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.
The Luck of the Liberals.
In all the inept arrangements of the recent leadership race for Ontario’s liberals, many observers lost sight of what was really happening on the Yellow Brick Road. The event took too long, was too complex in the voting and you had to wonder if they would ever get to the Land of Oz.
Luckily, the contestants were sincere. It was those contestants who, in the end, made it all work. My inclination was to support the Tin Man in the person of Nate Erskine-Smith but I found him surprisingly disorganized. Yasir Naqvi was a stalwart from the past of the party and served as the Cowardly Lion and he came third. Ted Hsu was fourth in the role of the Scarecrow and he continues in that role at Queen’s Park. Bonnie Crombie slipped easily into the role of Dorothy to lead the contestants down the Yellow Brick Road.
I was quite disappointed in them when Yasir Naqvi and Nate Erskine-Smith tried to unite the boys against the one girl in the race. Luckily, Ted Hsu recognized it as a destructive agreement and refused to participate. The boys club idea was similar to the stalking horse attempt of Patrick Brown on behalf of John Charest in the last conservative leadership. It ended when Brown was kicked out of the leadership race.
There was the odd criticism of Bonnie Crombie during the liberal debates but Crombie handled them well. The candidates recognized that they were all liberals—just maybe of different types. Erskine-Smith wanted to look like a bit of a maverick, Naqvi was the stolid old-timer and Hsu was the enthusiastic newcomer. That left Crombie in the awkward position of being considered more to the right than the party she was vying to lead.
In fairness to Crombie, it should be noted that she is not as far right as some of the federal liberals in the Trudeau cabinet and she is a raving socialist compared to former liberal leaders such as Paul Martin federally or Dalton McGinty provincially.
I think it would be a very foolish of any city mayor in Ontario who would not want a premier such as Bonnie Crombie, who understands municipal needs.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:
Just One Vote, Thank You.
Isn’t it generous of the nebbishes who think they run the liberal party in Ontario? They are letting us suckers tell them our second, third and even fourth choice for leader of the party. What they are really doing is an attempt to deny us our first choice. This ballot that allows you to vote by numbering the selections from one to four has been thrown sideways to where we have no idea who will win if it goes beyond one count.
I am going to keep my ballot simple. I am going to vote for my number-one choice and nobody else. That one vote will be for Bonnie Crombie. I started out this long and dreary campaign thinking I might support Nate Erskine-Smith. All I found out by offering my help, is that Mr. Erskine-Smith is not as well organized as a leadership candidate should be. He reminded me of former premier David Peterson. I liked the entire Peterson family but after a while I was fed up with the truck drivers running David. He became inaccessible and detached from the party. He made some very bad political decisions.
One of the things I was able to do in earlier leadership contests was to assess the team behind the candidate. That tells you a great deal. I must admit that I decided to vote for Bonnie Crombie without knowing who was running her campaign. I found out today and I should have realized that her campaign was the smooth and expensive type of campaign this insider runs. It is the insiders, connected to Queen’s Park, who would have wanted him. He must have come into the campaign late. Her earlier gaffs on bringing the party to the right and using Greenbelt lands would never have happened under his watch.
As it is, Bonnie Crombie is more to the right politically than I. In discussions with liberals across the province, I am of the conclusion that they need a Bonnie Crombie to get rid of Doug Ford and his thugs. It probably reflects what my late friend Hazel McCallion saw in Ms. Crombie. Hazel was always one of the most perceptive politicians I knew. She was always careful how she used her support and whom she trusted. Bonnie Crombie is the Cinderella that the Ontario liberals need. I am also confident that her Disney training will make for an interesting political experience.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:
Never Promise A Rose Garden.
If you ever want to teach a class of neophyte politicians how to raise the funds they will need, you should start with lectures by municipal politicians. This is where basic fund-raising begins. It is also why I have always been a proponent of funding politics through the Canada Revenue Agency.
This comes to mind after hearing the two Ontario liberal leadership candidates, who are federal MPs, challenging Bonnie Crombie’s fund-raising skills. Crombie is mayor of a city of over 800,000 and what she (or her team) would not know about fund-raising, probably hasn’t been invented yet. The low-hanging fruit for municipal politicians are the developers.
There is a story in this subject that goes back more than 50 years. It was my suggestion to the Ontario liberal party executive at the time, that the 75,000 paid-up members of the party, both federal and provincial, be asked to help fund a couple provincial by-elections. This was a novel suggestion back then and it caused a good deal of discussion around the boardroom table. The result was that I got the funds to test a mailing to our membership asking for funds. The treasurer of the party thought I was crazy but he actually was quite helpful in getting out the mailing.
I will have you know that the results of the request not only paid the cost of the mailing and could have bought lunch for the board—but not dinner.
I was not there for all the party arguments over fund-raising since but there were many efforts made by liberals to clean house. There seems to have been a tradition for the liberals to fix the problem and the conservatives to make it worse.
When Justin Trudeau made the scene in our current century, I was under the impression that he had a fix in mind. When he disavowed the liberals in the Senate and got the party to eliminate membership fees, he frankly had me puzzled. And then when he started using the supposedly free-of-a-fee liberal party supporters as his personal piggy bank, I got mad. The flood of e-mail pleas for donations became so annoying that I canceled the $5 per month that I had been giving the party for years.
I am a senior on a fixed income. What people such as I bring to the party is our experience. If you are not satisfied with that, then take us off your lists.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:
Reforming Voting II.
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:
Reforming Voting.
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:
Doug’s Doom.
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:
Tagging Team Nate.
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:
Putting Poilievre on Pause.
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:
The Plaint of the Pedant.
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: