Category: Uncategorized

Conning on Electoral Reform.

by Peter Lowry

You can prove just about anything with polls. I was laughing the other day at a poll for Fair Vote Canada that claimed 76 per cent of Canadians wanted a citizens’ assembly on electoral reform. We had a citizens’ assembly picked by lottery in Ontario that proposed a mixed member proportional system for voters to decide on during the provincial election in 2007. It was rejected by about two to one.

It is hard to imagine anything more ridiculous than having people take part in a citizens’ assembly by lottery. Why would you want anyone on a citizens’ assembly who did not know anything about the subject under discussion? Nor would you want too many representatives from Fair Vote Canada. These people have one avowed objective. They want proportional representation. That means, they want a party that gets 25 per cent of the votes to get 25 per cent of the seats in the elected body.

It might sound fair but how do you then have your member included in the elected body? Our current system is based on having people elected in electoral districts of approximately equal numbers of citizens. The votes are counted and the individual with the most votes is declared the winner. This is commonly called first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting.

This system, which has been refined over hundreds of years, ensures representation to people throughout the jurisdiction. You have your member. He might represent your neighbour more than you, but you had the opportunity to vote for or against that person as did your neighbour.

Proportional voting is designed for jurisdictions where many of the voters are either illiterate or speak many languages or dialects. It is easiest for them to vote for a symbol representing each of the political parties. Typically, the leader of the party is the first selected and then different types of lists are used to select the people who will represent that party in the legislature.

Proportional voting can also lead to long waits for a government to be cobbled together because no party has a majority. These governments can also fall, often when disagreements overcome reason.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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Free Enterprise, Not Free Rein.

by Peter Lowry

Once when introducing former premier Bill Davis at a function, I put on a little too much emphasis when I said “And on my far right is Premier Bill Davis.”

He immediately quipped back: “It’s the only place to be Peter.” Even many of the foreign visitors in our audience understood what he meant. I will admit that I thought of Bill as a friend. We appeared at a number of events together in those years and if my wife was attending, he would go into a routine of pleading with her to be a conservative candidate in the next provincial election. The only person who might not have thought it funny was our neighbour, the conservative MPP for our riding.

What people did not understand about Bill Davis was that not only was he a very decent guy but he was a Progressive Conservative. I first met him when he was education minister for Ontario and I can tell you that he did more for education in Ontario than many of his counterparts over the years. That private school kid who poses as education minister today has done nothing to foster education in this province and has betrayed the teachers, the students and their parents.

And this is the problem. This bunch who are running things at Queen’s Park are not even conservatives, let alone anything progressive. They think their job is to pander to the rich and to business and to free-wheeling developers. Real conservatives are supposed to respect what is good in our society. They are supposed to preserve and protect.

Conservative philosophy is rooted in the upper classes and British nobility. I somehow doubt that a good ole’ boy such as Doug Ford has ever read anything by philosopher Edmund Burke. (He didn’t exactly invent conservatism but he at least defined it.)  Why would Ford waste his time when he can use bombast and lies to better effect. He treats the public as gullible and the more people buy into his B.S., the more convinced he is that he is on track to wealth and a decent mausoleum as a final resting place, if not a monument.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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Is the Party Over?

by Peter Lowry

Did you see the Toronto Star article on why the Ontario liberals lost the 2022 provincial election? They admitted what they had done wrong. Everything. And to add insult to injury, they released their mea culpa report to the news media.

I have always been proud of being a liberal. Just not in this election. On the first day of the campaign Steven Del Duca came to my electoral district. I got out there to show my support for the party and its leader. I only wished that he looked like a leader. He was being delivered to the ridings in a delivery van for God’s sake! He wasn’t dressed as a leader. He didn’t even talk like a leader.

I had high hopes for our local candidate. Yet there were less than 20 liberals there to meet the party leader and support their candidate. This was not a good sign. I asked Steven Del Duca what he thought of the 15-day campaign the conservatives had left him? He didn’t understand me. At least my candidate understood what I said. He explained to the party leader that the call of the election was only 15 days before the advance polls opened for voting. It was a 15-day election. That was a denial of time or opportunity to pull that fat jerk, Ford, off his pedestal.

The only calls I got in that campaign were from the pollsters. Nobody called me to ask for help. Our liberal candidate ran one of the most pathetic lawn sign campaigns I have ever seen. He had been our mayor for three terms, he deserved some support! We got a few campaign pieces in the mail, mostly from the carpet bagger from Severn who was dumped on us to make sure conservative Patrick Brown did not have a provincial riding in 2018.

This liberal report complains that the party was trying to do too much with too little. It also makes the point that few in Ontario knew what “OLP’ stood for. I think the reason they lost the election was that the Ontario Liberal Party did not know what they stood for. They did not blame Steven Del Duca for losing. He should have blamed them. They needed to understand that the leader has his work to do. They should have done their job. And that is to build the liberal brand, to recruit progressives to the party—as fundraisers, as candidates, as supporters. They should have cut all ties with Justin Trudeau’s weak, lost and ignored liberals, and made sure there was always money available by building the brand provincially.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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The Tax That’s Time Has Come.

by Peter Lowry

Have you ever wondered why the rich get all upset and angry at the mention of a wealth tax? I got to thinking about it when the former president Trump’s tax returns were released recently. What the information explained to me was that Donald Trump is nothing but a con man. He has some assets. He uses those assets to acquire other assets. If the United States ever had a wealth tax, people such as Trump would end up exposed and soon bankrupt.

And it would not be the fault of the wealth tax.

Donald Trump runs a different kind of Ponzi scheme. He is not the billionaire that he tells you. He runs a house of cards. It is a tangle of options, mortgages, debt, and threads of revenue. It would take teams of accountants to sort, separate and follow those threads. The art of the deal, as I think he has told people, is to always keep ‘A’ away from ‘B.’

Trump must have also learned very young that it never pays to be the smartest kid on the block. All that buys you is an occasional bloody nose. You are usually safe with the friends who think they can con you. You can end up with their lunch money.

As long as people believe that Trump is a billionaire, he can live like a billionaire. When they stop believing that he is a billionaire, his paper will get called. He will not be able to put off paying. A late payment from one source will cause rumbles down the line. As Mark Twain showed in his novel The Million Pound Bank Note, you cannot pay for anything with a million-pound note.

The wealth tax is believed to get around this problem. In France, a country noted for trying new ideas, the wealth tax has its good points and its problems. The good news is that it is claimed to have added 2.6 billion francs to state revenues. It is also claimed to have caused the exodus of 124 billion francs to other tax jurisdictions.

All that the French have proved is that before you put up a tent in a windstorm, you have to make sure you are using secure pegs.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Taxing Excess Profit?

by Peter Lowry

It really is disgusting. As inflation is eating away at your paycheque, the boss of your company could be going home with more than 200 times the salary of the average employee. And those chief executive salaries kept ballooning last year. And nobody is doing anything about it.

And try to live on a fixed income in a time of hyper-inflation. You know that the new pricing at the grocery story is not just because of higher cost of operating. And it does not seem to be in aid of paying their store employees a bit more. The greed today is at the upper echelons of business. The 100 highest paid CEO’s in Canadian business were each paid more than $14 million.

And the politicians are not going to do anything about it. Not surprisingly, these politicians have little or no experience in business.  Prime minister Justin Trudeau told an interviewer—just before heading off for a Caribbean vacation with the family—that a wealth tax would not be worthwhile. As I recall Mr. Trudeau’s curriculum vitae, he went from university to teaching and then to politics. He has never worked in business and where he gets this sudden expertise in economics, is a mystery to me.

But, to be fair, neither does Mr. Poilievre. He attacks the Bank of Canada governor for the wrong reasons and promotes Bitcoin to his uneducated followers. And as for Jagmeet Singh of the NDP, he is a lawyer and he might call for a wealth tax, but you shouldn’t ask him to explain it.

What I would like to see is a graduated profit tax for business. We want the low end for small business, which it gets anyway, but a graduated tax for large businesses could deal nicely with unconscionable profits such as our large grocery chains claimed in the past year. What you really want is high rate of tax for profits in excess of the usual. For example, when Loblaws has a miraculous 40 per cent rise in profit as it did recently, they could afford to contribute 50 per cent of that windfall to taxes.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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Champagne’s Clarion Call.

by Peter Lowry

It is Canada’s last hope for a break in cell phone pricing. We have been betrayed by the Quislings in the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and the Competition Tribunal and our last hope could end up being the industry minister, François-Philippe Champagne. He might be struggling to stay in control of the situation but we know he is on the side of the customers.

How anyone could think a company so predatory and badly run as Rogers is today should be crowned as dominant supplier of cell phone service in Canada is beyond the understanding of many Canadians. While there was a lot of give and take over the years as the late Ted Rogers built the company, it was the help of many of his political friends that helped his company reach the heights it did. To now give his successor a carte blanche to buy Shaw Communications is an irresponsible action.

It was the then president of the liberal party who called me once and asked me to do some work for free for Ted. I produced a block of programs for him, under primitive conditions, on Canadian politics. He ran those tapes on his cables and then sent them out to other cable companies. Ted knew how to build his position.

But Ted Roger’s son is not the person we respected and encouraged. For him to have the same control of the company, as his father held, is a disservice to the employees who also helped build that company. Ted had a responsibility to plan better. Sure, you can put things off but, sooner or later, reality catches up with all of us.

Champagne said that he has to wait for the appeal by the Competition Bureau to be handled by the courts. It would appear from the legal proceedings that the Competition Bureau is quite serious in saying that the Shaw takeover should be blocked. It is worrying though that Champagne might be putting too much of his hopes on the sale of Freedom Mobile services to Vidéotron in Quebec. To trust that guy with his Péquiste background, who runs Quebecor, to stick to his word for ten years is pushing the envelope.

Not that I think Champagne is naïve. The Shaw family just need to find a better buyer than Rogers.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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The Clear Future.

by Peter Lowry

As a child, I spent many hours at the windows of inter-city trains in Ontario. When the trip included Toronto’s Union Station, I would be particularly excited. The vast dome of the main concourse was a feat of construction far beyond the comprehension of a child. It was the constant streams of people hurrying to some unknown destination that really impressed me.

But today, the people have stopped hurrying. They are not as sure of where they are going or of when and whether they will get there. The trains have let that little boy down. They are but a shadow of the trains we once trusted. We believed in those trains. We trusted their schedules. We relaxed in confidence.

And, damn it all, we have to get back to those trains. If we are going to save our planet, we bloody well have to get more people liking trains. Not just trains that are fast and can be trusted to get you to you to your destination in comfort and on time. They have to run on electricity and on dedicated rails. They have to be the primary method of travel. Ours was a country that grew into our nationhood on steel rails and that has to be our future. Canada is a country in desperate need of the little train that could.

There is no argument that inter-city and commuter trains give fast, efficient service when electrified. Nor is there argument against the planes of the future be most effective for long-haul flights between continents.

Canada has suffered too long the miss-conceptions and bad relations between freight and passenger rail. If they cannot get in bed comfortably, then we have to separate them. Canada becomes a smaller country when long distance travel can be by electric train travelling at over 300 kilometres per hour.

Regrettably, you cannot get change without leadership. We need politicians who keep their word. We need politicians who are going to help save this planet. They have to stop promising us targets some time in the future and do something today. Electrifying inter-city rail is the first step. It will make the future clearer.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Peace, Order and Good Government.

by Peter Lowry

In turning loose former colonies, the United Kingdom often use the direction for Peace, Order and Good Government somewhere in their initial constitutions. And here we are 158 years later—still with a constitution tied in knots.

But, to be fair, the admonition to work on peace, order and good government is much better than the American’s attempt to seek out “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Or is it any more ambitious than the Republic of France expounding on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity?

We are certainly not seeing a great deal of brotherhood out of strife-ridden France these days. And if America, in the era of Donald Trump, is finding much happiness with its condition these days, we would be surprised.

None of this gives Canadians the right to be smug.

I weep at the condition of politics in this country. We shame ourselves in the building discord. Justin Trudeau has destroyed the liberal party. He ripped it of organizational strength. He left the grass roots to rot. He uses supporters as his personal ATM. He is disinterested in their thoughts, ideas and ambitions. He wastes them as an effective army of supporters in elections. He is but an actor on the Ottawa stage.

After a long series of failed leadership changes, the conservatives have fallen into the hands of a demagogue. He lacks the organizational skills of Stephen Harper. He lacks the energy of a Jason Kenney. He is but a frail shadow of leadership.

And to top his problem, Poilievre has to fight two parties for the approval of the voters. The NDP, who are always late to the dinner table, are led by an observant Sikh. Their leader marches to the drumbeat of the Tenth Guru—not to the needs of a modern Canada.

And the situation across the provinces is not much better. The bitter are the Albertans—after years of struggles on the political right. Albertans have been used and abused for many years now by the libertarians among them. And that does not explain Ontario.

More to come in 2023.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Poilievre’s Perspective.

by Peter Lowry

It is quite unlikely that the Christmas break from parliament has brought any new perspective to conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. His problem is that he needs to see the report from Justice Paul Rouleau on the federal government’s use of the emergencies act. Depending on what the Ontario justice reports and how he says it, Poilievre might have some options.

To-date, the Tory leader is conflicted by his own awkward positioning. He welcomed the ‘Freedom’ convoy to Ottawa with open arms—obviously not aware of their intent to make the city’s major streets party central for over a month. His claim that the protestors would have left if the prime minister had met with them was specious and highly unlikely. In addition, his claim that there were “peaceful” elements to the protest was weakened by every day that the foolishness continued. It seemed that the size of the crowd was increasing and the level of disturbance for Ottawa citizens was increasing. Nobody seemed to want to go home.

Part of Poilievre’s problem was the length of time that he had spent as financial critic for the Tories. It became something of a trademark. His use of Zoom over the worst of the pandemic, to attend committee meetings, was studied, artistic and false. He might not have been wearing pants, but the scene the public saw was meticulous, crafted and natty.

He blew it when he started attacking Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem. He took most of his supporters out of their depth of understanding.  They really could not comprehend Poilievre’s claim that the Bank of Canada was causing the sudden rises in the cost of groceries. And by adding in support for cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin), the subsequent disastrous drop in value of cryptocurrencies turned them into fool’s gold.

But what surprises people these days is that Poilievre is bringing his family into play. He has found that polls show that he is not liked by women voters. He figures he needs to have his wife and children humanize him.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

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Brown Let Us Down.

by Peter Lowry

It is all Patrick Brown’s fault. I was rereading one of my blogs complaining about the past year in politics and I realized that it was all that damn Brown’s fault. I am holding him to blame for a really bad year. I am talking about the Patrick Brown, who was, at one point, my member of parliament, then leader of the Ontario conservatives, then mayor of Brampton, when he really wanted to be chair of Peel region, and, while mayor of Brampton, ran for the leadership of the federal conservative party, likely as a stalking horse for former Quebec premier John Charest. And you would think, if he could do all that, he could do one of those jobs properly.

Brown is a boy from Barrie who was trained as a lawyer, who might not have bothered passing the bar exam, since he fell in love with politics. And, to be honest, he was good at it. He found it easy to get elected on Barrie council. From that launching pad, it took him two tries to take out the incumbent liberal MP and head for Ottawa. I met him in that first winning federal election—and disliked him before I knew who he was and why he was at my door.

Brown became known politically as a retail politician. He made sure he was known for supporting local charities. He developed and ran a hockey night in support of the local hospital and made sure his name was prominent. It got him re-elected. It got him to successfully gerrymander the two Barrie ridings that were created for the growing city. He made sure there were sizeable numbers of strongly conservative rural voters added to the new urban constituencies.

Brown became bored with Ottawa. He did little. I listened to him read a speech for Bell Canada at a CRTC hearing. He saw what Jason Kenney was doing for the Harper government in the ethnic communities and must have befriended him. Kenney gave him the Indian sub-continent to be MP liaison. Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims have been immigrating to Canada from there since our country started keeping track of immigrants in the 1890s. The two largest groups of Sikh immigrants are in Brampton, Ontario and Vancouver, B.C. Hindi and Moslem immigrants spread out, mainly in Ontario.

Patrick Brown easily signed up more than 40,000 temporary members of the Ontario conservatives, many from the Indian sub-continent. And he won the Ontario leadership.

There were rumours that questioned the legitimacy of many of Brown’s sign-ups. There were other rumours as to his relationships with women. It made some claims about his relationships seem more credible. They led to his downfall as Ontario leader of the conservatives and a lawsuit over the claims. It also led to the subsequent win by Doug Ford of the Ontario party leadership.

So, we can blame Patrick Brown for Doug Ford becoming Ontario premier.     

As you know, Brown ended up as Brampton mayor. It is credibly believed that he won because he promised the Sikh population there that he would convert more of the city parks to cricket pitches. Most Sikhs love cricket.

And then there was the federal conservative party leadership. In this fiasco, Brown appeared to be a stalking horse for former Quebec liberal premier, John Charest. A stalking horse is supposed to sign up temporary members and then drop out and ask all his sign-ups to vote for a specific candidate. Brown failed to do the job, was pilloried by his party for reportedly ignoring the rules and maybe even the law.

So, we can blame Patrick Brown for Pierre Poilievre winning the federal conservative leadership.

And, we can also blame Patrick Brown for Justin Trudeau staying on as prime minister because it should be easy for Trudeau to deal with Poilievre.

Patrick Brown, you let us down.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]