Category: Federal Politics

Sajjan Is Not the Sex Police.

by Peter Lowry

The opposition parties in Ottawa have voted for a politically motivated censure and are demanding the resignation of Canada’s defence minister Harjit Sajjan. The opposition parties are complaining that he has not done enough about the senior staff of the military having or wanting to have sex. To his credit, it would seem that Mr. Sajjan is not interested nor involved in the sex lives of Canada’s generals and admirals.

And, frankly, everyone in parliament should follow Mr. Sajjan’s example. They should realize that that celibacy is not required in our armed forces. We have a military that is made up of Canadians looking for travel, organization in their lives and a reliable paycheque. The military houses them, feeds them, clothes them and looks after their health. They lead a nice life and rarely go in harms way. And if you get some sex occasionally, life can be even better.

But, as in any organization, there are restrictions on the sex. The boys have to stay out of the girls’ barracks and the girls have to stay out of the boys’ barracks. And, like in many organizations, men and women with authority over another person cannot demand sexual favours from the people who report to them. In the military, this is considered an offence under the Queen’s Regulations for the particular military service. And, as each military service has its own quasi police force, offenses that become known are handled, so to speak, and disciplined within the service.

There is more of a problem when you hear of complaints within the ranks of generals and admirals. These are the people who make the rules and it is very awkward when they break them. The problem is that people of this rank are expected to know when to defend themselves and when to capitulate.

People who rise to this level in the services are expected to know when a person of sexual interest to them has said yes, no or maybe. They are also required to know when the relationship could be considered improper.

The only body that can deal effectively with indiscretions at this level is the general staff of the military. The defence minister has to accept the decision of the general staff or appoint a new general staff.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Crocodile tears from Bell Canada.

by Peter Lowry

The new owners of the Toronto Star should be ashamed. When reading an article on a business opinion page on the weekend, it became apparent that I was reading an advertisement. This was not balanced reporting. It might be something that the company sends out in a news release but was not a report by an impartial and knowledgeable reporter. The source was obviously some public relations person writing on behalf of the president of Bell Canada’s residential and small business services!

This was purported to be an article about the recent reversal of a 2019 plan by the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to make deep cuts in Bell Canada’s wholesale rates for use by resellers of Bell’s Internet infrastructure.

Bell Canada’s near-monopoly position because of its copper wire and fiber optic networks allows the company to charge what the market will bear for its Internet services. And those rates are substantially higher than those charged in other developed nations for similar broadband services.

The Toronto Star article was written to make it appear that the CRTC decision in 2019 was some flight of whimsy. The reason the 2019 rates were never implemented was that Bell Canada and other networking telecoms had the rates challenged in court, denounced to politicians and anyone else willing to listen. Heaven forbid the Canadians ever get a fair shake in Internet pricing.

The facts are that the CRTC had set the previous 2016 wholesale rates so high that savvy customers saw that the resellers rates were no lower than Bell’s or other telecoms. There was no wiggle room for a better price.

A great deal of study and evaluation went into the 2019 figures. What the telecoms claimed as serious cuts were in fact the cuts that were needed to give the resellers an opportunity to carve out a piece of the Internet market. Internet customers are not about to organize a tag day for Canadian telecoms.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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“The evil that men do…

by Peter Lowry

Chantal Hébert of the Toronto Star is no William Shakespeare. A good writer but sometimes a bit too Quebec-centred, I was annoyed at her column the other day questioning why John A’s still on a pedestal.

Sir John A. Macdonald is on a pedestal (actually, under a statue, it is called a plinth) because he belongs there. For all his weaknesses, idiosyncrasies and alcoholism and skulduggery, he did a hell of a job putting this country together. And that is why there are statues and places named after him across the breadth of this nation.

This country needs heroes. We have damn few. It amuses me when visiting Queen’s Park in Toronto that there is a collateral relative of mine on a plinth in front of the legislature. It is Oliver Mowat. My old friend Bob Nixon, when leader of the Ontario liberals, referred to Mowat in a speech once as “that myopic little man.”

While I argued in favour of my relative, I had to admit that many of the problems facing the Canadian federation today, can be blamed on Sir Oliver Mowat. He was the main advocate for provincial rights in his time and, in that time, he was right. He had no way in his day to see the long-term needs of this country. It was his one-time law partner, Sir John A. Macdonald, who saw the need for a country-spanning railroad and a strong federal government.

But, in terms of the needs of the country back then, just before the turn of the 20th Century, it is not for us to say who was right or wrong. For people to throw paint at statues is a wasted effort—it is but a foolish action by callow youth.

The question today is ‘Can we change the past?’ Ask that of the paint throwers. Ask those who stand in the halls of government and apologize for the actions of past generations. They should tell us who could land on these shores and tell us how to interact with the aboriginals who sheltered here?

We should never forget that, in the thinking of past times, there was no greater offer to our aboriginals than to become as one with these late-comers to this land. Canada never has been the ‘melting pot’ of the Americans.

Only when we are sure that aboriginals have all the rights, privileges and opportunities in this land of which they are due, can we stand tall beside them.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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Those Bastards at Bell.

by Peter Lowry

Having once worked for Bell Canada, you find out very quickly why Bell is among the most hated of Canadian companies. It is the arrogance. Bell Canada shares its arrogant attitude with other telecoms and communications companies. Whether you are dealing with Rogers, Shaw, Telus, or Bell matters little. There is the same sense of privilege in all Canadian telecoms.

I remember a decade ago, at a Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) hearing, Bell Canada was applying for permission to buy CTV.  At the hearing in Gatineau, Quebec, I was sitting directly behind the Bell executive responsible for orchestrating the proceedings for Bell. his people where writing speeches for supporters and MPs who spoke to impress the commissioners. When it was my turn to speak as an intervenor, he left the room for probably an over-due washroom break. He would not have enjoyed what he knew I was there to say anyway.

I knew my intervention was a waste of time. I gave it my best shot. Even the chairman was congratulatory in a quiet discussion later as we both left the building. He knew then that the Harper conservatives would just overrule the decision if the commission did not bow to the Bell demands. It was another low point in the existence of the CRTC.

I had been there for the birth of the CRTC in the late 1960s. Some of us young Turks in the liberal party had taken on the challenge of swapping the old Board of Broadcast Governors (dominated by the CBC) for a more independent body.

And I will probably be there for the death of the CRTC the way it is going these days. They have let the fox in the henhouse by picking the former bureaucrat and former lobbyist for Telus, Ian Scott, as chair of the supposedly independent body. He stunned all knowledgeable Canadians by reversing the CRTC’s 2019 ruling on lower prices for wholesale Internet prices from major telecoms.

It came like a gift from heaven to people such as Bell that have been screwing consumers and smaller distributors alike for years. From personally pricing all the independents, I found that they could not give the consumer a break. Their prices worked out to the same as Bell’s—with poorer service.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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And he’s Pierre’s son?

by Peter Lowry

Screw you Justin, and the horse you rode in on. You have lost all rights to the name Trudeau. You have belittled and betrayed your father. You have denounced Pierre Trudeau’s legacy. You have pandered to those small-minded, bigoted politicians in Quebec who want to keep their people imprisoned on a French-speaking island.

Justin Trudeau, as prime minister, could have kept his mouth shut. Premier François Legault hardly needed Justin’s support in looking so small. Quebec’s latest demand to be recognized as some sort of nation is unCanadian, unnecessary and uncaring of the people those politicians are there to serve.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is there for all Canadians. They are not only rights and freedoms for just some Canadians. They are hardly just rights and freedoms for English-speaking Canadians.

Canada exists as a nation from Sea to Sea. Nobody gets a chunk of this nation to float out into the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean. Separation is not an option. It all belongs to all of us. And we would be damn stupid not to fight for that.

We have tolerated this nation crap from these petty politicians in Quebec for too long. When they felt so brave as to show off their bigotry, many of us lost patience. When I drive across a bridge from Ottawa, Ontario into Gatineau, Quebec, I do not want to become any less of a citizen.

But I am according to those ignorant politicians in Quebec City. As Pierre Trudeau once put it: I have been called worse by better people.

Pierre Trudeau saw a nation that accepted its bilingualism and its tolerance from sea to sea. He thought it ridiculous for Quebec City to defy Canada’s history in preference for one language over the other. Manitoba was wrong a century ago when it tried to banish French and Quebec is wrong to constrain English. Our languages are part of our individual rights. Nobody takes them away from us.

Just because Justin Trudeau has an election coming where he wants Quebec support is no reason to betray English-speaking Canadians.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Just a voice in the wilderness!

by Peter Lowry

The truth is that blogs get as much attention as just another mosquito in the wildness of Ontario. No matter what the readership numbers, you never seem to reach the readers who can do something. They are too busy to read blogs. And after all, it is just one person’s opinion.

And it is all the fault of those idiots out in Alberta who want to call diluted bitumen ‘oil.’ They are putting diluted bitumen through Enbridge’s Line 5 and calling it oil. That seems to be fine with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Her response is to order the shutdown of Line 5 where it crosses the Straits of Mackinac—the point where Lake Michigan flows into Lake Huron.

Governor Whitmer’s only experience with a pipeline burst is ten years ago when another Enbridge pipeline spilled diluted bitumen into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River in south Michigan. And even after spending close to a billion U.S. dollars plus millions in fines, Enbridge was unable to complete the clean-up. Bitumen in water is almost impossible to clean-up.

If a lake cargo ship dragged anchor through the shallow water at Mackinac, it would be guaranteed to collect a piece of pipeline in the process. If the line was carrying butane gas at the time, it would be the equivalent of our Canadian cows passing gas. It could also be equivalent to a month or so more of or even a year’s emissions from thousands of gas burning cars.

If the line was carrying refined real crude oil or gasoline, the released oil products would float and fast action could contain it. It could be cleaned up.

But if the line was carrying diluted bitumen at the time and the pipeline kept pumping long enough, the diluted bitumen would keep polluting even as it went over Niagara Falls. It could destroy the major source of fresh water for about 40 million Americans and Canadians as it made its way through the Great Lakes.

What the governor of Michigan needs to do is simply forbid the transmission of diluted bitumen through the pipeline. Anything else can be cleaned up.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

When every vote counts.

by Peter Lowry

There are Canadians I know in the Jewish community who tend to come down hard on me if I criticize Israel. It just cannot be helped though when that country’s government, the Knesset, is such an interesting example of proportional voting.  It looks now as though Mr. Netanyahu and his Likud party cannot form a government out of the 13 parties elected in the most recent of five elections in about two years. And people wonder why proportional representation would be a destructive way to elect our governments in Canada.

Quite frankly, proportional representation in Canada would be a disaster. Can you just imagine the potential number of political parties we would have? I can assure you that the Toronto liberals would have no truck with those Tories in Quebec who call themselves liberals. And Albertans would have their own gun-toting right-wing cowboys and cowgirls. I figure there are at least three potential parties currently holding the Bloc Québécois together. And the Ontario rural voters would resurrect the latent farmers of Ontario party.

It is mind blowing to think of the different interests and potential demands of the number of small parties needed to create a workable government. And that, in essence is the problem in Israel. Now, you could argue that we might not have a situation such as Mr. Netanyahu’s, where he has the largest group of supporters in the Knesset, but is also under some form of indictment for corruption at the same time.

You would think that Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud would also suffer from his hard right-wing attitude. You have to admit though that it is extremely difficult to maintain a graceful approach in a region with millions of people who dislike and distrust you. You can assume if he held out an olive branch, he would probably lose his arm along with the branch.

But if you want to balkanize Canada and turn it into a bunch of inconsequential states the size of Israel, just keep on trying to switch us to proportional voting. Think of what can build this country. Think of how we can get the leadership this country needs so desperately.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

A snapshot in time.

by Peter Lowry

Nothing is more foolish than to read the opinion polls of today and apply them to a general election somewhere down the distant road. The polls are nothing more than a snapshot in time that will change and wander until the voters have a chance to have their say. Nobody can forecast the future, even though we all try.

At this point in time, the poll tracker service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation tells us that the liberals might be enjoying a 50 per cent probability of forming a majority if an election had been held. The liberals could have also got that same nice warm feeling from collective incontinence.

The truth of the matter is nobody can predict the outcome of an election if we have not achieved a common agreement that the end of the pandemic is just around the next corner. Until then, the feeling of distrust and frustration with our politicians is palpable and real.

And, despite the suggestion that the conservatives might have had little solace in the six per cent likelihood of them winning a recent election, there is a drift in the polls that is concerning.

I think the recent over-rated, over publicized and over-written budget from our lady finance minister was a colossal waste of time and effort. Selling our provincial conservatives on day care is not the same as negotiating a free trade agreement.

Basically, I think Ms. Freeland blew the opportunity. We all need a little more excitement in our lives and that budget was practically incomprehensible. It was overloaded with too much housekeeping.

That budget needed to be uplifting and give our country something to look forward to besides more diapers to change. It needed to challenge us to excel. And it certainly needed new revenues. We need to get the money from the rich before it leaves the country. The budget needed to kick start new ideas and give Canadians something more to look forward to than the same-old, same-old. It came across to me as the garbage bin where all old ideas from the finance department come to die.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Bitumen is not oil.

by Peter Lowry

If pipeline companies were honest about what they are transmitting around North America, there would be fewer problems with environmentalists. It would also help if reporters were more accurate and editors more diligent There are differences between refined oil products such as the different grades of gasoline and crude oil. There are also serious concerns about pipelines carrying diluted bitumen to refineries for processing.

In the current dispute between governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Enbridge over Line 5, it makes considerable difference. Whitmer’s experience with a pipeline spill is based on the ten-year old spill of an Enbridge pipe that polluted a major tributary of the Kalamazoo River in southern Michigan. That spill cost more than a billion dollars, resulted in huge fines for the company and never could be completely cleaned up. That was a spill of diluted bitumen.

A spill from Enbridge’s Line 5 where it crosses the shallow lake bed of Lake Michigan at the Straits of Mackinac—from which the water flows into Lake Huron and through the Great Lakes and to the Atlantic Ocean—could be catastrophic if it is diluted bitumen.

The difference is that crude or refined oil products float and can be trapped and cleaned up. Diluted bitumen floats for a while until the diluent is washed away and the heavier bitumen sinks to the bottom. This can deny close to 40 million Americans and Canadians their source of water for home use, for farm animals, for industrial use, for leisure activities and for commercial fisheries. There is no doubt that Governor Whitmer has made a case.

And the battle has been engaged in the halls of both Ottawa and Washington. President Joe Biden has already put an end to the Keystone XL pipeline over the objections of Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Closure of Line 5 would have serious impacts on the Canadian economy as well as challenge the American self-sufficiency in oil.

But it is important to recognize that the main fight is over the diluted bitumen, not the refined products. If citizens understood the difference, there is a work-around that could mitigate the economic problems. Enbridge can complete its tunnel solution at Mackinac in about three years, In the meantime, we should tell the whole story so that people can understand the concern.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Green with Envy?

by Peter Lowry

Why cannot Canada’s green party get its act together? There has got to be something more important for that party to do than argue about who is being nice to whom? Elizabeth May is entitled to her retirement—such as it is! She is a tough act for anyone to follow. New leader Annamie Paul has got to stop her complaining and lead.

No doubt, she has more to say about where the greens would like to lead Canada. If nothing else, she can show Canadians where the other political parties are failing us. If I were her, I would go after the other parties like a buzz saw.

Start with the hypocritical liberals. As long as prime minister Justin Trudeau continues to twin the TransMountain pipeline—to potentially flood the Georgia Straits with bitumen from Alberta, that party is vulnerable. Every time Justin Trudeau poses as an environmentalist, his hypocrisy needs to be exposed.

But we also need to laugh occasionally and the conservative environmental plans are a good joke. The entire country needs to see the desperation of conservative leader Erin O’Toole—leading his party where no conservative has gone before. He will not have a carbon tax, when he can call it something else.

And you have to feel embarrassed for those new democrats. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has a heart-felt LEAP manifesto at his disposal and he has no idea what to do with it. That party also has no idea where it is going or how to get there. Tommy Douglas helped establish that party as the conscience of Canadian politics and about two leaders back, it somehow lost its way.

There is no need for Annamie Paul, as green leader, to expect anything more than a corporal’s guard of her party to get elected in the coming election. Even in politics, you should never make promises that you know you can never keep.

But you have a duty to the party to lead. You need to focus on what you can do. You have a voice. You have a clear objective. Be our environmental conscience. We desperately need you in that role.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]