Category: Federal Politics

Toronto Star writer Rosie DiManno is the reason better publications have the best editors. And the reason many people do not waste their time on her stuff is that the writing is excessive and pedantic. She must be one of the last newspaper writers around who thinks the one who writes the most words wins.

And Rosie’s diatribe against Justin Trudeau the other day was a good example of excess. It was Rosie trying to march to a different drummer. It was Rosie the hawk. It was Rosie, the supposed expert on desert warfare. She wants Prime Minister Trudeau to explain his stance on air strikes. She seems to be saying that the F-18 war is working against the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Rosie needs to face the facts: There are better experts on warfare and on hockey than Rosie DiManno. She just thinks she knows everything.

Maybe Rosie thinks there should be more but Justin Trudeau made it very clear why he wants the Canadian F-18s to come home from the Middle East. It is the wrong role for Canada. It is an outrageous expense for little gain. And it does not seem to be very effective. Does she still need better reasons?

Just maybe, Rosie, Justin Trudeau believes he should keep his election promises. There is no doubt that many election promises are just to differentiate you from your opposition. If, like Thomas Mulcair, you go through an election saying “Me too!” the voters see no point in electing you. By pointing out your differences, you can sometimes win.

And let us not bring recent events in Paris into the equation. To do that you need to understand the reasons for those attacks. You need to understand the minds and objectives of psychopaths. They could do something, sneaky and vicious and disgusting and sacrilegious. They could not do it openly, in daylight, with honour and with clear purpose. For they want your fear. And they are snivelling cowards and they dishonour the Prophet and His God Allah.

Rosie fails to understand the practical and common sense commitment of our new prime minister. There will be other opportunities to flail him for errors in judgement or commitment. Nobody is perfect. Neither, we suppose, is Rosie.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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

When the victor in a gruelling race gets up from the finish line and gamely trots around the track one more time, nobody begrudges them their victory lap. It is the honour of the victor. It is the same with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He did what only some of us realized he could do. He won. He won the election fairly. He won with integrity. The whirlwind world tour he is currently on is his victory lap. Thank goodness he is young enough to have the energy to do it.

For chair-bound pundits to criticize Trudeau for meeting the obligations of his job is a hollow cavil. He is hardly using these trips he is currently on to satisfy the urges of a tourist such as his predecessor. These are all meetings to show the world that there is a new sheriff in town in Ottawa.

Where Harper would add side trips to his world travels, Trudeau goes there and back. He went to the G-20 meeting in Turkey to meet the key world leaders. They had much to discuss. World events such as the Paris attacks were events running ahead of them.

This week it is the Pacific Rim countries that make up the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) organization. This is his introduction to many of our Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) partners. There are many questions to answer on the viability of the new TPP trade deal.

Trudeau will be back to Canada to meet with the country’s premiers. There are high hopes for Canadian solidarity to take to the United Nations meeting on climate change in Paris the following week.

In between, our prime minister will be heading to London to meet Queen Elizabeth before both of them fly to Malta for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. This is the meeting that some pundits think Trudeau should give a pass.

What the pundits do not understand is that Canada needs to reclaim its leadership role in the Commonwealth. Their votes are critical to Canada’s status in the United Nations that the Harper government denied us over the past nine years. Restoring our position with the Commonwealth is the fast track to building Canada’s status around the world.

Justin Trudeau is setting a tough pace in his first couple months in power. The pundits who think he should ease up be damned.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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

Why is it the people you like who can really screw things up? And what could be a safer job for MP Marc Garneau than Minister of Transport? You would think the former astronaut and head of Canada’s space agency would have more smarts than to pander to the juvenile audience on Twitter. You would also think he would understand the biased opinion of Toronto MP Adam Vaughan and use some discretion.

Marc was acting more like you would expect from the Harper government than a new broom that Justin Trudeau promises.

Decisions about Toronto’s Billy Bishop Airport on Toronto Islands are supposed to be tri-lateral. As things stand the Toronto port authority, Toronto council and Transport Canada have an agreement in place barring jets from the Toronto island airport. This ban is being challenged by Porter Airlines and multi-million dollar studies are underway at the port authority at the request of the city to determine the feasibility of jets at the airport. The studies are specifically on using the new Bombardier C-Series planes that are being developed in Canada. The port authority has yet to report on its findings and city council has had no opportunity to understand the considerations or to vote.

But Garneau has decided to arbitrarily dump on the entire process. And he did it on Twitter as though it was just a casual thought.

Maybe he was getting the entire story from MP Adam Vaughan whose electoral district includes the Toronto Islands and port area. Vaughan might be a favourite choice of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau but what Marc would not know is that Vaughan was one of the infamous group of downtown councillors who try to block anything progressive at city council. Vaughan makes no secret of his blind opposition to any expansion of Toronto’s Billy Bishop Airport services.

As Minister of Transport, Garneau has likely not seen any information from his department on the questions involved in this decision. While newcomers to the political scene in the cabinet have been very good about telling the media that they are waiting for briefings from their departments, Garneau must have missed that suggestion.

It will be interesting to see how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau treats this failure in his cabinet. Getting your foot out of your mouth is tougher for people with grey hair.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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

There will be no pirouettes to mock the Queen when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stops over in London to meet the Queen on his way to the Malta meeting of the Commonwealth nations. Justin Trudeau might be as ambivalent towards the Royals as his father was before him but he has no interest in rocking the constitutional boat in Canada. While Canada needs to rid the halls of Ottawa of the cloying smell of long dead Royals, it is not going to be done by Justin Trudeau in his first mandate.

Maybe it is easier for someone with Scots ancestry, such as your writer, to say screw the Royals. Canada does not need them. It is nothing personal. That false surge of Royal worship under the late and unlamented Harper regime was disquieting. It was nothing more than pandering to a small Canadian demographic of royalists. If we are lucky the Monarchist League will die off with time.

Nobody should be entitled to win the lottery at birth and expect a life of indulgence and false pageantry. The Royals might do wonders for Brit tourism but Canadians have been getting the dirty end of that stick for almost 150 years. We are neither fish nor fowl. We are a monarchy without a monarch. We are a democracy without the cheering. We are a country ruled by elites but with nobody to look up to. We are free but we act servile.

Those of us who love this country fret for her. Our freedoms are fragile. Our military is small while our land is large. Our neighbours to the south and over the polar icecap are powerful. We are but a buffer.

And yet the battle flag of the Maple Leaf is the rallying point, not the Brit Ensign. Let the Brits fight for Queen and country; we are world citizens in Canada. We come together in this land from the countries of the world. We owe no allegiance to old or far away roots.

Sir Wilfrid Laurier, more than anyone else fused the nature of Canada. He took the stoicism of the Brits with the joie de vive of the Quebecois to open Canada to tremendous growth through the 20^th Century.

What Pierre Trudeau saw some sixty years later were the anachronisms of the old Brit traditions in a burgeoning, boisterous and modern Canada. His pirouette in London behind the Queen was never for the Queen. It was for his fellow Canadians. Maybe Justin should learn to pirouette.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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

Interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose made her first mistake last weekend. It was in a reply to something Tom Clark asked her on his West Block show for Global Television. She started her answer with “Well look.” That was former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s favourite phrase throughout his overly long farewell campaign. You knew that the answer following those words would be critical of the question and just more Conservative ideology.

And those words are actually filler that the speaker uses to give some time for preparing his or her thoughts. If you really need time to consider the best answer to the question, the safest political trick is to repeat or rephrase the question. Just try not to do it all the time. It can make you look slow-witted.

What we have noticed most over the past ten years is the seeming inability of Canadian politicians to admit when they are wrong. We can assure you that there is no patent or copyright preventing you from admitting you erred. You are free to admit your screw-ups. Frankly, we think the Canadian public is tired of perfect politicians. Mind you pulling a ‘Paul Calandra’ in parliament and dissolving into tears because you have already made yourself look stupid can be considered overdoing it.

As always, balance in politics is important.

But the most important advice is that by admitting you were wrong goes a long way to proving you are human. We all make mistakes. Take the current kafuffle about bringing in 25,000 Syrian refugees before the end of the year. There have been many doors opened to the Trudeau team to let them off the hook for that promise. Friends and enemies alike recognize that bringing those refugees to Canada is fraught with logistical problems. You have to make haste with caution. Nobody is going to criticize the Liberals if it takes three or four months to complete the mission. The team only needs to show its good intentions and that the promise is in process of being completed.

There will probably be less leeway in the Liberal promise to fix the anti-terrorism bill known as Bill C-51. Many Canadians feel very strongly about the challenges to our freedoms in that bill. The Liberals will be watched closely on its repair as few of the critics could understand their willingness to support the seriously flawed bill.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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

They say that if you cannot beat them, you might as well join them. Obviously nobody has learned their lesson about pollsters. Through most of this past year, we had to put up with polling reports that seemed to have every federal politician except Elizabeth May in the Prime Minister’s role. Why do we listen to people who could not find an elephant in a telephone booth? (Oh damn. Kids today have never seen a telephone booth!)

Can you imagine a stupider way of doing polls than making automated telephone calls to random telephone numbers? How you tell whether the phone is answered by a curious five-year old or a garrulous 85-year old is beyond us? Our approach is to keep pressing numbers at random until that automated voice goes away. If we are not important enough to have a real person call us, you can stick it in your ear.

The silliest aspect of all these different techniques being used by pollsters has been the people would put them together and average them. There was this Internet site called 308 that wandered something like a drunk trying to find his way home.

And then there were the geniuses who were promoting strategic voting. We do trust that you saw that it did not work. One of those strategic voting sites even picked a Green candidate to go with in a riding where the Green got less than five per cent of the vote. Our local riding could have used some strategic voting. Our highly qualified Liberal candidate still lost by 86 votes in the recount.

And now they are doing polls on the ‘honeymoon’ with Justin Trudeau. Can anyone tell us the point of that? What is annoying though is that they throw in other subjects such as proportional voting. Any legitimate poll effort on that subject would first find out if the person knows a damn thing about proportional voting. Then you ask for their opinion on the subject. The first person to be interviewed for that survey should be Prime Minister Trudeau. Does Justin Trudeau even have a clue about the why’s and wherefore’s of proportional voting?

His promise in the election was to study the question. That would be a good idea. This writer will make a point of offering to help. It is very hard in Canada to find a good discussion of voting methods.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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

While the song might have had its origin in the U.S. Bible Belt, the guys in our Canadian Air Force barrack seemed to know at least a dozen verses, including the scatological. Mind you there were advantages for a kid who had been hauled by his mother through four-foot snow drifts in the morning of Toronto’s blizzard of 1944. It was a time before the Yonge Street subway but we were very relieved to find the old wooden Yonge Streetcars with their pathetic little coal stoves still running.

Mother was only two hours late getting to her war plant. The kid had been left at daycare with four workers devising evil things to do to their sole charge for the day.

It was thinking about those who served in the Second World War that brought up this subject. The home front was no bed of roses but nobody was bombing us or aiming guns at us in anger. We survived while many of those who went in harm’s way did not. Canadians served in the air, on land and at sea around the world. We have a clear image of those who served in the North Atlantic and in the battlefields of Europe but we should also remember those who fell in Africa and Asia.

What we probably do not need is fabrications of valour such as the CBC drama X Company that uses a glimmer of truth to build a bastion to fiction. The training camp on the north shore of Lake Ontario was a basic training centre that sent its graduates on to be further trained and operated by the Special Operations Executive in Great Britain and the American Office of Strategic Services. There were Canadians serving with both and the names of those who did not return remain clouded in secrecy and time.

That basic training school for spies on Lake Ontario was also the home of Hydra, the top-secret shortwave relay centre of signals for the British clandestine war effort. Hydra and Canada’s nascent Communications Security Establishment were launched at that time to give Canada a leadership role in collecting and decrypting electronic information. Today, Canada is part of the Five Eyes surveillance by Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States of their citizens as well as those of other countries.

But November 11 is a day set aside to remember those who have served our country in wars from the Boer War to World War I and World War II, the Korean War and Afghanistan. We might not have always known where they were or why they were there but their sacrifice was in our service. And they earned our remembrance.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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

That headline was a casual comment by Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star on Tom Clark’s West Block show on Global last Sunday. She was, of course, talking about politics. It was the old truism that in politics that you do not worry as much about your enemies because you keep them where you can see them. Danger lurks among the people behind you.

It is something that is always there in politics. Last week the “expert” from Toronto who came to take charge of the recount in Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte electoral district warned the scores of people supporting the Liberal candidate not to speak to the news media. There was nothing factual that they could have told the media that would matter. The warning was based on the many times people have fabricated something to make themselves seem more important.

And the more important the politico, the better stories their followers and hangers-on seem able to create.

But those of us whose job it was to deal with the news media for the party and try to get the favourable slant on the story had to deal with both sides. Unlike the corporate schmoozer, the political spin doctor runs ahead of the pack in the same manner as the point man on an armed patrol into enemy territory. You are on your own and you stay alive by your wits.

And you know that the media are not your friends. There might be some you respect more than others but they all have a job to do. If you are not careful, you are just one more road kill on their way to their story.

While there were many hours over the years spent with media people in both the Ottawa and Toronto press clubs, you always made one drink last a long time.

You always felt disappointed though when supposedly friendly politicos tried to use your goodwill with the media to test run their schemes. It has always been interesting in politics that we have to spend far more time talking people out of news releases than writing them. A political person with a good news sense is a rare find.

What is of greater concern today is the continual degrading of news outlets across the country. Conglomerate ownership, emerging use of personal media, changing patterns of advertising and the fluid nature of Canadian demographics forces continued attention. It is a process of life.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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