Uncategorized – Babel-on-the-Bay

Protesting Protests.

September 8, 2022September 7, 2022 by Peter Lowry

Every day someone, somewhere has come up with something new to protest. Maybe there needs to be licensing arrangements for protests before it gets completely out of hand. The latest annoyance this week was the people protesting the fighter jets at the Canadian National Exhibition.

If I had been down to the Ex this year, I would have gone to see the air show. As a one-time member of the Canadian air force, I am fascinated by the latest fighter aircraft. And, of course, they are powered by pollution-creating fuel. Let’s face it, war is hell in more ways than one.

But I can assure you, RCAF pilots probably waste less fuel than a teenager with his first car. And the very idea that people who have been in war zones would not want to see friendly planes up close, is ludicrous. Besides, those jet planes you see at Canadian air shows have probably never fired a shot or projectile in anger.

And while we are at it, I have a word for people who think they have the right to block roads or trains or in any other way to block fellow citizens from lawful entry or egress. I’m not sure I am spelling it right but it sounds like pssssssssfffffffffft.

Of course, I am fully in agreement with your right to inform others of your displeasure with an employer or a government.

And I reserve the right to ridicule those who insist we defund the police. I agree that police are not suitable for certain calls. I very much want them to be accompanied by people trained in handling mental illness and anger issues. You just better be prepared for the costs of that next time you pay your municipal and provincial taxes.

Speaking of that, just wait until your community ratepayers take your nimbyism too far. If you want to block reasonable in-fill, moderate apartment projects, granny flats and other schemes to provide more reasonable accommodation for people in your community, please be prepared to pay the real cost. Status quo has to be taxed too. There are no gated communities in Canada where you can hide from the realities of life and death and taxes.

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Dog Days of Summer.

August 1, 2022July 31, 2022 by Peter Lowry

It started in the news rooms of newspapers. The Dog Days where when the most you could come up with to write was the story of man bites dog. The Dog Days are different today. There are wild fires in one area, scorching heat in another and deadly floods in others. Mother Nature is on a rampage.

The business pages can be filled with the unconscionable profits of the oil companies and the grocery chains. These companies steal from those on fixed incomes. They beggar us all. Cars sit idle on the corporate lots—waiting for parts in short supply. Industry suffers from lack of materials, lack of staff, lack of financial support and the inability of politicians to bring order and good government.

But we still get the comments from our readers. One surprised me the other day. My reader questioned my condemnation of those who choose a life as a politician. I must admit that I have known some life-long politicians whom I liked and considered friends. These were people who brought a decency and a desire to do good to the political scene. I think of my late friend Herb Gray of Windsor, Ontario and the irrepressible Lloyd Axworthy of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

But, yes, I do revile those who lack life experience and bring nothing but the mindless cant of the right-wing of politics to the fore. And, I do despise the right-wing of politics that the clouded and unthinking minds, untouched of human kindness, bring to our political cesspools of conservative dogma.

The facts are that small government is an uncaring government. Tax cuts are bruising to those in need. No thank you, people should not be trickled on. Low taxes to business just prove that they are not paying their way. Business must be mindful of the human needs of their employees. Profit does not come first. Minimum wages are just that, a minimum. Growth and encouragement come from decency.

And if you do not like people, get the hell out of politics. Go work in palliative care and learn something about people. Each and every one of us has earned the right to share in this experience called life. Honour that obligation first.

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Is there an App for Stupid?

June 20, 2022June 18, 2022 by Peter Lowry

It is almost impossible to believe that 90 per cent of Canadians use a smart phone. That figure must come from Bell, Rogers, Telus and Vidéotron. Those companies have been ripping off Canadians for years—cheerfully aided by the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). We have been paying too much, too long and to greedy, profiteering companies.

This assumption that we all have access to an App such as the Canadian government’s ArriveCan is not only fallacious but insulting. I used to laugh at my oldest brother who, in his nineties, would sometimes have his nose buried in his smart phone. It amused him. He could afford it. He used it as though it was a toy. When it came to keeping in touch, we chatted on his landline.

When Ontario mandated that we all have proof of vaccination to enter restaurants and other venues, we were allowed to use paper copies of the QR codes as well as the smart phone app. I still have an envelope in the car with the paper copies.

I do not have a smart phone. I spent more than an hour on the telephone recently trying to convince a bureaucratic call centre person that he could not send me a text on my cell phone. The company had not only changed my password to my account but had added an extra layer of what they called security. It seems somebody had told this person that all cell phones can receive texts. Not mine. I told my grandsons years ago that my cell phone was a no-text zone. It is for out-going voice-calls only. If you want to leave me a message, you have to call my landline. And that is voice mail only. E-mails go to my computer and I will look at them, at my leisure.

The only way I found to handle the bureaucratic call-centre person was after an hour of trying to restrain myself, I told him there seemed to be no app for stupid. I added that since the call was being recorded, to have his manager listen to it. I told him any other solution might involve lawyers.

I was not too surprised by a flurry of e-mails from the company that the problem had been solved.

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On Uniting the Left.

June 17, 2022June 16, 2022 by Peter Lowry

Do you hear it? It is the useless plaint of those who would unite the left-leaning parties to fight the rogues of the right. It is a bit more strident when you play with figures and reveal that only 18 per cent of Ontario voters actually voted in favour of the conservative majority in the Ontario legislature. But it would not help if you could get those left-leaning parties together.

I think it has something to do with dynamics, or physics, or chemistry of the two parties, or maybe just common sense. The objective of the NDP, since being founded as the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in the 1930s, has been to replace the liberals in the hearts and minds of the voters. The liberals have always been the enemy in the ridings. Despite this aggressiveness, they have been known to cooperate in legislatures and in parliament and have made support deals there when they can.

With both liberals and NDP fighting over the same turf in Canada’s cities, it has been noted that NDP voters often tend to switch to the conservatives when they cannot vote for the NDP candidate. And so do many liberals. In fact, if the liberals and NDP ever did connect and become a single liberal democratic party, there would be a serious bleed of so-called blue liberals (the ones who delude themselves that they can be financially conservative) out of the back of the liberal’s big tent. The conservatives would benefit.

It is hard to judge the differences between the liberals and NDP at election time. That is when the new democrats take everything out of the fridge and spread it like a picnic feast for the voters. It is always too much and it hurts the party’s credibility. All the major parties join in the game of offering the voters their own money for their vote.

But it all, in the end, comes down to leadership. While the Liberals in Saskatchewan can merge with the conservatives there, and disappear, and the liberals in British Columbia are believed to be conservatives, the only real merger has to be at the federal level. That is not in the cards under the current liberal leader. The next federal leader of the liberal party will have a serious challenge in democratizing and rebuilding the abused and dispirited grass roots of the party.

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Out of the Warm.

April 1, 2022March 31, 2022 by Peter Lowry

There were royals in the Caribbean last month. Future King William of England and his consort Catherine visited Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas as a sort of farewell tour. All three independent countries are considering cutting ties with the English monarchy.

Unlike Canada, that ties its constitution in knots to try to stick with the fiction of the crown, these countries do not like looking like vassals.

The young royals were also roundly criticized in Jamaica for not apologizing for slavery. Why they should apologize was not particularly clear. Slavery ended in the British Empire two centuries ago. In fact, as I read it, the Brits bought off the slave owners in 1833 for the loss of their “property.” If that is true, the Brits should be thanked for their thoughtfulness, not criticized.

Instead of criticizing the young royals for slavery, there might be more justification for complaining about the Brits’ encouragement of piracy in the Caribbean and for the world-wide spread of sexually transmitted diseases by Brit sailors.

But overall, Bill and Kate had a lovely trip. The warmth and sunshine of the Caribbean can hardly be preserved and shipped to the dreary British Isles to ward off the doldrums of late winter.

In fact, I have always wondered why Canada did not adopt a few of the Caribbean islands. The island people would be delighted to share in Canada’s Medicare, assistance for families and all those Canadian tourists to keep their economy pumping. The islands could be considered as another province and they would soon be the envy of the rest of the Caribbean.

There was a feeble attempt at the idea a few years back when the Turks and Caicos Islands suggested some sort of deal. The only problem was that while some Canadians took the adoption idea seriously, the Turks and Caicos, with only about 38,000 population, would have been much too small to offer winter holidays to the many Canadians needing a break from our winter.

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Defining Dignity.

March 30, 2022March 29, 2022 by Peter Lowry

Ontario liberals have taken a bigger bite of the future than they might realize. They want to bring dignity to the people of Ontario. They want to start with the working poor. These are the gig workers, the delivery people, the Walmart employees and basically anyone working for the minimum wage. Nobody can live in Ontario on the minimum wage. A $16 per hour minimum wage would solve nothing. It is a path to malnutrition and starvation.

But when you promise dignity, you are offering much more than minimum wages. Dignity encompasses another million Ontario residents who cannot find decent or safe shelter. These are people who try to live on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) and have to rely on food banks and charities for a decent meal. They are people who are forced to steal from your front porch or your unlocked car. They are not all criminals but they are all desperate.

Remember the outcry when the Ford government tried to cut the programs for autism in Ontario. Those kids had support. Nobody wants to support the people kicked onto the streets of our cities. Oh sure, we give them a loonie or a toonie occasionally. Does that cover our guilt?

We are responsible. We cannot ignore those in our society incapable of holding a job through no fault other than the inability to meet the norms of society. We cannot hide them. There are no protected work houses in our society. They do not deserve to be locked away, hidden from sight. They are reality.

And yet Ontario elects a blowhard and cruel person such as Doug Ford. He came into office four years ago and immediately cut the allowance for ODSP to an average of less than $1100 per month per person. With inflation running rampant today, that is less than half what a single person needs today for lodging and at least one decent meal per day.

I think people who care are deeply concerned with where our society is headed today. Be they liberal or be they human, they care about where our society is going. We can start by ensuring that the Ford government is gone.

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Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.

March 22, 2022March 21, 2022 by Peter Lowry

The last conservative to tell the truth in Ontario was premier Bill Davis and it caused his party to lose power in the provincial election in 1985. In the 21^st Century, we have yet to hear of a conservative leader in Ontario with a penchant for truth. The biggest liar is our current premier Doug Ford.

He is still struggling to figure out what else Ontario voters would respond to without it costing more billions in deficits next year. Premier Ford is a blowhard. He thinks any political problem can be solved by offering to throw money at it. And if he really spent that money, that he promised taxpayers that he would spend, the province would be heading for the highest deficit ever.

The crassest of all bribes from the blowhard was to Ontario’s nurses. Because he had continued the short-term law limiting salaries to provincial workers, he actually offered the nurses a one-time bribe. Because the law limits front-line nurses to a maximum raise of just one per cent per year, he offered them a retention bonus of $5000. They would get half before the election and if he was still premier after the election, they would get the other half.

The problem is that Ford’s government has been short-changing the front-line medical staffs in our hospitals since the beginning of the pandemic. These people have worked long, hard hours throughout the worst of the pandemic with little or no recognition of their very difficult and high-risk jobs.

And next in line are the teachers of Ontario who have been put through the wringer over the pandemic with the on-again and off-again shutting down of schools—on the assumption that remote learning would work for all. And anyone who has had any experience with computerized learning programs knows that they do not work for all children. Mr. Ford and his private-schooled education minister have much to answer for.

But now we find out that Mr. Ford has been dicking with Ontario’s hydro rates over the past four years. His government has been building the provincial deficit at almost $7 billion a year while Ontario homeowners and industries have been supposedly enjoying reasonable rates for electricity.

And the promises keep rolling along.

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Would ‘Wetworks’ Work?

March 22, 2022March 22, 2022 by Peter Lowry

There seemed to be a common message in readers’ comments on my story last week on Russian president Vladimir Putin’s adventures in Ukraine. I never think of my readers as being particularly blood-thirsty but they seemed to all be in favour of dear old Vlad being offed. And they did not even seem to care who did it.

One suggestion was that the Russian oligarchs might be first in line for the honour. After all, no oligarch likes to be denied their God-given right to a vacation on the French Riviera. They hardly want to spend all of this miserable winter in Moscow. And to have their millions tied up in reprisals might limit their credit line at the casino. We certainly hope they have enough cash left in the kitty to hire a Russian hitman. They might also need a few rubles to bribe some of the guards at the Kremlin. It could be done.

As for the United Kingdom’s storied Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), I can only advise you that there is no such thing as an 007 agent. There are no licenses to kill. It has always been a question as to which country’s creative writers could come up with the more improbable scenarios for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) or the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II?

I think I had the most skeptical conversation in my life with a chap who was introduced to me as an American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent, based in Quebec City. If he had not been introduced by someone whom I knew in the Pearson Building on Sussex Drive in Ottawa, I might have just walked away laughing. What convinced me he might be real was when I asked him how he got his intelligence reports on Canada. His answer was “by reading your daily newspapers.”

A good friend of mine since we were young adults was a chap who was born in Ukraine and served in the Canadian Air Force. It was interesting to meet his mother who was Russian. He took her back to Ukraine and to Russia before she died. He told me some interesting stories about the Donetsk region of Ukraine when they got back to Canada. Maybe Mr. Putin will drop by the region to show that he is invincible. It might be a good time to prove he is not.

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Did the Fat Lady Sing?

March 21, 2022March 20, 2022 by Peter Lowry

The on-going comic opera in Alberta is running pell-mell towards the finale. With Jason Kenney’s arch enemy, Brian Jean, now back in the united conservative caucus, the provincial party meeting of April 9 is looming larger and darker for the premier. Jason Kenney is running out of friends in Alberta.

And you would think that the federal conservative leadership contest would be his savior. It is the convenient escape hatch. That race needs somebody smarter than Pierre Poilievre and with a better knowledge of the conservative party.

The race certainly needs someone better than retreads such as Jean Charest and Patrick Brown. And there are people who really like Jason Kenney—outside of Alberta. And, don’t forget, Albertans would vote for a prairie dog, as long as he came from Alberta.

Jason Kenney can tell anybody who will listen that he is just misunderstood in Alberta. It is all a conspiracy fomented among the former wildrose party members. After all, he kept telling them that the pandemic was over. He was going to get it right eventually.

And maybe he wasted billions on his pipelines. Yet Kenney is a piker compared to Justin Trudeau. The federal liberal leader is now up to up to an estimated $21 billion in costs to finish the Trans Mountain pipeline. The experts are now predicting that the federal government can never recover that much in shipping the products of the Alberta tar sands.

Kenney is probably worried that both Poilievre and Brown are his acolytes. He curried them for their current run for the roses. He taught them most of the slimy tricks they know. Poilievre might not appreciate being identified with someone as maladroit as Brown but he has to admit that Kenney was very much a role model for him.

And we have the perfect song for Kenney as he hitches up the old chuck wagon and moseys down to the Ottawa corral. It’s an old Neil Young number, with a minor gender change. It would have all kinds of interesting connotations if sung by Dolly Parton. It’s ‘He’ll be coming around the mountain when he comes.’

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Reaching Out.

March 20, 2022March 19, 2022 by Peter Lowry

Some politicians despair today at the difficulties they see in reaching out to their voters. Yet, there are many more opportunities today than there used to be. For example, my local liberal candidate in the first two days of being the official candidate took part in a webinar and a telephone town hall. He probably thinks I know little about the technologies but the truth is we were working on those ideas more than 40 years ago.

Webinars are based on computer-aided learning. Many of our current parents will be quite familiar with this as their children have bounced in and out with this technology during the pandemic. They probably saw some very bad methods along with some good.

For webinars, you can start with good technology. They have to have professional level sound, lighting and graphics. You would swear that some efforts are broadcast from the bathroom, by the way the sound bounces off all the porcelain. Good lighting can make a considerable difference in how people perceive the speakers. And you really need to check the clutter behind them.

Good telephone town halls are just as critical. You need good scripts for the intros and any prepared questions. You need to check the sound quality constantly. A professional master of ceremonies can make a good event better.

Frankly, I have been appalled at the lack of understanding of social media. This is an opportunity not envisaged 40 years ago. Social media is a form of creative media. It requires planning. It requires an on-going story line. It needs to build audience and interest. It is definitely not something the candidate dreams up daily.

And what are you doing about the ubiquitous lawn sign? You will probably have to Google it but you should look up the idea of the Burma Shave signs. This was a series of signs you saw on American highways back in the 1920s and 30s. They were small signs that were in a series of four or five that were funny and entertaining. You really do not have to compete with the local real estate agents for attention.

Creative approaches can help you win.

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