Federal Politics – Page 137

Morning Line: Liberal Party 3 – 1.

September 10, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Despite the less than accurate opinion polls showing all three major parties in a statistical tie, the trends are moving in the correct directions. There is no question but that the Conservatives are barely going through the motions, the New Democrats are falling off from their peak and the Liberal Party is on the upswing.

Maybe a week before the actual election there will be a further up-tick but at this time we are confident there will be at least a minority Liberal government on October 20. The problem is Quebec. At this time, we are not seeing any clear signs of movement in the province. This is despite the fact that the Bloc seems dead in the water. The Tories in Quebec are lost. And the NDP has nowhere to grow.

But the Liberals are coming on strong in the Atlantic and Ontario. Before the polls close in Central Daylight Time on October 19, a minority Liberal government can probably be assured. If Quebec moves into the mainstream and elects more Liberal members, it could give the Liberals a majority. The upcoming French-language debates might prove the opportunity that the Liberals need.

There are a number of factors impacting the election to-date. They are the English-language debate in Toronto, testimony at the Duffy trial in Ottawa, the fact of a recession in the Canadian economy, and the desperate attempts of refugees trying to escape the wars and economic deprivation of the Middle East and North Africa. All of these events helped to erode confidence in the Conservatives. Canadians are seeing them as mean-spirited, cruel and dishonest.

The English language debate early in the campaign changed people’s thinking on the Conservative attack ads claiming the Liberal leader was too young. With Justin Trudeau more than holding his own, the attack ads have lost traction.

The surprise decision of the Liberals to use deficit financing to recover from the current recession and employment needs also made a difference. It broke the Liberals free of the sameness of the campaign to-date. It was the equivalent of a young couple taking out a mortgage when buying a house and only frightened hide-bound conservatives.

It is the former progressives of the Conservative Party who are deserting Stephen Harper. It is not yet a rout but these voters are more likely to support the resurrected Liberals than the New Democrats.

And the more the Liberal campaign differentiates itself from the newly right-wing New Democrats for the remainder of the campaign, the more seats the Liberals can win.

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Morning Line: New Democrats 6 – 1.

September 9, 2015 by Peter Lowry

There is an old saying that if you start out with a sow’s ear, you are not likely to be able to make a silk purse of it. The current attempts to remake Canada’s New Democratic Party are somewhat similar. You can put your bets on the socialists if you wish but make sure you get the right odds. The forecasted odds of six-to-one should get you a payout of $7 (less track and government cuts) for every dollar you bet.

But in the long-run, that bet would cost you far more. Imagine first if a New Democratic government tried to keep all its promises—especially the one about balancing the budget this year.

Mind you, the promised day-care is the least costly of all. It is like the training programs promised by the Conservatives several years ago. These training programs were promoted incessantly with taxpayer-paid advertising without a single person being trained for over a year. The training programs could only work if the provinces agreed to support them. As no province was that gullible, it took a lot of negotiating for the program to get off the ground. It is estimated by experts in Ottawa that the NDP day-care program would take at least eight years to produce the first new day-care spot.

The most serious problem a New Democrat government would have is where they would find any talent at all with which to form a cabinet. Finding more than ten warm bodies capable of serving at the cabinet table would be an interesting challenge for NDP Leader Tom Mulcair.

What will be the biggest problem for the NDP is getting anywhere near a plurality of members elected. A majority in the next House of Commons will be 170 seats. Looking across the country, the NDP is still counting on the Orange Wave to repeat itself. The sad news for the NDP is that Jack Layton is dead and so is the Orange Wave.

There are many older voters in Ontario who remember the fiasco of the time that Ontario had a NDP government in the 1990s. These older voters are very reliable. They consider it their duty as citizens to vote. They are hardly likely to vote NDP.

There might be a few NDPers elected in Manitoba and Saskatchewan but you would be wise not to bet on a repeat of the last Alberta provincial election. The provincial NDP won because the Wildrose and the Conservatives fought each other to a draw and the provincial Liberals stepped back. That will not happen federally in Alberta.

And that leaves British Columbia. Canadian elections always end in British Columbia. That province does not make silk purses either.

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Morning Line: Conservatives 10 – 1.

September 8, 2015 by Peter Lowry

(Note: Your Morning Line is prepared for each race day to give the wagering public a starting point for their Totalisator bets on the day’s races. The Totalisator then computes the betting pool as bets are received until post-time and then computes the payouts for the win, place, show and combination bets.)

It is becoming increasingly obvious to all onlookers that Canada’s Conservative government’s ‘best-before’ date has expired. With a government rife with false entitlement, failing economics, ruling by ideology and trampling on human rights, Canadians want change. In an overly long election period of their design, the Conservatives are now in free fall.

The only remaining problem is whether there are any candidates for the Conservative Party who are worth paying to go to Ottawa? Key ministers have deserted the ship. There is little talent in the current batch of candidates for the party leader to even select an effective shadow cabinet.

From day one of the campaign, the Conservatives have been touting their economic smarts. They even pre-distributed payments to wealthy households on the assumption that they had their votes. These people might have the government’s money but they know that the government will tax much of it back next year.

And with their supposed economic smarts, why were the Conservatives so reluctant to call a recession a recession? They blame everyone but themselves for the economic problems. They believed that they could put all their investments in the tar sands and left nothing to fall back on. Not even a bank would want to hire these guys.

You would certainly never hire them to protect the environment or teach science.

As things stand at this time, there are few safe seats for the Conservatives east of the Ottawa River. Ontario has 15 new electoral districts this time but few of the new or old seats are safe for the Conservatives. Despite the residual support in the West, there is little likelihood of the Conservatives holding 100 seats in the next parliament.

The pivotal point in the campaign to-date was the confrontation of Conservative Leader Stephen Harper about the graphic scene of a three-year old Syrian child drowned and washed up on a beach. Mr. Harper used the question to promote his war wherein he bombs the sand dunes of the Middle East in his quest to destroy the brigands who call themselves an Islamic State.

If Stephen Harper was really serious in his ill-considered quest for justice in Syria, he would be bombing Syria’s Bashar al Assad. The Syrian President has directed the killing of far more civilian adults and children in the country’s civil war than the late comers of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

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Trudeau: The Liberal’s Energizer Bunny.

September 7, 2015 by Peter Lowry

The Liberal’s Justin Trudeau is turning out to be the potential survivor of this battle for the electoral island. With a third of an overly long campaign now behind us, there is little question that Trudeau’s youth is working for him. As much as the Conservatives have derided that youth on television, most Canadian voters have already decided “What’s so bad about being young?”

It was the same foolish commercials that lowered expectations for Trudeau at the first debate. It enabled him to win the debate without even breaking a sweat.

It is not that Trudeau has not made some mistakes. A few of the candidates he and his team have supported are disasters waiting to happen but, overall, Trudeau has a strong and effective group of candidates behind him.

But Trudeau’s parliamentary caucus was dead wrong on the Conservative’s anti-terrorism bill. The bill fails the smell test. It is unlikely to survive legal challenges and Canada’s concern for individual rights and freedoms. Everybody would understand if Trudeau made a commitment even at this late date to kill that bill as soon as a Liberal government takes office.

Yet he grabbed the nettle of deficit financing and stood apart from his opponents. That was a step that had to be taken. He left Harper and Mulcair in the sad state of saying they would balance the budget when they know they probably cannot.

Trudeau was also the leader we needed when the real horror of the mid-east turmoil was brought home in a simple picture of a dead little boy. That was everyone’s child and Trudeau made clear the need and Canada’s potential to offer immediate help.

It is Trudeau’s energy that is going to win the election for him and the Liberal Party. He is the party’s Energizer Bunny and he can still work a room full of strangers better than any politician we have every seen in many years in politics. It turns out that Stephen Harper’s ill-considered strategic move to call the election early benefitted the Liberal leader more than anyone else.

The election still has eight weeks to go. There will be more issues. There is give and take yet to come. There will be punches and counter-punches. It is Justin Trudeau who has the youthful energy to stay the course and to still be beating the drum on October 19.

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Mulcair: Canada’s pseudo Johnny Appleseed.

September 6, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Tom Mulcair’s role for Canada’s New Democrats seems to include wearing a forced smile and offering band-aid solutions to problems. Other than his strange arithmetic about day care, he is spreading seeds of programs rather than anything that might bear fruit in the foreseeable future. To most voters he remains an unknown, an enigma.

In trying to explain Tom Mulcair, you need to understand his background as a lawyer, a provincial Liberal Member of the National Assembly and as a federal New Democrat in Quebec. He was a prickly environmentalist in the Charest Liberal Government in Quebec and quit the cabinet when he accused Charest of demoting him.

When he won Outremont riding in Montreal for the NDP in a 2007 by-election, he became the only NDP MP from Quebec and Deputy Leader of the Party for Quebec.

It was 2011 when Thomas Mulcair was joined by another 58 newly-elected NDP MPs from Quebec. He was neither mentor, nor leader, nor inspiration to them. They were drawn in by Jack Layton and Tom Mulcair is no Jack Layton.

Where Mulcair did prove best was in his methodical and persistent prosecution of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the House of Commons. The NDP Leader took his role as Leader of the Opposition seriously and he was relentless. This performance was wasted on the majority of Canadians but convinced the news media of his potential for more.

But why we would want a prosecutor as prime minister is a good question?

All Mulcair has proved in the first month of the election campaign is that he is not bothering to add up his promises and yet he is promising a balanced budget on which even Stephen Harper has gone silent.

The real irony of Mulcair’s campaign for the NDP is that it smacks of the confusion caused by Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath’s campaign last year that gave the Wynne Liberals a majority mandate. In trying to replace the Liberal Party’s traditional place in Canadian politics, Mulcair is campaigning further and further to the right of his rivals. He actually sounds like Stephen Harper in some of his more smarmy moments.

But as noted, Tom Mulcair is not Jack Layton. Layton was a socialist, posing as a populist. Tom Mulcair is a right-wing Quebec Liberal posing as a socialist-environmentalist, running as a concerned conservative.

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Harper: Creating a Canada at cross purposes.

September 5, 2015 by Peter Lowry

What Prime Minister Stephen Harper has never understood is that Canada’s diversity is its strength. It makes us strong. It also makes our country hard to govern. We do not fit easily into the strategies of an ideologue. Our provinces are of varying sizes, mixed topography, ethnic and language mixes and even different aboriginal peoples. It is a country that needs strong leadership to grow, enrich and thrive.

Instead of offering leadership, Stephen Harper has caused division. He is a man with no close friends. He has turned on his mentors such as Tom Flanagan of the University of Calgary and Preston Manning of the Reform. He is a lonely but unsympathetic figure.

With a majority government for the past four years, Stephen Harper has concentrated on a mean-spirited agenda. He has given little thought to what the country really needs. He has caused the country and its provinces to work at cross purposes. He has played on ethnicity and pandered to the Diasporas of the Levant and the Ukraine.

Provincial borders need to be open, not barriers to a bottle of wine or a trades person. The problems created by provincial rules are easily negotiated by people of good will. They are the stuff of oppression when there is no leadership.

Canada is a country that grows with the versatility of people from so many lands. When the Harper government slows the process by slashing the budgets of embassies and consulates and concocts more barriers to immigrants and refugees, it impacts the economy of the provinces first.

By promoting Alberta’s tar sands while ignoring the steady loss of manufacturing in Ontario and Quebec, Stephen Harper helped nobody. Without that balance in the country’s export capability, how can its economy handle a trade war with the OPEC countries designed to drive the high priced synthetic oils out of competition?

Leadership is in understanding the concerns of environmentalists. It is in listening to the experts. It is in ensuring that contrary voices are heard. Then, and only then, a true leader can proceed with confidence of the rightness of a decision.

Leadership is also the big ideas. It is in challenging the status quo. It is in seeing the future and what it holds. It is in meeting the needs of a better future.

Stephen Harper has failed all tests of leadership. He uses scapegoats to bear the cost of failure for him. And too often it is all Canadians.

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Electoral reform appeals to losers.

September 3, 2015 by Peter Lowry

It is hardly a surprise that no Canadian government with a majority supports electoral reform. Why would they? It could make them losers. That is why losers such as the New Democratic Party are such enthusiastic supporters. It is why a Liberal Party that ended up in third place in the last federal election is willing to consider electoral reform. And it is why the Green Party and other fringe parties always favour electoral reform.

But if either of the main opposition parties gets a majority on October 19, electoral reform will drop to a very low priority on its agenda. Given the high probability of a minority government though, the country could be into the thick of arguments about electoral reform for the next two years. The losers in that argument could be the people who will have to use the new voting systems.

Hate it or honour it, our first-past-the-post voting system has withstood the tests of time and constant attempts at reform. It is hardly because it is the preferred system under all circumstances but it is the very simplicity of the system that earns it honours. Whether an elected position has 2 or 20 people contesting for the position, we can all follow the voting process, the count and the decision of a winner as the person with the largest number of votes.

But there is no question that first-past-the-post creates anomalies. Combined with distribution of votes, a party can win a majority of seats in parliament with as few as 35 per cent of the votes. That does leave the losers annoyed. They see it as unfair.

But what is fair? The New Democrats and Greens want some form of proportional representation in parliament. The Greens sometimes get close to five per cent of the vote but only one seat in the House of Commons. They want five per cent of the seats.

To get that though, we would need to have some form of proportional representation. It would mean the parties would appoint people to parliament according to their share of the national vote. And if we did that in Canada, you could probably forget about ever having majority governments.

It also means that we would never again have Member of Parliament, we can call our own. They would represent their parties, not the voters. Recognizing this, the NDP opt for mixed-member proportional representation. This means an elected MP would have a vast area to represent but have to sit with appointees in parliament.

But all this argument can be held after the election. The only further comment necessary is that British Columbia and Ontario have both held referendums on the issue. So far it is First-Past-the-Post – 2; Electoral Reform – 0.

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In a country run by a failed economist.

September 2, 2015 by Peter Lowry

What is a political party to do when they find their leader has feet of clay? The mantra of the party was that having an economist running the party, it could survive economic turmoil. What they never considered was that their dear leader could be the cause.

While Prime Minister Stephen Harper defends himself by claiming other sectors are doing well, the fact is that the energy sector is significant but only one of the failing sectors of the Canadian economy. During his time at the helm, Canada has lost a huge swath of manufacturing from ketchup and corn flakes to locomotives and medical isotopes. He has simply failed to lead.

This is the man that made sure there were no environmental impediments to the energy sector while not even meeting with Ontario’s premier when the province was bleeding manufacturing and intellectual property products.

And try if you wish to understand an economist who reviles science. Maybe that is why they call economics the dismal science. Harper and his minions cast the scientists out of Ottawa as though they were zealots casting money changers from the temple. As a country, we are no longer able to even measure our need for button hooks or bath tubs.

Yet this man is leader of the government and he runs it with a heavy hand. He sends our armed forces to make war with people who are not at war with us. He tries to magnify the threat they represent and denies that they are just disorganized brigands cashing in on the wars of others.

But when confronted with the reality of recession, he denies the word. He would not say recession in 2008, when the economy was collapsing in a world-wide melt down. His government survived that crisis by the use of the very economic measures that he constantly derides. The government threw billions into infrastructure for our cities and went heavily into debt to pump up Canada’s economy. With that and the strength of Canada’s banking system, his government was able to come out of that crisis.

But today’s crisis is of his making. He bet Canada’s future on the energy sector and the highly polluting tar sands. You can blame China and Greece for the problems if you wish but it is our country’s ability to overcome those market stresses that he has given away.

There is no question that the real losers in the upcoming election will be those Canadians who do not reject Stephen Harper, failed economist.

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The silence of the pipelines.

September 1, 2015 by Peter Lowry

There is not too much confrontation across Canada these days about pipelines to the sea. With real crude oil prices bouncing around $40 to $50 a barrel, there is not much interest in synthetics from the tar sands. We miss the railings of people such as our favourite closet environmentalist Finance Minister Joe Oliver. He was natural resources minister when Canadians were wondering about the excessive pollution caused by converting tar sands to synthetic oil. Joe Oliver kept any concern for the environment in the closet then and he has never let it out.

Instead the Finance Minister was giving speeches earlier this year about the disgraceful use of social license to block big business. What the minister was really saying was that ‘minority rights be damned, there is profit to be made here!’ Earlier this year, the minister actually complained to a friendly audience at a Manning Centre for ‘Building Democracy’ conference that “social license was forcing governments and business to obtain public support for undertakings that impact the environment, aboriginal rights or issues around potential pollution.”

That potential pollution is not just a maybe. It is a when. You hardly have to be an environmentalist to question thousands of kilometres of old pipelines being converted to pushing highly corrosive tar sands bitumen at high temperature and under pressure from Alberta to the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans or to the Gulf of Mexico.

But now the silence is deafening. President Obama has probably delayed his condemnation of the Keystone XL pipeline until after the Canadian election. There is no need for him to be accused of interfering in our election.

The Harper cabinet has already passed the Northern Gateway pipeline approval but nothing can happen on that front that will further infuriate B.C. citizens before the election. And besides, the supposedly unbiased opinion of the Calgary-based National Energy Board that has been approving these pipelines has yet to be tested in the courts.

Meanwhile Joe Oliver has gone to ground. He has even had to cancel his planned love-ins at certain Conservative (men-only) clubs around Toronto. They would have been possible if the media had not found out about them. The more reliable minister of everything political as well as Defence, Jason Kenney, is now feeding the news media the Conservative line on deficits. He speaks a form of Newspeak that only fools fall for.

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Go home Paul Martin.

August 31, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Nothing grates a left-leaning liberal more than Paul Martin that skinflint former finance minister and briefly prime minister. Once a friend, Paul became a non-person when Prime Minister Jean Chrétien gave him the finance portfolio. He built his reputation for balanced budgets on the backs of the poor, the unemployed, the sick and the elderly across Canada. He proved to one and all that he was no liberal.

It was an understandable situation. Growing up in the very political environment of his family’s home in Windsor and in Ottawa, Paul got away from left of centre politics and tried his hand at business. He had excellent mentors. Maurice Strong and then Paul Desmarais of Power Corporation were tough and experienced business leaders. Young Paul was more businessman than nationalist when he acquired Canada Steamship Lines from Paul Demarais. Martin made the company successful by using flags of convenience, foreign labour and automated loading and unloading of the ships—now built off-shore.

Those of us in the Liberal Party who had so deeply respected Paul’s father took a long time to realize that the younger Paul had come to prefer the approval of his friends in the business world. It was rumoured that he laughingly told them that all you had to do to win in politics is to campaign on the left and rule on the right.

And he was also proved wrong. As has been said before, why vote for a faux Conservative when you can vote for the real thing. Martin lost to Stephen Harper.

For supposed deficit-killer Martin to come out to Liberal functions today to “authorize” the planned deficits of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals is something of a travesty. It is reminding voters of the wrong Liberals.

Canada’s federal Liberals went into free fall after the Martin fiasco as the party searched for its future. It was almost a relief when Justin Trudeau came forward and offered renewal and change under a younger and more engaging leadership. He has made missteps on the road back to Sussex Drive where he was born but the change he is offering is still real.

Trudeau needed the declaration of these deficits to separate him from the New Democrat’s Thomas Mulcair. The NDP insisting that they would balance Canada’s budgets did not convince anybody of anything. They have already promised more than they can deliver and are losing credibility anyway.

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