Category: Uncategorized

If Ford is Right?

by Peter Lowry

It seems wrong to say I rarely read Rosie DiManno in the Toronto Star—and in the same breath—say I rarely disagree with her. Maybe it is her way with the first 1000 words that leave me exhausted and hardly prepared for the next couple 1000 words. I can, for example, wish her well in her quest for cataract surgery. I got ahead of her in line for this procedure because I live outside of Toronto. I do hope she has a better ophthalmologist than I had.

I complained to a doctor with a different specialty about him. This guy listened as I explained that, when in Toronto, I lived across the street from an ophthalmologist. This guy would always make sure I understood the why and where-fore for every procedure. He had my full confidence for everything he did with my eyes.

The specialist laughed. “You mean, he was ‘old school,’ he said.

Ever since, when seeing a doctor, I ask for the ‘old school’ treatment.

After all, I am old school myself.

But—back to the subject—Rosie is wrong about Doug Ford. The reason health care in Ontario is not working is because of Doug Ford and those schmucks in his government. The pandemic was just getting a grip on us after Ford won that 2018 provincial election. Their first actions were to cut back on everything. They took money from the poor. They took money from our hospitals. They took money from programs for autistic children. They kept our nurses and teachers to a one per cent raise in pay. They were mean and cruel and uncaring.

Rosie thinks Ford is right because he thinks the status quo is not working. The question is, is that the status quo with the Ford government, or the status quo with a caring government? Would it help if there was a competent government? Maybe the Ford government was more interested in opportunities for friendly developers than in meeting the needs of the workers. You did notice, did you not, that there was no one-per cent hold up for the Ontario Medical Association? They can put the tribute to Ford on his tombstone: He made our ophthalmologists millionaires.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Poilievre, Meet Smith!

by Peter Lowry

You do know that the Carleton Cowboy, Pierre Poilievre, is from Alberta, do you? And as he is now leader of the federal conservatives, he has moved into Stornoway—the opposition leader’s residence? It seemed like there should have been a celebratory event to mark the occasion. I would think of at least a conservative cotillion. The cotillion was a forerunner of the American square dance and would have suited Albert’s premier and her significant other to a “T.”

But even if Danielle Smith and ‘what’s his name’ were invited, would she and Poilievre be dancing to the same tune? Her ‘separate Alberta in a united Canada’ legislation might not be the same freedom that he is promising Canadians who want to block ports of entry and occupy our national capitol. After all, did the Carleton Cowboy offer up his office as a warming site for visitors during the Ottawa occupation?

If the visitors had reached Queen’s Park during their Toronto Visit, would the Ford’s be as welcoming? And did the Ford’s rush over with a welcoming casserole when the Poilievre’s moved into Stornoway? And is Pierre Poilievre doing any warm-up sprints getting ready for a new parliament with yet another conservative leader facing off with Mr. Trudeau?

And what should we expect with Mr. Singh and his new democrats propping up the tired liberals? It looks like he wants more than just dental Medicare.

And what is particularly surprising is that we hear that Quebecers do not particularly like the BS they hear from M. Poilievre. The newly resurrected Quebec provincial conservatives proved nothing in the recent provincial election. And the federal conservative’s failure to connect with their look-alikes in the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) was more serious than they realized. Quebecers are strong environmentalists and expect any political party they support to also protect the environment.

And while many Québécois are watching the trail of anti-religion, anti-immigration and anti-English moves by the Legault government with interest, they are also hoping that he loses some of that momentum. They have a good sense of what would be too much. It is obvious that Danielle Smith lacks that sense.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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If My Help Could Help?

by Peter Lowry

The Ontario liberals are going to be planning a leadership contest in the next while.  Liberalism is at a crossroads in the province. I think there is the talent available and I think there are those with the desire to be that leader. What the party needs to do is open the door as wide as possible to make it a truly democratic and fair event.

Start with what the event is not. It is not about who can sign up the most temporary liberals to vote for a candidate. It is not about who is the choice of the party’s former leadership. Leadership is about ideas, challenges, generating excitement and enthusiasm. Leadership is looking behind you and seeing that people are standing with you, believing in you and the direction you see into the future.

Leadership in liberalism requires a progressive person. You can hardly be a progressive and think in terms of a delegated convention. Liberalism is one person, one vote. Preferential voting is anathema to liberalism. It is working your way down to the least.

But it costs money to run a convention and each and every one of us who wants to have a vote that counts at the convention is going to have to contribute to the cost. I would suggest to you that the fairest contribution would be for every liberal-minded person to kick in $25 to cover expenses. And that includes the candidates. Candidates should not be forced to dig any deeper than the rest of us.

Of course, candidates need to be vetted. That should be an open process. It is not something that goes on behind closed doors. If there is something a candidate does not want people to know about him or her, then do not be a candidate for leader.

And candidates need to meet the party in all parts of the province. Local associations would be expected to organize and advertise meetings in their area. This would be an excellent time to get the $25 contributions from as many as possible.

While the people attending the event when the counting will be announced might have to look forward to a long day, I am sure the experience will be worth it.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Honour Your Father.

by Peter Lowry

This is a message to the Woke Generation. Yah you, you assholes. How dare you dishonour our county’s past? There is a strange structure in front of the Ontario Legislature that seems to be covering up the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald. That man did more to make Canada happen than anyone else in that generation. Does he have to cower there because a bunch of loud-mouthed ignoramuses are blaming him for the residential schools?

If Sir John has to take the blame for residential schools, then we all share his blame. Sir John did nothing that was not common of the attitudes of his times. What might our generation be accused of in the future? Do we want our great grandchildren castigating us for our failures? And, believe me, we have our failures.

Sir John was hardly acting alone at the times. He might have been drunk when the federal support for the residential schools was decided. And sure, Egerton Ryerson was on side. Ryerson was supposed to have been instrumental in providing Ontario with a robust and non-sectarian public school system. For his accomplishments against the dominant Anglican forces of the time, he deserved to be honoured. I am not sure just how much he agreed with the residential schools but to remove his name from Ryerson University, is an action by weak-minded idiots. As far as I am concerned, it will always be “Ryerson.”

There is a street running across the south part of Toronto with the name of a long-dead Scotsman. His name was Henry Dundas. And that is the name of the street. It is a long street, with many addresses. It has an area where ladies of a certain profession have been known to stroll. There is an area of very fine Chinese restaurants. As I said, it is a very long street.

Of course, I have no allusions that anyone would want to name a street after me. I would have to have a disclaimer in my obituary that it is really in honour of Kyle Lowry, who played so well for the Toronto Raptors.  People do look at me oddly when I refer to him as Cousin Kyle.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.

by Peter Lowry

How can we always tell when Ontario premier Doug Ford is lying to us? It is when he announces a program for the third time. He has found out that we did not believe him the first time. It is like his recent plan to privatize hospital surgeries. He thinks surgeons can do these minor surgeries, in private facilities, in their spare time.

Just where Ford thinks these surgical specialists will come from is not clear. And anyone who has ever undertaken a surgical residency forgot about any time being spare a long time ago.

There is also the question of who is doing the triage between hospital and private facilities? Will they label everybody coming through this convoluted system? Maybe you should play it safe and bring along all of your credit cards.

But what Mr. Ford is really missing in all of this is that medical people are still free and mobile citizens. He cannot force a surgeon to work anywhere. He cannot guarantee that there will be a surgical team to support the surgeon. It sounds to me that the private sector has all the advantages. When the private sector offers the best in the business the top pay for their services, they are not forced to duplicate the offer to the other 300 specialists of that persuasion in the province.

What Mr. Ford is obviously angling for is the Brit’s Harley Street model. That means the rich get the best and the rest of us get what’s left.

And it is happening. As recently as a few months ago, I was sitting in a luxurious town house in Ottawa chatting with an attractive young woman. She was a surgical nurse. Just, not anymore. She was housesitting the final touches on this townhouse that her partner had built. I think it was listed at $1.3 million, in a fast-moving market. She scoffed at Ford’s one per cent to stay in nursing. She mentioned some job offers that she was considering—none, I am sure, for less than double what nursing would offer.

Canadians have every right to be proud of Medicare as we have had in this country since 1967. We would be really stupid to let an ignorant conservative, such as Mr. Ford, destroy it.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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The Power of Populism.

by Peter Lowry

It is not all that surprising that most politician’s today want to be seen as populist. We all want to walk the walk and talk the talk. We want to be strong on communications. We want to be down on radical wokism. We want to feed the anger in Canada today. We want to stand apart, above the crowd. We are the voice of the people. We will challenge on their behalf.

That stance is cropping up on the extreme right these days as Ontario premier Doug Ford uses bombast and lies to confound and confuse a weakened opposition at Queen’s Park. His majority position affords him three more years of free-wheeling control of the political levers in Canada’s most populous province. He has attacked nurses and teachers while pandering to the development industry and privately-owned long-term care. He uses bluff and bombast in defence of his errors.

And, sitting in the bush at the federal level is the Carleton Cowboy, Pierre Poilievre. As the new leader of the federal conservative party, he got there by befriending the ‘Freedom’ convoy and welcoming them to their romp in Ottawa in January-February of 2022. That was the height of populist posturing. Canadians were increasingly outraged at people trying to close down our borders and the Ottawa occupation was the final bit of foolishness.

Neither premier Ford nor Poilievre took the witness stand when the question of using the emergencies act to end the Ottawa occupation was examined by Ontario justice Paul Rouleau. Populism obviously does not include clearing the air. Populism as practiced in Canada lately has little to do with the facts or the truth.

Mr. Poilievre is a fan of cryptocurrencies. He told his supporters he supports Bitcoin shortly before it lost about a third of its value. He wants to fire the governor of the Bank of Canada. He believes that the bank printed money at the behest of the prime minister. This was the money used to help Canadians to get through the worst of the pandemic. It is obvious to those of us who understand the function of the Bank of Canada that Mr. Poilievre has no knowledge of Canada’s financial systems.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Pondering the Political Phoenix.

by Peter Lowry

How many times over the years have we heard speculation about this or that political party being able to raise itself from the ashes? Would the federal conservatives ever survive the summer of 1993 with Kim Campbell? How could the weakened provincial liberals of Dalton McGinty defeat Mike Harris’ tax cutting conservatives? Change happens. All political parties believe they are at least a slogan short of winning or losing the next election.

Maybe the incumbent party has worn out its welcome? Is it time for a change? We save these theories for after the election. There are always the spoken and the unspoken reasons. There are also unspoken prejudices.

But is this party, that rises from the ashes, the same party that you knew? Do you even recognize the changes? And who is this new leader? Did you help choose this person? Is this person using words that you want to believe in?

Every party has to face these questions at some time. The recently chosen leader of the federal conservatives, Pierre Poilievre, has tuned in on the anger the sociologists see in today’s Canadian population. It arose during the stress of the pandemic, it isolated individuals who spoke out about vaccines, and it cost me a good financial advisor. When he started to speak to me of his views on vaccines, he might not have been aware of my years of fund-raising and helping direct funds to medical research in Canada. I was appalled at his brushing aside the science involved. I could no longer trust his judgement.

I also worry about younger members of the family who could be caught up in this anger that Poilievre seeks to channel to his party. They see the fun in getting even with the politicians and the elites who might have feathered their own nests through the pandemic lockdowns and then inflation.

It is difficult when Justin Trudeau is the obvious liberal target of Poilievre’s claims of elitism in parliament but then one can only wonder at who is the more elitist between the two. The Carleton Cowboy, as some describe Poilievre has much to apologize for, to his party. Maybe there will be more after the next election.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Who is Harrying Harry?

by Peter Lowry

No, there is no insight here to the royal who defines himself as a spare. Life is too short. I can hardly think of a reason why I would ever want to read such a self-centered opus. It does not make my bucket list. It just does not come across as a particularly fine whine.

But what does appall me is the report I heard of his probably exaggerated kills in the British weapons-testing grounds of Afghanistan. Shooting Taliban might seem a jolly good sport to some but only an idiot would brag about his numbers. The ghost writer had a responsibility to omit the number of kills from the manuscript, the publisher’s editor needed to, at least, warn the fool that he was going to make himself a target. Harry should ask author Salman Rushdie (who is still alive, at this writing) how it feels to make yourself a target for a lot of pissed-off fanatics.

Harry had better hope that the sales from the book pay for double the costs of security for the rest of his life.

The guy who really did not need this book is Harry’s pathetic pater. The guy with the big ears and frumpy wife is trying hard to make it to the coronation. One wonders just how much of the commonwealth will be left when that event takes place?

Of course, Canada will still be loyal. It was obvious 40 years ago that Canada would be the last hold-out to try to keep the fiction of the monarchy. We were tied in knots then and there is little hope of a breakthrough to a new constitution. There is already enough dissatisfaction across this country today, nobody wants to poke it with the stick of the constitution.

Maybe Harry will do a book tour to shake out the latent buyers of his book. He hardly wants the embarrassment of remaindering. (That is when your book is sold off at a few dollars. There is no profit to authors in that.) He would have to get used to signing his name a few hundred times a day.

Mind you, it is unlikely that Harry fled the royals, stark naked and penniless. Having Hollywood for home might be a bit unreal but it runs on real money. Maybe, he is doing all this publicity just to get even with the managers at Buck Palace. Pity.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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The Little Plane that Flew.

by Peter Lowry

The lady who is going to fix all things wrong with our military has announced the purchase of our new fighter plane. To nobody’s surprise at all, defence minister Anita Anand announced (once again) that Canada will buy a fleet of Lockheed Martin F-35 fighters. These single-seat, single-engine ground support fighters are going to require a companion fleet of in-air refuelers to enable them to get to and from Canada’s Arctic.

But, before you ask why, the objective is to have the largest fleet of inter-operable fighter aircraft in the world with the U.S., Canada and 15 other nations. Not since prime minister John Diefenbaker ended the Avro Arrow project in 1959, has Canada had any other fighter aircraft than what the Americans wanted us to have. It is in aid of a new fighter tactic heretofore known only to mosquitos in the summer—known as swarming.

To stay in the running to buy these aircraft, Canada has contributed billions since the 1990s to their development. There are still unresolved issues with the Pratt & Whitney engine.

I realize that I have written much about these planes over the past 12 years. Little has been complimentary. Little has been approvingly. Quite frankly, I am disgusted with the idea of our young men going to war as subalterns to the Americans. I am less than pleased to see billions spent on military hardware while Canadians die in the cold of our winters because of sleeping on the streets.

Shame on you Ms. Anand. Shame on all of us.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Cutting the Trans Mountain Ribbon?

by Peter Lowry

You did know that the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is to be completed in the second half of 2023? It only cost the Canadian government $4.7 billion, when it was purchased. And it was only expected to cost another $9.1 billion to twin the line, and add heaters so that the line could pump tar sands bitumen over the Rockies to Burrard Inlet for shipment around the Pacific Ocean. And the good news was that the pipeline had commitments from tar sands companies for over $20 billion worth of shipments over the next 20 years.

But the only hiccup in all that good news is that over the years of twinning and building and quietly ignoring the objections to this plan, the cost of completing all this good work has more than doubled to $21.4 billion.

Unlike with our grocery stores in Canada, who can just raise their prices willy-nilly when their costs go up, you cannot do that with bitumen. Bitumen has the unfortunate problem that it costs money to convert it to ersatz crude oil. Just to heat the water that is used to wash the sand out of the tar sands bitumen uses 100 cubic feet of natural gas for every barrel of bitumen. It also causes a great deal of pollution to create a chemical compound that can then be turned into things like gasoline which carry on polluting. It is something of a lose-lose situation.

To make matters worse, an independent third party has studied Trans Mountain’s prospects. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis based in Ohio has studied the various reports from Trans Mountain and other pipelines in North America. The institute does not believe that the bitumen from Alberta will find any long-term market in Asia. 

It is this problem with bitumen that it is always discounted below the cost of real crude oil. At a time when West Texas crude oil is being quoted in North America at just around US$90 per barrel, the best price quoted on Alberta bitumen would be less than $60 per barrel. I think the saying is that Alberta hearts are happiest when OPEC wants more than $100 per barrel of crude.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]