Category: Uncategorized

The Business of Business.

by Peter Lowry

It was about 40 years ago when I first heard Frank Stronach, creator of Magna International, speak. I liked some of what he said and puzzled over the rest. What he had done in business was impressive. He had almost single-handed created an auto parts business that today dominates the industry. He had strong views in support of employees and confusing views on government.

He appears to be a strong believer in profit sharing with employees. That I like. While he is in a position to drive-up base wages in the industry, he does not seem to follow through. While it has often been suggested that his companies could almost build a complete car from the components it makes, he has never appeared interested in moving in that direction.

Stronach is no Elon Musk (best known for his Tesla electric vehicle). They both might be rich and richer but neither seems to understand economics. And it is probably just as well if they do not. They keep making money anyway.

And similar to many business tycoons, they are usually dead wrong in their views on government. Government cannot and should not be run as a business. The objectives are very different.

Stronach wrote a guest column in the business section of the Toronto Star the other day. In the column, he turned up his nose at government incentives to locate offices and factories in this location or that. Instead, he wants government to stop spending money on making rules for business and (in his view) impeding their development. He thinks that in today’s global economy, government is too bureaucratic and inefficient and we are paying too much for the overhead they are demanding of companies.

Stronach is buying into the extreme right-wing economics that says lower taxes are the only answer. He not only suggests that we lower taxes by five to ten per cent per year but his mathematics are terrible. He thinks we could lower taxes by 50 per cent that way in just five years.

Stronach is preaching kindergarten economics in the major Canadian daily newspaper. I think the newspaper could do better.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Remembering Fraser Kelly.

by Peter Lowry

Fraser Kelly died last week. Our friendship was never that close, but our paths crisscrossed over the years. He was chasing politics as a reporter and editor for the old Toronto Telegram back in the 1960s when we first met. I was working to get Charles Templeton into the liberal party leadership. It was as though every time I left the Templeton home in Mississauga, Fraser was out front with the gaggle of lurking reporters.

Fraser was a young and brash reporter. He admired Telegram publisher John Basset and it must have been mutual. Basset took Fraser him with him when he folded the Telegram and concentrated on his CFTO television station which he built into the flagship for the CTV network. Fraser was a natural on television. He made the transition from reporter, editor to television host with ease. He became a Toronto personality.

I forget when he and I realized we were neighbours. He and Joan had a similar type home on the next street in North York’s Henry Farm. Since my house had a pool, we did most of the summer entertaining. Son, Matt preferred the pool but daughter Lisa also did some of my family’s babysitting.

Fraser was always a big hit, at parties the wife and I threw, as many of our friends are also political. I laughingly told Fraser he only came because he could hold court for all the politicos there.

The one thing that always stood out about Fraser Kelly was that he was the straightest arrow I ever knew in the news media. I don’t think I ever told him an off-color joke. I knew better.

But we always had fun. He introduced me to the Franz Josef room at the now long-gone Walker House Hotel that used to stand down on Front Street. We both enjoyed our long lunches there discussing our city and politics.

I never knew why I lost touch with Fraser when he left television work. He joined a communications consulting firm and coincidently moved from Henry Farm. We had no contact after that. I was sorry to learn of his passing.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Mourning Becomes the Monarchy.

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 49th 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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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Redux Alberta.

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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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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A Blogger’s Ego.

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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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Have you kissed a farmer today?

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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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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The NDP Fail Us.

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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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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“Well, here’s another nice mess!”

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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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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Ask your local candidates.

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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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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And the CBC lies.

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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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]