Category: Uncategorized

Bell could not wait. They had practiced their high-handed monopoly tactics on Canadians for years. Now they are taking on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the team owners of the National Hockey League. Bell had learned the tactics in the years when it was the only game in town.  Mind you, the previous management of CTV, that knocked the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation out of the Olympic ballpark for the Vancouver and London games, was no slouch at the monopoly game. Now Bell owns CTV, it invited the CBC in on the game and then low-balled the IOC.

For the package that included the 2010 Games in Vancouver and the London Games this year, CTV bid and won with its very generous offer of $153 million. They did not expect any profit on Vancouver and, with $100 million in production costs, CTV and Rogers are reported to have lost more than $20 million.  They expect to lose more on the London games this coming summer.  It is no wonder Rogers has bailed out on the Olympics for the next round.  Now that Bell owns CTV, it decided to invite the CBC back and play in a field in which the taxpayer-owned corporation had particular skills.  Canadians still remember the excellent job the CBC has done on international sports over the years.

The IOC officials were the ones in for a shock when they opened the one bid from Canada for the next set of games.  These will be the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia and the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.  The new Canadian consortium offered less than half of the Vancouver/London bid.  It is estimated at just $70 million.  The IOC took its marbles and went home in a huff.  They would rather take nothing.

The broadcasters will go back with something, eventually, but what they really would like to know is if there will be National Hockey League players on the men’s hockey teams in Sochi.  That makes a huge difference in the size of the Canadian audience and the profit from the commercials.  The networks could be in for a long wait to find out as the NHL is playing its own game. The NHL team owners want a share of the profits that their players produce and the IOC does not believe in sharing. This means three powerful monopolies are locking horns and seeing who blinks first.  To complicate matters further, the team owners have to negotiate with the players later this year and the players will also want some of the profits from their participation.

Unless somebody breaks the chain by acting reasonably, there will either be no NHL players in the Sochi Olympics or no Olympic coverage except from an American television network or the CBC could be trying to do the whole thing on the cheap itself without government support. Nobody really wants any of those scenarios.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

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

You have to be a bit older than most to remember the days when Bell stock was the mainstay of widows and orphans. It was reliable. It was like working for Bell. People used to say with pride that they worked for Bell. It was always an honourable job and a job for life.

Not any more.  Times have changed.  Prime Minister Harper’s friends at Bell discard employees like used tissues.  Stephen Harper and the executives at Bell Canada seemed to be joined at the hip.  They even throw people out of work simultaneously.  The other day it was reported that while Bell was dismissing hundreds of employees from its Mississauga call centre, Stephen Harper’s henchmen were firing hundreds of security people from Pearson Airport which also happens to be in Mississauga.  We should send an appropriate condolence card to Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion.

Mind you, there is no such need to send such a condolence card to Stephen Harper or Bell chief George Cope.  Nobody they know would be working at such a low pay type of job.  They do not know nor do they care about the hardships those people face in today’s job market.  People at that pay level are the last hired and the first fired and they go through life with one discouragement after the other.

It was just a few people who know how to read the political tea leaves who were deeply worried when broadcasters (specifically CTV) and the cable and satellite distribution companies got into a fight over what was believed to be an argument for the distributors to pay for the local broadcast content they were distributing.  It became clear later that the argument was a smokescreen for the satellite distributor Bell to take over CTV and cable/satellite distributor Shaw to take over Global.  The only piece that is missing in English Canada is for Bell to take over Rogers.  Just be patient.

Nobody paid much attention to the new arrangement until recently Bell and its new friend Rogers bought the Teacher’s share of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE).  There is nothing that Bell cannot buy today if the company executives just put their minds to it.  And gather around sports fans, you can now get all your instant sports information on your Bell or Rogers telephones and ipads.

It is all about control. While the deal with MLSE Chairman Larry Tanenbaum might seem odd—they gave him a gift of stock worth about $80 million—they are certainly not treating him like an employee.  For $80 million it is a little easier to understand if you consider it as an encouragement to break off negotiations with other broadcasters.  It is hard to turn down $80 million.  The people George Cope and Stephen Harper fired could really live high off the hog if they had a share of that kind of money.

Someone asked the other day, where this acquisition spree of Bell is going to end? It’s a good question.  We suggested that we will have to wait to hear whom Mr. Harper chooses as the new CRTC chair before we can guess where it is heading. Bell is supposed to be regulated by the CRTC.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

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

In advising aspiring politicians about communications, you can hardly ignore the phenomenon of social media on the Internet.  It is reality and it can be useful, is your advice, but—and it is a very large ‘but’—you have to keep it controlled.  Do you, for example, call yourself a blogger if you remember to post something every few months?  Do you think, your followers will be satisfied with a twit on twitter every other day?  Do you consider vapid twits from twitter as sufficient postings for facebook?  Obviously the answer is ‘no’ to those questions and that is the sum of the problem.

If someone is doing their job as a politician, there is really no time for social media.  If you are Prime Minister Harper, you have staff to do that sort of thing.  And even then it is not done all that well.  The Harper spoof sites are far more entertaining than the real Harper site.

And, if you are a serious politician, you pay attention to the spoof sites.  We were delighted that a spoof site was created on twitter recently for a fictional Peter Lowry @babelonthebay.  We are being recognized!  It was reasonably well done and linked the Babel mayor’s tweets to give it some content.  A spoof site shows that you have pissed somebody off.  It is the highest award you can earn in social media.

You have to remember that social media is dominated by 13-year olds.  You have to work in their mindset.  It is not a grouping of rocket scientists.  From a marketing perspective, the most important product discussion is about acne treatments.  If you make somebody angry, you get a childish response.  You try to encourage people to communicate with you directly if you have written something with which they disagree but a childish mindset cannot handle such direct contact.

Obviously, Babel-on-the-bay is not written for 13-year olds.  It is written for people interested in politics—mainly Canadian.  It appreciates that the reader is an adult and uses adult language.  It is an attempt to communicate ideas for Canada’s future.  It seeks to deflate the pompous.  It is for people who want to understand.  It is fun to write.  Please communicate if you wish to comment or to disagree, we rarely bite.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

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

It was our late friend and former Senator Keith Davey who provided the name.  It was called Polar Research.  It was the only research firm we trusted.  It was ours.  We never really trusted the mainline firms.  We knew their weaknesses.  We also knew better than to release our conclusions.

Our major weakness was the availability of skilled interviewers for Polar Research.  We had to work with the political volunteers who were available.  There is little time in a political campaign to train and motivate your callers.  It was for that reason that we developed a weighting formula that was based on a known factor within the polling sample.  It was only when we applied the weighting to the gross results that you could get a picture of what was happening.  Maybe we were just lucky but our polling—with its good or bad news—was always on the nose.

Today’s pollsters are probably more frustrated with call display than anything else.  Sure, you can overcome call display but too many people let the unknown go to voice mail.

The silliest survey technique to be developed in recent years is the automated telephone calls rudely asking a single question.  The call will ask you to press “1” for this candidate and “2’ for that candidate, etc.  By the time people get the third or fourth of those calls, they are punching a number at random to get rid of the call.  And these calls are only to people who have land lines.

No matter what technique is used, nobody today does really good surveys of political opinion.  The news media promote the foolishness because it is an opportunity for them to create a story.  These stories fill newspaper pages and air time.  They are biased by the media opinions.  (You thought they had no opinions?)

Not even the well proved reliability of door-to-door canvassing is as effective today as it was 30 years ago.  It is only when you go out door-knocking yourself that you realize that there are many people who will not answer the door to a stranger.  And you can be doubly rejected if it is obvious you are a political canvasser.

The added problem today is that one in three of the people you want to speak with are not even interested in going to vote.  Maybe these people could perform a public service by putting a plague sign on their lawn or door that says “I don’t vote.”  That could certainly save time.

But the facts are that no pollster can match the accuracy of the poll done at the election’s end by the Chief Returning Officer.  It is the only one that matters.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

It has been more than a century since the last Diamond Jubilee celebrating the reign of Queen Victoria.  We Canadians will be honoured with another Diamond Jubilee next year to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Victoria’s great-great granddaughter, Elizabeth II.  If the House of Hanover has proved anything, it is that boring works.

As proof of this boredom, are you going to gather the family around the radio or in front of the tely next Sunday, to listen raptly to a message to the Empire from our dear Monarch?  No you are probably not.  If it were not for the hard-working news media people trying desperately to find something quotable from the bilge, nobody would notice the broadcast.

During the Second World War, mother considered this broadcast an essential part of Christmas in Canada and she insisted us children listen quietly while George VI stuttered his way through another weary effort.  Maybe we were not supposed to notice when we heard his Queen Consort Elizabeth quietly correct him on something.  It was not as though mother was raised to the custom, spending her childhood in Chicago.

Luckily, winning the Second World War was not dependent on the oratorical skills of the British Royals.  Having heard earlier oratory from Adolph Hitler, even if you did not speak German, they were a chilling experience.

Regrettably Elizabeth II and her hubby are too old and frail to drop by and see all the peoples of their dominions during the Jubilee year.  We Canadians are getting second best with a visit by heir apparent Charles and his lovely wife Camilla.

If they should decide to visit Babel while they are here in Ontario, no doubt we shall do them up proud.  We could have all kinds of fetes to enliven the occasion.  For example, Babel could have a crockery painting contest.  This is in recognition of the very large market for souvenir crockery at these events, mainly hand-painted cups and saucers.

What we could do is have this crockery made with just paint-by-numbers designs and sell them to the loyal citizenry of Babel who could then have the fun of hand painting them.  There can be a contest as to who could add the most personality to the Royals depicted on the cup and saucer.  Charles and Camilla can be the judges.  It will be even more fun if the best hand-painted efforts are served full of tea, which the Royal couple could drink while doing their judging.

Will that be with milk or lemon?

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

When Christopher Hitchens died the other day, many people learned about polemics.  Considered the greatest polemicist of our time, Hitchens’ work was for the elite.  He was no mere blogger.  He challenged lowly bloggers with his command of the English language.  He showed bloggers a finer future.  Polemicists such as Hitchens can take a controversial stand and use words and images as the artist wields his brush.  You did not have to agree with him but he could put you in awe of his command of the subject.

Polemics is controversy.  As a Brit, Hitchens despised his country’s pretentious royalty.  He was a revered atheist.  He was happiest when ranting for the causes of the left wing.  He was a civilized Philip Roth.  He betrayed those of us who believed in him when he supported the Iraq War.  That was how he made the point that nobody is perfect.

Hitchens proved that only the good die young.  He must have really pissed off God.  The rest of us are cowards.  The trouble is we want people to like us.  Hitchens got them laughing and then he would outrage them.  He told them God, Jehovah and Allah were all full of crap and he almost got away with saying it.  We advise you not to try this at home, boys and girls!

Hitchens could debate with the Prime Minister of England on the subject of dumping the Royals and win the debate hands down.  He lived in the United States later in life because he found more to laugh at there.  Living with a bunch of Brits can depress anyone.

His attitude towards the American right wing was outrage.  He understood that these people were among the stupidest on earth and could not believe that they thought they should be the world’s leaders.  He would expose their hypocrisy, ridicule their leadership, denounce their direction, laugh at their liturgy and denounce their demagoguery.  He agreed though that their basic problem was probably poor potty training.

Living in the Washington area provided him with a plethora of material to polemize.  Only living in the Vatican could have given him more opportunity for derision.  What might have shortened his life was that he was running out of intelligent opponents.  People were starting to be entertained by him when what he really wanted to do was inform them.

Bloggers can only learn from Hitchens as the master.  He knew his opinions and bon mots were of value.  He did not cast them as pearls to the swine.  He was not like the blogger who is a slogger in the fields of the environment.  He knew that people would seem to agree but you would know they could really care less.

Maybe Hitchens was right.  Blogging is just practice.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

Hopefully that headline does not come as a surprise.  After writing this blog for the past three and a half years, the curiosity about what others write became too powerful an urge to resist.  It led to an interesting day of research.  Frankly, the most profound shock after hours of study is that there are so damn many of them.  Do all these people have that much time on their hands?  Can they not find gainful employment?

And who is Warren Kinsella?  Can one person really claim to have that much ego?

It is always interesting to read Andrew Coyne but he surprises the reader by falling into the most invidious of traps for bloggers.  He overuses the pronoun “I.”  It is an indication of lazy writing.

It was pleasant to note that the majority of the top bloggers are literate.  While Kinsella goes too far by using words that need to be explained, most popular blogs have Fog indexes in the 9 to 11 range.  (A Fog index of 9 means the writing is at a level easily read by a person who has had a year of high school.  At the 11 range, you are using some words that the person needs a few years of high school to easily read.)  Nobody is writing for dummies in political blogs but when you get an e-mail complaint saying the reader had to check three words in your last blog, you tend to cringe.

A possible exception to that is Jordon Cooper, a blogger in Saskatoon.  You have to not only be well educated and intelligent to read his blog, you have to be interested.  Once you figure out what he is talking about, it can be quite intriguing.

What is most puzzling about many of the blogs that were studied today is the awkwardness of manoeuvring around the material.  It is never easy and the way they tend to link their material, you can be six blogs away from where you started before you know what has happened.

If there is one basic beef that could be had with many of these bloggers is that they think they are reporters.  (Come to think of it, many of them are experienced reporters.)  Please do not read Babel-on-the-Bay for breaking news.  That is not the purpose of this blog.  What Babel does is look for insight that goes beyond a reporter’s analysis.  There is also a liberal slant to the material.  It is this different take that Babel offers.

What was also a relief to see was that other bloggers might only write something once a week or even once each month.  There is no urgency to do something every day.  You are invited to read and enjoy and discuss what the blog has to say but you are not paying for it and if time is needed for better paying activities, you might miss a few postings.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

It came up over lunch in a private dining room at Toronto’s National Club.  It seems that people think there is a good book that can be written.  It is not only a story of medical mystery but of politicians, avarice, ethics, irresponsible journalism and people who prey on the sick.  It is also a mainly Canadian story.

But it starts in Ferrara, Italy.  It was introduced by an Italian vascular surgeon, Professor Paolo Zamboni.  Dr. Zamboni had a theory.  He had noted that his wife and other patients with multiple sclerosis seemed to have restricted drainage of blood through the veins in their neck.  He thought this lack of good drainage was causing a build-up of iron in the patient’s brain, either causing or exacerbating the MS patient’s neurological condition.  He called his theory, Chronic Cerebrospinal Venous Insufficiency, or CCVSI.

As a vascular surgeon, Dr. Zamboni not only established a diagnosis of the problem, he and his team developed what they thought might be a cure.  He initially used balloon angioplasty techniques to open the veins. Later, he introduced the use of metal stents to keep the veins open.  Similar to the stents used to keep open the arteries of heart patients, Dr, Zamboni used them in neck veins.  This procedure was dubbed the Liberation Treatment.

The only problem was that Dr. Zamboni was not doing this as a research study.  There were no controls or double blind protocols.  He was touting a procedure that had neither been determined to be safe nor been submitted for peer review.  His only support for the theory was anecdotal reports of individuals who had the treatment and felt better.

It was not until the treatment was tried by a neurological team at the University of Buffalo in New York State—an area of the world with maybe ten times the incidence of multiple sclerosis than that of Ferrara, Italy–that Dr. Zamboni’s treatment was noticed by the news media.  They were medical researchers from CTV television network in Toronto, Ontario, working on the network investigative program W5.

It was not so much the fault of the W5 program people that the story was blown out of proportion and caused the controversy that ensued. Canada’s CTV network constantly inserts self-promotion for its programs into its regular newscasts.  It was the news programs on CTV that, in our view quite irresponsibly, sensationalized and promoted the Zamboni treatment.  They did far too good a job of promoting the CTV W5 program.

Part of the reason for the success is that the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada is made up of chapters that are actually MS support groups in every major town and city across Canada.  People with multiple sclerosis and their families in these support groups keep in constant communication.  Because of this high level of communication, the CTV news programs attracted thousands of MS patients and their families across Canada to watch the W5 program that weekend.

After the first very enthusiastic W5 program was aired, the demand for this supposedly miracle treatment was immediate and overwhelming.  The Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada was caught in the middle.  It could not retreat to acting responsibly.  It was hammered by patients and their families, by contributors, by politicians and the public on both sides of the question.

And there were two sides.  The medical profession saw the treatment as foolhardy and dangerous.  They wanted to study it and test it before coming to a conclusion.  Try to convince a person with an uncontrolled and debilitating disease that they have to wait!

As we said at the time to the heads of the Canadian MS Society: “That is your mob out there.  You better get out front and lead it.”

And, to their credit, they did.  Despite the controversy costing them large amounts in donations, the society set aside money to fund studies.  In combination with the U.S. MS Society, some $2.4 million was immediately earmarked for studies of CCVSI and the proposed treatment.   Within the year, studies were underway in Canada and the U.S.

But the controversy would not go away. Simcoe County in Ontario became the entire argument in microcosm.  While no surgeon would face the ethical problems of putting a stent in neck veins, there was a local doctor in Barrie promoting  CCVSI.  Since the examination was not covered by the Ontario health plan, he would do the study for for a figure believed to be between $200 to $400.  If he determined that you needed the Liberation Procedure, you could buy that off-shore for anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000 plus air fare and hotels.

Patients returned from these trips with stents in place.  There seemed to be no post-operative procedures to follow.  Some patients raved about the procedure.  A few died.  (Veins do not have the same characteristics as arteries to hold a stent in place.)  Some complained that Canadian doctors were reluctant to treat these patients with stents in their neck veins.  The controversy in Simcoe County split the chapter in half.

Simcoe County also is an area of focus for politicians.  The Member of Parliament for Barrie has never met a charity that he would not use to promote himself.  That person jumped into the fray with both feet.  He is a Conservative but that did not stop other parties from getting in on the publicity.  When two Liberal MPs, who were also medical doctors, from Toronto were in Barrie for a political event, they also jumped in, arguing for use of the Liberation Procedure.  They got scorched by an annoyed local Liberal who realized they did not know what they were talking about.

After a year of controversy, W5 did a follow-up program and admitted that they might have been a bit too enthusiastic.  Even the news programs, promoting W5, have been less eager to say that Dr. Zamboni’s cure is the answer.  They now say the jury is still out.

Despite the recent agreement of the federal government to go along with the provinces and assist in testing the theory, the Canadian MS Society studies are well under way.  Some answers should be available by summer of 2012.  It is unlikely that Dr. Zamboni is going to like the answers.

(Note:  The author of this article is a past president of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada and served on the management committee and as chair of public education for the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies.  He is not writing a book on this subject.  It is a story in which nobody wins.)

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

The time of the occupy movement has ended.  Reality and the Canadian winter are reclaiming our parks and streets.  Despite the large amount of empathy for the frustrations of the so-called 99 per cent, further occupation can achieve nothing.  The time has come for the protesters to realize that lazing around and pontificating can never replace the hard work of the real world.

There might be the occasional anarchist left for the police to evict but the smart ones will be developing a long-term plan of action.  In their planning, they will find there are many routes to the levers of power.  Some will take the way of community activism.  This is a fast, effective route to being noticed and to work your way into the municipal scene.  It can include work for charities, community services, and local news and information media.  Building a solid base in the community provides that place you can back up to.

Going directly into the political arena provides only a tenuous base of operations.  For every winner in this venue, there has to be losers.  For every opportunity, there are many pitfalls.  When one person moves forward, others have to step back.

You have to serve a political apprenticeship.  Nobody starts at the top.  There are no training wheels.  Ask former Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff how it feels to be out there in the top job and turning to find nobody behind you, nobody to trust.

And start by ensuring your livelihood outside the political sphere.  It can be fun to live hand-to-mouth when you are young with no commitments.  It is no fun when you are older and have responsibilities for others.

Making things happen all comes down to finding the point of leverage.  You can change the world.  You just have to remember that there are irrefutable laws of physics that apply to politics too.  For every positive action you take for change, there will be equal and opposite reactions against change.  And, sometimes, they do not feel all that equal.

Our only advice to the participants in the red sky is to go peacefully when asked.  That will keep your enemies off guard and confused.  Never do the expected.  Make your point and go on.  That will enable you to make the point again.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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