Category: Uncategorized

Lost Liberalism.

by Peter Lowry

We have a problem in Canada. His name is Justin Trudeau. Since being handed the leadership of the liberal party in Canada back in 2013, he has dismissed the structure and strengths of the liberal party. From the very beginning, he dismissed the liberal senators who helped supply organizational experience, fund-raising, party experience and knowledge. Trudeau filled the void left by these party stalwarts with his friends among the elites.

Liberals did not see that a political party without a membership fee was unrealistic. They did not realize that Justin Trudeau expected them to be his personal bank machine. They did not expect constant demands for financial support.

It reminds me of a similar mistake Justin’s father made in 1972. Pierre Trudeau thought he knew more about getting elected than the liberal party. I remember sitting in the party’s advertising agency boardroom in Toronto as Pierre Trudeau announced the 1972 election. He told us his theme for the election: The Land is Strong.

Luckily, most of us did not know how to get to the roof of that downtown Toronto building, so we could jump off. I just went home. It was about two weeks later that Senator Keith Davey called me and said Pierre Trudeau really needed some help. Keith and I spent a lot of time filling in the holes in the Ontario structure of the party in that election but the party was still two seats short of a majority across Canada when the votes were counted.

It was David Lewis and the NDP who made the deal with Pierre Trudeau to keep the liberals in power for the following two years. It was a stronger liberal party that returned to a majority in Ottawa in 1974. Justin Trudeau’s father could learn from his mistakes.

Not so for Justin Trudeau. He blew his lead and won only a minority of seats against conservative Andrew Scheer. He managed to do the same thing against Erin O’Toole two years later. And once again, it is the leader of the NDP who is keeping a Trudeau in the driver’s seat.

But only an elitist such as Justin Trudeau would be dumb enough to declare that he will stay for the next federal election.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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The Ups and Downs of Polls.

by Peter Lowry

The paranoid parties of the Prairies are having a polling contest. They are seeing who can waste the most money on polls four months before the election. They sure are a bunch of nervous nellies. From the day the united conservatives of Alberta picked that loser Danielle Smith, the NDP’s Rachel Notley has been smiling. That lady is using her comeback face.

And Alberta needs her. It all reminds me of the brief tenure of Joe Clark as prime minister of Canada for six months in 1979 and 80. He trusted Brian Mulroney and ended up playing second banana to Mulroney until the federal conservatives crashed and burned in the rout by the Chrétien liberals in 1993.

I suspect there will be lots of Calgary voters checking behind them to make sure their secret ballot for the NDP candidate remains their secret. Calgary has done it before and can do it again.

The one thing I can guarantee Alberta voters, lie all you want to the pollsters who call or send you an automated call, you can hardly lie to yourself. That screwball libertarian, Danielle Smith, will make lots more mistakes between now and election day in Alberta. She is the only politician to so publicly weep crocodile tears for the unvaccinated in the province. Has she tracked the number of COVID-19 dead?

But it was her Sovereignty Act that said the provincial government does not need to pay attention to federal laws with which it disagrees. This is the capper. You felt sorry for those truckers who misplaced their trucks in Ottawa’s busy streets. How can any province have a premier who has no idea what-so-ever as to the constitution of Canada?

The one thing for sure that Alberta voters know is that only the NDP will do anything concrete to fix the province’s healthcare problems. That is top of mind for Alberta voters as the May 29 vote gets closer..

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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One Taxpayer, Many Politicians.

by Peter Lowry

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say to just one level of government: “Hey stupid, Fix it.” Instead, we have provincial governments and territories squabbling over tax point divisions and jurisdictions.  We have municipal governments struggling to get some money to do an impossible level of services for people. And then we have a federal government trying to pull the whole mess together.

And don’t judge us by those nincompoops south of our border. The Americans have just as big a mess, only theirs is bought and paid for by incompetent millionaires.

At least, in Canada, we don’t have a sleaze such as Donald Trump trying to buy the top political job with those millionaire political slush funds. We might not be perfect but we aren’t that stupid.

We haven’t got people running around with baseball hats proclaiming that we are going to make Canada Great Again. We might just have a bunch of anti-vaxxers parking their trucks in inconvenient places, but most of the time, we just keep chopping wood and drawing water for our American neighbours.

I really hate following the Americans in their ridiculous attempts at international relations. We are much to small a country too want to piss off the Russians or the Chinese. It will be a long time before this country can say that it is nearing capacity to feed, house and care for our citizens.

But, at the same time, we hardly need klutzes such as Doug Ford in Ontario trying to sneak privatized medicine back into the mix in this province. I had to have an ophthalmologist look after my cataracts a few years ago and the son-of-a-bitch kept pushing me with patient-pays options. I got the feeling that he was abrupt and uncommunicable with me was because I was not making any extra money for him. Mind you, I have never met an impoverished ophthalmologist.

I think what really annoys me about Doug Ford’s approach to privatizing medicine in Ontario is how cheap he and his government are with the nurses and other support staff. He doesn’t realize that good medicine is a team effort.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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Cheapskates in Charge.

by Peter Lowry

Did you know that Ontario is the richest province in Canada? Did you also know that it is currently being run by the cheapest politicians in Canada? The Ontario conservatives remind me of that cute song Ontario’s own Shania Twain brought out in 1997: That don’t impress me much.

What caused this thinking was my new Ontario health card arriving in the mail this morning. All that missive reminded me of was another birthday in the offing. At my age, that is no favour. Oh sure, the wife will remember to buy me a new sweater or some socks. She might even find me a funny card in hopes of cheering me up. How are you going to feel when you realize that more than half the people you knew and liked in your age range are already dead? There is no consolation in old chestnuts such as that only the good die young.

But I think Ontario voters should be enraged by the paucity of this renewal health card. Sure, the original red and white Ontario health cards where easy to counterfeit and they did not contain much information. The replacement green cards were a definite improvement. They had our picture (twice), they had our health number, they had our date of birth, they had our signature and they had an expiry date for the card on a future birthday. We could even use this card for photographic identification, if we did not have our driver’s licence handy.

This piece of plastic junk, those cheapies at Queen’s Park sent me, looks like a bad counterfeit. They replaced my picture with a trillium blossom. Nobody would every accuse me of looking like a trillium blossom. Its blotchy, its messy, they dropped my signature and the only change was in the expiry. They increased the expiry to five years and I will do my best to be here to renew.

That would mean that I would also be here to help defeat that very bad government at Queen’s Park. I figure if I can stay healthy, I’ll still be here in three years to help vote out those cheap bastards.  

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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We Get Letters!

by Peter Lowry

It is tough to be a liberal in Ontario these days. You get letters to add to your opinions. One frequent flyer with Babel-on-the-Bay wrote the other day to say that maybe I could start a letter writing campaign to entice the new leader of the provincial NDP to jump ship to the leadership of the Ontario liberals. That seems like a non-starter when I have already said that I lack enough information to decide if she could do the job for the NDP.

It reminds me of the career of Bob Rae. I have never been a fan of Mr. Rae. Between the liberal government of David Peterson (1985 to 1990), the NDP government of Bob Rae (1990 to 1995) and the conservative government of Mike Harris (1995 to 2002), I would have a tough time deciding which was the worst  for Ontario. I think David Peterson’s was the most disappointing. Bob Rae’s was the most incompetent. And Mike Harris’ was the most malicious.

What really stunned me with Rae’s bunch at Queen’s Park was his listening to Thomas D’Aquino’s libertarian business council that continues, to this day, to think it has the right to direct our politicians. That business with Rae over what became the famous unpaid “Rae Days” of his regime came from D’Aquino marching into Queen’s Park and demanding that Rae and his poor bewildered treasurer balance the provincial budget. It was the worst possible advice, at the wrong time and it left Ontario in the incompetent hands of Mike Harris.

I had given guest lectures in most of the universities in Ontario in the 1970s. They were mostly to business classes and were on the social responsibility of business. If I had to give those lectures today to members of the business council, I think I would have to start with an analogy to the children’s book, The Three Little Pigs. The truth is that business was supposed to have given up the idea of telling governments how to run their operations with the demise of corporatism under the Italian Fascists.

There is no question but that business and government can work well together but it has to be clear to all concerned that the government is the boss. You always want politicians who have some experience other than politics. And you also want some experience in helping people—not just in telling them what to do.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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The Ideological Cant of the Cons.

by Peter Lowry

It must be so easy to be a conservative. The ideology saves you from the danger of too much thinking. You have to believe that people such as Donald Trump in the United States must have a marvelous filing system to keep track of his lists of lies. Liz Truss—one of a long line of incompetent conservative leaders in the UK—advocates tax cuts for the wealthy, in a period of hyper inflation. And as Pierre Poilievre can tell you: When in doubt about it; lie about it.

Last week that nasty little man turned his vindictive heat on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. That is a bad area for drug overdoses in the city but it is also an area getting a lot of attention from the city and local volunteer groups. Instead of recognizing the efforts of the province, the city and the citizens, Mr. Nasty condemns the provincial government, the citizens efforts and calls the area a “hell on earth.”

But where Poilievre gets off at condemning the British Columbia efforts is just displaying his ignorance for all to see. And to suggest that B.C. should follow the Alberta example is ludicrous. The drug problem is flourishing on a per capita comparison in Alberta that is almost as fast as in B.C. The conservative leader stayed true to his usual stance, he, somehow, found a way to also blame the prime minister.

And despite his lack of solutions for the opioid problem, he tells us that a conservative government would cancel the provincial test program to decriminalize small amounts of drugs and use the Alberta non-solution.

But what would you expect from Poilievre when his enthusiasm for Bitcoin has been tempered by its struggle to get back into more positive territory. No doubt, he is eager to see the Bank of Canada fail to keep a leash on inflation that is being fueled by war on the Eurasian Steppe, oil prices, shortages of food and world-wide supply chain failures. The one thing, we know for sure is that Poilievre is no economist.

What also annoys me about the conservatives is their climate stance. Like most conservatives, Poilievre ignores climate change and its causes. He panders to Alberta and its tar sands exploiters.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Nice is Not Enough.

by Peter Lowry

It was disappointing. The coffee in my cup was just lukewarm as I finished reading a page and a half of the Toronto Star the other morning. The overly long story was about Ontario’s newly-anointed new democratic party leader. Her name is Marit Stiles. She certainly seems a step up after 13 years of the lack-lustre leadership of Andrea Horwath. Whether Ms. Stiles can ever figure out where the provincial NDP needs to go is the question.

At least she was saved the fund-raising and travel strains of a contested leadership. Competition might have helped her focus some of her thinking on the party’s direction. It is the same problem former Ontario MPP Jagmeet Singh is having with the federal NDP. The labor relationship of the NDP belongs back in the party’s inception in the 1930s. You would think, some new thoughts would come to mind when closing on 100 years.

As long as the NDP remains locked in its reactive stance, it is going to be looked on as a being out of touch. The party does not seem to understand that 90 per cent of communication skills rely on listening skills.

Yet Stiles spoke to the folks at her party’s meeting on the weekend about their party being founded by labour, farmers and progressives. That was true for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the forerunners of the NDP, but the NDP forgot the farmers.

I remember a conversation I had with Saskatchewan MP Hazen Argue back in 1963 after he had lost the leadership of the new party to Tommy Douglas and had moved to the liberals. Hazen had some important truths to tell us about the farm vote. His particular concern was that having two national parties splitting the progressive vote was creating opportunities for the conservatives.

What Canada really needs is a liberal democratic party. As it stands today, it is the unions shopping the political parties for the best deal that is producing results such as the low turnout in the last Ontario election and four more years of very bad government. Ms. Stiles won the NDP leadership through default, rather than effort. Nobody knows whether she is a misstep or not.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Fighting Past Battles.

by Peter Lowry

With due respect for the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert, we should only fight past battles with tiny toy soldiers. I was sorrily disappointed the other day when Chantal waded once again into the Elghawaby affair. We should leave the lady alone. We have enough trouble just spelling her name. What I cannot understand is what she can contribute to fighting Islamophobia in Canada.

Ms. Elghawaby has not helped matters by apologizing for something she wrote a couple years ago. Who would you hope to convince by flip-flopping on calling the Quebec government bigots? They identify their own culpability by using the constitution’s not-withstanding clause. Neither Ms. Elghawaby’s apology nor my opinion matter very much to that sorry bunch in the Quebec National Assembly.

But we do need to worry about the ingrained distrust of Muslims in Canada. Not all of us grew up in, and appreciated, the multicultural environment such as Toronto offered. Sending Canadian troops to Afghanistan always was a bad idea. In fact, all the crusades since the Middle Ages have been very much a wasted effort.

And then there are people who want to keep on fighting. Chantal mentions a misstep taken by the Ontario government over teaching French back in 1912. Is this supposedly the same as the Quebec government’s suppression of English in 2022? That is ridiculous. You would think that we would all become more tolerant and understanding over the intervening 90 years. Maybe the education system still fails us. I did not have much trouble in school with French until our Ontario-trained teacher in grade 10 tried to teach the class French, with a German accent.

But unless Ms. Elghawaby has a strong pedagogical background in addition to her being a writer, she is unlikely to help solve the problem. We need to start in kindergarten teaching our children to play nice with each other. And since we persist in separating children by their parents’ supposed religion, that effort would hardly have full effect.

And that leaves us with an elitist prime minister who seems to make his appointments on whims. What makes him think that an Ontario journalist who happens to be Muslim can help to combat Islamophobia in Quebec?

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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Time, Tide and Schreiner.

by Peter Lowry

It is too bad the Toronto School Board wants to switch Grade 12 literature from Shakespeare and Dickens to native Canadian writers. There will just be another demarcation in where we writers reach for a cliché. And would there be any effort to include Margaret Atwood?

What some writers do is use endless clichés to liven our prose. Take, for example, a recent opinion from the Toronto Star’s Bob Hepburn. Instead of giving us up-front reassurance that Mike Schreiner has the talent and persistence to lead Ontario liberals, we get a cliché about tides from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Now that Mr. Hepburn has demonstrated that he paid attention in high school and is well educated, we might pay better attention to his blandishments in favour of Mr. Schreiner.

I suppose, now that Hepburn has got us thinking about it, that Mr. Schreiner might be qualified to lead at least a one-person party in the Ontario legislature. He has lent the legislature proceedings an air of intelligent criticism and polite decorum for a period of time. I, myself, would only be able to control myself for a period before referring to the premier once again as that horse’s ass.

But then Mr. Hepburn has worked for the Toronto Star for a very long time. He is almost as much of an institution as is the paper itself. He also makes some good points about Mr. Schreiner once he gets down to the real task at hand. I agree with him, for example, that Mike Schreiner is a progressive and appears interested in real change. I consider that to be very important in potential liberal leaders.

Bob Hepburn further notes that the federal liberals are in disarray and the Ontario breed are heading downhill. I am not at all sure the owners of the Toronto Star look on him kindly for exposing the liberals to such criticism but they probably feel a little balance encourages a broader readership of their paper.

But I do object strongly to the unstated declaration that only Mike Schreiner can bring the liberal party back from the brink. There are some other people who are actually liberals who might be interested. We should also consider them.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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The Peaking of Poilievre.

by Peter Lowry

We used to worry in political campaigns about when we peaked. This was a point when you could not get any further up the hill and had started going back down. I think it had something to do with the pollsters. They always wanted to show movement. Who wants to pay for another poll if there is no movement in the figures?

And the best times of all for pollsters is when they show a potential change of government—like now with this theoretical lead over the federal liberals by Poilievre’s conservatives.  We know, of course, with the anomalies of first-past-the-post voting that there is no sure thing. Canada seems to tilt to the whims of the voters. Atlantic Canada makes the most of its votes and spreads them across the two major parties. Quebec makes the liberals look good. Quebecers neither like nor trust Pierre Poilievre.

The decision for Canada used to be made in Ontario but this is a new ball game. The growing distrust and dislike for provincial conservative Doug Ford in Ontario, will hurt Poilievre.

In fact, Poilievre is hanging in the balance in that province.

Poilievre’s sweet spot is west of the Manitoba border. His only stumble across the three Prairie Provinces is Candice Bergen from Manitoba and the damage to the conservative brand by Danielle Smith in Alberta. Bergen, a previous stalwart of the party has resigned. She calls it retiring. If you know a bit about Bergen as an MP, you can understand that she would not be overwhelmed with the prospect of staying on under Poilievre’s version of leadership.

There are a few other conservative MPs we will be watching closely as the country heads towards the inevitable Poilievre vs Trudeau election. Poilievre takes too many cues from Donald Trump in the U.S. And there are some Canadian conservatives who know the difference between political exaggerations and outright lies. It will be interesting to see if Poilievre can get some of his claims closer to the truth.

What Poilievre does not seem to realize is that his insults directed at Mr. Trudeau are also belittling the Canadians who previously put their trust in Justin. Just remember that old line from the Christian Bible: The truth will set you free.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]