Category: Federal Politics

All the Honourable Persons.

by Peter Lowry

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau must be looking at the Senate of Canada and wishing he had taken a different approach. There is no guarantee that the honourable persons that he appoints to the Senate will have any more restraint than the returning Senator Mike Duffy.

A judge has declared that Duffy’s sense of entitlement was neither illegal nor improper and that he was not guilty of all 31 charges laid by the RCM Police. Since Duffy did not believe he was doing anything wrong, he was therefore doing nothing wrong. It was a ringing endorsement of entitlement. Duffy actually believed that he was entitled to reap the rewards of the out-dated honour system. Prime Minister Harper told him to.

The quandary for Mr. Trudeau is that most elites such as Duffy are known to have a strong sense of entitlement. Elites seem to share that sense of entitlement. They are used to finest foods, luxury accommodation and others paying their bills. If the prime minister wants senators who will work cheap, travel cheap, eat fast food, and skimp on the expenses, he should only appoint poor people. Poor people break into a sweat if they take home a few paper clips from the office.

But he has a committee out there trying to find elite potential senators for him. If he tells this committee that he only wants poor but elite senator possibilities, the committee is going to quit on him. Being from the elite themselves, they probably only know elite people. They are unlikely to know any poor people.

Having been around many Senators during years of working in political environs, we have known many very fine senators who have served this country well. They had the right to be called honourable.

But many of the senate appointments made by Stephen harper showed the contempt that he had for the senate. The judge at the Duffy trial made a point of commenting on the way Mr. Harper treated his senatorial appointments. He appointed some of the worst and he therefore got the worst from them.

While Mr. Trudeau’s approach attempts to distance him from the selection process, as Prime Minister, he is responsible for the final choice.

If he needs help with the new standards, we would be happy to do a cross country tour to find him senate candidates. We would go to the most likely Walmart’s in each province. If you are looking for poor people, that is the ideal place to start.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

The Left’s lost moment in time.

by Peter Lowry

Why do so many political writers believe that groupthink is achieved by constantly rewriting history? Never a fan of Ed Broadbent or the Broadbent Institute, it was still dismaying the other day to read a puff-piece in the Toronto Star about the so-called institute. It was promoting itself for activities planned for the next year.

But why launch self-congratulatory puffery with being excited about the publicity for the New Democratic Party in recent months. Much of that media attention was drawn by the controversy over NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair. While few could have predicted the measure of his downfall at the recent party convention, it was hardly positive attention for the NDP.

Even the publicity at the convention that featured an impassioned plea by Alberta Premier Rachel Notley for support of pipelines for the products of Alberta’s tar sands was far from being in line with core progressive policies of the NDP or anyone else.

And yet the Broadbent Institute writers give the back of their hand to the Leap Manifesto, the first really progressive material from the national NDP in many years. The creators of the manifesto hardly need to be patronized or put down by Broadbent and company.

For the writers of this puff-piece to point at fundraising tactics of the Liberal governments in Ontario and Quebec is a gratuitous smear that reflects badly on provincial NDP efforts in Ontario.

And when they laud the federal government for considering reforming the Canadian voting system, it is nothing more than a plug for proportional voting. To commend proportionality as an effective electoral system for democracies is farcical. It is also an effective system around the world for despots and police state tyrants. It gives all the power to centralized political parties and little to the people. It is a system designed for illiterate voters and separates the politicians from the people who elected them.

And can you imagine these people being proud of the claim that the word ‘socialism’ is the most looked up word in the Miriam-Webster on-line dictionary? All that means is that fewer people are aware today of what socialism really means.

While there is both good and bad among the issues promoted by the Broadbent Institute, the people there seem less and less in tune with the progressive side of Canadian politics. There is definitely little future for people who spend their time trying to rewrite history. Their moment in time might be long past.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

Democracy begins on our street.

by Peter Lowry

It is impossible to sum 50 years of membership in the Liberal Party of Canada in less than 500 words. The problem is that in today’s world if you cannot make your point in fewer words, you are not communicating.

But there is little excuse for the pique we have been in lately. One thing that contributes to this annoyance is the current rewrite of the Liberal party’s federal constitution. That has really left us in the dumps. This constitution fails to understand what liberalism is all about. It fails all the tests of democracy. It is an oppressive and top-down edict that betrays the trust we have placed in Justin Trudeau.

Liberalism begins on our street, in our neighbourhood, in our community and in our town. It does not come down from on high in Ottawa. This is because liberalism involves principles. It is based on the freedom of the individual to learn, to grow, to accomplish and who know their rights. Liberals are caring people who share a love of country without regard for heritage.

Liberalism is built on a strong past but looks to the future. It builds, it invests, it promotes a vibrant land of opportunity for all.

Liberal policy has to have its origins in the electoral districts. It should be brought to regional conclaves and then on to national attention. And nobody should have the right to censor. Bring your objections to the floor.

Liberal candidates have to come from the community. They have to be the choice of the liberals in the electoral district. That is the core of our democratic process. And MPs have to report back to their constituents.

And while Liberalist is a resource of names and information about Liberal Party supporters, it is supported by and the ultimate property of the electoral districts. Please stop abusing it with a constant barrage of fundraising. We certainly need the funds for the party but the party headquarters has to work with the electoral districts on this task.

We should also deal with the question of party membership fees. After many years, on many riding executives, we have never seen a person who was denied membership in the party for lack of a ten-dollar fee. The fee is a minor offset for normal expenses of keeping the party alive in the community. It also signifies a commitment. That means something.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

I can think for myself Justin Trudeau.

by Peter Lowry

Having helped rewrite many constitutions over the years, Justin Trudeau’s proposed constitution for the Liberal Party comes as something of a surprise. Becoming a Registered Liberal—as members are to be described—will require no membership fee, no particular principles and no responsibility other than to support the leader and his Liberal candidates.

No thanks.

That is not why this writer became a member of the Liberal Party of Canada over 50 years ago. We joined to make a contribution. Furthering liberal objectives requires more than slavishly following the party leader. Nor should the rules the party now works under be set by a remote national executive. Liberalism is not a top-down experience.

Why do we not leave that kind of approach to the Conservative Party of Canada? You see where top-down management got that party lately. It angered millions of Canadians.

And neither you, Justin, nor your campaign staff nor the national executive are going to tell us who the candidate will be in our electoral district. We are the best judge of the credentials of Liberal candidates in our town and how they will be accepted by the voters. We know the type of candidate we want to have represent us in Ottawa. You can butt out.

And while you are at it, you can stop straining your mind to come up with changes in how Canadians vote. You seem to lack any knowledge or experience with the issues. You should not make promises to do something without thinking it through.

That is almost as bad as your terrible solution to the Senate. That elitist answer to the problems is surely going to bite you in the ass.

But you also have a lot to learn about running a political party. The best followers are the ones with minds of their own. As any general can tell you, the successful army has smart lieutenants.

It is absolutely ridiculous how this proposed constitution for the Liberal Party gives so much space to the leadership question and a by-the-way mention of Liberal principles. And you hardly leave important questions to be determined by the party’s national executive.

Justin, leaders lead. Leave the details to the smart lieutenants. And one further point: you get what you pay for. If your party membership is free, what is it worth?

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

Yes, you can bet the rent money on Leap.

by Peter Lowry

One of our favourite bloggers insists that you should not bet the rent money on the Leap Manifesto. While agreeing that no gambler should ever bet the rent money, we will take that bet. Despite the naysayer being one of the best read and erudite of left of centre Canadian bloggers, he might lack our insight into the New Democratic Party activists behind the Leap Manifesto.

Leap has its roots deep in the Toronto NDP environment. It is a reasoned and rational answer to where the party was being lead in last year’s election. They held their indignation in check. There are no sour grapes or grapes of wrath. It rejects recriminations and looks only to the party’s future. It is positive and trusting in its direction to handling our country’s needs.

These are the same people who wanted to rebel against Andrea Horwath in the last Ontario election but eased up in sympathy for her weaknesses and lack of an adequate claim on power.

It was not until they saw Thomas Mulcair make the same mistakes in 2015 that they knew something had to be done. Mulcair put power ahead of principles and destroyed the base that the party had built with Jack layton. And they set out to annunciate the party’s needed direction.

As we have mentioned before, the Leap Manifesto does away with the bitterness and anger of the last century’s Regina Manifesto. It posits objectives instead of demands.

It is easy to picture Avi Lewis and his wife Naomi Klein sitting in his mother’s kitchen discussing the manifesto. It is not obvious what encouragement she gave but Michele Landsberg would have been with them every step of the way. The journalist, author would have had excellent suggestions and, along with husband Stephen Lewis, would have had excellent strategic advice.

The manifesto was already available on the Internet and well supported when brought to the recent Edmonton NDP Convention. The strategy was just to propose study by ridings and discussion over the next two years. This is no Trotskyite or Waffle strategy. It forces a decision on the manifesto on every candidate for the party leadership at the time and you can expect that the new party leader, whomever he or she is, will already be totally committed to the Leap Manifesto and its implications for the party.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

Rainy days on those Sunny Ways.

by Peter Lowry

You hate to tell this to our optimistic Prime Minister but occasionally it rains. We were thinking of that when we noted that in the past week, few people really appreciated the government’s feeble, last-minute attempt to manage assisted dying and the Senate was having trouble making the PM’s silly Senate solution functional. The combination was sad but amusing.

The Supreme Court wants a law in place by June that will satisfy the need for control of physician-assisted dying. It does not mean it is a fair law when it seems half of Canadians think it is too restrictive and the other half think it does not go far enough. It just means the people writing the law are too wishy-washy by half!

The only people to benefit from this assisted dying law will be the opposition parties. They will have a field day ripping this piece of legislation to shreds. They can hardly block it but the Senate just might do that for them.

The physician-assisted dying law will have little chance of being passed in a hurry by our dysfunctional Senate. They are too busy arguing whether Justin Trudeau’s selection of an ‘independent’ Senate Leader should have an office budget. Mind you, he and whatever staff he will have are hardly worth close to a million dollars.

Leave it to a bureaucrat such as Peter Harder to get into a fight over his budget. He knows that in Ottawa, if your office budget is less than a million, you are practically a nobody. Where is Harder’s authority if he has no minions to carry out his wishes and bring him coffee?

It just goes to show you how much thought our dear Justin has put into his elitist scheme of things in the Senate. His sad solution is a joke just waiting to implode on him. It is among the stupidest of his promises in last year’s election. (Mind you, promising that the 2015 election will be the last use of first-past-the-post voting in federal elections might also be a mountain too high to leap.)

Without party discipline in the Senate, Trudeau has little hope of any laws moving through that body with any responsible amount of speed. The Conservatives are currently the only caucus left in the Senate and they are hardly in the mood to cooperate with anybody.

Sunny Ways are great but Justin needs to understand: If you play in that barnyard of Ottawa long enough, you will eventually step into some warm and squishy ones.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

It looks good on the NDP.

by Peter Lowry

It is the way an Aussie friend says, “It looks good on them.” It is not said in a mean way but it implies that they deserve their quandary. And the current condition of the New Democrats is not only well deserved but about time. There are no more political virgins for them to sacrifice.

Tom Mulcair is still with them but as a lame duck. How long he will suffer the indignity is for him to decide.

Premier Rachel Notley of Alberta was emasculated by her own federal party. Her opposition is rattling sabres but that is ever thus in that province.

Robin Sears pontificated in the Toronto Star recently that the New Democrats have a penchant for lofty thoughts on environmental issues and socialist values. If that were the case, the only party that would worry about them is the Green Party.

But Sears tells us that it was all about power. Sears believes Mulcair was the natural successor to Saint Jack. Sears believed that Mulcair just had to be there to win the Prime Minister’s job. He does not seem aware that all Layton did while leading the NDP nowhere was luck into the collapse of the Bloc Québécois. The Orange Wave was nothing more than the Quebec one-finger salute to Ottawa and Mr. Harper. The truth be known, Mulcair did rather well in the last election given the circumstances he faced.

But the party, very rudely, dumped him. It was hardly a planned event. His frosty treatment of delegates and a bad speech on Sunday did not help. Muclair was out for the count. The figures were irrelevant.

Sears goes on to insult the Birkenstock Left of the NDP whose faith in the NDP has never waivered. He had this wet dream of Layton-Mulcair in the Prime Minister’s Office and believed it. And then he goes on to complain about the way the convention treated Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.

Actually, Rachel Notley was doing nothing but whining on behalf of the tar sands interests. The convention treated her very politely, rationalized that she had to say what she did, and then ignored her.

And then this so-called NDP pundit, Sears, has the nerve to suggest that the Leap Manifesto is a loony leap. It sounds like he has never read the document. As an ideal, the manifesto would be mild to a Green, a worthy objective to a left-wing Liberal and anathema to the right-wing Conservative. Read it for yourself, before you condemn it.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

The Knives are out for Notley.

by Peter Lowry

After the shoot-out at the Edmonton Corral last weekend, one of the participants was left bleeding in the dust. After the NDP delegates left town, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley is in critical condition and the wolves of the province’s right and further right wing parties are baying for her corpse.

But that seems so unfair! She did her best. She set aside all her better instincts and tried to sell pipelines. And the consensus on Saturday was that she did a fine job. It was hardly her fault that the federal New Democratic Party convention had other fish to fry.

Not that Notley’s position in her speech was tenable. She was trying to commit doublespeak in a manner that the human tongue was never designed to handle. She was lying to herself.

When she spoke of sending Alberta oil sands output to tidewater, she was admitting that the pollution caused by turning it into synthetic oil was too much for Alberta to handle. And how could she justify the seismic damage being done by pumping hot water underground to bring up the deep layers of bitumen sand? The steady growth of settling ponds in Northern Alberta must be outpacing the growth in provincial agriculture.

Actually, Notley might have one small win. She can take solace that the twinning of the American-owned Kinder-Morgan pipeline over the Rockies might still happen. While the environmentalists will fight it every step of the way, they could be fighting the Alberta and B.C. governments as well as the Trudeau government in Ottawa. Trudeau might be better at doublespeak than Notley. And B.C. politicians will sell their souls for a loonie.

But in all of this, nobody seems willing to sell Premier Notley insurance on the longevity of her NDP government. There could even be a shotgun marriage between the province’s Conservatives and the ultra-conservative Wildrose Party.

It seems to this writer that Rachel Notley deserves at least a ‘thank you’ from those Albertans whom she tried to help. Her ranting at the Leap Manifesto will do no good. A manifesto is an ideal, not reality. Notley is training her guns on a puff of smoke.

But frankly folks, bitumen is disgusting stuff that pollutes every step of the way to polluting more when it is used. Our warming world needs to have tar sands left in the ground. It will still take decades more to wean the world off the need for real oil.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

 

The NDP Gunfight at the Edmonton Corral.

by Peter Lowry

Who knew? Premier Rachel Notley in her Annie Oakley role had no choice but play to the home town crowd. Now former New Democrat Leader Tom Mulcair probably wished he was anywhere else.

But the gunfight at the Edmonton Corral was a three-way fight and you had to be careful not to turn your back on anyone. It was the carefully orchestrated Leap Manifesto versus Rachel Notley’s pipelines and Tom Mulcair was caught in the crossfire.

Nobody was making book on the situation with Mulcair. Sure, he let the party down in the election but the New Democrats are a party that gives a leader a second chance. The only question was how could they give a second chance to the guy who wasted the legacy of Saint Jack? Mulcair saw what happened to Andrea Horwath in Ontario when she tried to take the Ontario NDP down the same confused path.

Mulcair’s pathetic efforts to save his job did not reflect well on him. He knew that Notley had no choice but to support the pipelines. She played well to Albertans and to convention attendees with a carefully crafted speech that could have been written by the oil sands people. When Mulcair failed to call her out on the sham while trying to stay on the fence, he sealed his fate.

But they were both out of step with the Leap Manifesto. The manifesto was developed and strategized by the best in the party. It has the signatures of the Lewis clan and is a remarkable read. The NDP is a party built on manifestos. From the days of the Regina Manifesto, with its bitter and inflammatory language, the CCF and successor NDP have searched for the balance between a moral base and power.

The Leap Manifesto weaves a story. It starts with our responsibility to indigenous peoples and gently segues to the environment and then to social issues. There is nothing new or overreaching. It is a manifesto of nothing more than left of centre hopes.

When the manifesto comes to the floor for debate in the party’s 2018 policy and (likely) leadership convention, it could define the party for years to come. The new leader will have no choice but to make the manifesto his or hers.

While examining the forensic evidence around the shoot-out at the Edmonton Corral, another observation comes to mind. It looks as though we are seeing the end of union domination of the New Democrats. The party brain-trust is starting to see the future in social democrat colors.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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

Baby Bonus is not a Basic-Income guarantee.

by Peter Lowry

You wonder where Canada’s Families Minister Jean-Yves Duclos is at when he tells the news media that the Canada Child Benefit can be considered a step toward a guaranteed annual income plan. The new Liberal baby bonus program is just a political bribe that panders to a serious societal need.

But programs such as the Canada Child Benefit are just another layer of government bureaucracy and should be replaced as soon as possible with a more carefully crafted Guaranteed Annual Income plan for all Canadians. The very fact that the tax-free baby-bonus type program was created by the Trudeau brain-trust to compete with the Conservative fully-taxed plan was simply political one-upmanship. Both served recipients badly.

And yet Duclos tells the media that it is simple and easy for families to understand. He also says it is simple for government to administer and yet we are told it is distributed according to need.

A Guaranteed annual income is even easier to administer and it makes sure that no Canadian in need falls through the cracks in a wide variety of assistance and income replacement plans. A single plan represents a huge saving in administrative costs over what we have today.

Duclos is a tenured professor of Economics at Laval University and has done many studies related to income security methods. If anyone can speak with authority about a Guaranteed Annual Income for Canadians, it should be this cabinet minister.

And it is certainly an idea that’s time has come. Both Ontario and Quebec are currently examining the idea on a provincial scale. If it appeals to our two largest provinces though, it would make better sense on the national stage.

One of the major stumbling blocks with developing a guaranteed income plan is the huge amounts of money involved in replacing employment insurance, child benefits, old-age security and supplements, and then there are the monies spent by the provinces in supporting the indigent, the handicapped and those unable to earn an income. Mind you it is replacing those programs and those people we are adding are those that our programs were failing to help.

Canadians are looking for great accomplishments from the Trudeau government and we will hope that the parochial attitude Duclos expresses about provincial rights is not the federal government’s answer. Great accomplishments require leadership, not appeasement.

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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry

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