A developer is appealing to the Ontario Municipal Board for permission to build a 40+-storey mixed use building in the lot immediately behind the much smaller condo building that I live in. (If you’re not from Ontario and don’t know what the Ontario Municipal Board is, don’t worry. It’s not relevant to this story. Suffice it to say that it’s an unelected body that is appointed by the province to overrule elected city councils whenever the OMB decides to do so at the request of developers.)

A “prehearing” on the issue is coming up about a month and the developer is required to notify me and, I assume, everyone in the neighborhood about the meeting. This brings up a question. What the hell is a “prehearing”? My spellchecker tells me that it’s not anything, but the lawyer and/or the OMB must think it is something because they are spending a lot of time and money on it.

Whatever a prehearing is, it can, according to the notice, last all day. That’s a lot of time for people to just sit there before hearing anything. Maybe that’s it. Maybe a “prehearing” is a period of silent meditation. It’s good for the soul before and it will help you to tranquilly accept a totally inappropriate development being dropped on your backside. Yeah, that’s probably it.

The document lists a number of purposes of the meeting, but I don’t understand how it will be possible to achieve any of them without hearing anything. I suppose it would be a nice gesture to the deaf if we all learned sign language. However, I don’t know about anyone else, but I doubt I’d be able to do it before the meeting.

The developer’s lawyer is, apparently, very eager to notify me about the prehearing because he sent me three copies of the nine-page document. One copy was mailed to “Joel Michael Klebanoff.” Another went to “Joel Michael Klebanoff or occupant.” And a third was sent to “Klebanoff Joel Michael.”

All three envelopes carried the same address. The only variation was that the Klebanoff Joel Michael version positioned my postal code on a separate line, whereas the other two envelopes put it on the same line as “Toronto, Ontario.”

It was nice of the lawyer to provide copies for each of my personalities. I wonder when the remaining copies will arrive.