Category: Federal Politics

Confused Conservatives.

by Peter Lowry

Can you imagine conservative leader Pierre Poilievre singing “Solidarity Forever”? That is the image that comes to mind when you read that he thinks his party can win some of the labour vote in the next election. I expect he will. Despite the conservatives classifying the NDP as ‘woke’ there have always been an element in the labour movement that votes conservative. We saw it in some of the long-term conservative ridings in Toronto that switched to being NDP strongholds.

The facile answer at the time was that the liberals had always been the enemy and the former conservatives went to the NDP as their alternative. I think it is more complex than that. In the past 40 years or so, we have seen the more progressive unions switch to the liberals as the party that gets things done for them.

The voters that the Poilievre conservatives are attracting are the young, the angry and the ignorant. They probably know that Poilievre is lying to them and they don’t care. They see their support for Poilievre as getting even. They are counting on him to be disruptive. It is likely the reason Ontario’s Doug Ford won the last provincial election on the promise of “Buck a Beer.” You don’t really believe it will happen but the idea of somebody sticking it to the foreign-owned beer companies gives you a nice warm feeling.

I feel sorry for the young. This part of the electorate think Poilievre speaks for them. He doesn’t. He only speaks for himself. He spells disaster for the conservatives with his extremist right-wing views. He is an ideologue, inculcated throughout his life in the Alberta Reform party and conservative spread of hatred of the supposed liberal establishment of the east.

If he is ever elected prime minister of Canada, any federal effort to stem climate change would go straight into the garbage dumps. Instead of gradually reducing Alberta’s dependence on exploiting the tar sands, he would turn the industry loose to maximize their output and profits.

If you have ever wondered what the supposed freedom is that he is offering Canadians, it is the freedom to fend for yourself. It is the freedom to go hungry if you fall on hard times. It is also the freedom to sleep on the streets if you cannot afford the escalating housing costs. He will not be there for you.

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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry            

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We Can Unite the Left.

by Peter Lowry

Consider this: Singh and the new democrats can save Canada from going down the same slippery slope as the United States. Singh and his party are already keeping Poilievre and his conservative puppets from trampling on Canada’s democracy. The liberal and NDP accord is staving off an election that could see Poilievre win with his lies. He would be far less likely to win if Canada’s progressives joined forces.

It is the same as when Stephen Harper led the charge to unite the right. It led to nine years of cruel, austere conservative government, because the right was united and the progressives were fighting each other.

And why should there be fighting among the progressives? We have the same objectives. We want the same good government that serves the needs of the people.

 It is the conservatives who are always trying to inflict their ideology on us. Think about it. Do you want our government to protect the privileges of millionaires? And make the rest of us pay for it?

And what are they going to do about global warming, when every barrel of oil from the tar sands contributes to wildfires, tornadoes, floods, droughts and more climate change?

Canada needs progressives in government who will ensure that nobody needs sleep on our winter streets. The country needs progressives who can build a high-speed electric train system across Canada. We need a government that will give us the opportunity to change how our county works, how we are governed and how our democracy functions. We are certainly not a monarchy and we need to change that silly fiction from long ago.

Conservatives are not all as selfish and uncaring as their leaders try to tell us. The opportunity to have a truly progressive government will attract many away from the conservatives. Liberal democrats have proved that in Europe. They are only challenged by the right-wing parties when they do not do their job properly.

If you are an NDP supporter, please ask Jagmeet Singh to help build our coalition.

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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry            

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Poilievre Protects Polluters.

by Peter Lowry

Some of our pollsters tell us that the conservative leader is making in-roads with voters with his “Axe the Tax” campaign. His very first error in this is that the carbon charge is not a tax. That man thinks he can convince people to vote for him because they believe his lies. That so-called carbon charge puts money in your pocket and mine. If you are a tax-payer, you get a share of that money. The government does not keep it.

I am not particularly fond of Justin Trudeau as leader of the liberals either, but he is making sure that we get that carbon charge money to help us fight inflation. And to blame Justin Trudeau for inflation is another ridiculous lie. The outrageous salaries of the high-paid company chief executives in Canada contribute far more to inflation than any carbon payment.

The poster-boy for chief executives in Canada is Galen Weston of the Weston (Loblaws) empire. The last reports available tell us he was paid over $11 million dollars in 2022. You have to sell a hell of a lot of bread to make that much. And maybe he finds it helps if he charges a lot for the bread. And it also means thousands of trucks to deliver it. His company also pays the carbon charge.

It is the transportation industry that pays the most to the carbon penalty. Planes, trains, automobiles and trucks are the biggest contributors to carbon in our atmosphere. That is why the government has put so much emphasis on the eventual changeover to alternative sources of energy in transportation.

What Mr. Poilievre does not understand is that Canada would be considered a pariah among nations if it did not do its part. Canada is a trading nation. Much of our country’s income and wealth is attributable to the fact that we are a trading nation. Canada is recognized around the world for its grain and other farming products. It has built considerable expertise in mining and mine management. Our engineers are designing massive projects in many parts of the world. Canadian products are welcome around the world.

And yet, Mr. Poilievre doesn’t care. He has no plan for reducing carbon in our atmosphere. He has no plans for wildfires, floods, drought, tornadoes and wild swings in temperatures as the world succumbs to climate change. He is a sad little man who wants to be prime minister of Canada. And nobody knows why!

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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry            

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Political Parties Pay the Piper.

by Peter Lowry

And here, all along, I thought it was just the conservatives and liberals who were dumb. Now I find out that the new democrats are just as dim. Robin Sears, one of the chief apologists for the new democrats admitted in the Toronto Star the other day that the NDP were just as stupid as the conservatives and liberals in how they choose their party leaders.

Since the conservatives are always the last to admit their own stupidity, it will have to be the liberals and new democrats who will be the first to fix the problems.

After all, I would expect that Jagmeet Singh saw how Barrie member of parliament, Patrick Brown, lined up thousands from the Indian diaspora in Ontario to win the Ontario conservative leadership. There was nothing to stop Singh from going to the same diaspora, mainly in Ontario and British Columbia, when seeking the federal new democrat leadership. And it worked, didn’t it?

I am not privy to the reason the conservatives used to toss Brown out of the federal conservative leadership race when he started signing up the same Indian diaspora as Singh used. I think what worried the conservative leadership was not that Brown was acting as a stalking horse for John Charest but he might accidently win against Pierre Poilievre.

As it was, Poilievre won easily despite the idea of having all political ridings treated as equal. Anyone who would promote such a dumb idea as that does not know much about Canadian politics. Poilievre would have dominated all the Alberta ridings and most of the Saskatchewan but from there he would have had to have a lot of volunteers working the phones to get out his vote in BC and the eastern provinces.

He obviously did as he won handily.

But the problem is that the party membership lists need a lot of work to cut back the lists to meaningful memberships. The parties all need workers and contributors and need not waste much effort on people signed up in hopes of a leadership vote.

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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry            

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Ready to Rumble in 2024?

by Peter Lowry

Canadians can take our antagonisms out of social media this year and work towards an election for real. Mr. Poilievre certainly wants one. The conservatives just spent so much trying to humanize him. They don’t want the effort go to waste.

But don’t forget to check with Jagmeet Singh of the new democrats. He holds the key to the election whenever it is called. If he just admitted that his party needs the liberals and the liberals need the new democrats to commit to a liberal democratic party. It would be a seminal election for Canada.

Ideally, we need to have a leadership decision made by the members of the new party. We have the time. There are potential candidates. We can unite the left, the progressives, those who care.

There is also time to create a policy path for the liberal democrats. Not quite as rushed as the former NDP members would wish and maybe not as cautiously as some of the former liberals might wish.

But liberals and new democrats have proved they can cooperate. They have the well-being of Canadians in mind. And there is much more to be done. The basics of a strong childcare program are in place. Pharmacare and Dentalcare are next in the works across Canada. We are building homes for Canadians and newcomers. Together liberals and new democrats can do the job.

And, even more important, it is liberal and new democrat progressives that will fight climate change together. Canadians no longer want the selfishness of conservatives who put profit ahead of easing climate change. Progressives want their children’s children to have a liveable planet.

Under liberal democrats, Canada can take its rightful place in fighting the wildfires, floods and disasters around the world that are caused by those who want to pollute for profit instead of preserving this world. Leadership in addressing climate change is a job for progressives. Not for those who put profit before progress or position ahead of caring.

It takes every reader of this blog to take this idea forward. We will be discouraged by some and encouraged by others. You know it needs to happen.

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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry            

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It Begins on Your Street.

by Peter Lowry

Looking ahead to 2024, writing a political blog will be a year of many challenges. There is no social code that forbids us from talking either of religion or politics.  Canadians will keep their eyes peeled on the events to the south. We will watch Mr. Trump trying desperately to confound his enemies and his own party of the right.

We will also watch the bumbles and stumbles of the Brexiters of the United Kingdom. And we will watch for the shifting sands of the Middle East and the political whims of the Continent. We will wait to see how the Russians will deal with loser Putin and wonder at who will be heir to Xi Jinping in China.

But it is here on our street where the reality of politics takes meaning. Will the autistic child two doors down get the understanding help he needs? Will the old lady next door quietly die when her RRIFs run dry? Will the teacher three doors further down get to catch up with the rising cost of living. Did the nurse in apartment 202 get the job she wanted in the United States? When you think about it, everyone has their story and those stories might all be political.

In Ontario, we know that the conservative government is not here for us. They are there for their developer friends who want cheap land out of the Greenbelt to build over-priced homes. These same provincial politicians give their conservative lawyer friends a false title such as a KC for King’s Councel. They make a secret deal with a European spa and give away the people’s Ontario Place.

But maybe we are better off in Ontario where the provincial government does not discriminate between Canada’s official languages. There’s no ‘live and let live’ in the Province of Quebec.

Maybe we can all move to Alberta with it’s laugh a minute ‘Looney Tunes’ premier. She is going to spend all that ill-gotten, polluting oil money fighting the federal government over their efforts to save our earthly environment. She is a separatist with no place to go with her land-locked Alberta—that was created by the feds. She has never acknowledged the gift of billions in the shape of the Trans Mountain Pipeline.

Many years ago, we had a politician who told us “The land is strong.” Nobody knew what he meant. Now we have one who tells us to “Bring it home.” Who knows what mysteries that slogan could hold for us?

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Justin’s Journey.

by Peter Lowry

It might not please all Canadians that our prime minister is staying the course and sticking around for another election. I have listened to his claims of certitude and I cannot help but feel that he does not have the good sense of his father.  While I would not have wanted Pierre Trudeau’s logical mind running things during the pandemic, I felt that Justin Trudeau’s love of acting was perfect to help Canadians during that critical time of needing understanding and direction.

But his father knew when the time had come to go. He resigned as liberal leader twice. First was when when his government was defeated by a minority Joe Clark government and then again after his famous ‘walk in the snow.’

The first time I met Justin, I was running a fund-raising dinner for the Barrie liberals. We chatted over dinner and I quickly learned much about him. Both the wife and I agreed afterwards that he was more like his mother than his father. It was obvious that he would be seeking the leadership of the party. His speech really told you nothing. It was the type of speech I hated writing for politicians. I could have sworn that he had a switch somewhere on him that he could turn on and off when doing that type of thing.

What worries me about Justin’s obduracy is that he has destroyed the effectiveness of the liberal party for the upcoming election. He might not be ready to step down but his confidence is not shared by the liberal party. From what I have seen in Ontario, he has lost much of the muscle of the party to handle the kind of election Mr. Poilievre wants to engage. We have lost all those effective fund-raisers in the Senate. We have lost their knowledge and influence.

And just where does Justin think we are going to find the young, tireless workers, to knock on doors and distribute material. The Ontario liberals had a leadership contest recently and the contestants actually doubled the free provincial membership to over 100,000 people who said they wanted to vote for a leadership candidate.

But when push came to shove, they failed miserably in getting those free members out to vote. If you know who is going to vote for you, you organize to get those votes in the ballot boxes. Less than 25 per cent of those ‘liberals’ got to the polls. They paid nothing. They had no commitment.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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‘Bring It Home.’

by Peter Lowry

What does “Bring it home” mean to you? Does Mr. Poilievre’s keynote slogan have specificity for you? Is it a meaningful political doctrine? Or, is it just another vague slogan that can mean what you want it to mean?

But the cold, hard facts are that slogans are for the gullible. Slogans replace logic.

Take ‘Axe the Tax.’ This is taking many liberties with the facts. It is fixed on the idea that nobody wants to pay any taxes. Anybody with any common sense knows that you can hardly run a country successfully where nobody pays any taxes. What we already know is that the tax he wants to axe is not a tax. It is simply a penalty that industries pay for the carbon they are putting into the earth’s atmosphere. They obviously pass these charges on to their customers, so the government gives the money collected from the industries to the taxpayers. The taxpayer is expected to want to use less of these products, thereby cutting down on the damage to our environment.

When you consider all this, you realize that Mr. Poilievre is not promising to axe a tax on you but on an industry that is polluting our environment. Think about it. Why would Mr. Poilievre want to axe a tax on these industries. Why doesn’t he worry about the pollution they are causing? Does he want to be prime minister of Canada for them or for you?

Let’s go back to what “Bring it home” means. I don’t know how they teach international relations in Calgary where Mr. Poilievre went to university but I have travelled around the world teaching seminars about communicating the need for medical research, specifically for Multiple Sclerosis. The International Federation of MS Societies always worked on the premise that solving one medical problem can often solve needs for other conditions. This broadly based scientific approach has paid off around the world.

But Mr. Poilievre would not allow it. When he says ‘Bring it home’ he literally means that he would cut back on our assistance and cooperation with other countries—particularly if he did not agree with how they were run or he did not like their leaders.

I have always felt in my world travels that we are all ambassadors for our countries. We promote democracy, not by preaching about it but by acting respectful of others’ ideas and customs. I cannot imagine our foreign relations under Mr. Poilievre.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Poilievre’s Protagonist.

by Peter Lowry

There is only one target that interests conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. It is the prime minister’s job. It is the job the conservative wants and it is one he has worked towards all of his adult life. We can all wonder how he will react, if and when he discovers he will never reach his goal.

Poilievre’s problem is what the conservative communications people discovered too late, after he had been chosen leader. The conservative leader is not likeable. He is a mean and unfeeling little man and that is becoming better known all the time. Instead of hurting Trudeau with all his barbs against the liberal leader, Poilievre is pushing some of that audience to Trudeau’s side of the fence.

The most telling thing about Poilievre’s very expensive advertising campaign running over the past year is it is failing in its purpose. Take the ads with the children to start with; they clearly show that this man is uncomfortable with children. Look at the one with the little girl. That puzzle they are supposed to be working on together is way beyond her age group. She isn’t interested in it, other than maybe to see if any of the too small pieces taste good. Poilievre was not as interested in her as he is to look like he can put a couple pieces together.

What bothers me most in Poilievre’s attacks on Trudeau is that there is more than enough with which to criticize him, without sounding stupid. The only person, for example, I have seen criticize the Canadian prime minister for causing world-wide inflation is the conservative leader. He should let that complaint go.

He could weave a far more interesting story about Trudeau in regards to the strained relations with India rather than the silly remarks he has been making. And Poilievre should have been paying attention when the declared feminist, Trudeau, fired his justice minister. Poilievre is also not making friends with his complaints about the Trudeau government spending its way through most of the pandemic.

And one of the facts of governing of the Bank of Canada is that the prime minister does not tell the bank’s governors what to do. Nor does the leader of the opposition. Maybe Mr. Poilievre should do his present job in opposition a lot better, before aspiring to establish his extreme right-wing form of government in Ottawa.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Poilievre’s Hell.

by Peter Lowry

There should be a special place reserved in Hell for a political poseur such as Pierre Poilievre. I was reading a column by Jaime Watt of Navigator in the Toronto Star recently and he was bragging of the skill of the conservative leader in the House of Commons in using social media on the Internet.  Watt seemed particularly impressed with a recent release from Poilievre that he referred to as “Housing Hell.” I took a look at that effort the other day and found it amateurish, misleading, full of factual errors and a series of repeated slurs on the prime minister.

I do hope Mr. Watt’s public relations company had nothing to do with such a scurrilous piece of garbage. This is not fair political comment. It is malicious and mean and deliberately inaccurate. We all know that the conservative leader wants Mr. Trudeau’s job and spends far more time maligning him than proposing solutions to Canada’s problems.

Despite Mr. Poilievre’s opinion, Mr. Trudeau is not responsible for world-wide inflation. He was hardly the cause of the escalating costs of homes across Canada. You sometimes wonder if Mr. Poilievre has any knowledge of what is going on in the real world. Canada is still trying to shake off the vestiges of the pandemic. World routes for trade are still stabilizing.

And does Mr. Poilievre have a clue about the impact of the war in Ukraine and the concerns of the sizeable Ukrainian diaspora in Canada? And is he aware that Canadians have concerns for both sides of the conflict in Gaza? Canada took in twice the numbers of immigrants last year because of the pressures in many parts of the world and Mr. Poilievre blames it on Mr. Trudeau.

Poilievre is a mean and selfish little man who takes his lead from Donald Trump in the United States. I am surprised that he has not made his slogan “Make Canada Great Again.” Instead, he uses a vague slogan that says “Bring it home.” It implies a selfishness that most Canadians reject. In it, he seems to reject our responsibilities to help the people of Ukraine or the concern we all feel for the unfortunate non-combatants in Gaza and Israel.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]