Category: Uncategorized

Reforming Voting II.

by Peter Lowry

The following item was missed by a large number of our readers who access BabelontheBay.com through Progressive Bloggers. It is a subject on which I would really appreciate some comments. Please have at it.

It seems that too often we are looking at voting methods instead of examining the entire electoral process. There is much more involved in Canadian politics that the voter should be concerned about. We could go a long way to improving our democracy. Start with our candidates for political office. Why should we have more than 100 candidates show up for a municipal by-election? What does this prove? Wouldn’t we do better to have some vetting of these people before we waste resources on the selection?

A simple approach is primaries. Primaries are used in the United States for nominating people to be president and can be different from one state to another. The basic concept can be for political parties to choose their candidate. People who register as supporters of specific parties are invited to vote in their electoral district for the individual they think should be the candidate for their party.

The impact in Canada for this process would be to take the selection of candidates away from the party leader. The power could be left for the political party to object to a candidate for reason. Registration of voters could be left to the political parties as they would benefit the most from this change. It could be a year-round opportunity for them to proselytize and gain new members.

The major reason people want to have a change in voting is because they consider it wrong to be elected without a majority of votes. With the advent of safe Internet voting, the cost of holding a vote will drop considerably. When that is assured, we can have a run-off vote a week later such as the French have for their presidential elections. If the leading candidate has 40 per cent of the vote and the second has 35 per cent, a run-off vote can be held with just the top two candidates.

In any reform in voting or the role of political parties, the objective is to improve our democracy. We should ask that question in any change. I would suggest to you that the power over candidates presently held by the party leader works against democracy.

Democracy can only be measured by the effectiveness for the people. If the leader has the balance of power, the people are losing. The more power held by party leaders, the less is held by the people.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Reforming Voting.

by Peter Lowry

It seems that too often we are looking at voting methods instead of examining the entire electoral process. There is much more involved in Canadian politics that the voter should be concerned about. We could go a long way to improving our democracy. Start with our candidates for political office. Why should we have more than 100 candidates show up for a municipal by-election? What does this prove? Wouldn’t we do better to have some vetting of these people before we waste resources on the selection?

A simple approach is primaries. Primaries are used in the United States for nominating people to be president and can be different from one state to another. The basic concept can be for political parties to choose their candidate. People who register as supporters of specific parties are invited to vote in their electoral district for the individual they think should be the candidate for their party.

The impact in Canada for this process would be to take the selection of candidates away from the party leader. The power could be left for the political party to object to a candidate for reason. Registration of voters could be left to the political parties as they would benefit the most from this change. It could be a year-round opportunity for them to proselytize and gain new members.

The major reason people want to have a change in voting is because they consider it wrong to be elected without a majority of votes. With the advent of safe Internet voting, the cost of holding a vote will drop considerably. When that is assured, we can have a run-off vote a week later such as the French have for their presidential elections. If the leading candidate has 40 per cent of the vote and the second has 35 per cent, a run-off vote can be held with just the top two candidates.

In any reform in voting or the role of political parties, the objective is to improve our democracy. We should ask that question in any change. I would suggest to you that the power over candidates, presently held the party leader, works against democracy. We want our representative to represent us.

Democracy can only be measured by its effectiveness for the people. If the leader has to much of power, the people are losing. The more power held by party leaders, the less is held by the people.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Doug’s Doom.

by Peter Lowry

It won’t go away Doug. The Ontario Greenbelt will live on, long after you are gone. What Ontario’s premier does not recognize is that Ontario’s Greenbelt has its roots in conservative party planning. It got its start with the Niagara Escarpment plan when Bill Davis was premier. It got its second boost under, of all people conservative Mike Harris, when he was premier in 2002, and the Oak Ridges Moraine was protected. Then it was all brought together under the Greenbelt by the McGinty liberals when close to a million acres of good farmland was added to help ensure the province’s ability to grow food for a growing population.

What Doug and his government do not seem to realize is that the Greenbelt is part of the legacy we leave our children and their children. You screw with it at your peril.

One thing is for sure, you do not get away with asking a minister such as Paul Calandra to evaluate the Greenbelt. Where does he get the advice in his urban affairs and housing ministry to help him evaluate the Greenbelt? There is more than a million acres of farmland there,

Doug Ford’s government had already shown its lack of caring for farmland when it tried to get public approval for highway 413. It was not just the paving over the wetlands and farms that were the concern with this unnecessary highway. It was the pressure it would create for development along the highway route to highway 401 from the 400.

You have to admit: Doug Ford has a penchant for appointing ministers to ministries that might not come within their skill set.

Take Caroline Mulroney. This lady was Doug Ford’s first choice for Attorney General of Ontario. The fact that Caroline Mulroney was not licensed to practice law in Ontario might have escaped the premier’s attention.

Ms. Mulroney was quickly replaced by a ward healer from my riding of Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, Doug Downey. He was given the riding by Doug Ford to help keep Patrick Brown out of provincial politics. Mr. Downey’s major project so far has been to bring back King’s Counsel (KC) designations in Ontario and pass them out to mostly conservative lawyers whom he considers worthy.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Tagging Team Nate.

by Peter Lowry

It was fun meeting with my local Nathanial Erskine-Smith committee (otherwise known as Team Nate) organizers earlier in last week. I did tell them I write this blog, so it should not surprise them if they see it. They might think of me as that cranky old man but I found it very interesting. This Team Nate group seems to span the central Ontario city of Barrie, towns of Orillia, Bradford and Newmarket and the rest of Simcoe County provincial electoral districts. Luckily, we used one of those new computerized group meeting programs and I was pleased with the ease of use, the excellent quality of the pictures in the rooms (that were adequately lit) and the ease of managing the meeting. Probably, the only discordant voice was mine.

Not that my decision to support Nate Erskine-Smith for the leadership of Ontario liberals has changed. I neither make those decisions too quickly, nor forego them if something does not necessarily, please me. My only caveat at the moment is that I still have not met Nate. I have followed his career in politics and I don’t think I am wrong to give him some support.

What Team Nate is targeting at the moment is party memberships. That would be no secret. Any of the teams that are not targeting membership at this time are not in the race. This is not where many groups shine. I have noticed over the years that if you don’t make it fun, rewarding and a whole team effort, it will fall flat on its ass.

I was a member of the York Scarborough group of ridings during the last half of the 20th Century. We made a rule at one point that for the first half-hour of gathering before a public meeting, no member of the executive was allowed to talk to another. You could only talk to people you had never talked with at a meeting before. We were always numbered in the thousand or more and we always had a great esprit de cours.

I guess that the pandemic has changed that now that we have meetings via computer. It worries me that we are losing the physical contact. I am looking forward to meeting Nate in person when he is in Barrie this week.

What I gleaned from the meeting was that one of the young ladies considered her working on her nails on a par with the meeting. Maybe that was why her background was particularly dark. She really worked hard on her nails.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Putting Poilievre on Pause.

by Peter Lowry

There is a wonderful button on my television remote. It is a pause button. I think it would be the perfect button to use when I see clips of conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. Every time I see him, I want to ask him some very simple questions about his simple statements.

For example, when I hear him say ‘Canada is broken.” I want to ask him: In what way? This is a serious statement and I would like to know what is behind it? Is it just rhetoric? Or does it have a deeper meaning?

Is it like complaining about inflation. (We all seem to be concerned about that.) It might not be as simple as he paints it. He has that funny little way of blaming it on the prime minister by calling it Just-In—flation. Actually, that is quite a compliment. For the prime minister to create world-wide inflation just with Canada’s economy is quite surprising. Sad to say, Mr. Poilievre did not help in the need to contain Canada’s inflation by complaining about and threatening to fire the governor of the Bank of Canada for his efforts to stall inflation. And suggesting fighting inflation with cryptocurrency simply proves that Mr. Poilievre is no economist.

Sometimes, Mr. Poilievre reminds me of Donald Trump. I always assumed that not all of American presidents took office knowing what they were doing. I think the common thought was that Mr. Trump did not care. His objective was to become president of the country and he did. The only problem was that once he was there, he was at loose ends.

Obviously, Mr. Poilievre would not be at loose ends. He has a mission. He wants to be prime minister. He tells his convoy trucker friends that he is going to make Canada the freest country in the world. He has a budgeting idea that he can buy a couple dollars worth of ice cream as long as he cuts a couple dollars from something else, he was supposed to buy.

We already know that Mr. Poilievre’s idea of freedom is that his trucker friends can park their trucks anywhere they want and eat their ice cream at their leisure. It would be of concern though that in buying the ice cream for their friends and themselves, they might use the money for their truck’s fuel. If you spend your fuel money, you are not much of a trucker. And, we already know that Mr. Poilievre is not much of an economist.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

The Plaint of the Pedant.

by Peter Lowry

It might have given a false impression the other day when I was complaining about the stupidity of certain conservatives. I hardly have the right to be pedantic. Despite his deplorable lack of respect for education, Doug Ford actually has more formal education than I.  Neither of us has a university degree. And I have never been excessively concerned with detail unless I have responsibility for things happening that depend on detailed follow-through.

The difference between Ford and I is probably that I have a much more varied life experience and I worked hard at university extension courses and different trades training. I have also had wonderful mentors in many different aspects of working life. For example, how many writers have their news releases critiqued by a former publisher of a major regional daily newspaper. I surprised Ted Rogers and some of his people when I first went into his make-shift studio on Adelaide Street in Toronto. When they told me I was producer, director and switch operator for an as-live production, I got to work. Nobody had told them of the time I had worked with a brother’s TV production company.

I also have to admit that I have learned from my mistakes over the years. You cannot always know which road to take. I had my fill of public relations work in the 1990s and went to work selling for Bell Canada. I found out why so many people had given up on Bell. When I retired from Bell it was my manager who was disappointed as I had always made his numbers look good.       

But I still loved to write I registered Babel-on-the-Bay.com shortly after coming to Barrie, Ontario. I was experiencing condominium life at the time and was not ready to give a blog any attention. When the wife and I had enough of Ontario condominium rules we gave up our wonderful view of Kempenfelt Bay.

After twelve years of writing Babel-on the-Bay, I have a good sense of what my readers like and dislike. Talking with an aspiring blogger a while ago, I was telling him what my readers seemed to like and what did not appeal to them. He interrupted me and said “That’s the difference between us. You have readers.”

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Journeying With Journalists.

by Peter Lowry

It is very rare that I read other blogs. That is not being snooty, it is practical. I would just want to correct some of the writers and commiserate with a few others. I find getting a blog done every day is a challenge. Despite a career in public relations, I never considered myself a journalist. I designed and wrote many tabloids, newsletters, pamphlets, scripts and mailing pieces as well as news releases and never thought of myself as a writer. Every page I write is another part of me. When I reread what I have written, I always feel I could have said it better.

And in my lifetime, I have made the journey with many reporters, editors, publishers, and fellow public relations people—all, I am sure, were doing a superior job to me. I think I suffered the ultimate insult one day when a carefully crafted and lengthy news release I had sent out for a client was run in a prime location by a newspaper—with the client’s name carefully removed.

I came into writing with small steps. I was selling food for a major food company and living in what was then the Town of Leaside with my wife when I was asked to join the town safety council. There I was asked to try my hand at writing the safety news for the Leaside Advertiser weekly newspaper. That got me noticed and soon I was involved in town politics and helping a friend get elected to town council.

You might find it incredulous that I was soon working for the Globe and Mail. It would be if I forgot to say that I worked in the advertising department selling advertising in the Report on Business. Even there, I was soon dragged into other areas such as the publisher’s office to strategize the related advertising potential of upcoming special reports. We had some labour strife after I had been there a while and I ended up running the ad alley in an other-wise automated composing room. That was an experience worthy of a book but there was little writing involved.

My first major newspaper writing was for John Basset’s Toronto Telegram. It was just freelance stuff and I got out just before Basset sold off the paper to concentrate on his TV station. I put that writing down to hard lessons learned. There is more to this subject but I will save it for another time.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Arguing About Alcohol.

by Peter Lowry

Luckily, I am aware of some of the problems in medical research. At one time I was signing cheques for medical research in the millions of dollars. This was for research in Canada related to Multiple Sclerosis. If a responsible researcher had a valid study, they knew that the proposal would still have to be approved by rigorous review by an expert panel as well as being checked out against research, already being done around the world. I often sat in on these meetings, when president of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada.

I mention this subject in the public interest. There was some research done recently that stated baldly that alcohol is not good for you. I assumed, at first, that they were saying that excessive use might be bad for you. Yes, excessive use of alcohol can even make you fall down. And when you fall down you can hurt yourself.

But, to my surprise, this research actually said that any or all booze was bad. It caused some rude words from my wife when I (jokingly) hesitated at opening the bar later that day. She wanted her Scotch and soda.

And we were not about to ban booze in our home because of just one study. I was always a fan of the studies that said a glass of wine was good for the stomach.  

I remember one time talking to a lady who worked for a well-known Gin distiller. She was appalled when I said that I liked her gin for my summer glass of gin and tonic. She told me that her gin was the best and purest but that tonic was bad for me. She never did tell me what she thought about the slice of lime and ice cubes.

I was surprised when I found out that this recent study was based on 107 studies done over the last 40 years. It tended to debunk the theory that a couple glasses of wine a day was healthy. This one study has debunked them all. The problem is that there were far too many factors in daily living that influence our longevity. But, it is disappointing to report that instead of sitting at the computer writing these blogs, I should be out doing a daily five-kilo run. I should also be eating more green veggies. I think when you have lived to my age, I must be doing something right. I think it is possible I have chosen good doctors. Ones that don’t nag about your alcohol intake or eating your veggies.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

“You Can Fool Some of the People…

by Peter Lowry

The full axiom reads as: “You can fool some of the people some of the time but not all of the people, all of the time. Many of us have been watching with concern the attempt in Israel to politicize the judiciary. One of the tenets of a true democracy is the independence of the judiciary.

I thought it was marvelous the way the Israelis turned out in the thousands to protest the move by their right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to politicize their judiciary. He was simply giving himself and his government the power to reverse the courts. Too many Israelis had parents and grandparents who learned what it is like to live and die under such regimes.

And yet in Ontario nobody seems to care when Doug Ford’s attorney general is charging ahead with conservative plans to politicize Ontario justice. The attorney general wants more choice among the choices presented to him, so he can choose someone like him to be chief justice.

And I can tell you that someone such as Doug Downey as chief justice of Ontario is a sad thought. Doug Downey was the conservative’s go-to guy in Severn, Ontario. He was a lacklustre councillor on Orillia city council. He was forced on my electoral district of Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte by Doug Ford as a parachute candidate. I have only met him once, although by accident. He never attended an all-candidate meeting in the last election. I have never heard of him speaking in Barrie. He is a small-town ward healer.

Downey was not even Doug Ford’s first choice as attorney general. That first appointment was reserved for Brian Mulroney’s daughter. Having the senior Mulroney on board as a fund raiser was probably the price for giving her the job. The only problem was when the premier was told that Caroline Mulroney was educated in law in the United States and all her legal experience was in New York State. The fact that she could not practice law in Ontario was considered something of a problem in her being Attorney General of Ontario. She was quietly shuffled over to minister of transportation where she could shepherd the highway 413 and Bradford Bypass projects along for the conservative party. Mulroney is also minister of francophone affairs. She is one of the few French speakers in the conservative caucus having grown up in Ottawa and Montreal.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

The Confusion of Two Cities.

by Peter Lowry

There was a provincial study ordered by the conservative government when it came into office in 2018 of the organizational needs of Peel Region and other major urban centres. With Peel Region’s unwieldy mix of the City of Mississauga, the City of Brampton and rural Caledon and the services each municipality requires, some serious re-organization is needed. It is regretful that the study came up with nothing as nothing has been heard of the study since.

The awkward problem of concern to Mississauga is that a large part of their municipal taxes is spread across the region by Peel County, paying for some of the needs of Brampton and Caledon.

Mississauga, with a population of almost 800,000, is the third largest city in Ontario. It can no longer be left as a two-tier municipality, with Peel Region providing some of the shared services and also, needlessly, duplicating others. As things stand, Mississauga is making a good case for it to be a stand-alone city.

A good alternative is for Brampton to become part of Mississauga and for the Caledon portion of Peel County to be combined with similar Dufferin County.

This solution solves many of the problems that Brampton mayor Patrick Brown complains about. These two cities having interlocking public transportation services makes a great deal of sense. It improves the economic viability of both with the interchange of skilled help. It also means that Brampton would not have to obtain its own water supply as it already has the service connected through Mississauga.

This absorption of Brampton into Mississauga will add under 700,000 citizens to the city of Mississauga and will give balance to the to the services required throughout the enlarged city. It will also save substantial administrative costs as it will now be operated as a single tier city similar to Toronto.     

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]