Federal Politics – Page 103

Choosing a Conservative caretaker.

June 1, 2017 by Peter Lowry

The Conservative Party hierarchy could not have the better fall guy for the next federal election. Whomever came up with the convoluted voting system that was used to choose this poor guy last weekend might have saved the party years in the wilderness.

It will likely be 2023 before the Conservative Party comes roaring out of the west again. Caretaker Andrew Scheer will be expected to fall on his sword after the 2019 election and make room for a more dynamic leader.

The party’s real leader, to be chosen in 2021, could be young enough today to just be completing a dissertation at the right school. There is still much planning to be done to define the challenges and words of this new leader.

In the meantime, caretaker Scheer has his job defined. He has a caucus to cull. Lacking the tools that the job of Prime Minister offers, he has to make sure that the right MPs get the right opportunities to speak for the party. You need to watch and see who the key shadow ministers are that he selects. He has the experience as speaker and in caucus since the loss in 2015 to make the right selections.

In the background, he has to help build the team that will take the party through the cleansing cauldron of the next election in 2019. Knowing how unlikely it is to squeak through a win, it is the selection and placement of candidates that will create the strong base for the next leader. One of these new candidates is likely to be the pre-selected next leader. This leader will need a stronger, more determined and directed caucus.

The only danger for the backroom politicos pulling the strings on this scenario is that caretaker ‘Chuckles’ Scheer gets the bit in his teeth and goes for the long-shot win in 2019. It is unlikely because it is not his style nor is he ready to defy the odds or the party.

And, when you think about it, the only reason Scheer won the Conservative Party leadership was the strength of the social conservative members of the party combined with the anger Maxime Bernier earned from his province’s dairy farmers. Those farmers came close to defeating Bernier in his own riding. It was only Kevin O’Leary’s unwelcome interference in the race that gave Bernier the early impetuous in the voting.

In the meantime, Justin Trudeau can look forward to the 2019 election as a free pass. We should only hope that he makes good use of the time.

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The Infrastructure Bank Conundrum.

May 29, 2017 by Peter Lowry

It has been surprising just how many writers are interpreting the Liberal Government’s Infrastructure Bank as a prop for public-private partnerships (P3). It has also not helped that the government included the legislation in the larger budget bill and that finance minister Bill Morneau has been slow to defend his proposal. When you are seeding it with $35 billion of taxpayers’ money, this is not a corner store operation.

While taxpayers can expect that some of the propositions brought to the bank will be P3-type projects, we have to remember that the political partner in these projects takes the heat for the public value and the private partner takes the heat for the business case. The Infrastructure Bank takes the heat if neither of the partners nor the public are satisfied with the result.

There have certainly been some bad P3 projects in the past. It has been mostly caused by uncaring government’s selling out the public share at fire-sale prices. In Ontario you need only look as far as Toll-highway 407 and Toronto’s SkyDome to see what poor government control of P3 assets can cost.

We can hardly expect someone such as Bill Morneau, with his background, to be a very progressive finance minister. He has been to all the right schools in Canada as well as the dutiful stint at the London School of Economics and he is obviously neoliberal in his thinking.

And he will make sure that Justin Trudeau appoints all the same sort to control his Infrastructure Bank. You can hardly expect them to be dreamers or progressives. The only pressure on them will be to get the money working for us. You can be sure that like all Canadian bankers, they will act as skinflints and curmudgeons. Unlike their private sector banking brothers, they will have to address Canadian-only projects—of benefit to Canadians. That will be the novelty that will pay off for us.

Canadians can expect that the new Infrastructure Bank can attract four to five times its seed funds in foreign and domestic money in the first couple years. That $140 billion to $175 billion is going to make a huge difference in catching up our infrastructure deficit and getting us moving stronger into the future. So get off Bill’s back and help him build this bank for our future.

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The parade of the Conservative losers.

May 28, 2017 by Peter Lowry

A political movement died out near the Toronto airport yesterday. It was the once powerful Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. The new Conservative Party of Canada, heir to the Reform Party, struggles on. It was a time of bad television and bad politics as the surviving party chose a new leader. By a margin of less than two per cent, in complex voting, the social conservatives beat out the libertarians for the leadership.

The convention hall had seen better times. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp tried desperately to make a television event of a fiasco. The presentation of the ballots was stretched past credibility for a computerized count. Political pundits were perplexed and pollsters were puzzled.

As a television personality, Kevin O’Leary again proved that he has no knowledge of politics to pass on to future generations. His choice for leader, Quebec MP Maxime Bernier, led in voting until the final count. The perpetually smiling Andrew Scheer MP is the new leader of the Conservative Party, heir to the lost legacy of Stephen Harper.

Bernier and Scheer were Babel-on-the-Bay Morning Line’s fourth and fifth likely possibilities as leader—which is not bad considering the complexity of the strange voting method and the field of 13. Lisa Raitt and Michael Chong would have been far better choices politically but they could not produce as many new party members as the social conservative candidates. Michael Chong was the only candidate for leader who could have given Justin Trudeau a hard race in 2019. He was the only candidate who actually thought about where the party is headed.

Instead, the Conservatives now have Andrew Scheer to lead them. At least he has more of his own hair than Stephen Harper.

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We can blame Cousin Oliver.

May 26, 2017 by Peter Lowry

It is all Oliver Mowat’s fault. The myopic Father of Confederation had a mainly rural and agrarian Ontario to oversee in the early years of confederation. His picture hangs over our desk today, not as a distant relation but in the form of a preserved and framed, full front-page of a Saturday Globe published in 1893. The lead story recognizes Sir Oliver’s then 21-year tenure as Ontario’s premier.

But Ontario is a very different place today than the Province of Upper Canada that came into the Canadian confederation 150 years ago this July 1. Cousin Oliver would probably have something snarky to say about the picture of his one-time colleague Canada’s first Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald on the same wall. The two of them had very different views of confederation. Our preference is the country as foreseen by Sir John.

Yet, it was Sir Oliver who won those early battles taken to London that defined this country. He saw Canada as an outrider to the British ship of state. He saw us as a supplier of raw materials to English industry. He wanted strong provinces that could dictate to a national government of convenience. The British adjudicators of the time agreed with Sir Oliver.

But Sir John had his revenge. He built the national links of steel that drew Canada into one. His Canada was from sea to sea.

Give Oliver the credit he deserves in building Ontario into the powerhouse of confederation. It was his short-sightedness that left us with a constricting constitution that is so unsuited to the needs of our modern Canada.

Who knew in 1867 that Canada would outgrow the concept of the Commonwealth? Who knew in those early years of confederation that Canada could become a production powerhouse to help change the course of European and World Wars?

Let’s give Oliver the credit he deserves. He was a wily politician. He took George Brown and Edward Blake’s early Liberals and led them for 24 years as Premier of Ontario. He put together a voting coalition that included Catholics and working class voters. It was said about him that he was supported strongly by both the liquor interests and the prohibitionists. Cousin Oliver was a Liberal.

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With thanks to Rona Ambrose.

May 25, 2017 by Peter Lowry

Rona Ambrose M.P. is cleaning out her desk. With a new leader to be chosen this weekend, Ms. Ambrose is packing it in and going home to Alberta. It is a smart move for her at the right time.

And Canadians owe her special thanks for the job she did as interim leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. She took on a dispirited and unruly caucus in Ottawa after the last election. Rona created some order and made sure the job of official opposition was fulfilled. She did it well. She did it with style. She had us almost forgetting the arrogance of Stephen Harper.

Rona Ambrose brought humanity and decency to the job. She did it by giving no quarter to the Liberal government. She was tough when she needed to be tough. She was understanding when she needed to be understanding. She was not there to obstruct but to give thoughtful opposition.

It hardly helped that Rona had to do the job while the Conservative Party was running a 14-ring circus of a leadership contest across the country. That was tough competition for public attention. And the race was opening new and sometimes unintended pathways to impoverished policies.

The confusion caused by the structured voting method chosen by the party, left Rona and the caucus with no idea as to who will wear the leadership ring next week. She will have no ownership of the outcome.

But Rona Ambrose will be missed. Somehow, we sense with her that once a politician, always a politician. Maybe this new amalgamated Conservative party in Alberta will need her. Maybe the Prime Minister has a worthy appointment in mind. Rona Ambrose is an outstanding Canadian.

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The infrastructure bank argument.

May 24, 2017 by Peter Lowry

As a general rule, it seems useless to respond to e-mails from readers that are longer than the original commentary. It also seems useless to try to correct someone’s misconceptions on the subject. Besides, if federal finance minister Bill Morneau is not interested in better explaining his new infrastructure bank to Canadians, why should others feel responsible?

The recent Babel-on-the-Bay commentary on the infrastructure bank drew such a long and obviously annoyed comment from a Nova Scotia reader that it needs an answer.

First, the reader seems to have confused infrastructure funding with public-private partnerships. While an infrastructure bank might decide to support a P-3 project, it handles it as a business case. The deal has to produce a revenue stream that can repay the bank’s investment.

Canada is a particularly attractive place for safe and secure investment today and the infrastructure bank would just be one more investment opportunity. It will attract both Canadian and foreign investment.

The infrastructure bank will be no “give away.” The larger the funds the bank gathers from investors, the larger the projects it will be able to fund for Canada. There might be people who think we should only spend money that we have and not use debt financing but you can also make a very strong case for what infrastructure can earn.

It is definitely not “running up our credit cards.” It has taken more than 40 years for Ontario to get started on inter-city high-speed trains. The availability of funds from the infrastructure bank might just break through some of the political inertia in this country.

It might have been in the heat of the moment that the reader suggested that your writer was not very bright to be promoting something that he considered to just be a give-away to the private sector. Having been chair of the federal government’s very thorough study of the potential for public-private partnerships back in the middle of the 1980s, this writer does know a bit about the subject.

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Why progressive elites are losing.

May 23, 2017 by Peter Lowry

The disappointment progressives have felt with the New Democratic Party over the last couple decades has been something we have argued about but maybe not understood as well as we should. Maybe Robin V. Sears of the NDP put his finger on it the other day when complaining in print about the ease with which Donald Trump took much of the angry underclass away from the Democrats in the American’s 2016 presidential campaign. Donald Trump caught all of us progressive pundits with our pants down.

In Canada, we were still wondering why it was that NDP leader Thomas Mulcair blew away a sizeable lead towards winning the 2015 federal election. He could not even hold on to the seats in his own province brought to his party by former NDP leader Jack Layton.

But when the biggest policy argument of the NDP convention that fired Mulcair was the shallowness of the LEAP Manifesto, we should have twigged to what was wrong. This is a party that is out of touch with the people about whom it is supposed to care. It is a party dominated by unions that hardly know how to serve their own members.

What academics explain as the anger of the white working class is supposedly caused by the job losses to automation and the corporate ability to move production to lowest-wage jurisdictions. Add to that the realization that all politicians lie to them and that nobody can solve global warming and you can see how the frustration is building.

When stressed, voters turn to extremes. In America, we saw the accident of Trump. In Europe, we saw Brexit and the close call with Marine Le Pen. Canada picked the untried and unproven Justin Trudeau.

What the public is looking for are politicians that put principals ahead of promises. That is the lesson that at least Mulcair learned in the last federal election. Who was going to believe a socialist who promised a balanced budget? And where was the decency in arguing about Niqabs?

In the American tragedy of their last election, voters saw what anger, lies and distrust can produce. The only politician who came out of that horrendous selection process with honour was an aging democratic socialist by the name of Bernie Sanders. We should all take a page from his book.

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On the road to mediocrity.

May 18, 2017 by Peter Lowry

Do you know who will be the new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada on May 27? With a third of the votes already in and more trickling in every day, it is a very frustrating guessing game to determine who will win. The problem you are facing is that the people who preferred the losers are choosing the winner. It seems as though the party contest is designed to choose the mediocre.

If you are a CPC member you can vote for one of 14 candidates—even for one who has already withdrawn from the race. Never fear though, on the second series of voting, withdrawn candidates as well as the one with the fewest votes will have their second choices credited with the vote.

There are a number of candidates who will also have their votes quickly lost and their second choices will earn the support. If a voter’s second choice is dropped, their third choice will be credited with the vote. It is something like the spiral that develops around a drain. This system will continue until we have someone with more votes than everyone else combined.

But, hold fast, there is another factor to consider. Not all votes in this system are created equal. The simple way to explain this is that if there are 300 members voting in an electoral district, each membership will be worth 33.3 per cent of a vote. If there are only 50 members, each vote will be worth 200 percent of a vote. It is mind boggling. The weakest electoral districts will have more say per member than the strongest. Does that seem backward to you?

But this is how our Conservatives are choosing their new leader. If you know a Conservative Party member, you might send them a sympathy card.

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The poster boy and the NDP.

May 17, 2017 by Peter Lowry

Charlie Angus meet Jagmeet Singh. No doubt Charlie Angus MP, candidate for the New Democratic Party leadership has met Jagmeet Singh MPP, the newest candidate for the NDP leadership, before, but not likely as a competitor. The only surprise about this meeting is that both these gentlemen are in the same political party.

What is also obvious is that the 38-year old turbaned Sikh is in the wrong party. This is also the problem he has as deputy leader of the Ontario NDP and it will follow him into the leadership race for the federal party. Jagmeet Singh is not a union man. He seems to have had little or no experience with unions. With the ongoing role of unions in the NDP, that could be a liability.

That lack of understanding of the New Democrats and their socialist past by Jagmeet Singh has been obvious for some time. All you have to do is read back through the bills he has presented to the Ontario Legislature during his six years there representing Bramalea-Gore-Malton. You will see a person who is concerned with individual rights more than the collective rights of unions. Jagmeet Singh would probably be comfortable in a more progressive Liberal Party.

It is easier for a guy like Charlie Angus to deal with the problems that the unions present. He stood up to his Catholic church on the question of same-sex marriage and he is used to the rough and tumble of Northern Ontario union activists.

But the double problem for Ontario is that the union movement has been losing ground as well as seeing some key unions (temporarily, maybe) shifting over to support the Liberals. The New Democrats have not handled these problems well and both federal and provincial parties have been losing in the polls. Thomas Mulcair federally and Andrea Horwath provincially have been feeling the shifting ground that they stand on and you could see in recent elections the problems they faced in trying to tell us where their party is going.

While Jagmeet might already have the notoriety as one of the best dressed New Democrats or Sikhs in Canada, most interest will be in what he will say in the leadership about where the NDP is headed. This is a party that is desperately in need of some direction—and the contestants so far, Ashton, Angus, Caron and Julian, have come across as an anemic barbershop quartet.

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Infrastructure bank belongs in Toronto.

May 16, 2017 by Peter Lowry

The good news is that Canada’s new infrastructure bank will be in operation by the end of this year. Despite the complaints of other centres, Toronto is the city where it belongs. The bank will be launched with $35 billion in capital from the federal government and will seek Canadian and foreign investors looking for productive investments in Canadian infrastructure needs.

And that makes a great deal of economic sense. Any objections to it being in Toronto are nothing but sour grapes. And any objections some have to where the government is getting advice are way off base.

It was no surprise that the Chamber of Commerce in Montreal was disappointed the bank was not located there. If the bank was set up to just fund infrastructure projects in Quebec, that would make a lot of sense but since the project covers the entire country, Toronto is the truly international financial centre for it.

And for the Conservative opposition in Ottawa to complain about the influence the world’s largest investment management firm telling the government what is needed is silly. If you want to attract investment capital, who would you want to talk to, a tiddly-winks manufacturer or an organization that already does large capital investment.

An infrastructure bank such as is proposed has to have people who can talk to investors in all parts of the world. It has to attract some of their capital to Canada where it can help meet infrastructure needs. It has to create the kind of revenue streams that will interest these investors. If you are going to invest in electrifying the commuter trains in southern Ontario, you want to be sure that your money will produce a reliable return.

The good news is that people do want to invest in Canada. It is no surprise that a Spanish consortium bought Ontario’s Highway 407, an electronic toll road that constantly earns money for their investors. Drivers have a choice, they can pay the toll and drive relatively quickly across the top of Toronto. They can refuse to pay the toll and sit in grid lock.

Commuter trains, subways, light rail tramways, bus tramways and streetcars all deal in funds for use. We can wait for your taxes to pay for these services or we can have them sooner with the aid of a properly functioning infrastructure bank. What is your choice.

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