Category: Uncategorized

A Question of Trust.

by Peter Lowry

Journalists report on our politicians all the time. They think they can judge them best. They kid themselves. There is too much that they do not say about our MPs, MPPs and MLAs. Even if we, as interested citizens, watch our politicians on CPAC and provincial channels, we might only get a small sample of what our local politician is doing on our behalf in Ottawa or as a member of our provincial government.

So, what can we do four years or less later when they want to be re-elected? How do we judge their worth? Do you trust them again to represent you?

Many people abdicate the responsibility by voting for the party. It is their right to do that. Some will cheerfully vote for the village idiot—if he or she represents the preferred party.

The news media encourage voting for the party by spending considerable reporting resources on following the travels of the party leaders. Some of the large city media will also take the trouble sometimes to interview candidates in your electoral district. There will be the usual complaints about sign by-laws and access to voters in institutions and condominiums.

Some people try to save all the literature they receive during the election period and, maybe, sift through the pile before going to vote. What you have read is what they want you to know, or believe. Do you trust all you read?

Surprising few of your neighbours ever bother to go to one of the all-candidate meetings. And there are fewer of those than in the past. There used to be coffee parties where a supporter would invite neighbours to meet and talk with one of the candidates. The rarest event is when a candidate comes to your door.

But if you are lucky and can question your candidate, what do you want to know. Doesn’t it all boil down to a question of trust? Can you rely on this person to represent your concerns to the government of the day?

You are the voter. What do you want? Whom do you trust to deliver for you?

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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While the World Burns.

by Peter Lowry

It’s a puzzle that there are so many people who do not care or do not recognize the trouble in which our world struggles. To deny that climate change is happening is ludicrous. To not care is even more serious. There might not be an app for that on their cell phones but caring is a critical step towards possibly alleviating the problems.

Wild fires are destroying the west coast of North America. And those trees are not falling just in the forests. The fires are attacking our towns and homes and businesses. We are just starting to realize the costs of protecting our people.

And the pain is moving across the continent. If you are not being burnt, you are being flooded. The tornado season is extending. The hurricane season is reaching. The long-frozen poles of the earth are melting.

And, oh, what fools we mortals be!

Talk to people and learn. A mother of young children shrugs when asked about her children’s future. “That is their problem,” is the answer. A young person, tripping on some mind-altering potion, tells you “Who cares?” A politician tells you that only smaller government and lower taxes can help. The homeless person cuts off your concern with “Great, but have you got any spare change?”

We have not even begun to penetrate the conscience of many. They are too busy putting food on the table for their family. They have a plane to catch to take them to a new adventure. They are heading to another protest. There is free meatloaf tonight over at the mission. They have business meetings to attend. Projects need to be completed. There is a new movie to see. There is a new app to try on their phone.

And are we paying blackmail to cyber thieves? Are we too busy pulling down the statues of the past? Are we digging at the graves of those who have already returned to dust?

And all the time, people are crying out for newer and better leadership. Leaders who can respond to 100-year events. We’ll do better with the next pandemic?

Oh, will we?

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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You can’t cancel Canada Day.

by Peter Lowry

Trading barbs and cheap shots, Canada’s 43rd parliament rose for the summer recess this past week and will likely not return in the fall. The mood of the house and its far-flung, pandemic-separated membership was that this last sitting was the precursor to a general election.

The silliest part of all the partisan exchanges was conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s claim that he was up against a left-wing coalition that wants to cancel Canada Day. Maybe he thought this claim would endear him to Canadians who honour our country. It is more likely, it made him look silly. The only Canada Day that has been cancelled is the one normally scheduled for the front lawn of the parliament buildings in Ottawa. Nobody wants to celebrate in a huge hole in the grounds during the major rebuilding of parliament.

Some cities have also cancelled Canada Day celebrations due to the remaining danger of large crowds spreading new variants of covid-19. That is also regrettable but the fact remains that nobody has cancelled Canada Day. It happens on July one every year.

Probably the funniest partisan claim was from new democrat leader Jagmeet Singh. Singh is convinced that anything the liberals did that is helping Canadians through the coronavirus scourge was inspired by the new democrats. He complained that the liberals did not do enough.

All these complaints did not leave much for the Bloc Québécois to complain about, so they retrieved an oldy and goldy. They complained bitterly that the liberals are not doing enough to support the provinces on health care.

In answer to all of this criticism, prime minister Trudeau bitched about the toxic atmosphere of the current parliament. He thought the other party leaders were just crabbing about him because they had no contribution to add to helping Canadians.

I don’t know about you but I intend to celebrate Canada Day this year. Our country is still a work in process and I think it has great potential. I just wish that we did not have such crappy leadership for our political parties.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Sajjan Is Not the Sex Police.

by Peter Lowry

The opposition parties in Ottawa have voted for a politically motivated censure and are demanding the resignation of Canada’s defence minister Harjit Sajjan. The opposition parties are complaining that he has not done enough about the senior staff of the military having or wanting to have sex. To his credit, it would seem that Mr. Sajjan is not interested nor involved in the sex lives of Canada’s generals and admirals.

And, frankly, everyone in parliament should follow Mr. Sajjan’s example. They should realize that that celibacy is not required in our armed forces. We have a military that is made up of Canadians looking for travel, organization in their lives and a reliable paycheque. The military houses them, feeds them, clothes them and looks after their health. They lead a nice life and rarely go in harms way. And if you get some sex occasionally, life can be even better.

But, as in any organization, there are restrictions on the sex. The boys have to stay out of the girls’ barracks and the girls have to stay out of the boys’ barracks. And, like in many organizations, men and women with authority over another person cannot demand sexual favours from the people who report to them. In the military, this is considered an offence under the Queen’s Regulations for the particular military service. And, as each military service has its own quasi police force, offenses that become known are handled, so to speak, and disciplined within the service.

There is more of a problem when you hear of complaints within the ranks of generals and admirals. These are the people who make the rules and it is very awkward when they break them. The problem is that people of this rank are expected to know when to defend themselves and when to capitulate.

People who rise to this level in the services are expected to know when a person of sexual interest to them has said yes, no or maybe. They are also required to know when the relationship could be considered improper.

The only body that can deal effectively with indiscretions at this level is the general staff of the military. The defence minister has to accept the decision of the general staff or appoint a new general staff.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Ottawa: The Greens have a Problem.

by Peter Lowry

Sorry Justin, your liberals will have to delay your election plans. The Green’s have problems with their leadership, membership and people jumping ship. And it is partly your party’s fault. You really did not need to have that Green party member from Fredericton jump to the liberal party so soon.

Admittedly, the greens are never very good at elections but you might need two or three more greens to jump ship after the election to keep you and your family in Rideau Cottage. You never know when some green might be useful.

And just think, with the current green leader, you could get a Jewish woman and a black environmentalist. That is sure covering a lot of bases with just one MP. Besides, you could arrange for her to run in a winnable electoral district.

I think it is likely that former green leader Elizabeth May would do a better job of running the liberal party. Between your dress-up family holidays, rich friends, ‘We’ friends, pipeline envy and mistreatment of female MPs, it would be good if the liberals had a ready replacement standing by.

And there is no good reason to call the election in August anyway. Everyone will just blame you for spoiling their summer. And political canvassing is tough enough in cooler weather. In a hot August, all you get is sunstroke.

By October, we can probably have the pandemic behind us and be ready to get serious about an election. Nothing is guaranteed but no other party has done as much for Canadians lately as your liberals. We even have a few articulate liberal MPs from Quebec who understand our constitution and are willing to speak out about it.

We have noticed that you have been unwilling to address constitutional issues and your opponents in parliament, Messrs. O’Toole and Singh, are equally ill-equipped to address them. After the election, you might want to step down and let the liberal party choose a more competent leader.

You showed a lot of promise in the spring of 2015. It was just too bad you had no follow-through.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Bell Canada Tolls for Thee!

by Peter Lowry

Looking at a two-page, aren’t-we-nice advertisement for Bell Canada in the Toronto Star yesterday, it brought memories of a friend who passed away some dozen years ago. When I first met Max, he was a reporter covering the National Assembly in Quebec City for the now defunct Montreal Star. He had great stories to tell and many insights into Quebec politics. We renewed our acquaintance after the Montreal Star folded in 1979 and Max moved his family to Toronto where he had been hired as an editorial writer by the Toronto Star.

It came as a surprise, after a year or so, when he said he was moving to Ottawa to work on public relations for Bell Canada. It did not strike me as a great career move.

After Max and his family were settled in Ottawa and I was there on business with the government, Max invited me to tour his workplace at Bell. What I saw was a public relations operation that was larger than most public relations firms in Canada. And this was just the part dealing with the federal government. I would swear the staff promoting Bell Canada outnumbered Canada’s members of parliament.

It could hardly be said but it was obvious to me that Max did not see the operation as a collegial newsroom-type environment. This was a factory.

For a company that had always been respected as a stock for widows and orphans, Bell Canada has fallen into disrepute with Canadians. They see the company as immodest, greedy and uncaring. More people seem to hate the company than respect it. Maybe that is the reason it has so many people working at trying to win friends for it.

But putting all those people to work on its image does not seem to solve Bell’s problems. Maybe if it learned to treat its customers with more respect, the company bosses would learn something about customer relations. It does little good to have all those people telling members of parliament how important the company might be when the MPs go home to their ridings and hear what Canadian telecoms are now doing to reap more money from their voters.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Teaching Tolerance

by Peter Lowry

Running home in heavy rain as a youngster, I noted, while passing a small black lady on our street, that she was wearing a raincoat just like mine. When I got home, soaking wet, I found my mother had given my raincoat to that lady who had been visiting her at our home. Mother made the point that she had told me it was going to rain and I should take my raincoat. Since I did not think I needed it, she had given it to someone in need.

That was mother’s approach to charity. With six kids to raise by herself in downtown Toronto, it was a while before I got a new raincoat.

I remember my siblings and I making jokes about mother over the years because of her childhood in Chicago. The least of the jokes was that if a black family moved in next door, mother would start packing. It could not have been further from the truth. She would have been the first at their door with a casserole. We children said that was cruel—mother was not a good cook.

My kid brother and I were the youngest and we got the brunt of her training in tolerance. She was rising quickly with her growing company and would occasionally accept dinner invitations from co-workers who wanted to show off their ethnic cooking.

I remember the first time she took two of us with her to dinner with a Hindu family of the mother and two children. Her kids looked on wide-eyed as my brother and I enjoyed what they considered as routine. In our honor, the lady served apple pie for dessert. After we left, we told mother it was two thumbs down on the Indian apple pie.

But, living in Toronto in those days, as it transitioned to becoming a truly metropolitan city, we learned tolerance, acceptance and good food. How can you hate someone after a decent dinner together? The experiences also taught us that there was more to life than mother’s overcooked roast beef, boiled potatoes and canned vegetables.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Crocodile tears from Bell Canada.

by Peter Lowry

The new owners of the Toronto Star should be ashamed. When reading an article on a business opinion page on the weekend, it became apparent that I was reading an advertisement. This was not balanced reporting. It might be something that the company sends out in a news release but was not a report by an impartial and knowledgeable reporter. The source was obviously some public relations person writing on behalf of the president of Bell Canada’s residential and small business services!

This was purported to be an article about the recent reversal of a 2019 plan by the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to make deep cuts in Bell Canada’s wholesale rates for use by resellers of Bell’s Internet infrastructure.

Bell Canada’s near-monopoly position because of its copper wire and fiber optic networks allows the company to charge what the market will bear for its Internet services. And those rates are substantially higher than those charged in other developed nations for similar broadband services.

The Toronto Star article was written to make it appear that the CRTC decision in 2019 was some flight of whimsy. The reason the 2019 rates were never implemented was that Bell Canada and other networking telecoms had the rates challenged in court, denounced to politicians and anyone else willing to listen. Heaven forbid the Canadians ever get a fair shake in Internet pricing.

The facts are that the CRTC had set the previous 2016 wholesale rates so high that savvy customers saw that the resellers rates were no lower than Bell’s or other telecoms. There was no wiggle room for a better price.

A great deal of study and evaluation went into the 2019 figures. What the telecoms claimed as serious cuts were in fact the cuts that were needed to give the resellers an opportunity to carve out a piece of the Internet market. Internet customers are not about to organize a tag day for Canadian telecoms.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Time to retire Mr. Olive.

by Peter Lowry

Some of the basic skills you look for in reporters is their ability to research, to learn and to explain for readers. It is therefore with regret that we report that David Olive of the Toronto Star is overdue for retirement. If he must insist on writing the same errors in his opinion pieces about Canada’s fossil fuel industry, he is not keeping pace with the needs of his readers.

One of his most egregious errors is to refer to Alberta’s tar sands product as ‘heavy oil.’ If he just once referenced the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) information on that subject, he might learn something. USGS defines oil by its viscosity—how easily it flows. Bitumen from the Athabasca and Cold Lake tar sands does not flow well enough to be called heavy oil. That bitumen has to be mixed with a diluent to send it through pipelines.

And that is why the Gulf Coast refineries in Texas are not interested in Alberta’s bitumen. The Texas refineries can get Venezuelan bitumen—that has a much better viscosity rating than the Canadian product.

The reason to send the Canadian gunk to the Texas ports was to fill the holds of ships that were heading back across the Atlantic empty. There are many other refineries in this world interested in cheap—though highly polluting—sources of oil.

What is really annoying about Mr. Olive’s lack of research is his claim that Canada has never had a national energy strategy. Maybe he was too young in 1980 to remember the National Energy Program introduced by Pierre Trudeau’s liberals. If he had ever been to Alberta, he might have been given an earful on the local reaction to that strategy. It was not well received there.

It does much to explain the reason that Pierre Trudeau’s son bought the TransMountain pipeline and is wasting billions on twinning the pipeline to carry diluted bitumen to an environmentally sensitive shipping point in the Burrard Inlet. It might not impress many Albertans. It certainly does not impress Canadians who care about our environment.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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Doug Dares Deny Us.

by Peter Lowry

The Ontario legislature is in session this beautiful weekend. Doug Ford and his conservative henchmen are attacking our right to free speech. They want to use the ‘Notwithstanding Clause’ of our constitutional rights and freedoms to silence third-party advertising close to elections. They do not like to be made to look foolish.

But they look even more foolish today. The man who likes to think of himself as a populist premier does not like the truth flung at him through the media. It matters little to him that he can spend other people’s money to tell his version of the truth, he wants to deny others the right to respond—at least during the election campaign or too close to it.

The Tories can hardly attack the right of their opponent parties to argue with them during an election campaign. That right is protected in a democracy.

But not always. When teachers’ unions band together to make their case, they should not be allowed to say they are an anonymous gathering of ‘Working Families.’ If you have something to say to me buster, use your own name!

When a rich conservative defends the injustices of Doug Ford, he or she should sign his or her name to it. Let us know who you are and let us judge.

Elections are a time for truths. They are a time to review and grade the actions and aspirations of our politicians. They are a time for the voters to be honest with themselves. It is not a time to be selfish. It is a time to look ahead. We give politicians an enormous amount of power over us. We expect them to serve our common interests. The inconvenience of democracy is that it is not just your path that needs to be followed. It is the needs of all.

What is being debated this weekend at Queen’s Park is not the needs or wants of Ontario citizens. It is the needs and wants of the conservative party and its undemocratic leader. He and his party should be ashamed.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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