower -- and an uncomfortable silence settled in--Canadians in the crowd began to ask if they could contribute. Mr. Zawisky said donations could only come from Americans. Someone then suggested the crowd give their money to a U. S. citizen, who could then donate it.

An American in the audience who identified herself only as "Liza" volunteered to serve as an intermediary. Eager Canadians were soon approaching the young woman with 10-and 20-dollar bills.

Toby Heaps, a Canadian who volunteers for the Nader campaign, quickly approached reporters to clarify the situation. The Nader campaign could never accept the tainted Canadian funds, Mr. Heaps assured.

The money was briefly handed over to the campaign, but later returned to Liza. As she spoke with organizers, there appeared to be some confusion over whether she could keep the money and use it to make a donation online or whether she needed to give it back to the original donors.

There was further uncertainty when the young woman left the event before its conclusion, prompting Mr. Heaps to chase her down the stairs outside the hall to make sure the money was given back to its sources. She agreed to stand at the back of the room with the cash and return it to people as they left.

Alongside vice-presidential hopeful Matt Gonzalez, a former municipal politician in San Francisco, Mr. Nader is mounting his fourth bid for the presidency. He ran as a Green party candidate in 1996 and 2000. In 2004, he appeared on the ballot as an independent.

jcowan@nationalpost.com

Thanks fierceness

I got to shout out the book club, because there is nothing like a good book. And I have been loving what the girls have been doing. The book club came about during the winter this past year. I don't know if it was all the snow, a light work load or what, but I had a urge to get back to fiction, something I had abandoned for most of my university career. I read of course, but even if I was reading for pleasure I found more solace and stimulation in the pages of MacMillan, Kearns-Goodwin and Shilts than I did in any frivolous fiction. I would also say that when I have, in the past, been drawn to works of fictional literature it's with a snobby and decidedly conventional approach. I love the Russian classics: Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, pretty cheap eh? I love Jane Austin, such a girl. And the great Black Americans and their influencers, Emerson, Du Bois, Douglas, Ellison and Wright. Anyway, all of this is driving at the point, that in fact as my undergraduate education neared its close I felt a distinct void. I didn't take a single literature course at the University of Toronto, not even children's lit. which I bet would have rocked. And I stopped reading. So when those long nights set in in January I began to feel something must be done, and done it was. Eight or nine girls agreed that we would commit to one book a month. Strangely we also agreed that the book club would be girls only. Not even gays! Not that we have anything against male readers but there was a certain female dynamic which felt right from the beginning. There is always a certain pride in exclusivity. We had a preliminary dinner to discuss the structure of the book club, and our plans for the next meeting. So far we have been through two cycles, it should have been three, but things happen. Our last meeting was at Andrea and Emily's - we read Reinaldo Arenas's Before Night Falls and drank margaritas. This month Lauren chose Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle. Now both of those are memoirs, not fiction, but that is beside the point. The point is that yesterday when I went to the St. Jamestown library to look for the book, I came away with a few others. Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Linda Little's Scotch River, and Steinbeck's Cannery Row, plus a couple of study books, since I am contemplating taking the GRE's and the LSAT's - you know because I am counting on this fiction thing getting old.

*just as a side note, I chose that image of Walls's cover because I thought the cheesy Amazon logo was awesome, not because I was incapable of finding a freestanding image of cover.

Kylie you are the One

The Hand-Over

Riot Creative photog, Natalie Castellino came to Paul's handover goodbye party, and she was awesome enough to take some pics for me - since I don't own a camera...

Nader in Toronto

I just received this email from the Nader campaign. I can't F-ing wait.

Ralph Nader to speak on Monday August 11, on the trading floor of old Toronto Stock Exchange building.

Event also features partial screening of the biographical documentary, An Unreasonable Man.

Hovering over 5 per cent in national polls, Nader is on his third run for President of United States.

Find out why he runs and what's at stake for Canada this election.

Ralph Nader is the only major candidate for President of the United States standing up to implement Canadian-style universal healthcare, a Dion-style Carbon Tax, and ending the war in Iraq with a full 6-month withdrawal. Over ten million Americans say they will vote for him, and another 20 million say they would if they thought he had a chance of winning. He's on track to be on the ballot in 45 states, and has a shot at getting in the Google Presidential Debates to be held in New Orleans this September. Come see him this Monday August 11 at the Design Exchange in Downtown Toronto.

Event Program:

* Screening of a portion of An Unreasonable Man, the acclaimed documentary on Ralph Nader

* Ralph Nader Remarks on the US Presidential Election: What's at stake for Canada?

* Q and A with Ralph Nader

Where: Design Exchange, 234 Bay Street, Toronto, Ontario M5K 1B2.

Time: 7:00 to 9:30 pm

Getting to know you -Toronto

At the end of this month I will have lived in Toronto for five years, and in that time I have come to know this city well enough to know that, in actuality I know very little - about Toronto, or anywhere else for that matter. On the eve of that anniversary I have been thinking about what I do know. Then today as I waited, for several hours and at multiple locations, to pay a delinquent traffic violation, I realized that if you want to know how this city really functions head down to any municipal bureaucractic office and you will learn about the total chaos that really runs this city. I spent the first hour of my endeavour at Metro Hall, that glorious early nineties monstrosity at Wellington and John - you know the place. Only to be told that despite what my ticket said I could not pay the 23.75$ that I owed, for making an illegal right on Bloor. No, no, Metro Hall only deals with parking tickets. I mean I guess it makes sense that moving violations be dealt with twenty blocks away, just not sure why they haven't cleared that up on the ticket itself. Anyway, as I sat waiting in the Provincial Courts offices at 137 Edward Street, for over an hour, I reminisced about the last time I had been to Metro Hall.


It was just over a year ago, and Paul accompanied me. We waited for at least an hour, because I guess bureaucracy here is like 35mm film development; you can usually count on it being at least one hour. And while we waited, we saw perhaps the most aggressive civic disobedience that I have witnessed in this city. A gentleman, born in Toronto but raised in South Africa, who was several people behind us started the uproar. He fumed about how long it was taking, loudly saying, and I quote,
"Even in Africa it doesn't take this long... even in Africa"
Now I am sure I don't need to go into how uncomfortable this rant made the two dozen other waiting parking violators. But he did have a point, which everyone seemed to agree with. I mean over half of the people in that line were there because they worked for, either the City or exempt corporations, and they were only there to have their parking tickets voided. Makes one wonder why they were administered in the first place. In fact the gentleman directly ahead of Paul and I worked for City Hydro.

As a result of the growing frustration and the goading of the South African he began telling us about some of the more unsavory City infrastructure projects, he'd worked on. My favorites were the story about how he had been working in Rosedale on a broken water line, which had been crimped and the whole neighborhood was without water. He had his hydro truck on Yonge Street with all his equipment and the City had it towed. He had to wait four hours for a new truck so that he could restore water service to a huge swath of the city. The other was the ironic story about how five years ago the City changed the asphalt they use to repair potholes on our streets. They made the change because the new batch was much cheaper. Of course there is always a catch, and in this case it was that the cost savings was the result of a decrease in tar in the asphalt mixture, which resulted in a decrease in the materials longevity. Meaning that potholes filled with the new asphalt have to be repaired twice as fast as the original road around it. (And anyone who rides their bike around Toronto knows that road quality is something short of stellar). There were other stories but those sum it up rather nicely.

Anyway back to Metro Hall, while the City Hydro worker, Paul, and I commiserated, Mr. South Africa grew more and more enraged by the wait, and finally he stormed past the line to the window and began banging heavily, demanding to know why it was taking over an hour to deal with twenty people - something which legitimately seemed to be a surmountable task. He was so heated that others in line began to feed off his energy and suddenly Paul and I were members of a Canadian mob - not nearly as scary as others mobs but a mob none the less. Mr. South Africa wanted to know who was in charge and how he could make a complaint. He then proceeded to hand out the contact information for Metro Hall's parking complaint division to everyone in line. Before ceremonially departing as the buildings guards were being called.

I must say Paul and I agreed we had never felt more alive in this city or more connected to it than in that moment. We also laughed our asses off.

Fast Car