It is with heavy hearts that we let you know that Peter Lowry has passed away. We would like to thank everyone for their readership. Please know how much this blog meant to him.
Thanks again from his wife, daughter and grandsons.
Building on the Brand.
Can you believe that the liberals in Ontario will have a new leader next week and the Ford conservatives are going to pay to introduce her to Ontario voters. Ford and friends think they will turn the voters against her but the ad campaign will more likely be laughed at. It will just be added to the overly long list of dumb moves by the Ford conservatives.
And Bonnie Crombie will be standing there laughing at them. They should never make the mistake of thinking she is a young inexperienced woman. She proved in the recent liberal campaign for the provincial leadership that she can handle experienced politicians. And she won the leadership despite the hinky rules that said all electoral districts are equal. Down the road when next someone says one member, one vote, liberals should make sure their votes really are equal.
In a way, Bonnie Crombie reminds me of her mentor Hazel McCallion. Hazel was already mayor of Streetsville when I first met her. She must have been in her 50s. And she was smart and savvy then. She quickly proved that she was equal to and better than many of her fellow Mississauga councillors. When she went for the mayoralty, she knew I was rooting for her. Her craggy face was always smiling for me when we met.
The edge that Bonnie Crombie has is her Disney training in Anaheim, California. I have never worked with a politician trained by the great showman’s brand. I think there is a trust in the brand. After all, everybody loves Cinderella.
When you build on a brand such as that, you are building on a brand that is loved around the world. The millions of visitors that visit the Disney sites prove it year after year.
When Ford attacks Crombie, he will only prove that he is still a crass boor. I have no idea what he will attack her on. It really doesn’t matter. Most people would not guess that Bonnie Crombie is in her sixties. They would jump to her defense in the same way as you would for Snow White.
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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry
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Confused Conservatives.
Can you imagine conservative leader Pierre Poilievre singing “Solidarity Forever”? That is the image that comes to mind when you read that he thinks his party can win some of the labour vote in the next election. I expect he will. Despite the conservatives classifying the NDP as ‘woke’ there have always been an element in the labour movement that votes conservative. We saw it in some of the long-term conservative ridings in Toronto that switched to being NDP strongholds.
The facile answer at the time was that the liberals had always been the enemy and the former conservatives went to the NDP as their alternative. I think it is more complex than that. In the past 40 years or so, we have seen the more progressive unions switch to the liberals as the party that gets things done for them.
The voters that the Poilievre conservatives are attracting are the young, the angry and the ignorant. They probably know that Poilievre is lying to them and they don’t care. They see their support for Poilievre as getting even. They are counting on him to be disruptive. It is likely the reason Ontario’s Doug Ford won the last provincial election on the promise of “Buck a Beer.” You don’t really believe it will happen but the idea of somebody sticking it to the foreign-owned beer companies gives you a nice warm feeling.
I feel sorry for the young. This part of the electorate think Poilievre speaks for them. He doesn’t. He only speaks for himself. He spells disaster for the conservatives with his extremist right-wing views. He is an ideologue, inculcated throughout his life in the Alberta Reform party and conservative spread of hatred of the supposed liberal establishment of the east.
If he is ever elected prime minister of Canada, any federal effort to stem climate change would go straight into the garbage dumps. Instead of gradually reducing Alberta’s dependence on exploiting the tar sands, he would turn the industry loose to maximize their output and profits.
If you have ever wondered what the supposed freedom is that he is offering Canadians, it is the freedom to fend for yourself. It is the freedom to go hungry if you fall on hard times. It is also the freedom to sleep on the streets if you cannot afford the escalating housing costs. He will not be there for you.
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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry
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We Can Unite the Left.
Consider this: Singh and the new democrats can save Canada from going down the same slippery slope as the United States. Singh and his party are already keeping Poilievre and his conservative puppets from trampling on Canada’s democracy. The liberal and NDP accord is staving off an election that could see Poilievre win with his lies. He would be far less likely to win if Canada’s progressives joined forces.
It is the same as when Stephen Harper led the charge to unite the right. It led to nine years of cruel, austere conservative government, because the right was united and the progressives were fighting each other.
And why should there be fighting among the progressives? We have the same objectives. We want the same good government that serves the needs of the people.
It is the conservatives who are always trying to inflict their ideology on us. Think about it. Do you want our government to protect the privileges of millionaires? And make the rest of us pay for it?
And what are they going to do about global warming, when every barrel of oil from the tar sands contributes to wildfires, tornadoes, floods, droughts and more climate change?
Canada needs progressives in government who will ensure that nobody needs sleep on our winter streets. The country needs progressives who can build a high-speed electric train system across Canada. We need a government that will give us the opportunity to change how our county works, how we are governed and how our democracy functions. We are certainly not a monarchy and we need to change that silly fiction from long ago.
Conservatives are not all as selfish and uncaring as their leaders try to tell us. The opportunity to have a truly progressive government will attract many away from the conservatives. Liberal democrats have proved that in Europe. They are only challenged by the right-wing parties when they do not do their job properly.
If you are an NDP supporter, please ask Jagmeet Singh to help build our coalition.
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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry
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Don’t Cry for Ford Ontario.
Some times you just have to take it on the chin and carry on regardless. We heard the other day that the Ontario conservatives might not be having a dinner to honour their leader this year. They will still bow low and do what he says but they seem worried about the ongoing RCMP investigation of his dealings with developers in the Ontario Greenbelt and probably along the ill-fated Highway 413 as well.
If the conservative party followed Mr. Trump’s example in the United States, they would stick to routine. You can be sure that the Republican Party is carrying on with programs to crown Mr. Trump as their candidate. There is nothing the few malcontents who had their eyes on the nomination, can do about it. And while the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to consider the challenges to Mr. Trump running for president, you have to remember that most of the Supreme Court judges are Republican appointees.
But in Canada our politicians are citizens and no citizen is above the law.
It would be very expensive for the Ontario to pass up on a leader’s dinner this year. The last leader’s dinner put some $6 million in the conservatives’ bank account. And they might need it if they are going to pay for a campaign to defame the new liberal leader. That might be a far more expensive chore than they imagined.
Bonnie Crombie’s credibility is hardly built on nothing. She was backed by the well-known and respected late Hazel McCallion who preceded her in the Mississauga mayoralty. Nobody faults the excellent job Crombie has done while mayor. Her grasp of the issues, her work ethic, her public approval are all to be considered before being foolish enough to try to tear her down.
And why is she leaving the mayoralty in Ontario’s fourth largest city? As mayor, she has seen how Doug Ford has failed to keep faith with Ontario. As a former member of parliament, she has seen the need for the different levels of government to keep faith with the voters. Let’s face it, she has far more experience in Canadian politics than Doug Ford. Ford lurches from one mistake to another. He hardly wants her attacking him in the Ontario legislature.
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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry
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Poilievre Protects Polluters.
Some of our pollsters tell us that the conservative leader is making in-roads with voters with his “Axe the Tax” campaign. His very first error in this is that the carbon charge is not a tax. That man thinks he can convince people to vote for him because they believe his lies. That so-called carbon charge puts money in your pocket and mine. If you are a tax-payer, you get a share of that money. The government does not keep it.
I am not particularly fond of Justin Trudeau as leader of the liberals either, but he is making sure that we get that carbon charge money to help us fight inflation. And to blame Justin Trudeau for inflation is another ridiculous lie. The outrageous salaries of the high-paid company chief executives in Canada contribute far more to inflation than any carbon payment.
The poster-boy for chief executives in Canada is Galen Weston of the Weston (Loblaws) empire. The last reports available tell us he was paid over $11 million dollars in 2022. You have to sell a hell of a lot of bread to make that much. And maybe he finds it helps if he charges a lot for the bread. And it also means thousands of trucks to deliver it. His company also pays the carbon charge.
It is the transportation industry that pays the most to the carbon penalty. Planes, trains, automobiles and trucks are the biggest contributors to carbon in our atmosphere. That is why the government has put so much emphasis on the eventual changeover to alternative sources of energy in transportation.
What Mr. Poilievre does not understand is that Canada would be considered a pariah among nations if it did not do its part. Canada is a trading nation. Much of our country’s income and wealth is attributable to the fact that we are a trading nation. Canada is recognized around the world for its grain and other farming products. It has built considerable expertise in mining and mine management. Our engineers are designing massive projects in many parts of the world. Canadian products are welcome around the world.
And yet, Mr. Poilievre doesn’t care. He has no plan for reducing carbon in our atmosphere. He has no plans for wildfires, floods, drought, tornadoes and wild swings in temperatures as the world succumbs to climate change. He is a sad little man who wants to be prime minister of Canada. And nobody knows why!
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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry
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Political Parties Pay the Piper.
And here, all along, I thought it was just the conservatives and liberals who were dumb. Now I find out that the new democrats are just as dim. Robin Sears, one of the chief apologists for the new democrats admitted in the Toronto Star the other day that the NDP were just as stupid as the conservatives and liberals in how they choose their party leaders.
Since the conservatives are always the last to admit their own stupidity, it will have to be the liberals and new democrats who will be the first to fix the problems.
After all, I would expect that Jagmeet Singh saw how Barrie member of parliament, Patrick Brown, lined up thousands from the Indian diaspora in Ontario to win the Ontario conservative leadership. There was nothing to stop Singh from going to the same diaspora, mainly in Ontario and British Columbia, when seeking the federal new democrat leadership. And it worked, didn’t it?
I am not privy to the reason the conservatives used to toss Brown out of the federal conservative leadership race when he started signing up the same Indian diaspora as Singh used. I think what worried the conservative leadership was not that Brown was acting as a stalking horse for John Charest but he might accidently win against Pierre Poilievre.
As it was, Poilievre won easily despite the idea of having all political ridings treated as equal. Anyone who would promote such a dumb idea as that does not know much about Canadian politics. Poilievre would have dominated all the Alberta ridings and most of the Saskatchewan but from there he would have had to have a lot of volunteers working the phones to get out his vote in BC and the eastern provinces.
He obviously did as he won handily.
But the problem is that the party membership lists need a lot of work to cut back the lists to meaningful memberships. The parties all need workers and contributors and need not waste much effort on people signed up in hopes of a leadership vote.
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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry
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Losing Like Legault.
It looked like good news. It said that Quebec premier François Legault was losing ground in Quebec politics. It was like the news that your mother-in-law has been killed in an accident while driving your brand-new car. The insurance company will look after the car, but you are really going to miss your mother-in-law. Would it be the same if we did not have Legault to complain about any more?
The man is a bigot, you know. He hates having anglos in Quebec. He tries to bar immigrants who do not speak French. He doesn’t even want Quebec’s English language universities to bring students from other parts of Canada. He certainly doesn’t do much for Quebec tourism.
And what would you expect from a right-wing politician who tramples our Charter of Human rights and Freedoms. He wants a unilingual Quebec in a bilingual Canada.
I like to think of Legault as the “Missing Link.” It is a euphemism for his Third Link which is supposed to be for a tunnel under the St. Lawrence River between Quebec City and its suburbs south of the river. It is one of those on-again-off-again promises that politicians play with depending on their mood.
Having had to use the ferry between the city and Lévis on the south shore a few times, I would vote for a tunnel myself. After all, if the English and the French can have a Chunnel under the English Channel, why can’t Quebec connect with its own south shore? Though I did hear something about the Chunnel to Europe springing a leak the other day. That did not sound good.
The last time I checked on this tunnel scheme the provincial education minister was crying about it in the legislature. That did not sound good either. The tunnel is off again.
In a vain attempt to regain voter approval in the Quebec City area, premier Legault and his fellow hockey enthusiasts in the legislature offered the voters a couple pre-season hockey games in Quebec City by the Los Angeles Kings. The bribe came just after telling Quebecers that there had to be some belt tightening—such as cutting funding for the province’s food banks by $8 million. When it was mentioned that the Los Angeles Kings would cost the government $7 million, it put a damper on the plan.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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The Unlucky 413.
Premier Doug Ford of Ontario thinks our federal environment minister is an extremist. Last month he was ranting and raving about federal politicians who seemed negative towards his proposed Highway 413. It does seem unfair that after the Greenbelt fiasco, that some of his best friends are going to also lose their investments in land around the unneeded Highway 413.
Mr. Ford’s problem might be that he does not seem to be superstitious. He might never have noticed that there is no Highway 13 in Ontario. The 400 series of highways are always named after the former two or four-lane highway they supplement or replace. The only nearby highways to which Highway 413 would compete with for traffic are Highway 407, the toll road which is under utilized because of its high tolls, and further south again, Highway 401, which is heavily used because truckers cannot afford the Highway 407 tolls.
But when you consider that Highway 407 was initially designed as the Toronto bypass to take pressure off Highway 401, you realize how stupid it was for the former Harris conservative government in Ontario to sell off the highway for a toll road. Instead of taking the trucks off the Toronto section of Highway 401, it is now forcing trucks to use the 401.
The proposed new highway, now called Highway 413, was originally suggested as the GTA West Project and was only in case of a major increase in development in the Georgetown and Halton Hills area of the province. It might have a use if it did not run from a very high traffic location on Highway 400 on the East, just 52 kilometres west to another traffic problem where Hwy 407 joins Hwy 401 traffic, and where the volume of traffic could produce traffic jams of monumental proportions.
Doug Ford complains that the federal environment minister is deliberately trying to delay his Highway 413. He might be right. While the Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government had “overstepped” its constitutional authority in demanding an impact assessment of the highway project, the federal government is studying how to make the study acceptable to the court.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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Are They Pestering You?
One of the things I learned early in running elections is to work closely with your fundraisers. Money is not always the solution but it sure helps. I should not have to admit it but liberals, who are tired of all the pleas for money in their computer in-basket every day, can blame me if they like. It was about 60 years ago that I told the Ontario executive of the liberal party that the then 75,000 dues-paying members of the party in Ontario might like to contribute a few bucks to help win a bye-election that had been called.
Since computer-to-computer communications was in its infancy at the time, I was asking the board for the postage. All I can say about that first effort was that we did not have to hire extra help to open all the return envelopes.
You can imagine today why I have more than one e-mail address. It means I can get to the important messages faster and sweep the stoop at my convenience.
And I am not the only liberal who has grown tired of the continual pestering by the party. I had a call yesterday from a very generous friend who has already given to the party this year. He is an enthusiastic supporter of Bonnie Crombie and sent the Ontario party $500 from himself and another $500 from his wife. He did not worry about any immediate acknowledgement but he did object to the continued e-mail requests for funds. He says it is reaching the point of harassment.
What it says to me is that the computer experts working for the liberal party are not doing their job. Membership records require constant up-dating. Why would you send a member who gave you more than $100 a request for less? Why would you continue to send lower-valued requests to a generous donor? And why would you send a person, who is a tireless worker for the party in his community, endless requests for money?
In this time of serious inflation there are those who would like to contribute but cannot. They have to put their families first. The party is embarrassing them.
I spent more than 35 years working with companies that made or used computers. None of those machines was stupid but I saw many companies and organizations that failed to use those computers properly.
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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry
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