Uncategorized – Page 33 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Postmedia should axe Paul Godfrey.

January 21, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Watching Postmedia bleed red ink is a Canadian pastime on the scale of the vanishing tar sands and those perennial losers, Toronto’s hockey team. The difference is that the tar sands were done in by the Saudis and the Maple Leaf team owners do not care because the fans pay anyway. It is Paul Godfrey’s failed temple of debt that is helping destroy the last vestiges of newspaper readership in Canada.

It is those who let CEO Godfrey acquire the Sun Media chain last year who accelerated the demise. Adding debt on debt is never a wise move. Maybe he thought if he created something that no sensible business person would want to touch, he would be safe.

But Godfrey is taking down the better with the worse. Last time this household tried to end the Toronto Star’s ownership of our breakfast table, we tried the National Post. In a week, the Star was back where it belonged.

Yet we have always liked Postmedia’s Ottawa Citizen. Its editors and writers understand Ottawa. Conversely the Ottawa Sun seems to understand nothing and shares that understanding with the hoi polloi. It is like most other Sun papers that are produced for those who move their lips as they read—the newsprint absorbs the slobber.

And Godfrey announces that he is combining these newsrooms in Ottawa and elsewhere where he can. It is typical right-wing thinking. If he can just get rid of enough of the workers, profit is just around the corner. If they just got rid of Godfrey profit might even be possible.

In all the years that Paul was in the newspaper business you would think he would have understood some of the trends. There is lots of competition for attention out there. There are new generations who would rather exchange information through Facebook and Twitter. Their attention span is measured in seconds not a half hour of paging through a newspaper. And tabloids are more fun to read than metros.

Competition today is not a better social app. It is attention, need, educating, societal need and advancing our society. Are you growing our society or are you pandering to it?

Give it up Paul. It is time you took the millions you have taken out of the newspaper business, shut up shop, retire to that gated community in Florida and leave the business of communications to those who care.

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

There’s more to electoral reform than voting.

January 13, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Before you get to vote for a candidate or a political party in a general election much needs to happen. There are various aspects of our political system involved and they all have an impact on the quality of our democracy. And, on a scale of one to ten, our democracy has been at about four for the past 20 years.

The only reason that our democracy scores a four is that nobody has been successful in taking our right to vote from us. We have been allowed to vote. We saw where Stephen Harper’s Conservatives tried to manipulate the voting in their last-ditch voting rights bill near the end of their last term in office. They failed in their objective but there is still much to correct in that bill.

We even saw how the Conservatives manipulated the election period in hopes of gaining financial advantage. The extended election period worked against them.

But where we really fail is in keeping our political parties democratic is in citizen participation in determining the party’s basic principles and policies, the choice of party leaders and the selection of individual candidates. When we can solve these questions, we will be ready to consider how we should vote for who represents us. And First-Past-the-Post, proportional voting or ranked ballots are only some of the options to be discussed.

Our level of democracy has been seriously weakened over the past couple decades mainly by the control of the party exercised by the party leader. When we allowed party leaders to sign off on the individual candidates for the party, we took away one of the reasons why party membership was important.

And when we took away meaningful participation in party policy development, we said that party membership is not important. What we ended up with was lists of party supporters to constantly harass for donations to the party.

As things stand with the political parties, Members of Parliament find it more important to report to their party leader’s office than to their constituents. Where many MPs used to take time each month to hold an open meeting to talk to constituents, today they take part in some charity work in their electoral district if they are worried about getting re-elected.

Our MPs are somewhere between being elected because of who they are and what party they represent. We have some strong MPs and we have some nebbishes. We will have to decide what we want them to be before we vote on how we will vote.

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

Some Christmas notes.

December 25, 2015 by Peter Lowry

This is a compromise. Last year we wrote a poem for our readers about Stephen Harper but we no longer have him to kick around. And it would hardly do to have people get the wrong idea if we wrote poems for our new prime minister.

But the real reason for our current malaise is the falling off of readership. From the substantial readership at the end of the election campaign and the interesting peaks and valleys in November, people do not have much time for political commentaries in December. Babel-on-the-Bay is down to its hard core of regular readers. The only difference this year in December is that some hundreds of regular readers seem to have moved to Ottawa. We can guess who these people are and they feed on political subjects. We will try to keep you all entertained.

It is unlikely that you will hear much from Donald Trump in American politics after the Republican convention next summer. The seeds of his destruction are now starting to germinate. His vulgarity, his fascism, his outrageous and ignorant statements are all part of Trump’s house of cards and state by state you will see him rejected by Republican voters. It looks like this coming November Hilary Clinton might have little trouble beating Texas’ Ted Cruz for the American presidency.

Closer to home the situation in Ontario remains volatile. That disgusting Mr. Brown who bought the leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives has yet to emerge from his cocoon without his farm-boy twang and with something more interesting to say to Ontario audiences. His opponent, Kathleen Wynne, is no angel either as she also manipulated the process to win the Liberal Party in Ontario leadership. While her opponents are still trying to hang the gas plant fiasco on her, she is busy making her own mistakes with Ontario voters’ money.

But most eyes next year will be on Ottawa and that will provide lots of fodder for commentaries. We will be looking at some of these opportunities over the next week.

We must admit that we are somewhat at a loss as what to do about municipal politics in Canada. We cannot stand the hypocrisy at this level of politics. And if you are under the impression that the municipal level is not just the junior-A league of politics, you have not been paying attention.

But we started out to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and hope for an economically vibrant Canada in the year 2016.

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

The story behind the survey.

December 23, 2015 by Peter Lowry

On average this household gets one or two surveys per week. That is more than the average household but we encourage it. We answer interactive voice response (IVR) calls because they are fun and we enjoy confusing them. We are more cautious with live callers and we listen carefully to the technique and the mix of questions. We are particularly interested in any bias we find or any trick questions. We are probably more truthful on Internet panels in which we participate. It has been a while since we have written survey questionnaires or trained interviewers.

But we wish we could have written the survey for a friend that came to our e-mail in-box in the last week. We sent him an e-mail after answering the questionnaire and suggested that he should just ask his family and friends what he was trying to find out. The problem was that he had used one of the new Internet do-it-yourself surveys and it not only lacked subtlety but it would hardly provide an impartial answer from the people being interviewed. He was trying to answer a question that needed to be answered by people who cared.

At the same time another survey was going on in a local city ward where there will be a by-election to replace a councillor who resigned. This was an IVR telephone survey to see what the local identification was for a potential candidate. Since these are just beauty contests anyway, this potential candidate wanted to see the identification he had in the ward. He has now said he will run. Mind you, the usual group of suspects and also-rans have already declared and he is not exactly joining a very sparkling array of talent.

And that was just two surveys that were a waste of time.

Another survey we were looking at recently was the one being pushed to the media by the Broadbent Institute. Being no fan of Ed Broadbent, nor he of yours truly, we tend to disparage anything from that institute as we both treat studies sponsored by the right wing Fraser Institute. The problem with the recent Broadbent Institute study and with many Fraser Institutes studies is the bias these people have already expressed before bringing out surveys to support their cause.

The first requirement for any believable survey is the impartiality of the questionnaire and the interviewers. The second is the sampling technique and understanding you get what you pay for. The third requirement is that you have to know the people interpreting the raw data are also impartial. And finally, you have to bear in mind that a survey is about what people thought—not what they are necessarily going to do.

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

Whoa, whoa Rosie.

December 20, 2015 by Peter Lowry

The wife was upset about Rosie DiManno’s column the other morning. It is not that she has ever bothered to post a comment in the Toronto Star’s website about one of Rosie’s columns or anything else. She knows that her husband’s web site has refused unidentified comment in the years that Babel-on-the-Bay has existed. The wife simply could not understand why Rosie would spew so much bile on the subject.

In an era when we have much better filters to catch sexist and vulgar language, the Toronto Star seems to have given up and now refuses unidentified comment. That makes good sense to us. Why have people comment on your material if you cannot have an honest dialogue with them on the subject. Babel-on-the-Bay cannot respond to every comment but we do try to respond to positive, helpful readers,

One of the things we have noticed in the comments sections of various sites is that there seem to be a lot of conversations between regular contributors. They seem to almost be private clubs. And we do not care to join.

But we got in trouble for laughing at the wife’s comments on Rosie. Just because we zone Rosie out after her first two paragraphs, does not mean we are laughing at the wife for her ability to read all. (Mind you any Starch editorial study would show the wife to be in a small minority of Rosie’s readers.)

The few times we have mentioned Rosie DiManno in this web site, we have usually included a comment about her verbosity. She seems to think the Star should be paying her by the word. That system of paying writers disappeared a long time ago.

The trend today is for much shorter items. We never recommend twitting but if the story only needs 140 characters, do it! When we started this commentary ten years ago, we mixed thousand-word articles with very brief comments and gradually drifted to today’s approach of keeping the commentaries under 500 words. Not only is this a good size for readers to pick up on the fly but leaves it open to return to the subject when convenient.

When we started this site, it was designed to showcase our writing and editing skills. As it is we really enjoy discussing the political subjects we address and admit the writing skills have deteriorated a bit. If the economy keeps heading for the toilet, we will have to pull up our socks, write for today’s audience and sell our skills to the highest bidder. Dare we say: Move over Rosie.

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From here, you can smell the fear.

October 10, 2015 by Peter Lowry

There was a candidates meeting the other evening for the federal election candidates in the local electoral district. It was this national election in microcosm. The event in a church was sponsored by the Simcoe County Alliance to End Homelessness. Like this election, the candidates’ answers to homelessness were too long and yet inadequate. And we learn from Sun Media’s Barrie newspaper that the Conservative candidate came for a cameo and left.

But what the Conservative candidate was not hiding was his fear. Watching him closely at a previous all-candidate event, you could see the anger and frustration that he has been building throughout this long campaign. He obviously has no confidence in his generally weak and poorly run organization. He lacks the experience or knowledge of political campaigning at this level to understand his problems.

He is hardly unique in that. The candidate with the most experience in multiple previous election campaigns is the Libertarian candidate. His contribution to the evening’s subject was to not tax seniors for funds for housing and to legalize cannabis. Luckily nobody is too concerned about the Libertarians running the country.

The conundrum for the Conservative candidate is that he is posing as having been raised in poverty in Barrie. Yet he fled the meeting because neither he not his party has any thoughts or ideas to contribute on homelessness or poverty.

At least the party platforms of the Greens, Liberals and New Democrats have monies allocated to affordable housing. The Liberal pumped the party’s housing-first initiatives along with the seven per cent income tax cut for the middle class. (To be fair, he also pointed out that the Liberals have committed to working closely with the provinces and municipalities on this and other problems.)

Not to be outdone, the NDP candidate complained about the unequal distribution of wealth in Canada. She said that the NDP will build 10,000 new housing units for Canadians in need while also providing $15 day care for everybody.

Not to be left behind, the Green candidate promised 20,000 new housing units and 10,000 fixed-up fixer uppers per year for the next ten years. He said that this would all be funded by a carbon tax on the oil and gas industry.

All of this was much easier to say without the Conservative candidate there to confuse the issues. Mind you, it is just one more issue that the Conservative platform does not seem to recognize. It is also why you can sense the fear from top to bottom of the Conservative campaign. The party has no answers for Canadians.

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Nostalgia for the era of the monster rally.

October 5, 2015 by Peter Lowry

As the ground game became more important in Canadian politics during the second half of the 20^th Century, the monster rallies for the major parties lost their importance. The work involved in mounting the rallies took too much away from the ridings that needed the workers at the voters’ doors. There was a time though when we thought the rallies were worth it.

It was always risky but Liberals kept filling Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto through the sixties and the seventies. No precise information was ever given out but it was between 35 and 45 thousand tickets that were printed to fill the 16,000 seat arena. In the capacity of head of communications for the party in those years, a great deal of the time was taken up with reassuring party officials that there would be a good crowd. (And 40 years ago, we never would have dreamed of how inexpensive it is now to use the Internet and automated telephone calls to bring out the troops!)

The key to the attendance is still the busses that every riding within 200 kilometres is expected to fill to deliver the thousands of supporters. (Did you see the helicopter shots of the traffic jam with all those buses on Highway 410 on Sunday?) A great deal of pressure was put on the campaign managers to turn out every live body they could. That last rally the Liberal Party held for Mike Pearson in 1965 was moved from the Gardens to the Yorkdale Shopping Centre. As the largest mall in Canada at the time, it presented an interesting challenge. It was planned chaos.

You could not tell the Liberals from the shoppers unless they were carrying a sign. And you could only feel pity for the innocent shopper caught up in the tightly jammed throng. One of the organizers told us afterwards that Mr. Pearson was at his best trying to shout with a bullhorn from a stairway to the uncountable thousands of people.

Even at Maple Leaf Gardens, we always had a flatbed truck and bullhorns on standby for the leader to address the people we had to shut out of the event and blamed it on the Fire Marshall regulations.

But you will never see the Conservatives trying to showcase Stephen Harper in such an open event. They would be unable to keep out the riff-raff and there would be guaranteed protests and interruptions in the proceedings.

And we assume you could never put together one of Harper’s classic backdrops of the colours and cultures of Canada without an RCM Police and Security Investigation Service vetting them first. Mind you, the few times Harper’s organizers included children, he was obviously boring the poor kids. (Mind you the Trudeau children seemed fascinated by the Liberal bedlam in Brampton.)

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Harper needs to take lessons from the Royals.

August 19, 2015 by Peter Lowry

It is a good bet that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not thought of this. His friends the Brit Royals also have trouble with the paparazzi. They do hound one so! No matter how much editors might pay for a picture of Harper without his hairpiece, the Royals have it worse.

It is getting so bad over in Old Blighty that Kensington Palace sent a polite note to the news media about it. In typical Brit terms, this letter was supposed to be strongly worded. It took umbrage with the bad habits of photographers in using many different ruses to acquire pictures of the various heirs to the Crown of Westminster. They are particularly concerned about the young and impressionable Prince George.

It is hard to believe that this cute little kid is really only third in line for the throne. His great grandmother Elizabeth is still going strong, thank you. Maybe she is trying to outlive her son with the big ears. Mind you, the old queen would be wise not to accept a cup of tea from the Duchess of Cornwall.

But you will note that Babel-on-the-Bay is the only commentary that bothers to mention the Royals during a Canadian election campaign. Since monarchists are a dying breed in Canada, Mr. Harper has already pandered to that vote. And did he not bring over Charlie and the Duchess recently? They stayed away from main population centres in case nobody noticed them.

But we were talking about the problems the Royals have with paparazzi. Along with the note from Kensington Palace, the Metropolitan Police (the quite inadequate guardians of the Royals whilst at home) also sent a less than friendly note. The Peelers informed the media that their men were armed. And if that did not frighten them off, they also informed the media that their boyos had to make sudden and “split-second” decisions about the use of force. We can of course appreciate their concern but we think that threatening to shoot members of the paparazzi is a bit excessive.

This would never be necessary for them if they bothered to visit Canada more often. The R.C.M. Police will brook no shenanigans with the paparazzi when the Royals are under their care. It is sometimes a puzzler when Royals come to Canada whether people show up at events to see the funny Brits or to see all the Mounties in their red tunics, riding boots and pointy Stetsons.

But when you see how badly Harper is handling his media relations lately, you have to admire the determination of the Royals. God Save the Whatever!

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

The bully tactics of Stephen Harper.

August 2, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Prime Minister Stephen Harper must be a bully who has never grown up. He seems to be a misanthrope: a person who dislikes other humans. He shows narcissistic tendencies with his vanity over that hairpiece that is always so perfectly in place. He has always been stuffy, vain and demanding of power. His hairdresser is always on hand to fix his hair, make-up or take the lint off his suit. He has turned on all his mentors and has no close friends.

But it is the bully that is most dangerous to Canadians. You would accept the vanities and narcissism if the man worked for you. What you cannot accept is his using you. And he has used Canadians unmercifully from back when he wrested the Reform Party from Preston Manning and cajoled Peter MacKay to bring the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada into the fold. With that, his march on Ottawa was in progress.

Harper bullies his staff and their only outlet is to bully the news media, the civil servants and the lesser acolytes of the Conservative Party. By micro-managing the government from the Prime Minister’s Office, he has created a reign of terror throughout the Ottawa-based government. He browbeats the Governor General to do his bidding. He prorogues government at his whims. He obfuscates in the Parliament of Canada. His underlings create confused and mixed omnibus bills to keep the laws from those who might scoff at them. He fights with Supreme Court judges instead of working with them. He runs foreign affairs as a personal fiefdom picking his own travels for his extravagant tourism while sullying Canada’s world-wide reputation.

Most serious in foreign affairs are attempts to bully President Obama of the United States. Harper moves with the extremist Republicans challenging the Democratic President. He tries to work around Obama to get the TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline built. Obama is expected to deny this effort soon because the only purpose of the pipeline is to ship Alberta tar sands bitumen around the world. Harper has blocked all efforts in Canada to control this tar sands pollution. He seems to want the most polluting synthetic oil in the world as his legacy.

Harpers legacy will also be his attempts to bully his political opponents. His recent election act was passed to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Canadians who might not want to vote for his lacklustre candidates.

And like any bully, he can dish out the advertising slurs on others but cannot take it himself. Just one advantage he sees in an early election call for the October 19 election is that the union advertising against him will be stopped once the writ comes down.

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

Left, Right or Liberal?

July 27, 2015 by Peter Lowry

One of the best—and funniest—opeds we have read for a while was by Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star. Susan’s first premise in her article (Liberals must win the middle…July 25) was that there are too many communications people in the Liberal Party. She then segues into a discourse on whether the Liberal Party is even necessary. She gives the party a pass but notes that it has to determine if it takes the middle road through principle or pragmatism.

We will take it as something of a back-handed compliment that Susan recognizes the communications expertise that the Liberal Party has shown in the past. We will be less charitable about the idea she quotes from Stephen Harper’s mentor Tom Flanagan. The guru of Canada’s simian right tells political scientists that Liberals in Canada tend to thrive when national unity is a live issue. Maybe that is because we Liberals tend to understand the issue.

Susan goes on to make the point that the Liberal Party can hardly own the pragmatic political middle. That is the fighting ground for all political parties where they pander to the voters, bribe them with their own money and promise the nirvana to come.

But believing in a principled liberalism is also a tough row to hoe. It is a comfortable position when you are only fighting the ideological stands of the parties on the right and left. It becomes uncomfortable though when the Liberal Party leadership breaks its word and veers from one side of the spectrum to another. Intellectually you understand the need to go this way and that to scoop up some more voters but anyone who has followed the family dog around knows you get other detritus when you put a grocery bag over your hand to scoop.

The reason so many Canadians are disillusioned with politics is that there do not seem to be any principled politicians anymore. They died off with Lester Pearson, John Diefenbaker and Tommy Douglas. It has been downhill ever since. Leaders lie. They make promises they never intend to keep. (To be fair, they also make promises they cannot keep. They should have known that when they made the promise.)

Harper said the other day that he will appoint no more senators—those horses have already left the stable. Mulcair promises to abolish the Senate—wish him lots of luck figuring out how to do that. And Trudeau wandered to the right to suggest that elitists pick the senators—an idea his own party could not support.

Today we have the sight of Thomas Mulcair and Stephen Harper duking it out for the pragmatic middle ground. What is left for Justin Trudeau to do? Referee?

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