YOU'VE GOT TO KNOW WHEN TO HOLD 'EM

John Turmel is not expecting to vote in the March 30 Nepean-Carleton
by-election to replace John Baird as the riding's MPP at Queen's Park.

"If I don't show up for the victory party of the winner, you'll know
where I am," he said at an all-candidates meeting in Stittsville last week.

Turmel expected to be in jail by the time the polls open. He may be
in there for a long, long time. "It won't be the first time that
people have voted for me when I've been behind bars," he said.

He wears a hard hat and calls himself the "Anti-Poverty Engineer".
It's hard to get an accurate read when you first encounter him. You
peg him somewhere on the charts between Steven Hawking and a
character in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

As they say of some two-sport athletes, he's "a rare double". Combine
the characters of Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, and you
are entering the John Turmel zone.

Turmel takes credit for being the architect of unilets, a
zero-interest alternative time-based currency, which he claims will
erase Argentina's national debt. People laugh when they hear him
because he sounds so far outside the box.

Yet, the more you listen to him hammer away at the economic theories
of men like John Kenneth Galbraith, the more Turmel's zero-interest
bond currencies make sense.

Although he sounds far-fetched and less-than-believable, Turmel was
actually invited to draft the United Nations Millenium Declaration in
2000. There is more - much more - to John Turmel than saving third
world economies.

Turmel is in the Guiness Book of Records for having lost 60
elections. The Nepean-Carleton by-election will be his 61st in the L
column. Even the Washington Generals have beaten the Harlem
Globetrotters before.

"I'm on the same page as the Queen!" he says with
jump-out-of-your-skin enthusiasm, holding up the book. Then his face
saddens. "But the American book is different. In the United States,
I'm on the same page as the world's largest bagel."

Although he has never won an election, he wins regularly in his other
profession. While Rain Man counted cards in Vegas while playing Black
Jack, Turmel is Canada's most accomplished hold 'em poker player.

Turmel was, like Rain Man, a great Black Jack player, until he was
barred from playing in most Vegas casinos. While at Carleton, Turmel
scored an A-plus in Walter Schneider's The Mathematics of Gambling
course. He became Professor Schneider's T.A.

"I'm the world's biggest loser in elections, yet I'm the world's best
poker player. How does that happen?"

Despite the animation, Turmel is a genius when it comes to numbers.
His history of legal trouble began with his gaming operations that
employed more than 100 people. He said he kept moving to Nepean
because it was the "most friendly" city to his gambling operations.

Turmel began running in politics to try and legalize gambling. The
irony is that he was painted as a crackpot, but here we are a
generation later and gambling is not only legal, but a key component
of tourism both along the St. Lawrence and in the national capital
region with casinos in Gananoque and Gatineau.

He has spent most of the last three years in Atlantic City and out of
the local spotlight. "If you haven't heard from me in the last couple
of years, there has been a media blackout," he says.

His recent legal problems, however, are not gambling related. Turmel
is on a crusade to legalize marijuana, specifically for the treatment
of epilepsy. In a publicity stunt in May, 2003, Turmel went to
Parliament Hill with seven pounds of weed. He smoked pot at the Hill,
left a pound at the door to be inspected, then he left a pound for
P.M. Jean Chretien "to help him quit alcohol", and a pound for the
Supreme Court and another for the Attorney General's Office and
another at the court house on Elgin Street and another pound for the
police station.

According to Turmel, 3,600 people a day die from epileptic seizures
in Canada. Cannibis, he says, prevents seizures. Turmel was arrested
that day by the RCMP on trafficking charges.

His sentence was to be handed down this week on the day before the
election. He could face life. In the political arena, Turmel is the
self-proclaimed king of the fringe, and he knows he will not win. But
outside of politics, it's a different game, a different table, and
Turmel rarely loses. Regardless of the verdict, you just can't bet
against John Turmel.