Category: Federal Politics

It was during one of the overly warm days in this past August that are often referred to as the dog days of summer. It had to be a dog day because a reporter with a major Canadian newspaper got away with comparing the royal offspring of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to pedigree dogs. She thought the royal offspring were cuter than dogs but it proved that sometimes you can slip things past the best editors.

While this writer might disapprove of things royal, the pretences of it in Canada and is definitely not a monarchist, he would not compare the royal children to being bred like pedigree dogs. That seems to be going too far.

Mind you, we certainly agree with the writer that the monarchy—in Canada—is a massively expensive, outmoded institution. Canadians get none of the tourism advantages that the royals offer the Brits. We just get to kiss the hem occasionally when they do a walk about here just to remind us that we are part of the foolishness.

The Cambridge’s sire and dam along with their princely and princessly(?) young progeny are on the Canadian west coast to wow us colonials. Somehow it reminds us of an election being due soon out there and guess who will be front and centre with the royals while in beautiful British Columbia.

The wayward writer who started this compares the royals to the Kardashians. The first time this writer asked someone “What the hell is a Kardashian(?)” the follow-up to the answer was “You have got to be kidding!”

But after giving it some thought, we conceded that “Well, we guess the Americans have to have their form of royals, too.”

The best description of Canada’s royals was the newspaper writer’s suggestion that the royals are like a living, breathing incarnation of the Yule log television channel—an “intoxicating spectacle of dullness, as comforting and mind-numbing as it is predictable.”

But the writer (Emma Teitel of the Toronto Star) gets her best quote from Robert Finch, Dominion Chairman of the Monarchist League of Canada. He tells us that “the one thing that remains constant is the Queen. I think that continuity is reassuring for Canadians.”

Maybe dullness can reign but this writer loses interest in the Yule log channel after a very short time of watching.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

Found in the pile on the desk today was an op-ed written a few weeks ago by a former communications director for Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. A quick re-read had us smiling. It reminded us too much of being a young public relations person almost 50 years ago. Back then Hill + Knowlton Canada did not exist but the company was a prestige PR firm in the United States.

At the time, we joined a well-established Canadian PR firm and only found out afterward it was the Canadian affiliate of New York City-based Hill + Knowlton. While we found that the disciplines needed for the larger firm were beneficial to us, the relationship was more beneficial to them than it became for us. It was about four years later that Hill + Knowlton Canada was in operation. We parted amicably.

But the point of this is the recent op-ed by the Hill + Knowlton Canada vice-chairman, Peter Donolo. It proposed putting more money into branding Canada to cash in on the new popularity of the Liberal government and the ‘star appeal’ of our new prime minister.

Donolo thinks that $100 million per year would be a good start to an international campaign to build on Canada’s brand. That is the kind of money that PR firms only get from clients such as trans-continental pipelines. And Donolo wants to seize the moment—if not the day!

Mind you, thinking back, that was what this PR guy was doing for free back in the 1970s. In travelling around the world for the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies at that time, holding news conferences in many countries and getting in good plugs for Canadian scientific research, we always got good coverage for Canada.

While there was some slippage in the perception of our country during the Harper years, Canada has usually been high on the list of likeable countries. There is no question that we are perceived as more exciting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the helm.

But a $100 million might be the Hill + Knowlton budget but Tourism Canada can sell Canada effectively for much less. We have to pitch Canada as a tourism destination. We can do that by bringing the foreign writers and videographers to see what we have to offer. And we have plenty.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

 

The submission by Fair Vote Canada to the special parliamentary committee on electoral reform recently claimed that 9 million voters in the 2015 federal election were unable to make their votes count. This assumption was made because they voted for losing candidates. And they did not even get a lollipop for their trouble.

That is how it should be. Frankly, voting for a losing candidate can be a badge of honour. You might be surprised at the number of times this writer has wrestled over determining just which candidates on the lists of municipal candidates would be losers. At one time we actually went through lists of up to eight municipal offices requiring a vote and carefully voted for a loser in every category. It felt good. There is a pride to standing against the mob.

And we are hardly the first person willing to show disagreement. We used to have a vote for local hydro commissioners in the Toronto area. The way to get elected to the job was to have a P.Eng degree after your name. They finally got that business stopped.

But there is one important item on which Fair Vote Canada (not to be confused with the original Fair Vote organization in the United States) has erred. They worry about the voters who feel frustrated because they live in a ‘safe riding.’ They should stop worrying. There is no such thing as a ‘safe riding.’ Never as long as there is more than one candidate.

Over-confident candidates can often find themselves to be losers. You face new voters in every election. The young come of age and new residents move into the electoral district. District boundaries are redrawn. The incumbent often has an advantage but that can be reversed by a smart opponent.

The concerns for what the detractors of first-past-the-post voting call our democratic deficit include such areas as demographic diversity, pandering to voters in swing ridings, hyper-partisanship, unrelenting party discipline and policy lurches when new governments undo what a new government considers the excesses of the previous government. Why these problems of partisan politics would be different under proportional representation is never really explained.

But what kind of wimps are we encouraging today that we do not want anyone to lose. This writer wants right-wing ideologues to lose. People who do not care about our environment should be losers. And people who attempt to impose their rigid ethos on others should be prepared to lose.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

Into every life a little rain must fall. And there might not be many sunny days this fall for the Trudeau government. After almost a year in office, it is time for some tough decisions. You can hardly please all of the people all of the time. And most of these decisions are landing with a thud on the Prime Minister’s desk.

The most serious of these is the demand for a decision on the twinning of the American-owned Kinder-Morgan pipeline over the Rockies to Burnaby, B.C. Despite our Quisling news media referring to it as an oil pipeline, it is not. It is a high-pressure dual pipeline for diluted bitumen from the tar sands. Mr. Trudeau is being pushed by Canadian business, the People’s Republic of China, the Alberta and B.C. governments and the lagging Canadian economy to get this pipeline flowing.

Some of those same pressures are behind the Energy East pipeline to Saint John, New Brunswick. At least with that decision, Trudeau can delay by making the National Energy Board more of an impartial regulator. It should have happened when he took office.

By December, Mr. Trudeau’s office will have received the report from the special commons committee on electoral reform. The committee is expected to recommend a modified form of proportional representation that will be opposed by the Conservatives MPs unless there is a referendum.

But even more serious are the financial decisions that will require negotiations with the provinces. The first of these is the sharing of Medicare costs. It will not be as simple as having a selfie with the Prime Minister and being sent home with less than your province wants.

This might be a give and take situation if the federal government can control carbon pricing as it really should. What it gives out in Medicare solutions, it might just take back in carbon pricing. Those should be interesting negotiations. To make the negotiations more interesting, Quebec will be expecting the Trudeau government to come up with another billion to help out Quebec-based Bombardier.

One of the more interesting traps for Justin Trudeau is the planning for refugee settlement in the coming year. Any major increases in those figures are going to be welcomed by factions within the Conservative Party as they head for their 2017 leadership convention. While MP Kellie Leitch might have bungled her opener on the ‘Canadian Values’ agenda, there are going to be more attempts by Conservative leadership hopefuls to work that street.

The prime minister might enjoy his rock-star status with the citizens of the countries he visits but like Mr. Harper, he has to remember that politics start at home.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

 

This lady does not beat around the bush about to-day’s lesson. She is from an organization called Leadnow.ca and she and her organization think that our present voting system is broken. That seems to be a common theme among the do-gooders who come out to talk about electoral reform across Canada.

But fear not folks, you can also have a say at public meetings being held by your local Member of Parliament or at meetings of the Special Commons Committee on Electoral Reform. Between September 19 and October 7, the committee hopes to hold 15 meetings in cities across Canada. (The trip to Iqalit, Nunavut is tentative.)

The committee has been much more relaxed listening to academics and other supposed experts in Ottawa this past summer. The school mistress type presentation from Leadnow.ca was one of these ‘experts.’ Like many other opinionated witnesses, she started by stating that her organization’s members think “it is absolutely vital that Canada replace our broken first-past-the-post voting system with some form of proportional representation.”

She further claims that our present system “does not allow people to adequately and fairly express their preferences.” She thinks that under FPTP the people who do not vote for the winner have wasted their votes. Any thinking politician could tell her that no vote is ever wasted as the results of one election can be the basis for the hopes of a coming election.

What FPTP has really given Canada for the this nearly 150 years of being a nation is the stability that makes it one of the best governed countries in the world. Our system encourages national political parties that form around policies and political ideologies that offer a broad choice to the voters.

These national political parties are mainly ‘big tent’ parties that argue policy ahead of elections and build their platforms under the party’s big tent approach. The school teacher presentation claims that Canadians would want more opinions in parliament. She sees it as more fair. She wants all voices to be heard in parliament. We could get that by reforming parliament rather than how we vote.

She also wants a more inclusive parliament. While we can never be totally satisfied with the diversity that is already there, we would have to have hundreds more MPs to accommodate all. And nobody wants to spend the money that would cost.

Proportional representation would see a proliferation of narrow interest and regionally based parties. It would also cause more parliaments without majorities and Canadians would only find out after elections which direction the coalition parliaments want to take.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

It is a waste of time to do opinion polls on what Canadian values might be. For, as sure as you are what those values might be, they will be different tomorrow. And it is the constant flow of immigrants over the years that has contributed, challenged, confirmed and questioned our values.

Growing up in Toronto after the Second World War, the city was a constantly changing and exciting place as the world came to be part of our future. We learned of our world first hand from those whose hearts were still tied to past loyalties. We cheerfully shared our new world with their children.

And the tensions between our friends and their old-world parents were sometimes hard to witness. It could often take more than one generation to become more welcoming of the openness of this Canadian scene.

But some of the changes these newcomers brought were welcomed by us supposedly stuffy Torontonians. Newcomers were puzzled at the Sunday closures with no sports and playgrounds for children. They helped us open Toronto from being a city of churches. They helped end much of the salacious censorship. This new openness ended bathhouse raids and welcomed Gay Pride.

And we discovered the foods of the world. We remember when George’s Restaurant at Dundas and Sherbourne introduced the mix of jazz and pizza to us Torontonians. Spadina and Dundas was the first choice for either pastrami on rye or new hot Szechwan dishes from China. Today you can hardly think of a food specialty from anywhere in the world you cannot get in the city.

At the same time, we always felt sorry for the Canadians in the rural and small town belts across Ontario. They were hardly bothered by the concerns of us city mice. They just never benefitted as much either. Nor did they realize the benefits far outweighed the concerns.

This is why a Conservative such as MP Kellie Leitch in Simcoe-Grey can fearlessly challenge newcomers to Canada on their acceptance of Canadian values. She can play on the bigotry in her rural electoral district because of ignorance of what immigrants bring to this country.

And when a foolish public opinion poll asks Canadians if newcomers should be screened for “anti-Canadian values” you would expect more than half of them to say ‘yes.’ They cannot figure out why we should encourage immigrants who do not want to come here.

You have to remember that Canada is a dream to refugees around the world. It offers opportunity and freedom. It is only after they arrive that they realize that there are trade-offs to those freedoms. It makes newcomers susceptible to manipulation by people who might not have their best interests at heart. It can cause ill will. It takes people of goodwill to resolve those issues.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

These electoral reform committee meetings are more and more boring. The special commons committee sitting over the summer was supposed to give us commentators something to write about. The only problem is that with the usual slump in readership over the summer, this has proved to be a yawn. It provides nowhere need the entertainment value of the presidential race of our southern neighbour.

Blame Prime Minister Trudeau. It was his silly idea to promise to interfere in how we vote in this country. He gave cabinet responsibility for the promise to a wet-behind-the-ears lady from Peterborough. Ottawa watchers are starting to wonder what she will screw up next.

And what is really annoying is that we did our best to help. We were ignored by Ms. Monsef. Obviously no help was needed. She could louse up the portfolio all by herself, thank you. The same attitude was shown by the Liberal committee chair: We will screw it up by ourselves, thank you.

Well, who needs an old greybeard around who has been watching how people vote for over 50 years. We often supported more than a few candidates at once in some of those elections and over the years it added up to a lot of experience.

Speaking of greybeards, we were doubly annoyed when former NDP Leader Ed Broadbent was invited to pitch proportional representation (PR) to the committee. There was no balance to what he had to say. There were no apologies. His were the golden oldies of erroneous beliefs about the supposed benefits of PR.

He told the parliamentarians that there will be more women in politics with PR. He should have been asked why the New Democrats do not already have as many female MPs as male?

There was the usual claim that there is more civility in a parliament with PR. This is because you never know what party you might need to add to a coalition. He must be unaware of the fist fights that have taken place in the PR-elected Japanese Diet.

What is really upsetting though is very few of these academics and politicians talking to the committee understand the possible effects on Canada of some of these voting systems. Canada is a very large country with still a relatively small population. It is our national political parties that really are the glue that hold this country together. We have to do everything we can to keep those national parties working for this country. Anything that jeopardizes those national structures should be anathema to concerned Canadians.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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