Category: Federal Politics

It’s a ‘Tear Down”?

by Peter Lowry

Oh, how easy it is to cast aside our history. Don’t get me wrong but Ottawa is a nice city. That is all that it is. It is just a nice city. It has interesting neighbourhoods, burgeoning suburbs and some bad architecture. It just fails to impress anybody as the capital of Canada.

Queen Victoria never saw Canada but picked Ottawa as the capital. She was told the city was defensible and was on the border of Ontario and Quebec. It was just an old logging centre on the Ottawa River. Today it is home to more than a million and a half Canadians who either ice skate on the Rideau Canal in winter or flee south to get warm.

It was ten years ago that the wife and I drove down to the other capital city, Washington. After many visits to Washington over the years, I wanted to take a tourist bus and see the monuments and the White House. We spent a week, did the tours and were suitably impressed. To see the impressive sights in Ottawa would take a part of an afternoon.

And yet, the other day, Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star had the temerity to suggest that 24 Sussex, residence to Canada’s prime ministers and their families for the past 70 years, be torn down. It might be amusing to agree with the current prime minister’s mother that 24 Sussex is “the crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system.” There is no question that it lacks the panache of the White House.

But before the National Capital Commission tears it down, some thought must be given to its functionality. Is it just a residence or is it to be symbolic of this country? After all, is there anywhere in Canada with a serious sign that says: ‘Sir John A. Macdonald slept here’?

When are Canadians going to stop tearing things down and put up something for posterity?

And if we tell the national Capital Commission to build us something emblematic for the prime minister and family, will they come up with something better than an igloo?

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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‘Today I’m not doing anything.’

by Peter Lowry

It’s that old Bruno Mars chestnut. It’s called ‘The Lazy Song.’ It was running through my mind as I poured some orange juice around 7 am. The song was trying to lure me back to bed. It was still dark and I had no excuse for being awake and wandering.

Other than the fact I had more than eight hours of shut-eye, the bed was singing the siren song of ‘warm and cosy.’ I have no special plans for today. And there was nothing in the coffee or Toronto Star to get the juices flowing.

The headline on the front page of the Star was a silly story about the prime minister and family’s temporary residence at Rideau Cottage. Why they call a two-story Georgian style brick house a ‘cottage,’ I have no idea. I would expect Justin Trudeau to be surprised that they even call it ‘his fixer-upper.’ It just happens to be that he and his family are temporarily occupying Rideau Cottage while the official residence for prime ministers and their families sits dormant across the road at 24 Sussex Drive.

But it is totally unfair for the Toronto Star to point the finger at the PM and accuse him of being a spend-thrift. The house is the property of the National Capital Commission and the commission controls, and spends (lavishly) on Rideau Hall (the Governor Generals’ digs and office.), Rideau Park, Rideau Cottage and 24 Sussex. Who else would casually spend $189,000 on a new roof for a ‘cottage’ to keep the prime minister’s family warm and dry?

And, by the way, Rideau Park is the grounds where Rideau Hall and Rideau Cottage are located. The National Capital Commission might have recently spent more than a million on fencing, landscaping and paving but, again, the prime minister had no hand on the chequebook.

Mind you, at an annual salary of almost $350,000, the already wealthy prime minister and his family would not have to pitch a tent in the park. It is unlikely that he will be moving back to 24 Sussex. (His family lived there when he was born.) The National Capital Commission has claimed that it will cost over $36 million to repair the official residence.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Building Better Blogs.

by Peter Lowry

On average, about a third of the daily readers of BabelontheBay.com are referred to the site by an accumulator under the URL ProgressiveBloggers.ca. The site provides a long list of (maybe) progressive Canadian bloggers. It builds a following for us. We get interesting comments from Canada and around the world. We get into side conversations sometimes with other writers.

What the collective offers is an opportunity for Internet users to sample some of Canada’s varied bloggers. And you can be assured; it is certainly a varied bunch. Digging into one recently that was supposedly discussing a subject of interest. The surprise was that the writer seemed not to bother with constructing his writing in logical paragraphs. He had actually written over 800 words in a single paragraph stream-of-conscience diatribe. It was almost impossible to read. And yet, the writer claimed to have been a former teacher with a doctoral degree.

You will notice there is no mention of the writer’s name but the last time I commented on a fellow blogger’s commentary and identified him, he threatened to sue me. Though it was amusing, it was not worth a fuss, I apologized and forgot about it.

The one thing you soon are convinced of as a blogger is that bloggers have to have enormous egos. Why else would anyone stick their neck out in writing commentaries?

But when starting this blog, the intent was to provide you with some tips in case you ever want to write a blog of your own.

The most important tip of all is to not over use ‘I’ or ‘me’ or any personal pronoun. If everything is about you, use Facebook.

And never let anyone tell you a blog has to be at least so many words in length. Use enough words to say what you want to say. And then stop. You are probably not being paid by the word.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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“Regrets, we’ve had a few.”

by Peter Lowry

Talking to Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star late last year, prime minister Justin Trudeau complained about the “casual cynicism” of the left. He said we bugged him. Delacourt quotes Trudeau as saying the “You did nothing” refrain turns people against government altogether.  

But that is the public perception and the only answer to that is “Tough.” Mr. Trudeau is the master of his own fate. He should read in the Christian Bible where a leader has been weighed and found wanting. The writing is also on the wall for Justin Trudeau.

He fails to understand that winning elections is having a strong and enthusiastic party behind you. You cannot work to destroy your political party and expect to win majorities. A political party should not be used only as an automated teller machine.

You cannot make rash promises about the last time for first-past-the-post voting and then fail to deliver.

You cannot take the family on a trip to India and embarrass your nation.

You cannot profess to be a feminist and then fail to reconcile with women in your cabinet.

You cannot pass needed legislation about medically-assisted end of life and then have it rejected as inadequate by the courts.

Mr. Trudeau should heed the words of William Shakespeare “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

Mr. Trudeau is no environmentalist either. You can hardly save our world in 10, 20 or 30 years. The need for action is now.

Freedom of religion is a basic tenet of our country and Mr. Trudeau cannot merely say “Tsk, tsk” over the bigotry of the Quebec Assembly in denying religious symbols.

He can hardly sell reconciliation to Canada’s aboriginals while he vacations with the family in British Columbia.

Mr. Trudeau’s problems can all be better understood when you realize he is an elitist and lacks political sensitivity. It makes it difficult for him to lead.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Tribal Politics.

by Peter Lowry

One of the least discussed aspects of politics in Canada is the inherent tribalism. It exists, it impacts societal norms, it influences our politicians and how we vote. The smart politician uses our tribalism against us.

The major example of tribalism in Canada is the politics of Quebec. Some think of the stand-off between English and French speakers in the province as racism but as both English speakers and French speakers are of the same racial mixture as Europeans, the language divide can only be described as tribalism.

The other tribalism is in our cities where some immigrant ethnic groups tend to cloister. Growing up in Toronto, I thought most of our immigrants were Italian. I found out later that we were living in an area favoured by new Canadians from Italy. As I grew up, my exploration of the city grew from walking range to bicycle range. This enabled me to see the drift north from the old Jewish community. And then there was the later growth of the Chinese away from the downtown Chinatown into the north-east and the growing concentration of gay establishments and housing centred on Church and Wellesley Streets.

What I realized as a young man was that within the city, you could see the world. It might have been a smaller version of New York City but it rivalled it in many ways. It was Ed Mirvish from Honest Eds’ who created the theatre district. It was Johnny Lombardi’s grocery store that said this was Little Italy. I don’t know who turned the old used-car Danforth Greek but we all benefitted.

But the ethnic concentrations also created political problems. While I spend time researching and advising the liberal party on the communications needs within the many communities, I was less than pleased with the politicians who thought they could use the various communities to ensure their election. And the most serious problem was the candidates who thought using their own ethnic group to get elected was the right way to go.

I remember standing one day at the front of a large high school auditorium with my candidate for a riding nomination, looking at the audience, and saying: “Where in hell did all those Armenians come from?” Years of good relations with Toronto’s Armenian community went down the tubes when the guy who ran the Armenian Centre decided he wanted to become a politician.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The ‘champion of change’?

by Peter Lowry

This writer has never been a fan of former new democratic politician Ed Broadbent nor of the institute that he has named for him. There is no reason for him to be concerned about this as I also hold no briefs for the Fraser Institute, which likely supports the antithesis of the objectives of the Broadbent Institute. I have always been suspicious of think tanks with a built-in bias. Which I suspect is most of them.

Of the 100 or so think tanks in Canada, I tend to pay attention to the Samara Centre for Democracy that describes itself as a non-partisan charity. I expect that we are not the only country wherein our democracy needs charity.

But the bone I wanted to pick with Ed Broadbent today is in regard to his grandiose Canadian Democracy and Corporate Accountability Commission that he created and chaired with publisher Avie Bennett back in 2000. Their purpose was to encourage Canadian businesses to be socially responsible.

This is not to say how long I can hold a grudge. This was not a royal commission nor in any way supported by government. I debated and finally decided to provide them with some of my expertise on the subject. It was some 20 years before that I had spend time giving guest lectures at Ontario universities to business students. I had written quite few articles at that time on the social responsibility of business.

When I appeared before them to support a paper I had sent, I found that Ed Broadbent was rude and Avie Bennett appeared bored. I wrote off the experience as a waste of time and forgot about it.

But the other day, I came across some references to the report that the Broadbent-Bennett effort issued. The gist of it was that business needed to be coerced to be concerned about the environment, human rights and local communities, as well as the countries in which they choose to operate.

What annoyed me about this was that if Broadbent and his buddy had listened for a bit, they would have had an entirely new perspective. What I was saying 20 years before was that business can only benefit from being socially responsible. It is demonstrable that the socially responsible business has lower costs for staff turnover, better recognition in the news media and easier access to politicians. The company can attract desirable board members and can be much more profitable.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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No, He’s Not His Father.

by Peter Lowry

Prime minister Justin Trudeau recently told Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star that he was not his father. I knew that. I respected his father. His father respected the liberal party.

It was 50 years ago that Justin was born. Early that year the party held a large fund-raising dinner featuring Pierre Trudeau in the Canadian room of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) staff had kept those of us working on the dinner from knowing that Pierre was on his way to Vancouver to marry Margaret Sinclair. I should have seen it when the news media kept asking me about the syrupy speech he was giving on women’s rights. There were a lot of jokes afterwards that it was Pierre’s bachelor dinner.

The only times that the party connected with Pierre’s family life were in his Christmas cards. My wife still has her collection of Pierre Trudeau family Christmas cards and when she mentioned it to Justin, before he became party leader, she was immediately on the list for Justin and Sophie’s cards. And that is about the only way Justin is like his father.

One of the remarks in Susan Delacourt’s article was that “No one knows what would have happened to the liberal party if Trudeau had kept to (his) decision 10 years ago to sit out the leadership. And since he ran for the leadership, that decision was obviously bogus.

The one thing I believe is that the liberal party would have been better off without Justin. He acts as an elitist and he thinks he knows better than a party with the accumulated knowledge of this country since Confederation. He wasted much of that knowledge by barring the party senators from the liberal caucus. He cancelled the party’s minimal membership fee and opened the party to anyone who wanted to be on the party list. He left the party no role other than that as a quasi-automated banking machine where his office could go to ask for money.

Justin told Delacourt that he and his team in Ottawa made a decision to connect with the liberal grassroots. That, of course, is BS. Justin appears to be doing his utmost to destroy the party. He looks down on the grassroots and thinks all a party needs are selfies. He promised not to interfere in riding nominations and immediately, he became leader, forced out a candidate because he might not have liked her husband. He put elitists in charge of elections and loses ridings, that the liberals could have won.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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The Well-Worn Warrior.

by Peter Lowry

I certainly hope conservative leader Erin O’Toole is enjoying this holiday break from parliament. He deserves some rest. He needs to sit back in a warm easy chair, his feet up, his mind at ease and a thirst-quenching beverage of choice in easy reach. He needs the break to think about his future. What he really needs to think about, despite the amenities of Stornoway, the opposition leader’s residence, is his future.

This is Erin’s third career. When he was young, he went into a RCAF recruiting depot in 1991, with dreams of becoming a top-gun pilot. Like many of us, who have done that, you end up somewhere the air force thinks it needs you.

Erin did well by the air force. We are told he got a BA in history and political science at Royal Military College in Kingston. In exchange, he became a navigator. They even let him navigate in antiquated helicopters.

After the military, he stayed in the reserve while studying law at Dalhousie University. This led to his second career in in 2003, as a lawyer in Toronto. His talent seemed to be in commercial and regulatory law.

The legal community lost him though in 2012 when he saw the opportunity to go for the federal by-election in Durham to replace the former MP, Bev Oda, who had resigned. Prime minister Harper must have liked him because it was only after a few months of indoctrination as a new MP, that Harper invited him to sit at the cabinet table.

O’Toole liked that so much that when the conservatives lost in 2015, the member for Durham ran to replace Harper as leader of the conservatives. He lost to ‘Chuckles’ Scheer. When Scheer resigned in 2019, O’Toole was ready. No more Mr. Nice Guy seemed to be his motto. He wooed all conservatives, social conservatives and all the rest. He ran as a true-blue conservative. He won the brass ring.

But Canadians did not know him. In the 2021 general election, he ran a campaign trying to meet their expectations. What he did was confuse them. He came out of the campaign with no gains and an angry, disappointed caucus. He awaits the verdict of the party. He can always go back to law.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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The Friendly Warrior.

by Peter Lowry

The wife said it. I told her that I wanted to write something positive about federal new democratic leader Jagmeet Singh. I happened to have a newspaper page open in front of me when I asked and she pointed to a picture of Singh on the page and said: “He has the kindest face.”

She is right. Despite the kind face, Sikhs have a tradition of being warriors and as a follower of the Tenth Guru of Sikhism, Jagmeet carries the symbolic knives (Kirpan) which are one of what the Sikhs call ‘The Five Ks.’ The Kirpan shows he is always prepared to fight battles for the oppressed and downtrodden.

But there is a certain incongruity in wearing a bespoke suit from the Harry Rosen tailors and a smile and trying to look like a hardened warrior. And nobody seems to be taking Jagmeet seriously. When you fight an election earlier this year and come out of it with an increase of just one seat in the House of Commons, you have to wonder what is wrong.

From a political point of view, I am not inclined to blame Jagmeet. The guy is really trying. What he lacks is a strategic plan. He needs a cohesive party behind him. And, I think, he knows that the socialism of the party’s past is a dead issue.

This is the obvious time for the new democrats to prove that they have something to offer Canadians. They would probably be wise to re-open the Leap Manifesto to being revised and invite the support of the green party and left-wing liberals in the task. We probably have at least two years before anyone starts thinking of having an election. That time could be put to good use.

But as for Jagmeet’s position, I really do not think he is a leader. Sorry, guy. You are a married man with a little one on the way. Nobody thinks about leadership as they are changing a diaper.

I think Jagmeet made a mistake to encourage the Sikh diaspora in Canada to support him for the leadership of the NDP. He needed to build support among all Canadians and we are not seeing that happen.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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A Christmas Wish.

by Peter Lowry

Santa might scratch his head if I ask him for this: I want to hear the sounds of leadership throughout our land. And those sounds have to be about the future for Canadians and their beautiful, bountiful country. It is unlikely that anyone will object if elected or unelected liberals, conservatives, NDPers or greens sought out opportunities to speak out about the future our country offers its citizens. It is a big country and a critically important subject.

We desperately need thinkers in politics who can imagine a better future. For example, why does this country not think about small nuclear reactors to help open our near arctic lands to livability and productivity and the development of resources?  Why are we not replacing some of those highly polluting jet airliners with high-speed electric trains across the country? Why are we talking of restoring what is past, when we could have an enriched future?

No doubt, even Santa would remind us that we are still in the midst of a pandemic. We all know that. It is just that we have to see beyond. Who, but only an idiot, would suggest that Canada should go back to things as they were before?

It is obvious to Canadians that their future is in the East and the West and the North. The Biden administration in the United States is proving to be another downhill ride for our relationship to the South. That country has its own problems. It is time our politicians stopped whining about the U.S. ignoring us. With some leadership, we can solve our own problems.

Canadians have no wish to be looked down on in the same way as Americans treat Mexicans. We hardly want to be sycophants, singing from the same shallow foreign affairs song book as the Americans. We made a deal years ago that made us partners. If the Americans no longer want that partnership, we have other fish to fry.

I know there are a few men and women in the liberal caucus in Ottawa who are capable of speaking out about Canada’s future. It is hardly their nature to be sheep. There are even a few bright conservatives and new democrats. The message is: Your country needs you and it is time to speak up.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]