Category: Uncategorized

Lucki’s Luck.

by Peter Lowry

Comment #3 on the Rouleau Report:

Commissioner Brenda Lucki of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has resigned and retired from her job. She managed to time the resignation to escape the criticism due to Canada’s police forces in the Rouleau Inquiry report. Her and the RCMP certainly deserved their share.

As a youngster, I was deeply impressed with the books about the derring-do of our red coats of the north. As a young airman I was less than impressed with brash young officers on provincial duty, fresh out of 26 weeks at the Regina training depot.

In business, I found the RCMP open and interesting to work with but very much tied to an NIH (not-invented-here) attitude. To put it bluntly, the RCMP is quaint. The force is like the Yeoman Warders at the Tower of London, useful for some colour against the background of the Canadian Prairies, but an anachronism.

If Lucki had been smart enough to realize that it was her responsibility to lead the charge of her force up Parliament Hill on the miscreants of the ‘freedom’ convoy, our politicians could have slept better and she could be retired with honours. Sure, it might have been setting aside some of the restrictions on her force yet it was hardly unlikely that anyone in Ottawa would make a serious complaint.

But as it was, her force was part of the scepticism and dithering. Her communications with Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Thomas Carrique proved she was not doing her job.

We were just damn lucky that emergency preparedness minister Bill Blair was not turned loose on the convoy people. In 2010, during the G20 meeting when Blair was Toronto police chief, he was in titular command of an expanded police force. Yet with a more than adequate force he still let some crazies run amuck vandalizing downtown Toronto, and did nothing. He waited until the next day and his force kettled innocent citizens out for a summer, Sunday evening walk downtown. It is really too bad that there was never an inquiry into that serious abuse of police powers.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Federalism’s Failure.

by Peter Lowry

Comment #2 on the Rouleau Report:

 Justice Paul Rouleau understated it in his inquiry report when he labelled our policing as dysfunctional and a failure of federalism. While he showed a great deal of patience and the laid-back attitude of a good judge, he failed to take the report into the pitiful condition of our democracy. There were more than the ‘Freedom convoy’ organizers and dysfunctional police forces to blame for the winter sports on the streets of Ottawa in February, 2022.

The very heart of the problem is the failure of our politicians and their supporters to appreciate and respect our democracy. You can blame the pandemic for emphasizing the severity of the problem but it was building before the pandemic helped create the perfect storm. It was as though the country had learned nothing from the ravages of the Spanish Flu, a hundred years previous. The restrictions of our out-dated constitution and our politicians’ missteps left the country vulnerable and unable to deal with the pandemic in a unified manner.

What the pandemic helped accelerate was the breakdown of Canada’s increasingly dysfunctional confederation. Canada is a country of infinite potential, plagued by the mediocrity of our politicians under an increasingly unworkable constitution. Our politicians had already allowed the selloff of our ability to quickly develop and produce vaccines, when they permitted Connaught Laboratories to be sold to a company in France.

While Justin Trudeau did a good job communicating the needs and exigencies of COVID-19, his solitary presence in front of Rideau cottage made him a singular target for frustrations people felt with the confusing lock-downs and other pandemic-related restrictions. The prime minister made himself a target.

The bitterness and anger were also exaggerated by the blame laid by the opposition. The mean, vicious and exaggerated attacks on the prime minister by conservative critic Pierre Poilievre in parliament became mantra for the dissatisfied.

The situation was hardly helped by the carping of provinces such as Quebec, Ontario and Alberta. Unrealistic blame was laid on our federal government. In the province of Ontario, it was an inexperienced and self-indulgent government that left people confused and upset with federal as well as provincial answers.

The question Justice Rouleau left hanging is: How are we going to fix this country?

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Hébert Hardly Helps.

by Peter Lowry

While I have always respected Chantal Hébert’s opinion, whether written in the Toronto Star or expressed on the CBC, she lost my support in her commentary on the official languages act revision, to be presented soon to parliament. I have never before seen her use bias for facts.

But when she denies that Quebec Bill 96 is an attack on English language rights in Quebec, she is wrong. And should the federal liberal government enshrine that tribalism in federal law, they will drive a wedge in the liberal party that might never be healed.

And, yes, what you see in Quebec’s Bill 96 is tribalism. It cannot be racism because francophones and anglophones are mostly of the same race.

What needs to be understood about the current language laws in Quebec is that the Quebec assembly is trying to put the English language in stasis in Quebec. The law, as it stands, puts a cap on English education. The Quebec government refuses to allow freedom of choice. It refuses to allow anything other than French in the working environment.

It is too bad that Chantal keeps her focus on Quebec but when she challenges the language laws in the rest of the country, I sincerely believe she is wrong. The lady has probably never been in the kitchen of a good Chinese restaurant. Nobody in the rest of Canada cares what language is used in preparing Peking Duck, as long as the result is tasty.

I was once asked to accept a government contract for a year, reporting to a federal government facility in Laval, Quebec. It was convenient for me but I was somewhat surprised when I reported for duty the first time and found that the language of the facility in Laval was, understandably,  French. Nobody had thought to ask me if I spoke French.  And, to be fair, I am a neophyte in French. While I enjoy the language and have spent considerable money on individual tutoring, my French language skills would embarrass an eight-year-old. I got through all the meetings that year by always sitting beside a person whom I knew was bilingual and checking periodically on the more obscure words being spoken. There were always some amused looks though when I tried to answer questions in French. While it was a fun and worthwhile experience, I had to turn down the offer of a contract renewal.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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B.S. By the Barrel.

by Peter Lowry

The advertisement was on four full pages wrapped around the front (news section) of the Saturday Toronto Star. I have no idea what an ad such as that costs these days but it has to be north of $20,000. You would think that an ad that big, with that much space, that would cost at least $20,000, would say something positive.

Nope. The ad is sponsored by the six major oil sands companies in Alberta. And they have a plan. This plan has actually been going on for quite some time. The ad says that they have invested in technology and innovation and the plan is ‘robust.”

This robust plan consists mainly of what is known as carbon capture. The basic idea is capturing the carbon that you have created, liquifying it and putting it back underground. The oil sands people have had this plan in action for some time and are very pleased to announce that they plan to reduce their CO² emissions annually by 10 million tonnes by 2030.

The 10 million tonnes might seem impressive but against the industry figures as recent as 2019, when it was causing 241 million tonnes of CO² emissions, seems puny.

The fourth page of the ad tells us that they believe they are on the path to ‘Net Zero.’ Since it has taken them ten years to get to cutting emissions by 22 per cent per barrel, just how long it will take them to lasso the remaining 78 per cent might be open to questions. And they fail to tell you at what stage in the life of bitumen from the tar sands do they stop taking responsibility for the pollution it causes.

Does their responsibility end after they have heated the water, forced it down to the layers of fossilized bitumen in the earth and brought the liquid bitumen to the surface? Or does it end after the bitumen has had the sand and other impurities removed, so that it can be heated and forced through a pipeline?

Do the oil sands company’s responsibilities end when the bitumen is loaded on ocean tankers and heads through the Georgia Straight towards the Pacific Ocean? Does the foreign refinery take responsibility for the huge amounts of bitumen slag left when the bitumen is refined into ersatz crude oil? And who takes responsibility when the ersatz oil is refined into gasoline, fuel oil or other petroleum product and creates further pollution?

It seems to me that there is never an end to destroying our planet with tar sands.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Target, Ontario.

by Peter Lowry

Comment #1 on the Rouleau Report:

Watching Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Thomas Carrique at the Rouleau Inquiry last November was disturbing. Here was the senior police officer for the province making snide and unhelpful comments about Peter Sloly, the Ottawa police chief.   He told the inquiry that he demanded that Sloly provide a workable plan to clear the large trucks that were parked illegally on Ottawa thoroughfares.

Sloly obviously already had too many balls in the air and hardly needed Carrique’s cynicism. And Carrrique was obviously not carrying out his responsibility to the province. Carrique and his political masters should pay special attention to Justice Rouleau’s comment that the province was “ultimately responsible for effective policing in Ottawa.” Observers knew that and the fact that Ontario refused to cooperate during the event and in Justice Rouleau’ inquiry, shows their ignorance of their responsibilities to the people of Ontario.

I think I will respectfully disagree with Justice Rouleau’s comment that the Ottawa event could have been expected. The anger of the anti-vaxxers was easy enough to see but what problems it would create could have (and still can) take many different routes.

What really hit home with the government of Ontario was the blockade at the Ambassador Bridge at Windsor. It was only then that the conservative government got pressure from business that the closure of this major conduit for auto parts could have serious long-term consequences. The call was heard immediately that there needed to be a clean-up in aisle three in Windsor.

It says something very basic about the attitude of the current Ontario government. They did not appear to give a damn about the people in Ottawa who were being inconvenienced by the truck convoy. Those were just people. The Ambassador Bridge was about business.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Poilievre Panders to Péquistes.

by Peter Lowry

Not much is heard from the federal conservative leader these days. He is letting some of his conservative MPs take the heat. He can let his Quebec lieutenant, Pierre Paul-Hus MP, tell the House of Commons that his conservatives support the bigotry of the Quebec government. This is not what Poilievre has been saying but he obviously wants to have it both ways. He wants English Canada to think he wants fair treatment for Anglophones in Quebec, while Quebec voters think he backs their National Assembly’s bigotry.

It reminds you of Prime Minister Mackenzie-King’s stance on conscription in the Second World War. It was something like ‘conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription.’ It did not work for the war-time prime minister and it would hardly work today.

The problem in Quebec today is that the CAQ government of François Legault has gone overboard in restricting English language use, to match its religious bigotry. This is just getting even as far as many seniors and farmers feel but the world has passed them by. It is the young people who think it is silly. The Legault government has annoyed them by restricting their access to, and use of English. They consider it to be sophisticated to speak both English and French. They want to travel the world and experience what it has to offer. They are not impressed with just the Francophonie with its world population smaller than that of the United States of America.

What the Legault government does not realize is that they are hurting the long term economic prospects of their own province. They have already hurt the prospects of Montreal as being a world city. As a bilingual city, Montreal had many opportunities to become the dominant Canadian city in world shipping and banking. Losing that position to Toronto and Vancouver was a process heightened by the Quebec péquistes. The Legault government is just accelerating building a wall around Quebec.

It seems to me that if I was a prominent member of the Trudeau cabinet and an MP from Quebec, I would look for speaking opportunities at Quebec universities and lay it on the line to the students. The Legault government is trying to deny them full access to the world. And that quisling Poilievre would aid Legault.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Kick The Healthcare Can.

by Peter Lowry

Remember as kids, a group of us would be walking to school. If one of us saw a can on top of someone’s garbage they would knock it to the pavement. We would take turns kicking it until we left it in the school yard for a custodian to pick up and send it on in its journey to some landfill.

It seems to be the way our federal and provincial governments are handling healthcare. It is a quasi-adult form of kick the can.

It’s wrong. It’s stupid. It is simple fodder for the journalists, and commentators who are not helping clear the air. They are unaware of the rules of this game of kick the can. Maybe they always rode a school bus and never got to kick the can.

Recently the feds and provinces had a meeting that enabled everyone to vent their feelings about the cost of healthcare. And it is hard to blame them when we have only recently come out of the worst of a pandemic. Pandemics and climate change seem to be nature’s way of leveling off the human population of this desperate planet of ours.

The basic problem the prime minister and provincial premiers were facing was that healthcare is a provincial responsibility and the feds pay a healthy percentage of the cost to help keep the system working across Canada. It only cost the federal government $46.2 billion to cover off about a third of the healthcare bill for the next ten years. There are a lot of side deals yet to be made.

What is very wrong with this is that nobody admits they are raising taxes to pay the bills. They are kicking the can, in the form of debt, down the road to be paid by our great grand children. It is the difference between an ongoing expense and a long-term investment. Only conservatives are stupid enough to go around saying governments need to balance the budget. Yes, they do with expense items. Long-term debt needs to be saved for infrastructure that will still be of value 20 or 40 years later.

There is supposed to be a plan in place in Ontario to electrify the commuter lines. The value of this is not so much to reduce carbon dispersal but to increase the speed of the lines and provide better service. The first step is to eliminate level crossings. We will never get that done if the province tries to hide the costs of healthcare in long-term debt.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Pay Attention, Stupid.

by Peter Lowry

There must be two different types of humans. There is this very strange type who can walk around with their nose deep into whatever on their cell phone. You expect to see them lying bloody and wounded by the last lamppost they walked into, or run over by a car. And then there is the type where you miss seeing the little buds in their ears and they are talking to somebody somewhere else. They give you an annoyed look for interrupting their conversation. 

What I have not been able to figure out are the claims by the people selling cell phone service. They seem to think that over 90 per cent of the population have to use cell phones while on the move. Unless there is some rite of passage that I missed when they handed out cell phones to eight-year-olds, there are some very inaccurate figures being bandied about.

Would you believe that there are Canadians who cannot afford to own a cell phone? There is no charity, to my knowledge, that is handing out pre-paid cell phones to the indigent. There are seniors who have, sadly, forgotten who to call. And there are still those of us who would rather enjoy a good book, any day.

And would you believe, I have never in my lifetime taken a picture with a cell phone.

Canadians are being ripped off on cell phones and Internet services. It is passed time that more of us should be saying “No thanks.”

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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The Dream Job.

by Peter Lowry

Get in line folks. There is still the possibility of another election in Toronto. We might need another strong mayor. The job pays more than $200,000 a year and you get a lot of free lunches and dinners and breakfasts. And the only serious advice is not to have sex with any member of your staff. (Which is good advice in any job.)

What is intimidating is that the last mayor did a hell of a good job. If there were shots fired on the Danforth, the mayor was there. If a truck goes wild on north Yonge Street, the mayor is there. Any spectacular fire, or loss of life, the mayor is there to commiserate.

This is a 24/7 job. Nor should you be so foolish as to think of it as easy You have to deal with 24 people on a daily basis who all want your job. And they are all sure they could do a better job of it. And you always have to remember to keep your enemies close and be on your guard against those who say they want to be your friend.

You have to always remember that this is an elected job. You have to work hard to get elected and work harder to stay elected. Oh, did I mention that you might need to have at least $2,000,000 in the kitty for the campaign. And you will need the hard work of a campaign team of over a thousand close friends.

I should also warn you about this strong mayor business. You are allowed to override your council only when it suits the fancy of the premier of Ontario. You are attached to premier at the hip. He is the boss of you.

Did I also mention that you need to have excellent communication skills. You have to give the right speech at very short notice. You have to know the right things to say. You are also the official greeter for the city. It helps if you know how to say “welcome to our city” in at least 50 languages.

Oh, and another ‘by the way’ –candidates for this job normally have a year or more of campaigning getting ready for this job. I think the new law requires that the new mayor of Toronto has to be chosen within 60 days. Good luck.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

John, But Not Forgotten.

by Peter Lowry

Did you know that there was a time in Canadian politics when the established news media did not report on the peccadillos of politicians? We should go back to those days. Or is the lady in question complaining? What right has the Toronto Star to dig at information about who is sleeping with whom, if neither party wants to be known?

Does the Toronto Star have some salacious interest in what’s going on in the bedrooms of the nation? I would suggest that the Toronto Star should take the advice of John Tory’s wife, who told them that it was a personal matter. She should have told the reporter to ‘get stuffed.’

And John Tory should not have resigned. Like it or not, the Toronto Star is not in charge of morals in the city. Nor is a sleaze such as our over-inflated premier. This was the guy who was looking for a travelling bedroom to take him around the province when he first got elected. Did you really think he was in need of a good night’s sleep?

Our media should pay attention to the French approach. Both the wife and mistress and probably some of the dalliances of François Mitterrand attended his state funeral after serving the longest as president of the republic.

And closer to home, you do know that Franklin Roosevelt’s favourite bedroom companion was his secretary for those years in the White House? And then there were the Kennedy’s of oh-so proper Boston fame. They learned from the parent who bought a movie studio so that he could sleep with its star.

And the atmosphere in Ottawa is no different. I usually found I was being updated more at the press club bar than anywhere else. People are human everywhere. Men are attracted to women and women are drawn to men and sometimes there are same sex liaisons. We all have our interest and our degree of interest. We react to different stimulants. Which is probably a good thing.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]