Uncategorized – Page 32 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Election day is not a holiday.

October 6, 2016 by Peter Lowry

One of the objectives of the current special parliamentary committee on electoral reform in Canada is to look at ways of encouraging more people to vote. To-date they have considered suggestions of everything from paying people to vote to making it law. Some American companies considering the importance of the upcoming federal election in the United States are even giving their employees the day off to vote.

But what everyone is doing is looking at the question of how to increase voting turnout through the wrong end of the telescope. The problem is with the politicians. They are lazy, inexpert and making the wrong assumptions before any election even gets off the ground.

If companies really wanted to help turn out the vote, they would give employees wanting to help their political parties the day off to work for their party to get out the vote. It is of no concern of the company which party but having employees who care makes it all worthwhile.

Political parties throughout North America have been on a steady downward spiral for the past quarter century. From the time that Jean Chrétien trashed his Red Book of promises in taking power in 1993, the Liberal Party of Canada headed downhill. In the same way, the Conservative Party of Canada became Stephen Harper’s personal instrument and forgot about the future.

And if no American politico is not now aware of the desperate need for America to reform its political primary system, they have been in a coma for the past year.

Political parties in North America have been taking a bad rap for the past 150 years. They are the unappreciated engine of the political process of the country. As corrupt as they might have been in the past, they work hard to reflect current morals. They are the public—some living in the past, some looking to the future. They generate politicians, good and bad, they deal in process and political possibilities.

We cannot have organized, national politicians without their handmaidens in the political parties. We need the workers, the strategists, the sign holders, the leaders, the door knockers and the challengers. Political parties must be allowed to grow and replenish.

Yet we encourage the destroyers. Harper is gone but Trudeau has taken the Liberal Party, shaken it like a rag doll and let the insiders fall out. Trump has driven a disillusioned Republican Party to perdition. It will take years to rebuild. Maybe it will be better for it. All political parties need to rebuild themselves. They do not belong to the politicians. They belong to their nation.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

Lessons from the world of twits.

September 29, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The first question for today: ‘Is there life after Twitter?’ Front-page news the other day at the Toronto Star was that columnist Paul Wells is boycotting Twitter. It is a form of protest. He will forego his 30 tweets per day and his 60,000 followers until Twitter gets its censorship problems corrected to Mr. Wells’ satisfaction.

So welcome to the real world Mr. Wells. Welcome to the Twitter-free universe. This is your chance to get a life. You can walk around your city with your head held high—no longer myopically peering at your smart phone. You no longer even need that weather app; you can look up at the sky. And you can look at the world around you.

You could even be ahead of that guy Trump in the U.S. He has far more followers of his twits than you. He is a braggart and a buffoon and he entertains. Just wait for his reaction in November when he finds there is no app that will get those Twitterites to follow him to the polls.

A few years ago a grandson convinced us to give Twitter another trial. He said that all writers have to promote themselves on Twitter. That was not true. Twitter proves to be a colossal waste of time. If every Twitterite took that time to read a few good books, they would have something interesting to talk about. They would know more about their world. They would know more about people and how they live.

We spent many years of being an early adopter of things technical. The first home computers, the radio telephone in the car before the concept of cells was developed. Boy, did we have the gadgets—usually at excessive cost and then the analysis, report and rejection.

Social media has done almost as much for the Internet as pornography. Both build users. They both repel. Social media is intrusive, dangerous, exploitive, vulgar and eventually nauseating—come to think of it, so is pornography.

So good on you Paul Wells. You might have done the deed for your own purposes but you could be helping free the slaves of social media. Think of all those young people learning to interact properly with their peers instead of sexting. Think of the exercise our youth will get as they go out to explore their neighbourhood without the life-line of a smart phone. They will be the ones looking around them in wonder. They might be seeing their real world for the first time.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

The Division of Ignorance.

September 18, 2016 by Peter Lowry

If you are black, is that license to call people racist because they are white? It seems the editors of the Toronto Star have stopped thinking when they accept op-eds from writers who just want to create racial strife. Desmond Cole, a regular contributor to the Toronto Star said in a September 15 op-ed article that “Suspicion of all immigrants who are not white, or not members of the former British Empire, is a Canadian value.”

Mr. Cole insults all Canadians who happen to be white and the Toronto Star should be embarrassed. Cole uses a speech by Sir John A. Macdonald as support for his thesis and says the fact that it was 150 years ago is irrelevant.

And it is obvious that Mr. Cole has no idea of the wide differences today between British and Canadian values. Canada has grown in many ways over the past 150 years. As mentioned recently in one of our commentaries, our Canadian values are constantly changing—we hope for the better.

Of course people such as MP Kelly Leitch do not help just because she might think bigotry plays well with some of her voters. Leitch has been severely criticized within her own political party for her proposals and her chances of winning her party’s leadership have fallen from slim to zero.

But the comments of writers such as Mr. Cole and the disruptive antics of an organization such as Black Lives Matter do not help matters either. They can cause embarrassment for the black community.

Nor are Mr. Cole’s opinions on Canada’s treatment of its indigenous peoples germane. When he takes the time to see how attitudes have changed across Canada over the years and the extensive efforts of Canadians to atone for past mistakes, maybe then he can comment. To suggest that Canadians practice a forgetfulness of past indignities is not only wrong but displays an ignorance that is hard to take.

Another grievous error in Mr. Cole’s comments is his scurrilous attack on the North-West Mounted Police, its successor Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the spin-off Canadian Border Services Agency. Nobody believes that these forces are paragons but they certainly do not deserve to be described as being “steeped in centuries of racism, colonialism and white supremacy.”

It seems to this writer that Mr. Cole welcomes divisive comments by politicians as a way to keep his own cultural war going.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

Bye Toronto Star, it’s been good to know you.

August 14, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The writer has no inside knowledge about what is happening there but it was when reading the Toronto Star a few mornings ago that we got the feeling that there is little time left for it. It was not just the announcement of more firings and layoffs or the lack of weight to the complete paper. What it really lacks today is substance and depth.

And here we thought the National Post would be next to bite the dust. That paper has been desperate to just get its distribution to the point of having any meaning. Maybe it is the combination with the Sun newspapers that is keeping the doors open on Paul Godfrey’s American funded fool-hardiness.

Did you know that Joe Atkinson’s modest little Toronto Star newspaper was 124 this year? It still holds on to the circulation honours as Canada’s number one broadsheet newspaper. We are just not sure how long it can keep going.

We would sure miss Chantal Hèbert’s columns. She does a wonderful job bringing Quebec into perspective. A great political reporter such as Bob Hepburn seems to be down to one column a week. We are hoping Martin Regg Cohn is just on a well-earned vacation.

You would think they could do with fewer of those high-priced names on the paper’s board. They hardly seem to be doing a good job of bringing the paper into the 21^st century. Our household dropped the less than adequate Sunday print edition and tried the electronic version but that also seems a loser.

But the real concern is in finding sources to replace the news-gathering resources of the Toronto Star that are trustworthy. As much as we appreciate the Ottawa insights of the Ottawa Citizen, the Godfrey biases hang over that newspaper like barrage balloons.

And you can hardly trust anything from the Internet. As much as the Huffington Post works hard, its roots are in a conservative blog. It would probably be justice if this bewildered, beggared blogger returned to where he started his career–embracing the corporate tentacles of the Globe and Mail.

If you are a news junkie, you have come to despise the self promotion, repetition and self-deception of today’s television news programming. You ignore the torn off news clips on radio, rewritten (maybe) from the news wire. Local papers are nothing but wraps for advertising flyers. And the major print media are dying from a death of a thousand cuts. We will all soon be as ignorant as all those followers of the Republican Party candidate in the United States.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

The madness of modern media.

July 20, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Where do you get your real news? Canadians can still turn to the impoverished Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Canadian Press Services and its Broadcast News are sadly reduced versions of a trusted past. Television and radio are more and more faceless conglomerates while newspaper empires crumble. All news media are in a rear-guard action as the Internet encroaches on their audiences.

Good grief, you are not reading this blog for news are you? Sorry, all you get from blogs are opinions.

The blogger who posits his or her opinion as news is misleading you. It is like suggesting that Fox News in the United States is free of bias or that Calgary-based Shaw’s Global Television in Canada does not favour pipelines. And how do you like having Canada’s largest television network CTV under the control of Bell Canada?

It is when you consider the madness of Canada’s media situation that you begin to understand the slippery downhill slope that traditional media are on. Why are they letting the Internet take over? Has print media just become another version of a Pokémon Monster? Is print media going to move on mass to the Internet with the confused public?

Are we expecting people with their cellphone cameras to replace professional news coverage? Are pseudo media such Huffington Post taking over with what seems to be a mixed offering of social media blogs and news networks? Where is the line between fact and fiction? How can readers have any trust?

All we know is that daily papers are thinner and thinner as the advertising moves to buy the viewers of television and identified audiences on the social media of the Internet.

Meanwhile we are time-shifting the TV shows we might watch while using live broadcast for breaking news and our favourite sports? And only a spendthrift would waste the extra money on sports packages that you might or might not watch. You are better off watching those occasional interests at a sports bar.

We knew this was coming in 1976 when we saw the Hollywood movie Network and we agreed that we should all be mad as hell and not take it anymore. It showed us that television news was no longer news but repetitious clips of entertainment designed to promote the network’s commercial laden programs for the lowest common denominators of society.

And people wonder why someone such as that disgusting Donald Trump can develop a following. Do we have any media left that we can trust?

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

The lost art of politics.

July 18, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The other day, the question came up: What is wrong with politics? You have to figure there are several good books in that question so you are hardly going to answer it in a 400-word blog. If you boil it all down to basics, you have to say that people no longer want to compromise. And compromise is the essential art of politics.

In politics you have to do what you can today while saving the impossible for tomorrow.

But you cannot put off the impossible forever. In a world of diametrically opposed positions, the compromise is becoming harder to find. We have seen many examples of this in the stand-off positions taken by the politicos in the American Congress. The Democrats and Republican politicians practice brinkmanship while the country is in dire straits. They are intransigent to appease their disparate publics. The tri-partite strength of the American Dream is often shattered when the President, the politicians and the judges of the Supreme Court are at loggerheads. There are many frustrations and proposed fixes and little action.

Canadian politics are no better. At least Canadians can blame Queen Victoria and quisling politicians for the current state of their almost unrepairable constitution. Canadians use generational change as an excuse to throw out each previous generation of failed politicos. The new breed quickly tosses the worst of their predecessors’ failed laws.

The Canadian Dream is something we recreate as the need arises. We think that compromise is something we do with our farm-team provincial politicos. Our approach to compromise is to water our wine—to appease the lowest common denominator.

Canadians are high on clean air, sparkling waters and virgin forests until we need to despoil them to tear away the minerals and hydrocarbons. Making money comes first.

Compromise in Canada is what we do with our business benefactors. Just tell us when you are through raping and pillaging the environment so that we can pass a law against it.

Canada is run for the One Per Cent. They prefer to buy their positions of trust, their appointments, their honours, their recognition and/or their obscurity. They are the proud patrons of our politicians.

The public has its day when periodically, the politicos turn their attention to the desire to get re-elected. Sometimes they do that too late.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

Vote Reform Primer: Back to Basics.

June 4, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The following is an up-dated version of the discussion on first-past-the-post voting in the Democracy Papers of 2007. We will be running a series of these primers over the next few weeks. We welcome any questions or arguments you might have. We are always pleased to respond to serious questions.

When we wrote the Democracy Papers nine years ago, it was to help people in Ontario to understand the question being asked in the Ontario Referendum on Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) Voting. While there was a great deal of confusion as to what MMP meant, it became quite obvious early in the discussions that Ontario citizens were quite unlikely to vote in favour of the proposed voting system. It seemed that the more obvious that became the more strident the proponents of changing how we vote became.

One particularly group demanding change is Fair Vote Canada which is an offshoot of Fair Vote in the United States. As the name implies, these people do not do not think first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting is fair. And while they pose as non-partisan, it is important to recognize that this organization is mainly made up of New Democratic and Green Party supporters. These parties have the most to gain if we ever switched to proportional voting.

The premise that FPTP voting is unfair is based on the fact that all you need to win is a plurality (or simply the most) votes. They think it is unfair for someone to win if they do not have more than 50 per cent of the votes. They also think it is unfair if a party only wins 40 per cent of the votes and wins 60 per cent of the seats in parliament. They also think it is unfair if you win 20 per cent of the votes across the country but do not win 20 per cent of the seats in parliament. These people should really call themselves ‘Unfair Vote Canada.’

What they are really complaining about are some of the characteristics of FPTP voting. And those are only some of the problems.

FPTP voting is an awkward name for simple, single-member constituency plurality voting. It is almost too simple: you just go to the polls, vote for one person, the votes are counted and the person with the most votes wins.

But with a system that is simple, there is no confusion. What you vote for is what you get–if enough of your neighbours agree with you. If your candidate loses, you tried and you have nothing of which to be ashamed. Your vote was counted and you made a contribution to democracy.

FPTP is the most democratic method of electing members to government. Whether there are two candidates on the ballot or 20, FPTP means that in your constituency you elect the person preferred by the most voters. If it is fair when there are two candidates, why would it not be fair with 20? If you would prefer that the person be the choice of more than 50 per cent of the voters, it is a simple matter to have a run-off election.

FPTP is very easy to keep honest. There are no complicated formulas, no mathematical manipulations, just a plain simple, easy to understand, count of ballots for candidate ‘A,’ candidate ‘B’ and so forth. The one with the most votes wins. No questions. An occasional recount is needed when the vote is close but that can be as much fun to watch as a close horse race.

But there is far more than money at stake. In FPTP you are putting your trust in people. You do not have to vote for a party. You can vote for a person, a person you trust, one who works on behalf of the people in your riding. Parties do not have to keep their word. It is difficult to hold a party accountable. A person, your Member of Parliament, comes back for re-election and is accountable to the voters.

Politics is about people. It is there to serve people. Elections are not just about political parties, party platforms or any of the parties’ broken promises. To put parties ahead of the people we choose in our constituencies is to give political parties control of our lives. Political parties deal with ideology, broad solutions and power. It is people who can deal with our concerns as individuals.

In that vein, you have a good reason to support FPTP: It gets things done. An election is a call to action. It is when we sum the activities on our behalf of the previous government and our member and consider our collective needs for the coming term. It is a time for change or a time to consolidate and it is the voters’ decision to make.

FPTP gives the voters control. It means, the voters can remove a government that becomes so convinced its ideology is right that it ignores the needs of the voters. The ability to change governments is one of the most important capabilities of FPTP.

With FPTP, we know who to call. Your politicians are there to represent all the voters in their riding. They can ignore you, if they dare. They can even disagree with your ideas. They might have to tell you why they cannot support your ideas, but, if they are good at their job, they might have an explanation that satisfies you.

In FPTP our politicians are accountable. They cannot get away with an answer such as ‘my party leader said I had to vote for it, so I did.’ There are no excuses. The record of our politicians is there for us to examine. They have to meet our expectations.

And, finally, with FPTP it is hard to get elected and hard to stay elected. To be the first past the post in an election is no easy task. The voters are demanding and ruthless with those who think there are shortcuts to earning our trust. Should we ever ask for less?

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An appropriate salute to Queen Victoria.

May 23, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The following is a repeat of our 2013 salute to Queen Victoria. Nothing has changed. Enjoy your long weekend.

Happy birthday Your Majesty! As children in Ontario, we used to set off fireworks to celebrate your birthday. It was a joyous occasion. It was wonderful to know that the sun never set on your empire. We were all British subjects. You were the image of our strength. You were a moral compass. We all got passing grades in our loyalty.

But times have changed lady! You have been dead for some 113 years. The children that you spawned to repopulate the palaces of Europe are long gone. Your great-great granddaughter, Elizabeth II is fast coming up on your length of service to your people as one of the few reigning monarchs left in the world. When she joins you in history, there are no bets on where the English royals are headed.

Elizabeth II has certainly done a fine job on shoring up the monarchy but her own son, the Prince of Wales is one of the stumbling blocks. There is just no respect for a man who was provided with a story-book princess. She gave him a couple of nice kids but he was too busy boffing an old flame. The demise of the princess almost turned into a public relations disaster for the Brit royalty.

So how do we honour you Victoria? What is appropriate in Canada to recognize the sovereign who was the midwife of our Confederation? In a few more years, Canada will celebrate 150 years. It is way past time to release us from your apron strings. Canada has proved its loyalty in the blood of wars and support in times of need. We should, in your honour, write a new constitution for this country, this Canada.

Canada has surpassed its origins. We have welcomed the peoples of the world. We are not just English or French anymore. We are all languages, all races, all religions and our perspective is of peace and hope and progress and compassion. Sorry Madam but a country such as this must stand on its own.

And it is also past time when we need to recognize our needs as a country. We tried to import your Parliament of Westminster to this new land and failed. We have the weaknesses in our parliamentary structure that Oliver Cromwell noted hundreds of years ago. We have been unable to patch them with the customs evolved over time as has Westminster. Our version of a House of Lords is a sham. Outdated, misused and misunderstood, the Canadian Senate has failed. It needs modern thinking.

Canadians pride themselves on their democracy. Yet we need checks and balances to the power of our Prime Minister’s Office. We need to distance our court and administrative agency appointments from politics of the day. We have much to rethink. And even if we reason that the time is long past for a royal head of state, in Ontario at least, we will be sure to keep our Victoria Day long weekend holiday.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

The death of journalism.

March 21, 2016 by Peter Lowry

We are told that journalism is dying. It was supposed to have chronicled centuries. Journalism, as we knew it, was born in the 19^th Century, came to fruition in the 20^th Century and is staging an ugly despairing death in the 21^st Century. Canadians bear witness to this death on a daily basis and pay little heed.

But they will miss it when it is gone. Broadcast media can never replace true journalism. Print on a screen or paper is the medium that best enables the citizen to select and self-edit the content. It is the ability to select content that measures the journalist’s effort. The provocative headline and the arresting photograph help but it is the reverse pyramid of a reporter’s skill that draws you through the information. And it will be in our quest for information and for truth that we will mourn the passing of journalism.

And we have no trust in what seems to be replacing it. Newspapers of today are a lost cause. Fewer newspaper owners with narrowed biases are replacing the altruism of the journalist as newspaper publishing returns to the partisan politics of its origins. The newspapers that are left are in a race with bankruptcy as fewer advertising dollars are swept up by newer, more aggressive media.

Despite the hype, the Internet cannot save journalism. It is like a trunk sewer collecting and drawing the good, the bad, the flotsam and the bouquets along in the growing torrent. And you can hardly expect untested blogs to replace true journalism. The journalist needs time, expenses, sources and access to deliver what he or she and maybe you will recognize as the truth. And there are many truths to be told.

Each of us who uses the Internet as our soapbox challenges the truth. We are burdened with our biases too. We are but the blind discovering the elephant. We take our limited view and give an opinion. Only you can decide.

Broadcast has been providing a bridge for journalism but it is a weak and biased bridge as the news vehicles drive by the news in their rush to fill the next hour’s feeding cycle.

The era of the news magazine has been challenged with the immediacy of radio. And television creates magazine style news. We have lots of information today and never enough hard news.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

Pay politicians what they are worth?

March 20, 2016 by Peter Lowry

A friend made the suggestion the other day that we should pay politicians according to the contribution they make. While there was an immediate acceptance of the suggestion, we realized that there would have to be a minimum base to allow the individual something to live on. It is just that we have known too many politicians who would starve to death if they were paid based on their productivity.

And where does this concept have to start? If we began it with school board trustees, we would have to make them pay for the appointment. That is all it is. The role of a school trustee is that of an ego on a crusade. You should have to pay for it. Get on the board. Get your hobby horse looked after. Get off the board. Your bill from the community should be reasonable and please pay promptly.

City or town councillors are often the same. They get the bug to run because they are tired of complaining about a sidewalk or an inappropriately located stop sign. Once their wagon is running smoothly on their newly paved road, they get the urge to fix other’s little red wagon. What we should have is an alms box outside the councillor’s office door. It would never do to give the councillor an envelope with money in it but hopefully there would be enough in the alms box each week to feed and cloth the councillor’s family.

Mayors and reeves would be looked after by the business community. Their alms boxes would be larger and suitable for envelopes full of money. These boys and girls are not in the loonie or toonie class.

This approach would at least give pause to the city politician who sees an opening into federal or provincial politics. You can build up a nice return in your alms box but the higher levels of government present challenges.

First of all party politics can challenge the alms approach. You have to become adept at promising help but not delivering if it goes against party policy. The party bagmen and bagwomen get first dibs on targeted donors and the individual member has to live on the leavings.

And then there are often differences between the provincial and federal fundraising rules. In Ontario, for example, the Premier can sell direct contact to CEOs for $5000 a plate dinner while federal members have to live with more stringent rules.

But then federal contracts and business opportunities can far exceed provincial opportunities and there must be enough money in the business community to satisfy everyone. Mind you even the laziest parliamentarian should have enough left from expenses to be able to serve a decent brand of whisky.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]