Uncategorized – Babel-on-the-Bay

Mourning Becomes the Monarchy.

January 10, 2022January 11, 2022 by Peter Lowry

The Grand old Duke of York, he had an old-time friend. He marched him up on top of girl too young, and marched him down again.

The incident spells the end of the British monarchy. The fiction dies with Queen Elizabeth II. Her reign spans from the end of history to the end of the world, as Brits have known it. Good for two thousand years, it was.

But good things end. Brexit saw to that. The union of England, Wales, Scotland and the bit left of Ireland cannot exist without the support of Europe. The French have finally won the wars of the centuries. The win is only by default.

The colonies are gone. The Commonwealth is but a fiction for wannabes. Canada stands firmly wherever the United States of America wants it.

But where will Canada stand when America implodes? Will Trump take Canada into the abyss of lies along with his God-forsaken country?

Will the United States Marines rise up to save their country? Will Canada be in the balcony for the Second American Revolution? Or will it be inundated with American refugees? Will we have to arm the 49^th Parallel?

Meanwhile, in the dis-United Kingdom, who will dispatch that guy who so desperately needs a good barber? Will common sense ever return to that parliament on the Thames? Will the non-King Charles negotiate even a share of the wealth of the former monarchy? What will the government do with the former royal stables? Or the breeding of royal Corgis?

Will Russia’s Putin have won over the now defunct North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)? Will China allow Canada to sell wheat and canola to the Orient?

Will China and Russia divide the spoils to dominate the world or will they cross nuclear swords in a final display of intransigence.

In this dystopian world there will be no monarchies, just dictatorships for what future our progeny will endure.

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Redux Alberta.

November 23, 2021November 22, 2021 by Peter Lowry

They are at it again in Alberta. Out-of-touch politicians are fighting over the spoils of an Alberta that no longer exists. They are fighting over the tar sands bitumen that has to be left in the ground. They are fighting to continue to exploit the coal under the foothills of the Rockies. They are exploiting the ignorance of the voters who think it’s that old-time politics.

But it’s not. The world is changing too fast for that old-time politics of earlier years. Bill Aberhart and Ernest Manning are long gone. We can no longer accept talk as action. Words are the ammunition of those only who want your vote.

And Brian Jean is back. He wants his former party back. He was the leader of the Wildrose Party with which Jason Kenney merged the conservatives to create the united front to the new democrats.

And when Jason Kenney achieved his dream of leadership, what did he do with it? Did he lead Alberta in the face of the pandemic? Did he strengthen the medical preparedness? Did he encourage Alberta’s medical workers? Did he and his conservatives heed the advice and concerns of health professionals?

Jason Kenney is known for losing Albertans’ money in failed pipelines. He is known for railing against the liberals in Ottawa who are twinning a pipeline for taking Alberta’s tar sands bitumen to ocean tankers at Vancouver.

Kenney slyly alludes to Alberta as a country separated from Canada. Kenney is your typical climate change denier as wild fires denude the foothills. Kenney entertains on a rooftop as the horsemen of the apocalypse ride free across the Alberta prairie. He led Alberta into the pestilence.

Will Brian Jean do better? Who are we to say?

But we worry about Alberta and we watch with concern and caring.

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A Blogger’s Ego.

October 31, 2021October 30, 2021 by Peter Lowry

You need a certain amount of chutzpah to undertake the production of a regular blog on today’s Internet. You have to believe you have something to say. And it takes time to realize what you are really doing. You are pitting your ego against those of super egos. I often take a quick run through the liberal-oriented accumulator progressivebloggers.ca to a) make sure my daily blog is there and b) see what the super egos are talking about. It hardly keeps me modest when I realize maybe three of us are the only real progressives.

But it also teaches me to stick to my knitting. With more than 60 years of politics behind me, that’s my milieu. Not that people from all parties do not, sometimes, react aggressively to what I write. Particularly when I have trampled on one of their shibboleths. It doesn’t matter whether I have trashed O’Toole, Singh or Trudeau, I will get some scathing e-mails promising to never read Babel-on-the-Bay again. I never know how to reply. They’ll be back.

It really impresses me how Google Analytics can show me new heights of readership during elections. It is also nice to see that I can still outguess most of the pollsters. They are stuck trying to understand their raw data where I am analysing how Canadians are reacting on a real-time basis.

One of the things I marvel over is the readers of Babel-on the-Bay around the world. I think I might be helping keep more than a few consular people up to date, though I know one regular reader in Germany is an old friend. I was surprised by the number of daily readers in China until a friend pointed out that the particular city had large numbers of classes in English and they might be using blogs, such as mine, as a daily exercise.

The one thing I have found is that I enjoy writing these commentaries on a daily basis but I resist the urge to do more than one in a day. And despite the advice people give neophyte bloggers, a blog of more than 400 words had better be damn interesting or you are just wasting your time. Some blogs remind me of the remark by an ancient writer who apologized for writing a long letter because he did not have the time to write a short one.

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Have you kissed a farmer today?

October 6, 2021October 5, 2021 by Peter Lowry

Reading the latest statistics about the urban-rural divide in Canadian politics the other day was a disappointment. It seems the split is becoming more pronounced. In Canada, our rural voters are becoming the mainstay of conservative votes while mostly urban voters are supporting the liberals. The trend has been obvious for many years. We never seem to learn.

My problem is that I go back to the days when the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was led by Hazen Argue, a farmer from Saskatchewan. When the deal was made by Tommy Douglas and David Lewis to bring their new democratic party under the auspices of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), it lost much of its farm vote.

The liberals certainly tried to win the farm vote. The smartest move by Pierre Trudeau as prime minister was when he appointed my late friend Eugene Wehlan as minister of agriculture. Gene did more for farmers in Canada and around the world than any collection of conservative agriculture ministers had ever done. He was a strong advocate of supply management and worked hard to ensure that farmers had the benefits of advancements in technology.

And what is annoying today is that the conservative politicians take the farm vote for granted. They use them. When they wanted to keep my riding from voting liberal, it was a simple effort to convince the commission that did the rebalancing of ridings to gerrymander the Barrie ridings by splitting the city in two and adding a rural third to each of the riding’s voters. The closest we came was in the 2015 federal election which went to a recount.

I took part in that recount because I wanted to see what the impact was in the rural vs. urban vote. A nobody conservative won the riding by 86 votes. It proved out in a random recount of rural and urban polls that the conservatives would win the rural polls by a higher percentage than the liberals were getting in the urban polls.

It will be interesting to see who Justin Trudeau will choose for the agriculture portfolio in his new cabinet.

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The NDP Fail Us.

September 25, 2021September 24, 2021 by Peter Lowry

There were a few complaints the other day when I mentioned that the new democratic party had its hey-day back in the 1960s and 70s. What I did not explain was that the party meant something back then. I was being accused of ignoring what was called the Orange Wave when Jack Layton won 59 seats for the NDP in Quebec in the 2011 federal election. That was an aberration.

The Orange Wave told you far more about Quebec voters and Jack Layton than it did about the NDP.

I will never accuse Quebec voters of being whimsical but they certainly do have some fun at the polls. In 2011, they wanted to give the Canadian salute of one finger to both Canada’s conservative and liberal parties and were tired of the Bloc Québécois—and along came Montreal-born Jack Layton!

I had known Jack Layton long before he became a favourite of Canadian media. We were political enemies. Over the years, I had worked on the liberal side and he for the NDP. The most interesting win was in Toronto’s Fort York riding in the 1987 provincial election. That was when liberal Bob Wong became the first Canadian of Chinese descent to win a seat in the Ontario Legislature.

To add interest to the election, Jack was running the NDP campaign in Fort York and Olivia Chow, whom Jack married shortly thereafter, was working for the riding returning officer. That made for some awkward maneuvering in the campaign. It was a tough enough campaign when you had to communicate effectively with part of Toronto’s Portuguese-speaking community, in various Chinese dialects, part of Toronto’s gay community and the downtown Canadian native community. I always thought it would have helped if our candidate could speak more than a few words in Chinese.

As an aside on this little story, I must admit that I am delighted that Kevin Vuong just won what is now Spadina-Fort York riding as a liberal—after Justin Trudeau denounced him without proof of any wrong-doing. Kevin has every right to sit as an independent. Mr. Trudeau and Toronto Star should not be so quick to condemn people without trial or jury.

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“Well, here’s another nice mess!”

August 30, 2021August 29, 2021 by Peter Lowry

When comedian Stan Laurel used to comment on the mess they were in, to his partner Oliver Hardy, it would draw laughter from the audience. Now that it is used to complain about Mr. Trudeau’s election, nobody seems to be laughing. Is it possible the pandemic has left us without a sense of humour?

After all, who knew that Trudeau’s keeping the inexperienced and apolitical MP Maryam Monsef in the cabinet would get his campaign in trouble? When she referred to the Taliban as “brothers” the other day, it was obviously a cultural use of the word—but one that many Canadians would not understand. If she had said it in the Dari language, it would not have caused any waves.

But the real problem with Monsef was that her momentary notoriety reminded Canadians of Justin Trudeau’s broken promise that 2015 was the last time Canada would use first-past-the-post voting. When Trudeau chose her as minister of democratic reform back in 2015, he opened a can of worms that is still coming back to haunt him. Monsef’s lack of understanding of the political situation and her inept handling of the special committee, put together to handle the possible reform, led to an ongoing embarrassment for the Trudeau liberals. What started as an honest effort in reform of how Canadians’ vote has turned into an endless criticism of the prime minister.

It has been this writer’s opinion for some time that, as angry as we might be at Mr. Trudeau for his inadequacies, he does not suffer much when compared to his competitors. Trudeau is an imperfect solution in a bad situation.

After all, can you imagine Mr. O’Toole or Mr. Singh popping out of Rideau Cottage in the part year, giving us updates on the Covid-19 situation? You have to admit that Justin Trudeau did a good job in a disastrous situation.

And do you really think that the conservative party would have turned the economics of this country upside down to rescue millions of Canadians from literally starving during the pandemic? For all his faults, Trudeau did what had to be done. He deserves some thanks.

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Ask your local candidates.

August 29, 2021 by Peter Lowry

Maybe all politics is local, after all. It seems the key question for candidates in this current federal election is: When did you have your covid-19 vaccines? And be prepared for some surprises.

I know that the conservatives have not checked and even the liberals might have one or two anti-vaxxers who have kept quiet.

That key question out of the way, you can ask other more mundane questions to see if one of your local candidates is worth supporting on election day.

If you want to embarrass your local liberal candidate, for example, ask him or her how liberals can be concerned about climate change when they are paying another $12 billion to twin the Trans Mountain pipeline to Vancouver? Do they know that bitumen from the Alberta tar sands can only be refined into synthetic crude by a highly polluting process?

Even funnier is the question to conservative candidates as to why they want to give parents tax credits for daycare while doing nothing about making sure that sufficient daycare spaces are available? The point is that without the provinces creating the daycare places, a tax credit is useless.

The question to your new democratic candidate is very simple. Ask him or her who they think is going to implement their plans? If they think they are going to win an NDP government, you can write them off as delusional and you can take your vote elsewhere.

It is worse with the greens. A vote for your local green person and it is you who might be delusional. And wouldn’t it be great when that party gets its act together? Mind you, the other parties have been getting into the green’s act—with more words, if not substance. And who would believe anything realistic on the environment from O’Toole’s conservatives?

It is high time Canadians stopped following the hollow promises of the party leaders and seriously considered voting for the most caring and intelligent candidate in their riding. That might seem like an unusual idea but it is inevitable that two if not all three major parties will need new leaders in the next couple years. The members of parliament can have a strong influence on whom their party will choose. If you have intelligent and caring MPs, they might help get us better party leaders. And wouldn’t that be excellent?

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And the CBC lies.

August 12, 2021August 11, 2021 by Peter Lowry

The old Canadian Broadcasting Corporation English headquarters on Jarvis Street in Toronto used to be referred to as ‘The Kremlin.’ I remember seeing my first videotape machine there. It was almost as big as my car and you edited the huge reels of two-inch tape with scissors. The same capability is now built into cell phones as an accessory. That is history. To-day the English-language CBC rules from fortress-Front Street.

But the proclivity for lies still seems to permeate the corporation. A memory from the Kremlin years might be apocryphal but says it best. At the end of a planning meeting to cover the last Diefenbaker election, the unforgiven was said: “Let’s get to work gentlemen, we have a government to defeat.”

When Pierre Trudeau bought into our concerns that the Board of Broadcast Governors was stifling the growth of private broadcasting in Canada in favour of the CBC, he gave us the quasi-independent Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC) and a CBC ready to fight for survival. It might have made the Bassett’s and Shaw’s as rich as Croesus, but the fiction of the altruistic CBC, with only our goodwill at heart, lives on.

But they lie, you know.

I have tried over the years to get the CBC to stop referring to the land-destroying output of the Alberta tar sands as oil. Bitumen from the tar sands cannot become synthetic crude oil until a refinery takes out all the excess carbon and other impurities. It is an extremely polluting process and Albertans much prefer that the process take place a long way from them. Pipelines for diluted bitumen rely on heat and high pressure to force the diluted gunk along and that puts at risk every creek, river or waterway these pipelines cross. Even the Great Lakes are endangered.

Tell that to the CBC and be ignored. They will tell the story their way.

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A Question of Trust.

July 8, 2021July 7, 2021 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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While the World Burns.

July 6, 2021July 6, 2021 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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