Federal Politics – Page 123

Don’t forget Canada’s Minister of Pot.

April 9, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Canada is certainly a slow-moving country. It takes six years to get the right just to have your day in court. How long it will take to actually get a class-action case to court is another matter. The only thing is that as time marches on, we should never forget the role played in the G-20 abuse of human rights by then Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair.

He might now be spending his days checking out the marijuana quality across Canada for the Trudeau government but he is still the person who could have stopped the entire G-20 embarrassment for Toronto.

In 2010, Blair asked the Attorney General’s office at Queen’s Park what law would authorize the police-state measures he was being asked to use during the G-20 meeting hosted by Prime Minister Harper in Toronto that summer. They could not find a reference to support it so the Ontario government gave him the wrong legal reference. He had a responsibility to question the obvious error. He did not. He let the events of that summer weekend in Toronto happen. He failed in his responsibility to his job and to the citizens of Toronto and Canada.

Bill Blair had been the poster boy for chiefs of police across North America. It took the Toronto Police Services Board another five years to get rid of him.

Imagine the embarrassment to the Liberal Party when Justin Trudeau personally picked the former police chief to be the Liberal candidate in Scarborough-Southwest. The embarrassment was felt strongly by progressive Liberals. Justin not only broke his promise to the party but showed very poor political judgement.

But there is a wide gulf between bad judgement and criminal responsibility. Toronto never even got an apology from Blair about the events of the G-20. He dumped the blame on an underling who was supposedly the only senior police presence in Toronto at the time.

We are obviously supposed to believe that Blair and the other chiefs were all enjoying a peaceful weekend at their summer cottages while police cars were being torched in Toronto. It seems nobody thought to interfere with a few stupid anarchists from Montreal rampaging and doing malicious damage on our city streets. Yet the next day, innocent pedestrians were rounded up like cattle and illegally searched and imprisoned.

It was a time of infamy. And Bill Blair has to take his share of the blame.

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The Liberal Party is not a movement.

April 8, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The difference between a political party and a political movement is that a political party has a past, some structure and a future. A political movement follows the person with the best batteries in their megaphone. And it is too bad Justin Trudeau does not understand the difference.

Our Liberal prime minister has once again shown his lack of understanding of practical politics. Born into the cocoon of privilege at 22 Sussex Drive he has seen life from a different perspective than that of the hoi polio. Yes, he has had the realities of life forced on him but not in the way the rest of us worry about our future and the future of those we love. Justin Trudeau understands his ability to affect change but has failed to set timetables and goals for those profound changes he wants to affect.

He also fails to understand the role the political party can play in helping him reach those goals. He does not understand that a movement is usually something you have with your bowels. A movement is quickly forgotten. A political party exists tomorrow. It might not be all you want it to be every day, but it gives you a base.

The political party that existed across Canada when Justin was contemplating his run for the leadership might have been a shaky ship but it existed as a viable framework. It could be encouraged. It could be grown. Justin’s efforts alone added another 300,000 names to the lists.

His efforts also sparked better candidates, more party workers and more effort. And those candidates who thought they could win with social media alone were left by the wayside. The party and Justin Trudeau did a great job in the 2015 election.

And Justin Trudeau needs to recognize the effort the party made. It was the canvassers who did one more block of calls before their day ended. It was the volunteer drivers who got that last group of seniors to the polls. You never expect to win every electoral district but the effort counts.

And now he wants to screw it up. It is like when his father insisted on the slogan ‘The Land is Strong’ in the 1972 election. It left him with a minority after the sweep of 1968. Justin Trudeau needs to understand that he has more to learn from the Liberal Party than the party needs to learn from him.

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There is more than one way to pay your dues.

April 5, 2016 by Peter Lowry

There was an event years ago when the Liberal Party president and this writer were taking a rest after helping set up chairs for a large party meeting. And yes, it was part of our jobs. Because authority in the party comes with responsibility. You do whatever needs to be done.

Justin Trudeau needs to hear what that party president said those years ago. As he caught his breath, he said the it would sure be easier to send the party office a cheque. And it is.

This comes to mind with reading what happened at the Halifax meeting of the Liberal Party’s national board the other day. It seems that Prime Minister Trudeau presented the board with a plan to do away with membership in the Liberal Party of Canada.

Our idealist prime minister seems to think that we are wasting our time worrying about membership fees. He just wants the names of people that the party office can bombard with requests for funds.

But what he does not seem to understand is that the party has worked with a multi-tier system of membership for many years. Electoral district lists have always been sectioned with party members being the smaller list. The larger list was always made up of people in the district who gave money, took signs or were otherwise supportive of the party. With the party’s centralized LiberaList now working (most of the time) Justin seems to think that anybody who does not mind being spammed by the party can have all the privileges of Liberal Party membership.

That party worker who will doggedly go out and canvas for the Liberal candidate night after night is worth more than a lot of $100 contributors. The campaign worker who braves the elements to put up signs, keeps making those phone calls, greets potential workers at the campaign office, does a literature drop or collects money for the campaign is usually a paid-up member of the party. They are people you get to know and trust. They are not elitist. They are your neighbours.

And these are the people you want giving opinions on party policy ideas. They are the people you want at party conventions to listen to ideas and consider resolutions. These are the people you want to choose from for party office. And, most important, these are the people you want choosing the candidates who will run for the party in their electoral district.

Thinking about it, Justin’s father never really understood the Liberal Party either. He just appreciated it. What his son needs to learn is the difference between leading the party and using it.

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So gas up. They lie, cheat and steal anyway.

April 2, 2016 by Peter Lowry

You would think that Canadians would be tired of it. Every time you buy gas at your local gas station you are being ripped off. And yet the other day one of Canada’s major refinery executives compounded the abuse we are taking.

Mark Sherman, chief operating officer for Irving Oil told Global News that the company needed the Energy East pipeline from Alberta to Saint John, New Brunswick to process pipeline content for Canadian consumption. He was complaining about further environmental assessments holding up the pipeline completion.

The guy who runs Irving Oil actually said that the pipeline is as important to Canada as the Trans-Canada Highway or the first national railway. He ignored the comment from the interviewer that the Energy East pipeline is designed for the shipment of bitumen. He refers to it as crude oil. That is an outright lie. Bitumen can only be converted to synthetic oil at the cost of extreme levels of pollution.

But Sherman also lied about the marine export terminal that Irving Oil has offered to build for the Energy East pipeline. The strategy is that Irving would off-load American, Arabian, Norwegian or Venezuelan crude from tankers at Saint John and then send them off full of bitumen for processing in third world countries that do not care about the pollution. This is the first time an Irving executive has suggested that Irving wanted to process any of the bitumen. What the refinery would do with the tons of bitumen slag left over from processing bitumen, Sherman did not say.

This is a serious change of stance by the Irving interests as up until now the company had stayed out of the Energy East controversy.

This must be part of being in the Canadian cartel that rips off Canadians by their gross manipulation of the prices of refined oil products. When it is announced on the radio that there will be a two or three cent rise in the price of a litre of gas and all the gas stations in your area raise their prices, you know something is rotten. It also says a great deal about government’s concern for the consumer.

But nobody needs to take up a collection for the offspring of K.C. Irving. This was the man who took billions out of the fragile Atlantic provinces’ economies and left a will saying that his sons could only have the money if they left New Brunswick and stopped paying Canadian taxes.

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Is Justin Trudeau’s senate legitimate?

March 28, 2016 by Peter Lowry

When a leading Liberal thinker such as Pierre Trudeau’s former Principal Secretary Thomas Axworthy challenges us on how to make the new independent(?) Senate of Canada legitimate, workable and effective, we need to pay attention. The only problem is that in a think piece for the Toronto Star on March 26, Tom writes that Justin Trudeau’s senate solution seems to be based on a fantasy.

Tom credits Helen Forsey (daughter of the late constitutional expert Senator Eugene Forsey) with writing of the ‘fantasy of the future’ in which people who have earned the respect of their fellow Canadians through their work for the common good, are appointed to the senate.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already gone Helen Forsey one better. He has picked an elite committee to recommend elite candidates for the senate for him to choose. He must have figured that it takes an elite to know one. It reminds us of Benito Mussolini’s corporations that he appointed to make Italy’s trains run on time.

But what is legitimate about elitism in any form?

Tom answers his own question about whether this elitist senate is workable. In his article, he questions the organizational structure of this new body that is supposed to be without connection to political parties. He is concerned that the senate will have no choice but to to organize itself into quasi-provincial caucuses. While some might think that a house of the provinces could work, there needs to be a lot of thought about the inequality that this idea would foster.

And that leaves the critical question as to whether this elitist, ‘non-partisan’ senate can work on behalf of Canadians. The answer is probably not. When you ask people who have no experience in the process of creating legislation to study bills, you are asking for trouble.

And besides, Canada already has the Order of Canada as an honours system—such as it is. To also use the senate as an honours system is almost as silly as the political use of the Queen’s Jubilee Medal for political purposes under the last Conservative government.

As policy chair for Massey College, University of Toronto, we see that Tom will be hosting a conference at the college on April 25. The conference will be on the future of an independent senate. Hopefully the conference can help make sure it will be a short future.

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Party conventions are always about money.

March 27, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The first thing learned about political conventions is that it always has to be at a profit. The second is that if there is nothing contentious, create something. You always have to fill the hall.

And filling the hall does not seem to be a problem for any of the three political party conventions planned over the next couple months.

The May meeting of the Liberal Party of Canada in Winnipeg will be a love-in and by far the largest of the events. The party’s Liberalist has been worked hard and thoroughly to turn out the faithful. The Liberals are coming to celebrate their victory last October and to get their kudos. Just look at the registration costs and you can easily compute the profit that goes into the party bank account. And the attendees will get their money’s worth: just line up for your selfie with Justin on the left.

The New Democrat convention in Edmonton at the end of April is the low-budget political event but then it will also be the most intense. Party Leader Thomas Mulcair has been working the party for some time now to try to keep his job. While the NDP has made a tradition of not automatically dumping their failed leaders, they probably should with Tom Mulcair. He might think he deserves another chance in 2019 but the only excuse for the party to keep him is to keep the seat warm and plan for a better leader in 2024. The only problem is that not all the delegates are long range thinkers.

The most interesting of the three party conventions in the offing is the Conservative Party of Canada meeting in Vancouver at the same time as the Liberals are in Winnipeg. This apparatchik would most like to be a fly on the wall in those hospitality suites. The most important topics at this conference are ‘Who’ and ‘How.’

Those are interwoven subjects because you can hardly get one without the other. The legacy of Stephen Harper could be entirely in the hands of former Minister of everything Jason Kenney. Kenney is playing it low key and is waiting to see how the field of potential leadership candidates emerges.

But this will be the leadership kick-off for the Conservatives. Michael Chong MP from Ontario has already launched and working the smaller ‘C’ conservatives. If he is smart(?) Peter MacKay might stay home in Nova Scotia. There is a very broad opening between Kenney and Chong and nature hates a vacuum. There will be more.

Frankly, it is a great time to be a political commentator.

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Impatient for democratic reform?

March 26, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The federal Minister of Democratic Institutions Maryam Monsef must have the easiest job in Ottawa. Sure, she is new to the job and has lots to learn but so far, she has had it easy. Even her announcement of the Senate of Canada appointment process was made easy. She made it last December along with Liberal House Leader Dominic LeBlanc. It was LeBlanc who did the heavy lifting.

Not that the Senate solution was anything impressive. It was an elitist solution to appointing elites. It was a singularly unimpressive temporary solution. The Senate of Canada is an anachronism that exists only because of Canada’s constitutional constipation. If we had a real and hard-working Minister of Democratic Institutions, reform of the senate would be high on the docket list of important reforms.

Like many first and second generation Canadians, the Minister is probably reluctant to touch the monarchy file. This writer is a sixth generation Canadian and he has been fed up with the claptrap about the monarchy since being indoctrinated in Grade 3 of our Ontario school system. There is nothing more meaningless and embarrassing to Canadians than our foreign monarch and her dysfunctional family.

But even if we continue to have democratic institution ministers who are afraid of Canada’s silly monarchist supporters, we have got to do something about the governor general. This is elitist to the extreme to house and use some supposedly patrician Canadian who can only do as the prime minister tells him or her and carry on as though they are performing some important duty. We could hire an actor to do the job much cheaper.

Of course we are all waiting for the democratic Institutions minister’s big scene when she appoints a committee of the House of Commons to decide how Canadians will vote. Her role here is to make Prime Minister Justin Trudeau look good about keeping his promise. That is the promise that 2015 was the last time Canadians would use First-Past-The-Post voting to choose their Member of Parliament.

The minister’s problem is that the Conservatives will agree to nothing and the New Democrats want proportional voting. If the Liberal majority picks preferential voting (indicating your first, second and third choice to create a mock-majority) and no other party supports them, there would be no credibility to a change without a referendum. And good luck on that!

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Don’t bet your pay cheque on this budget

March 24, 2016 by Peter Lowry

To be honest, Finance Minister Bill Morneau, you did nothing wrong. Listening to your preamble on the budget the other day, you said that hope is possible. You talked about the years after the Second World War when the middle class emerged in Canada. We were strong. We were confident. And yet in the 1970s we found that the middle class were just like gerbils. We were running in a wheel to nowhere.

But now Bill and you and your colleague Justin tell us that the middle class is back and we can bet the pay cheque on it. We are just going to spend our way out of our problems.

But just a few questions if we may?

How do you bet the pay cheque if you do not have one? Neither you nor Justin are exactly middle class. You have never had to live from pay cheque to pay cheque. As one astute observer said in Ottawa yesterday, being middle class is a state of mind. People constantly fall out of both ends of that pipe. There are no safeguards

And by the way, you need to know up front that what you did for Canada’s Aboriginal peoples yesterday was admirable. It might have helped if the money was more specifically assigned but it looks like our First Nations could be winners.

But are you not the one who is really gambling? It looks very much like you are gambling on Canada’s ability to join the recovery. If oil is back over US$60 a barrel sooner than expected, will you have not won your bets?

Your budget reads like you gave the list of Liberal promises to the civil servants there in Finance and said see how much of this you can do and stay under a $30 billion deficit. You know how we can tell? There is absolutely no creativity in those figures. The budget is a bloody boring read.

You might have restored the Baby Bonus but you have really done nothing else for the middle class.

You might have raised the desperation level money for seniors with the Guaranteed Income Supplement but you have left most seniors mired in mediocre living because their savings for their retirement are producing nothing for them.

Your budget might have righted some wrongs but you built nothing for the future.

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But this is not about oil!

March 23, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Companies exploiting the Athabasca and Cold Lake oil sands and the pipeline public relations people must be proud of themselves. They have gullible business media writers, television script writers and others in the news business talking about oil. They have all found it easier to talk about oil rather than to explain bitumen.

Just last week Gordon Pape, a person who has made a career of giving advice on building wealth, wrote a column for the Toronto Star about pipelines that illustrates the problem. He was warning people of the economic consequences of saying no to any more pipelines. The only problem is that he illustrates his story with stalled pipelines that are designed to send diluted, heated bitumen through pipelines under high pressure.

And that is the problem. Canadians are being constantly lied to about pipelines. In Pape’s story he claims that Canadians have suddenly decided that economic stagnation is preferable to any project that might—and he puts emphasis on the word might—have a negative effect on the environment.

“Might” is a weak word. If you Google the words “Enbridge, Pipeline, Kalamazoo, Michigan,” you can read for yourself what happens when millions of litres of diluted bitumen are spilled into a river system. It is now more than five years and more than a billion (US) dollars spent to try to restore the area of the spill. It is the largest pipeline spill in American history and the clean-up can never be finished.

Pape speaks positively about the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline proposal for a pipeline to Kitimat, B.C. He says it is not officially dead yet but opposition from First Nations, the B.C. government and the federal Liberal’s pledge to outlaw tanker traffic in the ecologically sensitive region has effectively killed the project.

What Pape neglects to mention is that the proposed pipeline is actually twinned with a smaller diameter pipe that would feed light crude over the Rockies to Bruderheim, Alberta. At the Bruderheim terminal, the bitumen was to be mixed with the light crude, heated and sent back to Kitimat through the larger diameter pipe at high pressure.

Twinning the Kinder Morgan pipeline to Burnaby, B.C. was also a planned conversion to bitumen. And the 4,600 kilometres of the Energy East pipeline is again a proposal for diluted, high temperature, high pressure bitumen transit.

While Pape paints an optimistic picture for pipelines, he asks us if we want to shut down the prospects for future growth in this industry? What we should ask is when will the tar sands people find a method of converting bitumen to synthetic crude oil in Alberta without destroying the province’s environment?

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A guaranteed income for Canadian elites?

March 19, 2016 by Peter Lowry

That was a firm step backward in time for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday. He gave jobs to people who had no need for another job. He gave the title of senator to people who had no need for further titles. He made a mockery of much needed reform.

This is elitism at its worst. It is putting the onus of reviewing government legislation on people known for other accomplishments. While two of yesterday’s elitist appointees had some government experience with legislation, our prime minister expects the rest to suddenly turn their talents to reviewing and debating government legislation in a forum created for another era almost 150 years ago.

We might as well call it what it is. This is just simple cowardice. Justin Trudeau is afraid of the constitutional struggles of his father. He wants to leave sleeping dogs lie. He believes he can change how people vote in this country without constitutional change or referendum yet cannot conceive an approach to senate reform that does not necessarily challenge the constitution.

But the prime minister’s sunny days are going to become rainy days if he does not start paying attention to the problems our constitution creates. Only a foolish egotist believes that a constitution if we write it today can meet the needs of a country more than 100 years in the future. Constitutions do not need to be easy to change but they should never be impossible to change.

Canada exists today with an irrelevant foreign monarchy, an overly powerful prime minister, a moribund senate, a ceremonial governor general, and a collection of unequal and unbalanced provinces–with improperly allotted responsibilities. And the further problems these create could feed this one commentary with subjects for the next 50 years.

But the better short term solution to the senate was suggested quite some time ago by Babel-on-the-Bay. The senate has a political job to do. It therefore needs to be political. It needs people selected by their respective political parties according to the popular vote in each federal election. It would be proportional and unlikely to have a majority. It does not need a majority to do its job. It just needs people who care. There is no need for the senate to be a sinecure. It just needs some new blood after every federal election. And does that not make more sense?

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