Federal Politics – Page 112

The Party is Over?

November 19, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The good news is that we are doing away with organized political parties. The bad news is that we are doing away with organized political parties. And one or both of these statements has the seeds of a problem in it.

The bad news is that non-political people with very large egos and lots of money will be your candidates for office in coming elections. The good news is that we are going to be rid of those rotten politicians who knew what to do when they got elected.

The bad news is that the people running for office will all lie to you. The good news is that you will not have to listen to the truth.

And obviously, we will do away with all that left and right confusion. All candidates will be considered populists. You will only have to vote for people who will cut taxes and build just the roads you need to use. Maybe we can all quit work and go on the dole.

Since nobody is working, the newspapers, magazines and radio and television stations will all stop functioning. A few volunteers will keep the Internet going so that you can read all about your political candidates on their FaceBook pages. The only news will be posted on Twitter. You will have to use YouTube for entertainment.

You can fill in the blanks from there. Did Donald Trump really mean to destroy the Republican Party in the United States? Just as serious, did Justin Trudeau really understand what he was doing when he told Senators, they could no longer be Liberals? Did he have a clue as to the long-term consequences of further disorganizing a highly disorganized Liberal Party of Canada? A leader without an organized party has rabble to gather. You have to keep putting yourself in front of your mob.

And comes the day when you find an arrow in your back, you know that someone behind you wants your position. It creates an endless cycle.

But there are people who understand the importance of organized political parties. They are of the same importance as the organized food distribution systems we have created over the years. They serve a purpose.

Parties provide food for the mind in their policy development. They define our principles. They raise political funds and choose our politicians and leaders. They communicate for them. They make the system work for all.

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Breaking in the new POTUS.

November 17, 2016 by Peter Lowry

POTUS is what the U.S. Secret Service, who are charged with protecting the President, call the President of the United States. The service has a long tradition of doing that job. It is a job that can involve four years of excruciating boredom and three seconds of horror.

It is a job that has been glamourized by Hollywood. Even Dirty Harry (actor Clint Eastwood) had an opportunity to stop shooting bad guys and portray an aging Secret Service agent determined to protect his President.

But the truth is that it is an almost impossible job. The lone, crazed person with a gun is the danger and fits no pattern or obvious threat. The politician in POTUS and the ego demands access to voters, admirers, crowds and nobody knows what danger lurks in a gun-happy environment.

In years of being involved in public events in Canada’s largest city for the Prime Minister of Canada, we learned from the Americans the screening systems, the checks and changes that could keep the event as safe as could be. It was routine to provide information to the Metro Toronto Police and the R.C.M. Police detailed to the event.

One of the first of these Canadian events for us was a large dinner at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel for Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. The party had provided a seat at one of our media tables for the wife. She was dropped off at the Prime Minister’s suite in the hotel after the dinner and speeches while we completed some wrap-up details with the media. (It was years later that the task was referred to as being a ‘spin-doctor.’)

When coming back to the Prime Minister’s suite, the hall door was open and there were only two people there. The protection detail had dropped off the Prime Minister and wandered off. He was sitting on a love seat with the wife, deep in conversation. The man actually blushed when I came up behind them and said, “Hi dear, who’s your friend?”

‘Mike’ Pearson was a gentleman and it was a delight to know him. He was the last Prime Minister of Canada to not have a regular R.C.M. Police detail for protection and the last P.M. to routinely drive himself to work at the parliament buildings. The world has changed very much from those days.

No doubt the Americans will have to increase the U.S. Secret Service detail on the new POTUS-elect. The honeymoon for President Donald Trump might not be too long.

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The rise of the exurbanites.

November 14, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Trump reached for it in America and the exurbanites coalesced behind him. With these new rural voters who have fled the cities and in sync with the traditional American Gothic farmers, he dominated state after state. These people resent and fear our conglomerate cities, the liberal attitudes they promote and the crush of the ethnic hordes. Many of these exurbanites commute to the cities for work and they hate it. The buttons are there; you just have to press them.

It is a supposedly easy route to power. There are two good examples of politicians seeking out those voters here in Ontario. They are the ones working that grungy side of the street. They are MP Kellie Leitch from Simcoe-Grey who is trying to muscle in on the federal party leadership and Ontario PC Leader Patrick Brown, currently representing Simcoe-North. They are here in adjoining ridings in central Ontario, pandering to the same type of narrow-minded, bitter and easy to anger voters.

And if you think Barrie voters are going to elect Patrick Brown in the 2018 provincial election, you are wrong. Barrie was deliberately gerrymandered under the Conservatives to cut the city in half and give each half a solid slice of exurbanite and rural voters. The edge in both north and south Barrie ridings goes to the Conservatives.

Brown’s current problems in Ontario are that unlike Donald Trump, he tries to keep a foot on each side of the street. He is a social conservative and he tries to find the middle ground. Eventually he is going to find that there is no middle ground and make a decision.

Meanwhile, in the safe ground of small town and rural Simcoe-Grey, MP Kellie Leitch is moving forward with her hate-filled Canadian-values campaign for her party’s leadership. Donald Trump is her hero.

Leitch has neither the money nor the ego of a Donald Trump and is hardly expected to sustain this aspect of her campaign under the intense pressure by her colleagues in Ottawa to tone it down. What her fellow MPs are concerned about is not as much as whether she wins the leadership but the very real concern of creating a schism in Canada’s Conservative Party. A large block of the urban Conservative vote across the country are progressive conservatives who pride themselves in not being knee-jerk rednecks. They will never buy into Dr. Leitch’s Canadian-values, anti-immigrant B.S. and you cannot win Ontario without winning any urban seats.

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Watching Justin suck and blow again.

November 13, 2016 by Peter Lowry

One of our favourite progressive bloggers is on the West Coast and he likes to refer to Prime Minister Trudeau as ‘le Dauphin.’ He actually wrote that the Dauphin’s announcement of a $1.5 billion fund to upgrade responses to tanker and oil spills on the Pacific coast was a good start. Start at what?

The Prime Minister actually appears to think that this ‘generous’ plan will make us all amenable to supertankers filled with bitumen plying the waters around Vancouver Island. He thinks that the money will be spent on teaching us how to do a better job at cleaning up spills.

It must have taken Toronto Star pundit Chantal Hébert all of two minutes to figure out the Dauphin was using the announcement to pave the path for the tripling of Kinder-Morgan’s TransMountain pipeline capacity. We are not all gullible here in Ontario. We will be back out there one of these days and we want to find that beautiful City of Vancouver right where we left it.

Reading the announcement of how the $1.5 billion of our tax money is to be spent (over five years) begs the question: “What the hell have we been doing about spills previously?” This is lame.

And who is paying for this program? Does this mean that the tankers carrying the bitumen away from the West Coast get a couple of free spills? How much of this money is being spent to help protect our West Coast? And what is the share required to protect the Arctic and the East Coasts? Who is helping pay the bills there? And God save the Bay of Fundy if TransCanada Pipeline’s Energy East gets approved.

Is exploiting Alberta’s bitumen that important to the Trudeau government? Maybe if the bitumen producers took all the money they are currently spending on television and newspaper advertising, they could spend it on protecting our environment.

But shipping bitumen to countries that cannot afford to be concerned about the environment is hardly the answer. Bitumen is extremely polluting in the process of turning it into artificial crude oil and then further polluting when burnt to create energy. It has far too many strikes against it to be considered for any energy needs.

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Our electoral discontent?

November 12, 2016 by Peter Lowry

There was an item among progressive blogs the other day that said Canada needed to change how it votes so that what happened in the U.S. did not happen here. The writer seemed confused by the way Americans elect their President. The reality Tuesday night was that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over a million votes more than Donald Trump. Trump won the state-based Electoral College. Now that question has been cleared up, why is it so urgent for Canadians to change how they vote?

We should be terribly tired by now with all the knee-jerk demands for change in how we vote from people who have never really thought through how voting works. A change at just the voting stage of the governing process can have major ramifications for how our political parties function and the kind of governance we get. We have enough problems with our political parties today. And it really does not hurt to remind people that under the supposedly safe proportional voting in the Weimar Republic, Adolph Hitler’s Brown Shirts gained control of the German Reichstag in 1933 with just a third of support from German voters.

One of the key benefits of the Canadian first-past-the-post system is that every member of the legislature or parliament has to be elected in a single-member constituency. It was very amusing that one of the possible systems voted on recently in Prince Edward Island was the idea of appointing party leaders to the legislature if their party got more than ten per cent of the vote. The idea was not a winner.

Academics love to give their advice to politicians on a variety of subjects but it does not necessarily mean they have worked with all these systems they suggest. The best advice heard in those elitist sessions of the Special Commons Committee on Electoral Reform was that no system is perfect.

The Canadian problem is not so much in how we vote but in the Constitution of Canada created for us by the British government 150 years ago. We have a non-elected Senate of Canada that is an embarrassment. We have tiny provinces and we have large provinces and we are a very large and diverse country. Before we change how we vote, we need to take a look at what we vote for. We cannot continue to use band-aid solutions to solve critical needs.

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When a tax is a better answer.

November 7, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Canadians have not really joined the dispute between carbon tax and ‘Cap and Trade’ yet. It is of increasing importance that they do. And while nobody really wants to choose taxes over industrial deals, there are good reasons for us to choose carbon taxes.

The primary reason why a carbon tax is the best answer is that the people paying these taxes will be able to follow what is going on. After all, what is easier to understand than a tax? Who collects it, who spends it and on what is public information.

‘Cap and Trade’ works like the con artists’ shell game: Now you see it; Now you don’t. This system is played out between the politicians and industry. It is the government and industry who negotiate the ‘Caps’ and then industry that makes the ‘Trades.’ One major stumbling block is industries that threaten to leave the country if their cap is too expensive for them. There are also industries that will not negotiate.

And how do you feel about politicians negotiating with the people who make campaign donations, offer politicians jobs after their public service and other favours?

What a carbon tax does is level the playing field. Both domestic and imported goods will pay the tax—and so will the consumer of both. Politicians can hardly be negotiating ‘Cap’ and ‘Trade’ deals with foreign manufacturers. Taxes that apply to all are not restricted under international trade agreements. And carbon taxes are easy for everyone to understand.

And what is particularly important to Canadians is that this country has an advantage in using carbon taxes. It is the fact that Canada has 80 per cent carbon-free electricity generation—one of the major carbon problems in other countries. Electricity in countries that use coal to generate electricity would not have our carbon tax advantage.

But the real advantage to a carbon tax is the impact it has on consumers. We will be able to see the difference between the highly polluting source of a product versus the ‘Green’ product. And do not feel badly that we, the consumers, are the ones paying the tax as we are collectively the worst polluters. The only hope to slowing down global warming is for all of us to change our habits. We have to burn less fossil fuels, use less polluting products, build energy efficient buildings and homes.

And with carbon taxes, we can see the progress that we are making in saving our planet.

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Those who forget the past…

November 5, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Those who forget the past are going to screw up our future. Those are not the exact words of the old cliché but they certainly fit. This occurred to us the other day when Transport Minister Marc Garneau announced the Trudeau government’s solution to cheaper air travel—let foreigners own a larger share of our airlines. For a solution, such as that, you need to forget Canada’s past and not care about its future.

Somebody needs to remind our high-flying transport minister that Canada was built and brought together by railways. Maybe we were lucky that Sir John A, Macdonald did not have the airline option. Our first Prime Minister might have cut some corners but he brought this country together with rails of steel. And they have helped hold the country together for almost 150 years.

But we can no longer leave those rails to rust. What our airlines really need is competition and high-speed, electrified railways can offer that competition. Start with the Windsor-Ottawa-Quebec City corridor and the airlines would have the real competition they need.

And there is no question but high-speed transport of goods across this country would be a huge boost to the economy. It would revitalize the west, lower the cost of goods, boost tourism and help improve Canadians’ experience of their entire country.

It is also important to recognize that the electrification process is already starting as commuter rail systems for our large cities are getting in line for electrification improvement. Electric trains on commuter lines can serve more people as they move in and out of stations at a greater speed.

And if anyone was listening to Finance Minister Bill Morneau last week, the money and the labour are part of his plan. Foreign capital will be eager to buy into high-speed trains based on the Japanese and French experience. They have proved that high-speed trains can meet consumer needs.

And the labour is there in large scale immigration. Like the mass migration of past centuries that built vast projects there is the migration parked in Europe and the Europeans can hardly use them all. We need them as consumers, we need them for their talents and we need them to help build our nation.

Maybe Trudeau cabinet members such as Bill Morneau (finance), Marc Garneau (transport) and John McCallum (immigration) should get on the same page and start working on building Canada’s future.

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Public-Private Partnerships revisited.

November 4, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Canadians have had limited experience in public-private partnerships over the years and while one government can launch a public-private project it only takes the next government to destroy the value achieved. The two projects (other than the Canadian Pacific Railway) that immediately came to mind listening to Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s elite panel report last week were SkyDome in Toronto and the Electronic Toll Route Highway 407 around Toronto. These projects offer both the positive and the negatives of public-private endeavours.

SkyDome (where Baseball’s Blue Jays play) was a private sector initiative that caught the imagination of the public. While the Ontario government took much of the credit for its creation, it soon sold off the facility to the private sector at a substantial capital loss.

Conversely, the 407 Toll Route was a government initiative to fund a major capital project for the province. Here again, it was sold off to a Spanish consortium with the first change of government.

Having been chair of the federal government’s Business Ventures Project that studied public-private partnerships back in the mid 1980s, it is hard to say whether we should share the credit or the embarrassment. And since the chair’s job was an unpaid position, we had mixed emotions when the Mulroney Conservatives buried the report.

Today high-flying, jargon-using consulting companies such as McKinsey & Company are making astronomical fees for showing governments the value in using public-private partnerships to achieve societal objectives. Just the other day we saw the global managing partner of McKinsey & Co. standing with Finance Minister Bill Morneau promoting the obvious.

But the serious problem with public-private partnerships is the lack of staying power of the public representatives. No doubt that Morneau is serious in supporting the approach McKinsey is promoting but he has problems with his own cabinet let alone the opposition critics in parliament.

One of the key strategies involved is large increases in immigration in this approach to Canada’s future growth. Without substantial increases in immigration, there is no way Canada would have the economic growth and labour force needed for massive infrastructure projects.

Even a major money earner for private sector partners such as electrified, high-speed rail lines would require more than doubling currently planned immigration levels. Right-wing Liberal Immigration Minister John McCallum might have done a good job on the Syrian file last year but he will dig in his heels at anything that looks like a continued high level of immigration.

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

Revisiting electoral reform.

November 3, 2016 by Peter Lowry

As the special commons committee on electoral reform finishes hearings and prepares to enter into its deliberations, there is a sense of deja vu. Canadians in six provinces have already had a variety of commissions and citizens’ forums study different voting reforms. British Columbia, Ontario and Prince Edward Island have had votes in which the proposed changes lost (twice in B.C.). New Brunswick and Quebec have yet to hold a vote on their proposals and PEI is currently in the process of collecting new votes on five voting options. (We will tell you what we have been laughing at in this vote after the vote is counted next week.)

But these vote debates will never rival hockey or sex as the Canadian pastime. We know that because pollsters tell us that only about half of Canadians care about vote reform.

In keeping with the elitist approach of the Trudeau Liberals, the current federal committee study has been mainly by invitation only. The Ottawa hearings were largely restricted to academics, foreign experts in countries with proportional voting and a number of Fair Vote advocates. The barely representative hearings across Canada were dominated by more academics and Fair vote advocates and Fair Vote supporters from the audiences.

The differences are in the questions asked by the different parties represented on the special commons committee. The Conservatives are open and confused but insist that any change must be approved in a national plebiscite. The New Democrats, Bloc and Greens are all pushing hard for proportional representation in parliament. (It is their one hope of getting more members into parliament.) The Liberals on the committee have mostly demonstrated their lack of experience in elections and electoral systems. It has been a good learning experience for them and we will know what to write on their report cards when we see their report.

But no matter what the committee reports, the ultimate decision will be made by the Trudeau cabinet. It looks obvious that the committee will not report favourably on Prime Minister Trudeau’s preferred preferential voting. It has been made very clear to the committee that the only party that would have benefited from preferential voting in the last election in Canada was the Liberal Party.

But as much as the chorus of so-called experts keep damning our first-past-the-post voting system, they have no alternative that could be expected to satisfy Canadians. There is little question but that we want every vote to count. They already do. It is the trust that we have in the present system that makes the difference.

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The silence of Trudeau’s lambs.

October 30, 2016 by Peter Lowry

You wonder what a writer such as Thomas Harris (The Silence of the Lambs) would make of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s most recent elitist appointments to the Senate of Canada. What is really different in this circumstance is that these people are reported to have actually applied to be appointed. It is a strange type of job application where nobody with experience need apply.

Being offered the job of Canadian senator is like winning one of those scratch tickets that are supposedly offering cash for life. In this Senate, you are paid the salary of a member of parliament and quite generous expenses until you are 75-years old. And you do not have to run for re-election every four years. People used to have to prove themselves in politics for a number of years before getting that kind of offer.

And that is the serious problem with Justin Trudeau’s solution to the senate. He intends to fill the senate with political virgins who, he says, wear no visible party colors.

But he is forcing these very lucky people into a serious learning curve that some of them might not be able to handle. They are a mainly apolitical group being thrown into the ring with real politicians. They are supposed to deal with political questions for Canadians. They are supposedly nonpartisan and they have applied for a job where they are required to make what are partisan decisions.

But the Conservatives and New Democrats in Parliament are starting to come to their own conclusions. Looking at the backgrounds of these appointees brings them to the conclusion that most of these backgrounds are mainly of interest to people of a liberal inclination. It is not that they are Liberals in the political sense but they think like many liberals. Justin Trudeau might not have the experience of a jury consultant but he knows the people he likes.

By side-stepping the political vetting process and leaving it to his elite committee, Trudeau is striving for an appearance of a non-partisan selection process. He has failed in the attempt.

There is a simple explanation. If you ever want to see our prime minister scream and run for a place to hide, just suggest to him that we re-open the Canadian Constitution. He has an almost pathological fear of that process. He saw it as his father’s one failing.

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