Category: Federal Politics

The Blame Game.

by Peter Lowry

It is like making sausage. You really did not want to dig into the process. That is what Justice Paul Rouleau and his ‘Freedom Convoy’ Inquiry has gotten into. The vulgar, but technical enough, term for what happened in Ottawa last February appears to be a CLUSTER-F**K. The list of the guilty appears to cover all three levels of government, politicians and their servants alike.

And nobody can spread the blame more thoroughly than civil servants. They know the nuances of political speak. They know what memos to incinerate and which to discover. They know who should be called as witnesses and who to hide. They know who to impeach and whom to protect.

And why is premier Ford not on the witness list? It was his ministers and his employees who fumbled the blockade at the vital Ambassador Bridge. It was his incompetent minister who ignored pleas from the City of Ottawa. And we can only hope that Justice Rouleau spends some time discussing the disgusting lack of intelligence sharing between the RCMP, OPP and Ottawa Police Services.

But we should have no sympathy for the Ottawa police chief who let his cops collapse in the face of numbers. Any military strategist could have told him that when you don’t have the numbers, you need to use your brain. It is not just there to hold up your brass hat.

And they could have brought in MP Bill Blair. He was the guy who let his expanded force kettle innocent civilians during the G7 meeting in Toronto back in 2010. (And he did not even need an emergency act.)

Even MP Marco Mendicino, minister of public safety, could have been helpful in discussing some legal avenues open to the Ottawa Police Services. Why he was not in the forefront of the federal government response to the convoy is a question Justice Rouleau should ask him.

We were cheering when the emergency act was applied. We watched, delighted, the methods of the enlarged police action. It took only one foray by Toronto’s Police equestrian team to show that horses might be old fashioned but they sure scared those truckers. It was the best television show we had seen since before the pandemic.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The Price of Freedom.

by Peter Lowry

Justice Paul Rouleau provided a very informative and thorough discussion of the why, what and how of the Emergencies Act inquiry last Thursday. It was a step forward in Canada for an act of parliament to require such an inquiry to be conducted after the act has been used.

One can only wish that we could retroactively have had such a clause in force in the previous War Measures Act that was brought into use by Pierre Trudeau in 1970.  I felt very strongly, at the time, that such strong actions should not have been taken. Yet, to be fair, I did feel the act of 2022 was necessary. The difference was that in 1970, I did not feel we had given the Sûreté du Québec time to do its job. In 2022, we gave the Ottawa police service more than enough time to do its job. There was also the matter of the border blockades in Manitoba and Ontario as well as the one that Alberta did get cleared as the act was brought into force by Ottawa.

Along with millions of other Canadians, I was angry with the Ottawa police service for not doing the job they were paid to do. You did not have to be a follower of Canadian politics to be angry at police who were not doing their job. I am sure most of us will be particularly interested in their excuses for failing to act when they knew what was coming and the intent of the convoy.

I might live today in the middle of Ontario but I know every foot (or metre) of the area in Ottawa being occupied by those convoy people in their ignorance. Those loud and obnoxious boors were insulting our parliament, our parliamentarians, our flag, our country and our law-abiding citizens.

This might seem like a strange comment to add to this commentary, but I sincerely hope that this inquiry will not become politicized. It might be too late already. On the very first day, we were told by three provinces that they objected to the utilization of the act. These three provinces with their conservative governments were obviously not there to listen.

We already have too many divisions in this country. In English and French, we desperately need to work together. City and rural, we desperately need to work together. East and West, we desperately need to work together. We have a great country, with endless potential. We have built our country with the peoples of the world. We will only enjoy the bounty of this land if we work together. Shame on our neighbours to the south for being so divided. Shame on us if we follow.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The Next Can of Worms.

by Peter Lowry

Just when you think things are going to quiet down a bit, we have another Ottawa can of worms being opened. Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star tells us that conservative leader Poilievre and prime minister Trudeau want to start duking it out over the convoy to Ottawa last February. It sounds about as useful as the House of Representatives in the U.S. studying the attack on the U.S. Capitol of January 6.

It is not as though there were no acts to be passed this year according to the liberal-NDP pact that is keeping the liberals in power. If the NDP don’t keep Trudeau’s feet to the fire, we will be lucky to see the beginnings of dental care this year. Without that beginning, we could be into an election before spring of 2023.

Neither Poilievre nor Trudeau would come out well in a head-to-head battle. Both men carry baggage. Poilievre just needs an election before his truckers lose interest. Trudeau needs to find someone to rebuild the liberal party. It is going to take time to repair the damage he has done to that venerable party. You can hardly treat all those workers like your personal ATM and keep them to help liberals get elected.

Every month that goes by will spell trouble for Poilievre. He is no Stephen Harper. Harper was always in trouble with women voters but Poilievre is in worse shape. Women simply don’t like him. His token wife can’t help him here.

It really is funny when you think of it. Poilievre has his path to power all mapped out and the fates are not cooperating. He did not realize that he could get stalled at the starting gate. Every day that Trudeau stays in power is a day when Poilievre loses more of his angry entourage. They wander off, they are too impatient. They need disciplined brown shirts to keep them tense and ready for the combat to come.

It is almost the reverse for Justin Trudeau. His strength in the cities is ebbing. He isn’t connecting the way he is capable. He is disappointing the Ukraine diaspora and yet really doing all that he can to help.

Where I think Trudeau is seriously losing ground is with the G-7 leaders. I think they are perceiving him as lots of talk and little action. They soon lose interest.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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We Need Class Actions.

by Peter Lowry

It is the arrogance of the oil industry that really causes the problems. We need generations of citizens building on the work of those environmentalists who have gone before. It worked to end the crimes of the tobacco industry. The oil industry will be even harder to crack. Its pockets are deeper. Its strategies are different.

And the oil industry has volumes of pseudo scientific studies that question its culpability. It is a long way from the oil fields of Texas to the melting glaciers of Greenland.

But a world of science says that greenhouse gas emissions are melting the polar caps. We are raising the level of our oceans. We are upsetting the critical balance of nature. Out of control fires are making it worse. Thousand-year storms are becoming too common. Placid rivers are overflowing. The politicians and their carbon emission targets are getting nowhere. It is action time.

I propose we take the petroleum industry to court for failing to curb greenhouse gas emissions. We need it to happen in other countries, too. It has to become a cause that the courts cannot ignore. We have to attack on all fronts.

We need lawyers with strength in environmental actions. We will probably end up before the supreme courts. The point is that the oil companies are knowingly destroying our planet. Every barrel of crude oil produced is adding to the burden.

We are coming through a world-wide pandemic and the oil companies have been making unconscionable profits. Hopefully we can come up with an ersatz crude that is not based on the crushed remains of long-ago dinosaurs. We will still need a few oil products.

The bugler is sending a message.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Delusions of the NDP.

by Peter Lowry

That did it. The federal new democrats think they can ingratiate themselves with Quebec voters by supporting bigotry and economic deprivation. As Puck said in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “What fools these mortals be.”

Only fools would support Quebec’s despicable language and religious symbols laws. Do they realize the leader of the federal NDP would be barred from a job with the Quebec government? Maybe, as an observant Sikh, growing up in Brampton, Ontario, Jagmeet Singh does not recognize bigotry. And yet in Quebec, he would be knee-deep in discrimination.

The NDP actually voted in favour of a Bloc Québécois attempt to further strip the rights of non-French-speaking Quebecers. The bill would have denied the rights of non-French speakers to Canadian citizenship if the applicant resided in Quebec. In addition, the Bloc bill would have interfered with the rights of Quebec businesses to communicate in English at work with English-speaking employees. It also denied employers and their employees from communicating in any other language but French. This bill was a further insult to Quebec’s English-speaking minority and actually interferes with the ability of Quebec firms to do business outside Quebec.

But the new democrats supported it in a feeble attempt to win praise and recognition in Quebec. They do not understand that the Orange Wave of Jack Layton is long dead.

And Jagmeet Singh is no Jack Layton.

More seriously, the actions of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) are already hurting the immigration needs of the province. This is continuing to hurt the ability of business to find many of the skills needed in a modern business world. It is crushing the ability of the province to penetrate the markets of almost 400 million Americans and Canadians on their doorstep because too many of their employees are unable to communicate with those markets in English or Spanish.

At a time when new tourism markets need to be developed, the province is denying the need for bilingualism. When his unthinking immigration minister Jean Boulet said publicly the other day (in French, of course) that most immigrants to Quebec “don’t work, don’t speak French or don’t adhere to the values of Quebec Society,” his boss premier François Legault said he still wanted him in the CAQ cabinet.

I think Quebec can do better.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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In Sheep’s Clothing.

by Peter Lowry

Nor does the leopard change his spots. The news media seem to think that the new leader of the conservatives in parliament has discovered his nicer self. We can expect that he would want to appear more likeable to the Canadian voter. Nobody said he was stupid. His objective is be prime minister and nobody wins that job overnight.

But what will not change are his narrow libertarian leanings. He will use his wife, his children, hollow concerns, anything to be considered more likeable. His worry for the Eastern Canadians recovering from the ravages of Mother Nature’s hurricane is facile. He is still a mean little man who fails to understand the need for government to aid and protect those less fortunate in the vagaries of life.

Pierre Poilievre preaches that it is every person for themselves. His plan is for a country where only those who strive will survive. It would be a land where the rich will only get richer and the poor and those of advanced age will be forgotten. There will be no sympathy for the sick and cold prisons for the violent.

This is a man who has never held a job outside of politics. He probably has no understanding of the every-day workplace. He would not know the good employer from the bad. He has never experienced the discipline of military service. He fights against gun control and has probably never been on the wrong side of a person who was out of control with a weapon.

Mr. Poilievre seems to have never experienced trauma. He appears to have no grasp of the economics he pretends to critique. He must have been advised to button up on his support for cryptocurrencies. Maybe, some day, he will be able to take a tour of the Bank of Canada and learn how it functions, outside of direct government control.

A reader suggested the other day that Mr. Poilievre is a parasite on the body politic. I think such comments are counter productive. He is a person of limited experience. He does not seem to want to help protect our world’s environment and its safety for human habitation. He seems a bookish type. I wonder if he has ever read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies?

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The Sweet Spot.

by Peter Lowry

When the new leader of Canada’s conservatives made his debut confrontation across the aisle from the prime minister, it was more of a touchy-feely session than a gun fight in some corral. It was a soft approach, testing old punch lines and old arguments. It was if they were each looking for the sweet spot before drawing the knives for real.

If that opening was “playing nice” as columnist Chantal Hébert described the occasion, the two will need better script writers over the coming three years. Pierre Poilievre’s problem is that he is going to have to hone closer to the truth. He wisely stuck to the tired but ever-present conservative shibboleths such as the federal carbon tax. His plaint over possible tax increases was just standard conservative cant and was hardly even worthy of an answer.

Hébert’s opinion that the liberals will stand firm on the carbon tax to emphasize the parties’ different stands on the environment, makes sense. Poilievre might be representing an Ottawa area constituency but his home is Alberta. He is pro-pipelines, pro-tar sands and a climate change denier.

Poilievre’s problem is that he has to grow the sweep of the conservative party with his 300,000 malcontent supporters among 37 million Canadians. And he is hardly going to do that with arguments for government meanness and frugality. If he thinks that, he just does not understand the anger that surges across this troubled and fragile world. He can use that anger only if he can identify the causes. Just 300,000 malcontents might be too small a sample.

We could all feel more confident if the standard bearer on the other side of the aisle was not Justin Trudeau. No doubt there were many groans across Canada recently when Trudeau told us that he wants to lead his liberals into the next election. He should check to find how many of these so-called liberals are enthusiastic about that prospect. He should also check to see why Donald Trump and his “deplorables” won the American presidency in the 2016 election in that country.

The facts are that real liberals need a real liberal leader.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Poilievre’s ‘Woke.’

by Peter Lowry

The word ‘woke’ is not all that new. Its use is taking a roller-coaster ride. Young people tend to use it in the sense of becoming aware of societal errors of the past. Right-wing religious writers have usurped the word ‘wokeness’ to be a label for a supposably baseless new religion attempting to supplant the traditional Christian religions. It must have cost many of us some puzzlement when conservative leader Pierre Poilievre accused the Trudeau government of entering a radical woke coalition with the new democrats.

It was this suggestion that there could be a radical wokeness that left me confused. There was nothing new in the arrangement between the two parties. Our present prime minister’s father and the NDP’s David Lewis had entered into a similar arrangement in the 1970s.

I suppose, if I had cared, I could have contacted the conservative leader’s office to find out what he meant. I wrote it off as just a weak attempt to impress a younger audience. I expect it is just another example of Mr. Poilievre’s uncaring glibness when attacking others.

When political observers write about the relative strengths of the party leaders, they tend to denigrate Trudeau’s grasp of finance while giving Poilievre a pass. They even hope that finance minister Christa Freeland can fill the void. They tend to forget the wild swings Poilievre makes at subjects such as cryptocurrencies and the governance of the Bank of Canada.

Whether Freeland is capable of complimenting Trudeau’s strong advocacy in controlling climate change and providing for the social needs of Canadians has yet to be determined. Whether there is a need for her to backstop Trudeau in the way Paul Martin supported Jean Chrétien, I doubt it. How soon we forget that Paul Martin’s far right actions as finance minister in the 1990s cost the liberal party dearly. Many of us progressive liberals never forgave Paul for his right-wing attack on social spending. It cost the liberal party the loss to Stephen Harper. Canadians seemed to say: Why vote for a right-wing liberal when you can get the real thing with Harper?

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Carbon-Capture Conservatives.

by Peter Lowry

It is becoming obvious now that carbon-based fuels exploiters in Canada are going to hang their hats on carbon-capture technologies—if they can just get governments to pay for it. For an expensive solution that really cannot do the job, it appears to be the only answer they can find. And their political lackies are expected to get on the carbon-capture band wagon. Just watch politicos like federal conservative leader Pierre Poilievre jump aboard.

You need to remember that there are multiple carbon expelling events in the life of the high-carbon bitumen from the Athabasca tar sands. There are the high amounts of carbon created by the digging or drilling for the access to the bitumen. Then there is the transport of the bitumen to the upgrader processes that brings it to a bitumen sludge that can be transported by rail or forced at high temperatures through pipelines. Eventually, the bitumen gets to a refinery that can produce ersatz crude oil from the bitumen, leaving behind tons of bitumen slag. From that stage, the crude can be refined into carbon-based fuels for heating and transport requirements. It is because of all these process stages that the actual amount of pollution caused by the bitumen is hard to compute.

But what we also know is that while oil and water really do not mix, at least oil is difficult to cleanup when it spills into water. Bitumen, because of its tar-like nature floats for a while and then sinks to become an obnoxious part of the eco-system that is impossible to cleanup.

This is also the reason for the ongoing and bitter legal battle between the State of Michigan and the Enbridge pipeline people over the Line 5 pipeline crossing the Straits of Mackinac. The State of Michigan has had the experience of a critical spill of bitumen into tributaries to the Kalamazoo River in South Michigan. In 12 years and more than a billion dollars on cleanup, there is still bitumen in the Kalamazoo.

When you get politicians on both sides of the border arguing over the issue, there is also a lot of confusion. The only comment that I will add is that if any large lake-ship accidently drags an anchor through the Straits of Mackinac when Line 5 is carrying bitumen, millions of Americans and Canadians living around the Great Lakes are going to be outraged at the economic destruction it could cause.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Trudeau Sings?

by Peter Lowry

We obviously have a multi-talented prime minister. It turns out he can sing as well as do blackface. Or was this a complaint about his singing? I know how it is. You get together with some other Canucks in some foreign port and after a few cups of the local joy juice, you are all singing Alouette.

But karaoke is something else. It is very rude for someone to record another person’s attempt at a more difficult number. And besides, Trudeau needed to save his sense of humour for when he got back to parliament. Poilievre was lying in wait for him. 

The entire parliament was waiting for the first attack on the prime minister by the new leader of the opposition. This is Justin’s third new leader of the opposition. I figured that the confrontation would be good for a few laughs. Yet, I missed the whole thing as my Internet and television were down when Justin Trudeau returned to the house of commons the other day.

Did Poilievre ask if he sang in New York as he did in London? Or did he just go for the laughs over Justin-flation?

My advice to Justin would have been to leave them laughing. Unless, of course, Mr. Poilievre made the continued mistake of exhibiting his total lack of knowledge of economics. In that case, a gentle and patient lecture on basic economics might be in order. Trudeau might even suggest a few helpful texts on the subject

But in this vein, I would like to publicly thank Linda McQuaig for writing in the Toronto Star the other day that Poilievre is the farthest thing from a populist. Linda is a very perceptive writer on politics. She obviously knows a populist when she sees one. And Poilievre is not included. She commented on that weasel’s time with Stephen Harper and suggested that he might just be Harper-Lite.

Actually, Pierre Poilievre keeps trying to be like Stephen Harper, except he lacks Harper’s sparkling personality. If anything, Mr. Poilievre reminds me of the shark in Bobby Darin’s 1959 swing version of Mack the Knife.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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