Category: Federal Politics

Delusions of the NDP.

by Peter Lowry

That did it. The federal new democrats think they can ingratiate themselves with Quebec voters by supporting bigotry and economic deprivation. As Puck said in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “What fools these mortals be.”

Only fools would support Quebec’s despicable language and religious symbols laws. Do they realize the leader of the federal NDP would be barred from a job with the Quebec government? Maybe, as an observant Sikh, growing up in Brampton, Ontario, Jagmeet Singh does not recognize bigotry. And yet in Quebec, he would be knee-deep in discrimination.

The NDP actually voted in favour of a Bloc Québécois attempt to further strip the rights of non-French-speaking Quebecers. The bill would have denied the rights of non-French speakers to Canadian citizenship if the applicant resided in Quebec. In addition, the Bloc bill would have interfered with the rights of Quebec businesses to communicate in English at work with English-speaking employees. It also denied employers and their employees from communicating in any other language but French. This bill was a further insult to Quebec’s English-speaking minority and actually interferes with the ability of Quebec firms to do business outside Quebec.

But the new democrats supported it in a feeble attempt to win praise and recognition in Quebec. They do not understand that the Orange Wave of Jack Layton is long dead.

And Jagmeet Singh is no Jack Layton.

More seriously, the actions of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) are already hurting the immigration needs of the province. This is continuing to hurt the ability of business to find many of the skills needed in a modern business world. It is crushing the ability of the province to penetrate the markets of almost 400 million Americans and Canadians on their doorstep because too many of their employees are unable to communicate with those markets in English or Spanish.

At a time when new tourism markets need to be developed, the province is denying the need for bilingualism. When his unthinking immigration minister Jean Boulet said publicly the other day (in French, of course) that most immigrants to Quebec “don’t work, don’t speak French or don’t adhere to the values of Quebec Society,” his boss premier François Legault said he still wanted him in the CAQ cabinet.

I think Quebec can do better.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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In Sheep’s Clothing.

by Peter Lowry

Nor does the leopard change his spots. The news media seem to think that the new leader of the conservatives in parliament has discovered his nicer self. We can expect that he would want to appear more likeable to the Canadian voter. Nobody said he was stupid. His objective is be prime minister and nobody wins that job overnight.

But what will not change are his narrow libertarian leanings. He will use his wife, his children, hollow concerns, anything to be considered more likeable. His worry for the Eastern Canadians recovering from the ravages of Mother Nature’s hurricane is facile. He is still a mean little man who fails to understand the need for government to aid and protect those less fortunate in the vagaries of life.

Pierre Poilievre preaches that it is every person for themselves. His plan is for a country where only those who strive will survive. It would be a land where the rich will only get richer and the poor and those of advanced age will be forgotten. There will be no sympathy for the sick and cold prisons for the violent.

This is a man who has never held a job outside of politics. He probably has no understanding of the every-day workplace. He would not know the good employer from the bad. He has never experienced the discipline of military service. He fights against gun control and has probably never been on the wrong side of a person who was out of control with a weapon.

Mr. Poilievre seems to have never experienced trauma. He appears to have no grasp of the economics he pretends to critique. He must have been advised to button up on his support for cryptocurrencies. Maybe, some day, he will be able to take a tour of the Bank of Canada and learn how it functions, outside of direct government control.

A reader suggested the other day that Mr. Poilievre is a parasite on the body politic. I think such comments are counter productive. He is a person of limited experience. He does not seem to want to help protect our world’s environment and its safety for human habitation. He seems a bookish type. I wonder if he has ever read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies?

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The Sweet Spot.

by Peter Lowry

When the new leader of Canada’s conservatives made his debut confrontation across the aisle from the prime minister, it was more of a touchy-feely session than a gun fight in some corral. It was a soft approach, testing old punch lines and old arguments. It was if they were each looking for the sweet spot before drawing the knives for real.

If that opening was “playing nice” as columnist Chantal Hébert described the occasion, the two will need better script writers over the coming three years. Pierre Poilievre’s problem is that he is going to have to hone closer to the truth. He wisely stuck to the tired but ever-present conservative shibboleths such as the federal carbon tax. His plaint over possible tax increases was just standard conservative cant and was hardly even worthy of an answer.

Hébert’s opinion that the liberals will stand firm on the carbon tax to emphasize the parties’ different stands on the environment, makes sense. Poilievre might be representing an Ottawa area constituency but his home is Alberta. He is pro-pipelines, pro-tar sands and a climate change denier.

Poilievre’s problem is that he has to grow the sweep of the conservative party with his 300,000 malcontent supporters among 37 million Canadians. And he is hardly going to do that with arguments for government meanness and frugality. If he thinks that, he just does not understand the anger that surges across this troubled and fragile world. He can use that anger only if he can identify the causes. Just 300,000 malcontents might be too small a sample.

We could all feel more confident if the standard bearer on the other side of the aisle was not Justin Trudeau. No doubt there were many groans across Canada recently when Trudeau told us that he wants to lead his liberals into the next election. He should check to find how many of these so-called liberals are enthusiastic about that prospect. He should also check to see why Donald Trump and his “deplorables” won the American presidency in the 2016 election in that country.

The facts are that real liberals need a real liberal leader.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Poilievre’s ‘Woke.’

by Peter Lowry

The word ‘woke’ is not all that new. Its use is taking a roller-coaster ride. Young people tend to use it in the sense of becoming aware of societal errors of the past. Right-wing religious writers have usurped the word ‘wokeness’ to be a label for a supposably baseless new religion attempting to supplant the traditional Christian religions. It must have cost many of us some puzzlement when conservative leader Pierre Poilievre accused the Trudeau government of entering a radical woke coalition with the new democrats.

It was this suggestion that there could be a radical wokeness that left me confused. There was nothing new in the arrangement between the two parties. Our present prime minister’s father and the NDP’s David Lewis had entered into a similar arrangement in the 1970s.

I suppose, if I had cared, I could have contacted the conservative leader’s office to find out what he meant. I wrote it off as just a weak attempt to impress a younger audience. I expect it is just another example of Mr. Poilievre’s uncaring glibness when attacking others.

When political observers write about the relative strengths of the party leaders, they tend to denigrate Trudeau’s grasp of finance while giving Poilievre a pass. They even hope that finance minister Christa Freeland can fill the void. They tend to forget the wild swings Poilievre makes at subjects such as cryptocurrencies and the governance of the Bank of Canada.

Whether Freeland is capable of complimenting Trudeau’s strong advocacy in controlling climate change and providing for the social needs of Canadians has yet to be determined. Whether there is a need for her to backstop Trudeau in the way Paul Martin supported Jean Chrétien, I doubt it. How soon we forget that Paul Martin’s far right actions as finance minister in the 1990s cost the liberal party dearly. Many of us progressive liberals never forgave Paul for his right-wing attack on social spending. It cost the liberal party the loss to Stephen Harper. Canadians seemed to say: Why vote for a right-wing liberal when you can get the real thing with Harper?

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Carbon-Capture Conservatives.

by Peter Lowry

It is becoming obvious now that carbon-based fuels exploiters in Canada are going to hang their hats on carbon-capture technologies—if they can just get governments to pay for it. For an expensive solution that really cannot do the job, it appears to be the only answer they can find. And their political lackies are expected to get on the carbon-capture band wagon. Just watch politicos like federal conservative leader Pierre Poilievre jump aboard.

You need to remember that there are multiple carbon expelling events in the life of the high-carbon bitumen from the Athabasca tar sands. There are the high amounts of carbon created by the digging or drilling for the access to the bitumen. Then there is the transport of the bitumen to the upgrader processes that brings it to a bitumen sludge that can be transported by rail or forced at high temperatures through pipelines. Eventually, the bitumen gets to a refinery that can produce ersatz crude oil from the bitumen, leaving behind tons of bitumen slag. From that stage, the crude can be refined into carbon-based fuels for heating and transport requirements. It is because of all these process stages that the actual amount of pollution caused by the bitumen is hard to compute.

But what we also know is that while oil and water really do not mix, at least oil is difficult to cleanup when it spills into water. Bitumen, because of its tar-like nature floats for a while and then sinks to become an obnoxious part of the eco-system that is impossible to cleanup.

This is also the reason for the ongoing and bitter legal battle between the State of Michigan and the Enbridge pipeline people over the Line 5 pipeline crossing the Straits of Mackinac. The State of Michigan has had the experience of a critical spill of bitumen into tributaries to the Kalamazoo River in South Michigan. In 12 years and more than a billion dollars on cleanup, there is still bitumen in the Kalamazoo.

When you get politicians on both sides of the border arguing over the issue, there is also a lot of confusion. The only comment that I will add is that if any large lake-ship accidently drags an anchor through the Straits of Mackinac when Line 5 is carrying bitumen, millions of Americans and Canadians living around the Great Lakes are going to be outraged at the economic destruction it could cause.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Trudeau Sings?

by Peter Lowry

We obviously have a multi-talented prime minister. It turns out he can sing as well as do blackface. Or was this a complaint about his singing? I know how it is. You get together with some other Canucks in some foreign port and after a few cups of the local joy juice, you are all singing Alouette.

But karaoke is something else. It is very rude for someone to record another person’s attempt at a more difficult number. And besides, Trudeau needed to save his sense of humour for when he got back to parliament. Poilievre was lying in wait for him. 

The entire parliament was waiting for the first attack on the prime minister by the new leader of the opposition. This is Justin’s third new leader of the opposition. I figured that the confrontation would be good for a few laughs. Yet, I missed the whole thing as my Internet and television were down when Justin Trudeau returned to the house of commons the other day.

Did Poilievre ask if he sang in New York as he did in London? Or did he just go for the laughs over Justin-flation?

My advice to Justin would have been to leave them laughing. Unless, of course, Mr. Poilievre made the continued mistake of exhibiting his total lack of knowledge of economics. In that case, a gentle and patient lecture on basic economics might be in order. Trudeau might even suggest a few helpful texts on the subject

But in this vein, I would like to publicly thank Linda McQuaig for writing in the Toronto Star the other day that Poilievre is the farthest thing from a populist. Linda is a very perceptive writer on politics. She obviously knows a populist when she sees one. And Poilievre is not included. She commented on that weasel’s time with Stephen Harper and suggested that he might just be Harper-Lite.

Actually, Pierre Poilievre keeps trying to be like Stephen Harper, except he lacks Harper’s sparkling personality. If anything, Mr. Poilievre reminds me of the shark in Bobby Darin’s 1959 swing version of Mack the Knife.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The New Politics?

by Peter Lowry

In writing recently about the similarities of Pierre Poilievre and Donald Trump, I kept walking around the obvious. Putting a political label on either of them is difficult. The truth is that their politics needs a new name. It isn’t as authoritarian as European fascism. It lacks the corporatism. And only Trump shows signs of racism. And neither is a real libertarian.

Both Poilievre and Trump have this inability to stick to the truth. That might just be the belief of politicians that if you say something frequently and loudly, it can become a truth, of sorts. Mr. Trump is under the impression that he was the winner between he and Joe Biden. And poor Pierre Poilievre thought (until recently) that Bitcoin was a good investment. No doubt both the gentlemen can be easily deluded.

But I mentioned the other day that they both need their hard-core supporters. The ‘brown shirts’ (and shirtless) who carried out Trump’s insurrection in the American Capitol could have used some better leadership. Poilievre’s trucker convoy had lost most of its leaders to jail cells or restraining orders before the police got them properly kettled and ran them out of the nation’s capital.

I tend to think of the two as buskers, playing for nickels and dimes on the periphery of politics. Trump caught everyone by surprise by winning in 2016 and the American public made sure he lost in 2020. He was a sorry spectacle in the White House.

The striking difference between Trump and Poilievre is that Trump started out in 2015 with no clue about how politics really works and Poilievre has no clue about anything outside of politics. I would say that Poilievre is the loser in the sense that his entire working life has been nothing but politics.  

They both seem to think they can be dictatorial. It was probably Trump’s greatest disappointment in office. People kept telling him what he could not do. His only solution was to hire people who would lie to him. At least he felt better.

Other than ridiculous promises to end inflation, end government handouts and to prevent increases in taxes in the future, we have no clear idea of what Poilievre would do as prime minister. Like Trump, he obviously has no idea what to do about climate change or pandemics or inflation.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Lessons in Economics.

by Peter Lowry

It was regrettable that Justin Trudeau did not have room on his plane to take the new conservative leader to London. I was thinking that Justin could take in the pageantry of the funeral after dropping Pierre Poilievre off at the London School of Economics. The boy needs all the help on that subject he can get.

Over the years, I have met quite a few people who have been to that school. I find the conversation is enriched by their experience.

While considered reasonably intelligent, Mr. Poilievre desperately needs help in understanding some basics about the subject. Though I am reminded of the complaint by the late Harry S. Truman who said he wanted to hire a one-armed economist who could not say to him: “On the other hand, Mr. President.”

The problem with economics is that everything seems to be based on ranges. The Bank of Canada can use interest rates to deal with inflation but at the same time, has to be very wary of causing recession. And contrary to statements by Mr. Poilievre, the Bank of Canada does not print money at the behest of the prime minister. In fact, Mr. Poilievre might be very surprised at how little of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) actually involves printed currency.

And while Mr. Poilievre says he wants to fire the governor of the bank, he should be aware that it is a very active board of directors of the bank who provide the governor with advice and counsel.

The scariest aspect of Mr. Poilievre’s pseudo economics is his support of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is not real money. Cryptocurrencies are the equivalent of fool’s gold, mined on computers. They are an investment in fiction. They have no value other than what fools will pay.

My younger relatives might think I am over the hill and in my dotage but I am deeply concerned that they might be listening to this silly little man and his rage in going after the prime minister’s office. He really needs to be brought up short.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Yes, We Can.

by Peter Lowry

By now we should all be tired of the naysayers who say Canada’s constitution is impossible to change. The facts are that nothing is impossible. The ultimate authority on how we are governed is the people. We can, in a referendum for example, call for a constitutional conference to assess the need for change in Canada. If change is determined to be needed, we can elect delegates from the federal electoral districts across Canada to exam possible changes and make recommendations. Any recommendations can be debated at large and then a referendum vote can be called to accept or reject any or all of them.

There are many possibilities for the delegates to a constitutional conference. First of all, they have to care about the questions. Some could be politicians who have something to contribute. A few might be political scientists with ideas to build on. Most would be citizens concerned about the future of our country.

Back in 2007 there was a group of lottery winners in Ontario who were asked to consider methods of voting. They came up with a convoluted mixed member proportional voting system for the province. In the subsequent referendum, the idea was defeated by about two to one. In a similar vein, British Columbia had three attempts at reform of voting and Prince Edward Island had one. The conclusion seems to be that there is continuing support for first-past-the-post voting in those provinces.

What we need to consider in the election of people to the constitutional conference is are we going to elect enough people with open minds? Compromise and consideration of the needs of others are important if they are going to make the process work for Canadians.

Though there are those who have a strange view of the subject. There was a writer to the Toronto Star the other day who thought the crown’s only constituency is the constitution. He wrote that the royals are only given their high office to defend the constitution and be the living embodiment of the constitution and are therefore not responsible to the electorate. I wonder if the writer knows that the United Kingdom does not have a constitution. They have lots of customs; no written constitution.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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In a Land of Make Believe.

by Peter Lowry

It is surreal. We live in a time of floods and fire, when Mother Nature raises her ire. We fight nonsensical wars. And we are living in a fairy tale. The Queen is dead; long live the guy with the big ears.

The prime minister is taking our Canadian elites to London to see that the Queen is ‘done up proper’ in Westminster. Her nerdy family are standing by. The mourners in London bring new meaning to the English queue, while the elites of world leaders gather to honour the last monarch. That peasant Putin was snubbed. Did Xi Jinping send his regrets?

Did you hear the other day that some of the school boards in Ontario are telling teachers not to mention the Queen. They don’t want to frighten the children with tales of usurping the land of the first nomads who came here some 15,000 years ago.

And the fairy tale lives on. We are a free country; despite the promises of freedom by the new conservative leader. You know him now, don’t you? He is that nasty little man who thinks he knows about economics. He favours Bitcoin for investing. He blames the prime minister and the Bank of Canada for inflation. He seems to forget that Canada has handled inflation better than most developed countries.

The royals cost Canadians nothing more than our self respect. Why should we recognize and honour these people who lord it over us? What is their contribution to this country? Come visit us and we will turn out our children waving tiny Union Jack flags. Hip-hip-hooray?

A faux governor general belittles us. To pass legal judgement and laws in the name of a foreign monarch, is but a sham.

Instead of gathering to pass laws of importance to Canadians, our parliament chose to gather last week to make nice about the late queen. Hypocrisy ran rampant. The Bloc Québécois left the building, hopefully forever.

Enjoy your trip to London prime minister. Do some sight seeing while you are there. I can recommend a little pub down behind the Tower of London.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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