Posts Tagged ‘Politics’

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The Whig wins Babel.

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

That settled it in Babel.  We had our traditional all-candidates meeting at City Hall and the Whig candidate walked away with it.  There was no contest.  We can go and vote today and we will.  There is no need for more campaigning in Babel.  Sure, we will watch the party leaders’ debate on television next week but that is to see which leader wins.

Just watching the gradual gathering of the contestants here in Babel told the story.  The Freedom Party candidate was first in his place.  He is young and knew no better.  He admitted when his party had no policy on an issue—which was often.  He is a political science student and by this time next year he will probably be something else having come to understand the conundrums his funny right-wing party presents.

The Green guy sat himself down early and bored everyone over the next two hours.  It was a test of our commitment to democracy that we suffered through the often inane comments of the fringe candidates.

The funniest of the fringe was the Libertarian who seems to have absolutely no concept of what Libertarianism means.  There was the occasional laugh and a couple times, two people actually started to applaud him.

The NDP candidate surprised us.  The lady was not on her top form.  She rambled a bit in her answers. She was not always clear in what she was saying but that seemed to suit some of the quite unclear questions and the vagueness of some of the NDP platform.

The Conservative candidate was brought into the council chambers by three ladies of his cheering claque.  Having lost his seat as a councillor in last fall’s municipal election, he did not seem as familiar with the locale.  His opening went well but his subsequent claim that his party leader, Tim Hudak, did not say he would not honour the uploading of provincial costs from municipalities beyond the billion dollars already uploaded by the Liberal government was met by some derision.  It also got him into a shouting match with the Whig candidate.  While the dozen or so members of his cheering section tried to cover up his gaffe, he came out of the argument looking foolish because of his attempt at what many in the hall knew was a blatant lie.

The Whig arrived in style, briefing book under his arm, reading glasses perched on top of his closely cropped hair.  He did a victory lap around the hall, glad handing as he went.  His bonhomie was a bit forced but he did show warmth in welcoming two youngsters who were obviously his grandsons.  He made a point of showing good humour by extended familiarities in saying hello to each of the other candidates who were already seated, ready to proceed.  The Whig made good use of his professionally prepared briefing book throughout his presentations but when he got away from it, he used far more “I’s” than “we’s.”  He makes much of his service background in the military police but the campaign medals he brags of are what are known as “I was there” ribbons.  It is fair game to mention them; he just needs to be more humble about them.

He needs to spend some time on the back benches at Queen’s Park to find out what politics is really about.  He has too easy a win here in Babel.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  peter@lowry.me

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They suckered Tim from the get go.

Monday, September 12th, 2011

The Ontario Liberals did it so innocently.  It was a minor announcement.  There was little fanfare.  Tim Hudak went for the bait and now he is floundering on the shore, ready for the mercy kill.  The provincial Conservative leader broke the cardinal rule of political campaigns: make your plan and stick to it.  He has been suckered.

Someone smarter than Tim would have been curious about the timing.  A smarter person might have remembered that the announcement sounded very much like a plan put forward by the Conservatives in the Ontario Legislature last year.  And, besides, in a campaign about billions in budgets to run this province, a $12 million plan to help a few new Canadians get the job experience they need, is really small potatoes.

But Tim bit.  He is flailing out at the “foreigners” who are being helped with the hard-earned cash of real Canadians.  What he does not realize is that the positive response he is getting is from his own voters.  Tim is drinking his own bath water.  He already has a lock on the bigot vote.  Why waste time to go after it again?

When then Conservative Leader John Tory made his gaffe in the 2007 election in supporting faith-based schools, it was a different kind of mistake.  Tory stepped out of the game plan and did something that was anathema to his voters.  You conflict your voters at your peril.

By attacking “foreigners” as he is, Tim Hudak is narrowing his vote.  The breakthrough that his federal party made earlier this year with the Toronto area ethnic communities was based on hard work in those communities.  Tim blew that the first time he opened his mouth about the Liberal program.  Who but newer Canadians understand the frustrations people feel when they cannot use the training they received in another country because of their lack of ease with the language.  This program is a critical step needed to improve and upgrade our workforce. And they must be Canadians first.

Poor Tim has been had.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  peter@lowry.me



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Hudak dumps on municipalities.

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

This will be known as the Hudak error of the 2011 provincial election.  At this crucial stage of the campaign, you hardly want to shaft your key supporters across Ontario.  Former Conservative Leader John Tory’s gaffe, four years ago, was to promise full funding to parochial schools.  This week, Ontario Conservative Leader Tim Hudak told municipal politicians that he would not promise to keep taking former provincial costs back from property tax.

While Hudak could hardly choose the timing of the Association of Ontario Municipalities meeting, the timing of his announcement will undermine his hoped for campaign momentum.  Conservatives have traditionally dominated the municipal scene in Ontario.  He was causing major problems for his own supporters.

His announcement will not change any municipal Conservative’s voting pattern but some of the enthusiasm for his election will suffer.  It can drop the active support among some municipal Tories down a few notches and that can be felt in many of the close electoral district races.  Races where one or two hundred votes could have changed the district’s outcome will not have the extra push that is needed.

The extreme right will agree with Hudak but the more middle ground Tories will see it as a repeat of one of the major mistakes of the Mike Harris regime.  The Harris Tory government, of which Hudak was part, saw the dumping of provincial costs on municipal ratepayers as an easy out to their budgeting problems.  They failed to recognize that the municipalities are the responsibility of the province and that there was no panacea in transferring costs to them.

The McGuinty government had made a deal with the municipalities that they would—over time—take costs that should properly be paid by the province back under provincial responsibility.  The entire program was priced out at $1.5 Billion.  The government kept its word and to-date some $1 Billion has been transferred.  It is the remaining $0.5 Billion that Hudak said he would not promise to pay.

The earlier Tim Hudak showed that he could be consistent and stick to his script.  Lately he is losing that ability, he appears rattled and he has had to backtrack.  This latest gaffe will not help.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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The hollowness of political promises.

Thursday, August 18th, 2011

You have to love political promises.  They cost the person promising them nothing.  They are only creative when the voters do not recognize instantly that they are being bribed with their own money.  Take the recent promise by Ontario Premier Dalton McGinty to make GO Transit give you your money back if your commuter train is late. It was a brilliant offer.

The offer was also meaningless.  It played to a demographic in which McGinty is neither warmly nor overwhelmingly approved.  Suburban commuters using GO trains tend to be upscale in income, small-C conservative if they have a political leaning and are not overly interested in the political scene.  Almost all have families waiting for them when they get home and if only four per cent of their trips are delayed, that is too many.

These commuters are going to see the money-back guarantee as their right and you would have a hard time getting them to understand that it is a false promise.  First of all, the exceptions covered in the small print are going to mean very few of these refunds will ever be made.  There might also be a tendency among GO employees to see if they can blame one of the exceptions before paying.  And even if you do get your money back a few times, the increased expense for GO will be paid with higher fares.

The people unhappy with this election promise are GO executives who recognize that this offer will be a pain in the ass rather than good customer relations.  Since they work for the politicians, they know to keep their thoughts on this to themselves.

The only other people who might be displeased are New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath and Conservative Leader Tim Hudak.  They will be glaring at their staff people who are supposed to be coming up with these ideas and asking why McGinty got there first.  If they come back at McGinty with promises of giving double the cash back, the GO Transit execs will really start to worry.

McGinty can claim that the point he was making is that GO Transit is much better than the old Canadian National Railways passenger service.  We always used to consider CN to be on time if it arrived on the right day.

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All material in this blog is copyright © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  peter@lowry.me

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The argument is not about human rights.

Monday, August 15th, 2011

When Conservative Leader Tim Hudak and Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty argue about Ontario’s Human Rights Tribunal system, they are hardly arguing about human rights.  While it is confusing trying to follow Tim Hudak’s various flip-flops on the issue, they appear to be arguing over who is best at looking after the province’s lawyers.

In his earlier and more simplistic stance to get rid of the Human Rights Tribunal, Hudak was taking the Libertarian approach to please the extremists on the far right of his party.  In suggesting, at the time, that the courts should handle human rights cases, he was offering fatter, longer running and profitable cases for lawyers.  Even with his ill-defined offer to fix the existing ‘kangaroo court’ tribunals, it sounds as though he might be suggesting they be a more restrictive, legalized process.

There is no question that McGuinty’s approach is also legal aid for lawyers.  As a lawyer, himself, he understands that with all the lawyers in Ontario, they need help to make a living.  McGuinty sees nothing wrong with hiring a law professor to ensure that the human rights system is protecting people in Ontario.  What is wrong is that the system is already too much of a legal system.  What it really needs to be is a fair system.  There is a difference between the law and fairness.  People mistakenly refer to the law as justice.  They are two different things.

If someone is seeking compensation for their wounded feelings for a real or supposed discriminatory act, they probably should have a lawyer represent them.

But the province needs to ensure that people can have easy access to Human Rights Tribunals without being forced to hire a lawyer.  They need to shut down these quasi-judicial hearing and assess a complaint for what it is.  Tribunals held over a telephone connection are intimidating and unfair.  Hearings chaired by lawyers, playing at being a judge, are neither satisfactory nor necessarily trustworthy.   There also needs to be an easy appeal process for people who feel they have been denied fairness.

The problem is that the law fails to keep up to what society recognizes as fair.  For example, there is still rampant discrimination in Ontario based on age.  We can hardly forgive this discrimination just because the law has not caught up.

We have no choice but to choose the McGuinty approach over Hudak’s in these circumstances.  It is just too bad that McGuinty thinks like a lawyer.

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All material in this blog is copyright © Peter Lowry

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A friendly note from a whiny left-wing griper.

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

This note is for Toronto Councillor Giogio Mammoliti. He complained to the news media that he is tired of the “whiny left-wing gripers’ and “communists” who contact him.  No, this is not from a communist, Mr. Mammoliti.  Far from it.  The only real communists we have ever met were totalitarian.  They did not believe in democracy.  They saw people such as you as corrupted by a weak, self-indulgent society.

But if you want to think of this writer as a ‘whiny left-wing griper,’ that is fair comment.  Mind you, we will resist the temptation to refer to you as one of Mayor Rob Ford’s ‘storm troopers.’  Name calling is not our game.

When Don Cherry made his silly speech about ‘left-wing pinkos’ back at Ford’s inauguration, everyone recognized that Cherry was just trying to be entertaining.  In very small doses, he can be amusing.  Sorry, you do not have the élan of a Don Cherry.

It is good to see that you are using the new Internet media.  It proves that you are not entirely the Neanderthal that you make yourself out as.  We can only assume that your new Facebook page is an attempt at humour.  In analyzing Facebook when it was first popular, we tested a few concepts and came to the conclusion that any idiot can use  Facebook and often does.  It is not our favourite venue for intellectual discourse.

But the problem with Facebook, Twitter and other social media is the time it takes to edit an active page.  A cost-benefit analysis can show that the time spent is worth maybe 72 cents per hour.  As long as millions of people are willing to contribute their labour, we keep creating more dot-com millionaires.  As you have told the media that you can smell the wrong people on your page, you have an obvious advantage.

But getting back to us whiny left-wing gripers:  If you think we whine too much, we will try to do better.  We will henceforth be straightforward and keep our baritone at a reasonable pitch.

We cannot do anything about being left-wing.  It is our nature.  Frankly, we should envy you your ability to ignore and disparage the poor and disadvantaged in our society.  It must be so refreshing for you not to be concerned for any of those poor souls who voted for you.  No doubt they will correct their error in judgement, next time around.

And we promise to try not to gripe.  It is probably a waste of time anyway.  We will continue to make the case for politics of caring.  We believe that a man can only stand tall if he is not standing on others.

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All material in this blog is copyright © Peter Lowry

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Busker Bob battles on.

Monday, August 8th, 2011

The buskers who entertain us on the streets while we wait for the heavy hitters have a tough job.  Even getting a little attention is encouraging for them.  Imagine how Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae feels out on the summer barbeque circuit.  In the midst of backyards full of local Liberals, a reformed New Democrat can feel lonely.

In the doldrums of summer, a little interest from the news media can be a godsend.  The media tend to act like lawyers in a courtroom and do not ask any questions to which they do not know the answers.  It saves having to write down what the interviewee is saying.

The first question is predictably about the NDP’s Jack Layton and cancer, MP Nycole Turmel and the Bloc Quebecoise.  The answer calls for the right level of concern for Jack Layton’s health and the right level of indignation about Jack’s hand-picked stand-in.  Consider the nerve of that woman to play footsie with the separatists as well as the NDP.  It is not as though Bob knows nothing of flitting between parties.

The turmoil around Turmel is also opening the door for Rae to address Prime Minister Harper’s gaffs.  He gets to make scathing comments about Mr. Harper and Harper’s friend Toronto Mayor Rob Ford to the delight of Liberal audiences.  Whether this helps Bob’s friend Dalton McGuinty remains to be seen.

If Bob could just redirect a little of that media stardom that he is presently enjoying to what Mr. Harper is currently doing in Brazil, it would be even more helpful to Canadians.  After ignoring South America, in fact, everything in the America’s south of Mexico over the past five years, Harper has a lot of catching up to do.  Not that the Liberals have a much better record in the southern half of our hemisphere.  There are economies down there that are defying the global trends and we can gain much by making more friends and doing more business.

It is just that international affairs are supposed to be Bob Rae’s specialty and he should head to that opening.  He has to remember that he is a caretaker and, if nothing else, he should keep things looking operational.

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The American angst of the summer of 2011.

Sunday, August 7th, 2011

What is going on south of that Canada-United States of America border?  Democrats are turning on Obama.  Republicans are disavowing their motley leadership. The rock that used to be Standard and Poors has turned thumbs down on the American economy.

With the plunging stock market, those of us on fixed incomes have just seen our retirement savings go south again.  The stock market does not crash these days, it just bounces like a perpetual motion India rubber ball—not higher and higher, just lower and lower.  We are all getting mad as hell and we are not going to take this any more.  (You might have heard that before but so what?)

Americans are telling their politicians how mad they are and you can hardly blame them.  It is bad enough that the greed of Wall Street drove us all into recession three years ago.  For the American politicians to create a stupid, destructive, ignorant artificial crisis such as an arbitrary, unfounded debt limit was a vicious and flagrant disregard for the people they were supposed to serve.  They should all be spanked and sent home and the voters should replace them with adults.

One of the obstacles we repeatedly run into calling for a Canadian Constitutional Conference is the people who are deathly afraid that you want a system of government similar to the Americans.  Good grief no!  Canadians have indirectly suffered the worst effects of the American Constitution for over two hundred years and hardly deserve such a flawed system of government themselves.

But as has been said many times, democracy itself is hardly perfect.  It is just much better than the alternatives.  The basic problem of the American Constitution is that it is based on a union of states and not a union of people.  Even the subsequent civil war that the country suffered only produced necessary band-aids to the problems rather than solutions.

This writer would not have the temerity to suggest what the Americans should do to clean up their act.  What they might do is reflect long and hard on the original objectives of their constitutional congress.  They were supposed to assure Americans of the individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Concentrating on making that happen would be a damn good start.

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Dalton McGuinty goes to war.

Saturday, August 6th, 2011

It is amazing.  Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has gone to war.  It is a smart war.  It is strategic.  Why are we so surprised?

The opening salvos have been lobs.  They are firing for effect.  When McGuinty claimed Harper’s focus was on Western Canada, Harper, with few words, brushed it aside.  Harper later retaliated by saying that he wants the provincial Conservatives to win the Ontario election on October 6.  He used the analogy of a hockey hat trick.  Thinking he was speaking to a solely Conservative audience, Harper went too far by saying the ‘left-wing mess’ that he inherited in 2006 and that Rob Ford inherited in Toronto last year will be the same for (Provincial Conservative Leader) Tim Hudak in October.

This could launch a war of words that will carry through the election.  And it will be a war that Dalton McGuinty can fight alone.  Stephen Harper has stated his position and that was all that was needed from him.  Harper is now the straw man that Dalton can fight instead of Hudak.  Why fight lesser players when you can take on the Federal Conservative Leader?

It is a major strategic coup.  It denigrates Hudak to the lesser role of someone yapping from the cheap seats but not allowed in the ring with the big kids.  At the same time, it elevates McGuinty to the federal level where his federal counterparts are, at the moment, laying low.  McGuinty is more than free to attack Harper on the long-term funding needs of Medicare and on Harper’s poor stance on environmental issues.  The federal Liberals will appreciate the help.

The only risk in this for McGuinty is the NDP.  For every vote he gains in this attack on Harper, he is siphoning off some support to the Provincial NDP.  The federal and provincial members of that party are used to working together and the lack of Jack Layton’s leadership can benefit Andrea Horwath as she is the next most prominent spokesperson for the party.

The battle of Ontario is a three-way fight.  Nobody is forecasting an NDP breakthrough but it has happened before.  Nobody really believes the polls that show Tim Hudak in the lead but some people could not believe the Rob Ford would win in Toronto last year.  If you make any bets on this election today, you had better hold out for long odds.

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Contemplation in a summer of hope.

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

It has been that kind of summer.  It has been a restorative time.  Far too hot to be active but very pleasant to sit on the balcony with a cold drink, watching the boats, the swimmers, the children at play.  The only books taken out to that balcony are historical, offering insights into the past.  It is more fun to sit and contemplate the future.

Many of the concerns for the future have revolved around the Liberal Party of Canada.  Where the party might be headed is a recurring theme for writers as the historical governing party has mainly withdrawn from public life to lick its wounds.

The answer to the federal angst is positive.  “We shall rise to fight again,” is the rallying cry.  We just have to be a different kind of political party.  We have to define our party.  We need to seek out our coalition of voters and speak with them and for them.  We need to be proudly left of that vague, amorphous political centre.  We need to represent justice in a world of injustice.  We need to understand that while we have to use the law and to make law, we cannot lose sight of the individual.

The Liberal Party must recognize the power of one.  This is the individual and the individual no longer owes existence and rights to the state but the state owes the individual for its acceptance and existence.  Similarly, the police to not bring order to the populace but are the delegated force of the populace and owe allegiance to that populace.

Our politicians must be our servants, carrying out the wishes of the populace, always conscious of protecting of the rights and wishes of the individual.  These servants protect our environment for now and for the future.  They mind our health, they bring order to commerce, they build the infrastructure to meet the needs of all our society, and they assure our rights to learning.  There is no fixed list of tasks to be achieved, there are just the needs of people in a successful society.

To create this new approach to politics, we must also change our thinking about how a political party works.  It has to be there to work for its supporters.  It is there to organize the political priorities.  It produces the people who can serve us best in government.  It is the conduit for direction from the populace.  It is an information network.  This will take very hard work to create.

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