Category: Federal Politics

Food Fight.

by Peter Lowry

Going into a grocery store today is not the pleasure I used to feel when going into a well-run store. Each visit becomes a brutal series of price shocks. It is the few cents on a smaller can of peas. It is the three dollars more for a pound of butter. And nothing infuriates a senior more than the multiple deals where you get a few cents off if you buy two or three of something or the value-pack in the meat department that can fill your freezer for months. You are not saving it for your old age. How much more old age do you think we still have to endure?

What really annoys me though is the thoughtless promotion of Loblaws over their ‘No Name’ products that they have finally stopped raising the prices on products that they contracted for two years ago. All I know is that Loblaws’ various branded stores are making unconscionable profits to the reported tune of a million dollars a day. This is the conglomerate that was hauled into court in 2018 as part of the infamous bread price-fixing scandal. Remember the $25 gift card that all Canadian homes were supposed to get from the Weston empire. They owed Canadians a hell of a lot more.

If the triumvirate of grocery giants in Canada—Loblaws, Empire and Metro—is anything like the triumvirate of—Bell, Rogers and Telus—good luck to us. We already pay 20 per cent more for cell phone service in most of Canada. Are we about half-way there in heading for a 20 per cent rise in food costs?

I listened to finance minister Cynthia Freeland the other day. She stood there in the House of Commons and told us that we were getting a boost in the GST refund rate for the next five months.

At least she did not spout that garbage from Pee-Pee Poilievre that some other social benefit would have to be cancelled to pay for this federal largess. I am assuming that some of her cabinet colleagues had given her a heads up on spouting conservative dogma.

But I remain adamant that the communications companies, the gas companies and the bastards in the food chain who are making unconscionable profits off Canadians be taxed out of their profits on our suffering.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Pee-Pee, Where Are You?

by Peter Lowry

Our Carleton MP Pierre Poilievre (Pee-Pee) has vanished. Our new leader of Canada’s conservatives is among the missing. After all the hoopla around his winning the leadership, you would think Pee-Pee was in for the duration in opposition. Or is he just sitting at home, enthralled by watching the Rouleau Inquiry on CPAC?

You remember those halcyon days last winter in Ottawa don’t you Pee-Pee? You could go to your home, west on Hwy 417, away from that noisy downtown. Do you remember welcoming your trucker friends to Ottawa. You waved to them from the bridges, you brought them coffee from the parliament buildings. You introduced them to some of your conservative friends. You encouraged them to make downtown Ottawa a living hell for those who lived there. You encouraged them to break reasonable laws for peace and order.

But why aren’t you at the Rouleau Inquiry? Your friend Justin Trudeau is coming. We are not so sure if your buddy Doug Ford from Ontario is coming, maybe. After all, those fuckers, the truckers, are your kind of guys. They don’t like masks. They don’t like mandates for healthcare. They are somewhat ignorant as to how Canada is run but they want to fix it anyway. Just like you.

Pee-Pee, you are such a sleaze! You and your Bitcoin world need a dose of reality. You don’t even understand the role of the Bank of Canada but you think you can lay all the blame for world-wide inflation on Justin Trudeau. If you ever have to get a real job, you should definitely stay away from the world of finance.

And don’t you love the way the lawyers at the Rouleau Inquiry are trying to dump all the blame for use of the emergencies act on former Ottawa chief Peter Sloly. I wonder if former Toronto police chief Bill Blair (now an MP) has noticed that Pete Sloly doesn’t work for him anymore.

You have to admire how Sloly has handled himself during these hearings. He has been giving back as good as good as he has got. Maybe he should have been more attentive to what the Ontario provincial police and RCMP were really doing but considering what he was facing on the streets of Ottawa, I think he deserves a medal.

Unlike Bill Blair, Peter Sloly knew when he had been had and to resign.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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A Peoples’ Parliament.

by Peter Lowry

A peoples’ parliament is an ideal for Canada but reality is that we have an elitist prime minister, a manipulative leader of the opposition and a few other struggling parties. At one time we had more of a peoples’ parliament. This current one is more of a peoples’ parties’ parliament. If we would stop voting for useless party drones instead of the best candidate for MP, we might once again have a peoples’ parliament.

It really was more of a peoples’ parliament back in the days of Justin Trudeau’s father. You could argue that it was not truly democratic but I felt that the openness of the government to input was a great start. One aspect in which I was directly involved was the creation of the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). I started with the group who fought at a liberal party session in Ottawa to let the Board of Broadcast Governors run the CBC but not make the rules for the private television stations and networks that were developing.

The CRTC was created by Pierre Trudeau’s government in 1968 and my MP, Bob Stanbury, was the communications minister at one time. The first time I appeared before the commission was on an application by a cable television company to cherry pick the apartment buildings across Toronto and let the other cable companies have the rest. I had fun with that one and the commission ruling was taken directly from my comments. It also led to a call asking me to produce shows for a young cable upstart called Ted Rogers.

I appeared many times on behalf of consumers before the CRTC and I never had as much fun as in those early days. I think the most successful appearance I made before our parliament was one before the parliamentary committee on finance. I was president of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada at the time but appeared on behalf of Canadians for Health Research. It was in the Railway Committee Room in the parliament buildings. The Montreal based Health Research group were very concerned about some $60 million that had been cut in primary research funding across Canada. The gal running the health research group needed someone who wasn’t going to be too impressed to be speaking to members of parliament. My address was ‘read into’ Hansard that day and I got a call from the prime minister’s office that the finance minister had ‘found’ $60 million and there would be no cuts to health research that year.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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A Shotgun Marriage?

by Peter Lowry

Do we realize that it is the Canadian consumer who is getting screwed in this Rogers takeover of Shaw Communications? It would leave Bell Canada, Rogers and Telus free to rape and pillage in the Canadian 5G world. You can feel the change in attitude already. It is a new arrogance.

I got my first dose of this new arrogance earlier this month. I tend to be a frequent flier on the Bell Canada help line. This month’s bill included notice of a coming rate hike but I was on a four-month quest to get an item taken off my bill. It was a $20 per month charge for a 4K PVR. Bell wants to charge me this $20 over 60 months This is the device that records television programs for you. Whether it is worth $1200, with or without interest, is not the argument. The problem is that I do not have one. I have a working 3K PVR that does the job just as well as the 4K model. I like it because I know it is paid for.

Why Bell sent me the 4K model has been a bit confusing. Plugging it into the maze of wires for remote television and Internet service was the challenge. I failed at plug-in 101. A service representative had to come and rescue my installation.

He was a very knowledgeable person and he quickly noted that the television signal was not plugged into the system hub. How it got unplugged I have absolutely no idea.

His second question was why, for two pre-historic television sets, I had a 4K PVR. He plugged in the old 3K that I was sending back to Bell (despite that I owned it after 60 months of payments). Since I now had a fully functional system, I accepted his suggestion that he take the 4K model back to Bell for me. This is why I have been trying to get it taken off my bill for the last four months.

And that is when I met the new model Ma Bell. She reminded me of my grade three school teacher who terrified us kids. If the principal had not come in and took me up to grade four, that teacher and I where in a fight to the finish.

This was not your usual mealy-mouthed, ‘we are here to help’ type of Bell employee. This was a new tough-minded, ‘Let’s duke it out,’ person. She said I got my 20 bucks back in the Internet credit of $25 per month. She acted as though I was cheating the widows and orphans who have Bell stock in their portfolio. And they were not about to move the credit to the television bill as opposed to the Internet bill.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The Charlottetown Calamity.

by Peter Lowry

The Charlottetown Accord was rejected by Canadians 30 years ago. It was not one of our country’s finer moments. Historians might puzzle over its failure in years to come but to those of us who fought it, we knew we were fighting for our country. The accord was a top-down, inelegant document having its origin in the former Meech Lake Accord. Crafted by federal and provincial politicians, it was considered just an appeasement to Quebec—whose voters turned it down anyway.

The Charlottetown Accord passed by 50.1 per cent in favour in Ontario. It was the newer Canadian’s votes in Toronto that passed the accord. They were impressed that all three parties were supporting it.

That agreement between the parties caused me political problems. I could tell my local MP (a conservative) to get lost but liberal senators and MPs who contacted me were more of a problem. I particularly remember the lengthy conversation with Senator Richard Stanbury, a good friend for the past 30 years. It was especially hard for me to say ‘no’ to Dick when he asked me to support the accord. His concern was with Quebec voting for separation from Canada if we did not pass the accord.

I had a great sense of relief when former prime minister Pierre Trudeau came out of his retirement. His speech at La Maison Egg Roll in Verdun, Quebec was classic. He was still in great form. He held the accord up to ridicule. He saw it as a document that would further divide Canadians rather than bring them together. He was concerned by the attempts in the accord to make changes that would be irreversible without unanimous consent. He was particularly scathing in denouncing the transfer of many federal government responsibilities to the provinces.

Pierre Trudeau might have thought of himself as the little Dutch boy sticking his fingers into the dike. Yet, he turned the tide. And yes, the péquiste leaders in Quebec hated the accord because it was a few steps short of giving them the separation they wanted.

What we can all agree on is that never again will Canadians allow their politicians to control changes to their constitution. It must be done democratically. It involves all of us. We are already warming to the idea of telling Charles III to take a hike as Canada’s sovereign.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Mr. Ford Regrets.

by Peter Lowry

You never know why some people extend regrets to a friendly invitation. Everyone seems to be going on and on about the premier of Ontario going to his lawyers to get him off the list of witness for the Rouleau Inquiry in Ottawa. You would think that in as much as it is the judgement of the Trudeau government that is being questioned here, Mr. Ford would be delighted to help impeach them.

But no. Mr. Ford’s problem is not that he is unhappy maligning the federal liberals. He can do that over his morning cereal. Mr. Ford’s handlers have another problem. It is the problem that he cannot go into the witness box with a teleprompter. Anywhere that Mr. Ford goes these days, his teleprompter equipment goes with him. He has never been taught how to use it properly but it is there for him to keep his feet out of his mouth.

His need for a teleprompter is so serious that one was installed at the funeral for two South Simcoe police officers in Barrie recently. I think it was the first time I had ever seen teleprompter equipment at a funeral. Doug was the only person to use it. Under the circumstances, it was not as hilarious as his usual use of the equipment. He reads a line from one side, turns his head to the other side and reads a line from there.

The fact this is just an inquiry and not a trial, has not changed Doug’s attitude. He knows that his off-the-cuff remarks can cause him trouble. And that might be serious if it got out just how much he was chortling over the discomfort to Ottawa’s liberal politicians.

His other problem is that part of the order for the emergencies act was to solve the needs at the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor. Doug had shot off his mouth about the impact that inconvenient blockade was having on Ontario. I doubt that he has gotten around to thanking the prime minister for including that problem. It was easy enough to resolve, once someone told the Ontario provincial police to clean up that mess.

Talking to Ontario conservatives about what a blowhard Doug Ford can be, I often get the response that he sure is, “But he is our blowhard.”

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Freeland Fails.

by Peter Lowry

Before making her deputy prime minister and finance minister, did anyone check to see if Chrystia Freeland was really a liberal? She does not often talk like one. She sounds more like one of those blue liberals from Quebec. She is heading down the path of former finance minister and, briefly prime minister, Paul Martin.

Paul Martin betrayed the liberalism of his father. The shipping magnate from Montreal was reputed to have promoted the idea in Canadian politics that you campaign down the middle of the road and, once elected, veer to the right.

When an astute observer of political entrails as Chantal Hébert of the Toronto Star says that Freeland is a party-killer, people might start to listen. What Hébert really said was that Freeland is acting like the free-spending party of the early days of COVID 19 may be over.

This is at a time when what Canada really needs is a finance minister who can look ahead and see where this train is really headed.

Yes, some of the so-called financial experts are calling for a recession next year. It just does not make sense to help make the recession happen. And that is where Freeland is heading.

The problem is that we struggled enough to reach the point we are at with COVID. Nobody declared the pandemic over and done with. We are still battling variants. People are still dying. We are still inoculating people.

On top of that, our hospitals across this country are in desperate shape. They had their COVID along with ours. Freeland and her boss are going to have to come to the table with the provinces to help. The federal treasury needs to be raided to support the provinces. We can hardly let some right-wing provincial governments try to privatize parts of Medicare.

And as a favour, I will tell you where Freeland can get some of the money. Get it from the capitalist bastards who reaped unconscionable profits in the past year. They screwed the Canadian public out of that money and now we need some back. They can also make a contribution to the recovery.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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Policing Police.

by Peter Lowry

There is more than one benefit of the inquiry into the use of the emergencies act by Justice Paul Rouleau. It is showing how antiquated and inefficient our approach to policing is across Canada. I can only speak to the situation in Ontario but I have seen police actions across Canada and in other countries and I have seen nothing that I thought was a better solution. To go around saying, defund the police, is a foolish waste of time. As much as I admire many of those men and women who devote their working life to policing, we need to learn how they can serve us better.

And new thinking about policing in Canada needs to start at the top. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are an out-of-date anachronism. It is a poorly equipped quasi military force whose costumes are great for citizenship ceremonies and equestrian displays. They are probably more effective when carrying out their national policing responsibilities in mufti.

Policing of the provinces is a different matter. Ontario and Quebec both have overly politicized province-wide forces reporting to their provincial governments. They both seem to lack impartial judicial oversight. To send out young men and women from the RCMP’s Regina training depot to police other provinces is another serious error.

Growing up in Toronto, I saw many sides of Toronto’s municipal police. And it has always struck me that this is the level of policing that raises the more serious problems. I expect that the Toronto police never fell lower in Torontonian’s estimation than during the G-7 in Toronto in 2010. The police services boards are inadequate and are more a system of protecting the police and ensuring adequate budgets, than any level of management. We put a hell of a lot of responsibility on chiefs of police and not enough on the police services boards that hire and fire them.

And as the Rouleau inquiry in Ottawa appears to be indicating, we certainly need better coordination between the different police forces. We also need better civilian oversight of all levels of policing and faster action to contain circumstances such as blockades that impede the normal flow of commerce and citizens.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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Freeland’s Faux Pas.

by Peter Lowry

Where does finance minister Chrystia Freeland get off boosting one of conservative Pierre Poilievre’s dumber ideas? We thought he was stupid to say that, under a conservative regime, there would be no new expenditures without equivalent cuts in other programs. And now we learn that Freeland is making it a directive to her cabinet colleagues.

There is no shorter route to a recession than for everyone to stop spending. If she does not know that, then she and her advisors should all be fired.

And how can Canadians stop spending? They are being ripped off by the oil companies and the food chain. When unconscionable profits are not stopped by her government, what gives her the right to inflict more harm on us?

Canada needs investment, not recession. We need clean energy infrastructure. We need high-speed electric trains replacing fossil-fueled airplanes. We need electric vehicles of all types. We need inexpensive, energy-conserving homes. We need reasonably priced rental accommodation. We need to protect our farmland.

Freeland doesn’t seem to understand that you learn from the past and you build for the future. She needs to understand that if Canadians want to forsake the future, they need only vote conservative. And if they wanted a further lift back into the past, they could vote for the new democrats.

I believe I read something about her latest foolishness in connection with a speech in Washington. It seemed to ask American lawmakers for their approval of her road to recession. It would certainly get rave reviews from the Trump republicans. Anything that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer seems to please those idiots.

And, frankly, Canadians are sick and tired of the stupid conservative assertion that government spending, during the worst of the pandemic, was the cause of the current world inflation. Government spending had very much to do with how well we got through the first waves of the pandemic and very little to do with the current inflation. The breakdown of the world-wide distribution system, the greed of some industries and world tensions have caused the inflation. And Ms. Freeland and her finance department staff are not helping.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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For Whom Bell Tolls?

by Peter Lowry

It was 22 years ago that Bell Canada spun off Nortel—the jewel in Canada’s communications crown. What Jean Monty of Bell Canada really did was to dismiss Canada’s world leadership in a company that was key to Bell Canada’s future and the future of telecommunications in Canada.

What started out as Northern Electric in 1895, that was a joint operation of Western Electric in the U.S. and Bell Canada and segued into Bell Northern Research and then Nortel Networks. It was the golden goose. Monty, as head of Bell Canada, cut its throat and then cut it adrift. A cornucopia of some 6000 active patents were feasted on by the world’s, mainly U.S., telecoms and computer companies for just $4.5 billion. Nortel Networks officially died in 2011.

What brings this to mind today was the announcement earlier in the week by Finland’s giant telecom equipment supplier Nokia of a $340 million research hub in Kanata, Ontario. And since politicians never learn from their mistakes, the federal, provincial and municipal governments are kicking in a gift of $72 million to get the project moving. And the excuse was that Nokia can provide fifth generation equipment across the networks.

Platitudes, of course, were proffered by the prime minister, the premier of Ontario and the mayor of Kanata. It all has something to do with deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland’s approach to only doing business with friends and allies who are democratic. It seems counter to the old chestnut that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Personally, I think Ms. Freeland is wrong. In present world conditions, I think we need to attempt to restore friendly relations with China. And when Russia gets rid of the foolish Mr. Putin and makes peace with the Ukraine, we should quickly restore our former relations with that country. Canada has proved its abilities in wars and it has proved its capabilities as a peacekeeper. We also need to prove to countries outside of the Americas that we can be a good friend.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

[email protected]