Federal Politics – Page 152

“And deliver us from evil.”

January 31, 2015 by Peter Lowry

That line from the Anglican version of the Lord’s Prayer is a simple request to God to keep us from being beset by that which is evil in society. Were we to leave that job to those we choose to govern our country, we could be in serious trouble. Politicians seem to overreact. They go after malefactors with a zeal that puts the Lord of Hosts to shame.

Take the Hair and his friends in Ottawa. For years now they have been building new prisons for evil doers. It does little good to tell them that statistically crime is decreasing in Canada. In a society where by and large, there are opportunities and benefits for those in need, crime tends to fall off. Poor people no longer need to turn to crime in our society for basic sustenance.

But the Hair’s strategy seems to be that if you build them, the prisoners will come.

The Hair has of course been helpful in this regard. He realized very early in the game that a society without guns would never get the prisons filled. He knew that a gun registry would be the first steps in ending the power of the gun culture. He disparaged the registry. He ignored the chiefs of police across the country that saw the usefulness of the registry to protect our citizens. He ended the registry. He ended this effective step towards control of firearms in our country.

In building the culture of the gun, the Hair set out to glorify the military. He promised them new fighter planes and new helicopter gunships. He promised new ships to the navy and equipment to the army. They never got them but he at least promised. He and his minions went to see them in their fields of battle. He glorified their dead and buried them with honour. He might have skimped too much on looking after our veterans but he can only micromanage so much.

Along the way he realized that getting elected in Canada can be made easier by getting the support of Canada’s large number of Jewish citizens. To get their support he took large delegations to Israel to show the Israelis that they had his full support. He played up Canada’s support beyond any reasonable assurances and earned the outrage of the Muslim world.

The Hair knew that Canadians did not want the deaths and dismemberment of mid-East crusades but he sent planes to smite the infidel from the sky. This participation in Mid-East affairs annoyed some of the brigands involved in exploiting the troubles in the Levant. They are adept at using social media on the Internet and they are promising Canadians that there will be reprisals in Canada.

This greatly pleases the Hair as he can now pass increasingly repressive laws to allow him to manage Canadians better. He might not be able to arrange an infestation of locusts to teach us but he does have all those prisons to fill.

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Canadians are waiting for the Hair.

January 29, 2015 by Peter Lowry

The lights are on late in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). The price of crude oil is less than $50 a barrel. The Canadian dollar is trading just under 80 cents American. The surplus promised in the 2014-15 fiscal year is gone. The federal budget that was expected in March is being put off until April or May, or later. The Bank of Canada prime lending rate has been dropped to 0.75 per cent to stabilize the currency. What is the Hair to do?

Part of the problem is that the Hair has foolishly decided to try for a fourth term as Prime Minister. He can hardly run on the strength of his management of Canada’s economy. The economy is in the toilet. He snubbed manufacturing and opted for tar sands exports.

His own finance minister, the late Jim Flaherty, told him that offering rich parents income splitting would be giving money to the wrong people. The Hair not only did it but pre-announced his largess just before the price of oil went into the tank. Now he has done it and cannot pay for it.

And the Hair has sent Canadians into harm’s way in Iraq. He sent them on a crusade to smite the infidel of the New Caliphate. These people are the brigands who also call themselves the Islamic State. We really know them as thieves, cowards and murderers.

But they shake their fists at us in our peaceful homes and threaten to bring their jihad to us. It will just be an excuse for the Hair to propose draconian laws that infringe on the rights and freedoms of Canadians of all colors and faiths.

But what are Canadians really worried about? It must be the hair! Looking at Babel-on-the-Bay’s stats on Google Analytics this morning tells all. The most viewed posting in this blog is not about beer or bitumen or even the dangers of xenophobia. There has been a steady stream of readers of the archives (more than 6000 and counting) and is continuing to access this blog’s first reference to the Prime Minister’s hairpiece. There was even an e-mail from a reader today suggesting that a wig was a goofy form of deception.

If that was the only thing that the Hair did to deceive Canadians, we would be getting off easy.

When a man in the Prime Minister’s position flies around the world with his personal hairdresser, you should worry. And if you were going to vote for him because he always looks so prime ministerial, just think of what it costs us.

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Oh sure, let’s blame Question Period.

January 28, 2015 by Peter Lowry

The Prime Minister must be smiling. You can tell because his make-up is a bit askew. Someone told him that his favourite newspaper wants to get rid of Question Period in the House of Commons. As he explained to an aide, “Without Question Period, I would never have to show up in that damn place except for budgets and Throne Speeches.”

He does like to look prime ministerial and periodically, when he sees the time is right, he will rise in the House to allay the concerns of the overly curious Opposition. While sometimes his answers bear little relationship to the question asked, he relishes the opportunity to extol the record of his administration.

When it comes to obfuscation though, he used to rely on minions such as his Parliamentary Secretary who is chosen for his or her gullibility and eagerness to do what the Prime Minister’s staff tells him or her to do. We even had one recently who cried when apologizing to the House for being less than forthcoming when answering questions for the Prime Minister.

But while the Prime Minister’s supporters might think of Question Period as something of a bother, it is actually more like a safety valve. It is the only time in the day that government MPs have any chance to let off a little steam. They get to shout rude things to the people across the floor and get it off their chest. Such rude behaviour is frowned on in committee meetings as that is where the real work of the house is done.

The problem is that committee meetings are boring and not routinely telecast and it means Canadians are left in the dark as to what is going on. Were it not for Question Period, most Canadians would not even know that Ottawa is where they send their tax money. They also think they might be happier if our parliamentarians were more polite to each other. Why? Do they think being polite would make a difference?

And we should not be blaming television for the lack of public interest when fully half of citizens are learning about our politics from television. Can you imagine relying on Sun Media for our information about our government?

What Canadians need to do is send better qualified people to Ottawa. Choosing some nebbish merely because he or she represents this leader or that leader is a disservice to your neighbours. When you send good people to Ottawa, you can feel better about what is going on in parliament.

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Lord Cross-the-Pond still ponders.

January 26, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Finding another commentary by Lord Cross-the-Pond, Conrad Black, in this past weekend’s National Post only proves that he really needs something serious to do. And we can assure him that his friend Paul Godfrey needs no help in running the National Post and Sun Media newspapers into the ground until the American money lenders are satisfied. It is heart-warming to see that Lord Connie still thinks of people like us as lumpen-left. It is too bad that he cannot find something he knows about to write about.

And hopefully Paul Godfrey is not paying Connie anything for those overly long blog postings. It is not that we always disagree with what we read in these wandering diatribes. For example his erudite and insightful observations of the Roman Catholic Church such as ”just a superstition-mongering humbug, claptrap and hallelujah factory run by septuagenarian celibates and closeted homosexuals, (who) are themselves too dyspeptic or self-obsessed to procreate in self-sustaining numbers” are facile and bang-on no matter how much Connie denies it. He blames that kind of thinking on us lumpen-left.

In his usual fashion, Lord Connie solves all the problems of the Middle East from the days of the Children’s Crusade to today’s equivalent sponsored by Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. He thinks that the West is blameless under the circumstances and that there is just a rampant jealousy among the Arabs for our ability to make democracy work, for at least the wealthy in our society.

What Connie really needs to do is to take a course at the University of Toronto on what ever part of the world he wants to write about and learn first, write second. While taking advantage of that learning institute, he might also take a modern communications course. He would find that short sentences, simple words, clear thoughts are what constitute modern communication. Proving you know big words and can stream them in paragraph-long sentences is somewhat passé.

And, since he might have still been in prison when Barak Obama was elected in the United States, he might not be aware that Obama only wanted to get the American’s the hell out of Dodge in the country they call Eye-Rack. These brigands who call themselves the new Caliphate or Islamic State were created by enemies of Bashar el Assad in Syria. They only wandered into Iraq to steal the oil that helps pay for their weapons.

What we would also suggest to Connie is that even if his visitor’s permit might not be expired yet, he might head back across the Pond any time. The Brits might appreciate him more than us Canucks.

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Is Canada racist? No. Is there racism in Canada? Yes.

January 24, 2015 by Peter Lowry

The announcements of the concern about racism the other day in Winnipeg came as no surprise. That part of this country has been trying to stuff the racism genie back in the bottle since the confluence of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers was the site of an early trading post. Give the city the credit it deserves though, the racism is now exposed and the city has a chance to work on the problems. It is just too bad that Montreal does not do the same. It continues as the most racist city in Canada.

And we are not talking of mistreatment of Canada’s aboriginal and Métis people in Montreal. We are talking the insidious distrust of anyone who is not racially or tribally pure laine. While there is sometimes a misunderstanding of cultural sensitivities between the anglo and francophone populations in Quebec, there is no excuse for the continued demand for an intolerant ‘Charter of Values’ as promoted by the Parti Québécois during the last provincial election.

But when the ruling Liberals under Philippe Couilliard also promise a version of the values charter, you are right to question the motives. Is this pandering to that insipient intolerance? Quebec politicians of all stripes seem to feed off a culture of intolerance. It goes back to the battle on the Plains of Abraham. It was supported by the clerics of the Catholic Church in Lower Canada. And then, as the church lost its influence, politicians found it useful. It took the Supreme Court of Canada two decades to finally squash Premier Maurice Duplessis’s infamous Padlock Law but even then the jurists failed to address anything more than the fact the province did not have jurisdiction to pass the law.

Both Thomas Mulcair of the New Democrats and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau are sensitive to the issue. Scratch hard enough with either and you see the defensiveness they hold for Quebec. They are Quebeckers first and federal politicians second. Mulcair stabilizes his Quebec sensitivity with his French passport. The younger Trudeau balances with his maternal ties in British Columbia.

There are obviously few Quebecers who want to link the pure laine or de souche (hard liner) attitudes in Quebec to an inferiority complex. That would be like a feather pillow with little resistance and less impression. The problems are the politicians who will skate with it because of its potential for them to gain ground for their own ambitions. Everyone saw in the introduction of Pierre-Karl Péladeau to separatist politics last year that it was a horse he wanted to ride. While Péladeau won his rural seat in the National Assembly last year, his naϊveté helped pull down his separatist party.

Any Canadian from other parts of Canada who has travelled in Quebec and knows its people will tell you that Quebecers can play in the first line of any team they choose. There is no rational for any values charter that does not recognize that diversity of Quebec is its strength. The diversity of Canada is something in which we all take pride.

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If there is Will, he will find a way.

January 23, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Not being a regular reader of the Washington Post, we might not have read many columns by George F. Will. It was only when Toronto’s National Post picked up one of his commentaries last weekend that we had the fun of trying to figure out how his mind works—or maybe does not. What appeared to start out as a mindless Republican tarring of America’s first black President, was found to include some mindless repetition of TransCanada Pipelines’ news releases.

This guy Will must be a staunch anti-environmentalist. Yet he has the temerity to say about President Obama that “his mind has always been as closed as an unshucked oyster.” Will adds that the more Mr. Obama talks about the pipeline, “the more ignorant he seems.” Would it be politically incorrect under these circumstances to suggest Mr. Will is guilty of being the pot that is calling the kettle ‘black’?

Mr. Will talks as though he cares about Canada leaving the wealth of the Athabasca and Cold Lake tar sands in the ground. Why should he give a damn? The states of California and Utah both have large tar sands deposits that also would be better off staying in the ground. Will seems to prefer to ridicule people who point out that tar sands are the dirtiest source of oil in the world. Just in refining the tar sands bitumen to synthetic crude oil produces three times the carbon of crude oil refining. The bitumen coke residue of the processing is dirtier than the most polluting coal.

If Mr. Will had any knowledge of his topic, he would have known that Alberta Premier Jim Prentice and the top brass of Enbridge were in Texas before his commentary went to press re-announcing the three-year old Flanagan South pipeline project from Pontiac, Illinois southwest to Cushing, Oklahoma where it connects to existing pipelines to the Texas Gulf Coast. While it is a less direct route than Keystone XL, it does not require State Department or Presidential approval. It has always been the bitumen pumping backup for the Alberta tar sands.

Mr. Will accuses people who care about the environment of working from some environmental catechism. We can assure him that we do not. He obviously does not understand the difference between oil and bitumen despite bitumen being the source of pitch used to waterproof the galleys that plied the Mediterranean back when the pyramids were being built.

If Mr. Will even had a clue as to the reasons for the currently low prices for oil, he would know that the last thing we need is to speed climate change for unnecessary profit.

But that seems to be what Republicans want.

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The Hair regrets his fixed voting dates.

January 22, 2015 by Peter Lowry

The best laid schemes of mice and Hair often go for nought. (Robbie Burns said that much better.) Fixed election dates for Canada were an easy promise to keep back in 2006 but they have never really worked well for the Hair. With a looming election date of October 19 for this year, the Hair must want to call the whole thing off.

And he had such lovely plans. He had everything dovetailed so nicely. He started with all those ambitious goodies to use the planned surplus this year. He announced them last November. Finance Minister Joe Oliver would start the election year with Jim Flaherty’s planned surplus but leave nothing for the opposition to promise their goodies.

But is it all a game to befuddle the voters? Despite his avowal at year end less than a month ago that the October 19 date is firm, speculation is again rampant that the Hair will take the country to the polls before July 1. And under normal circumstances it is what any other Prime Minister might do.

But not the Hair. He wants everyone to think he is keeping his word—until he breaks it.

Does he really want that nebbish Finance Minister Oliver to stand up in the House of Commons in April or May and admit that the vaunted surplus is just smoke and mirrors?

Does the Hair want his promises to the rich of income splitting and child benefits to be the cause of further deficits?

Does he want to admit that his resource-based economic strategy for Canada is just a deck of cards?

And what is going to happen in the next few months that could change things?

Does the Hair have a better crystal ball than anyone else?

And you can hardly blame any of this on that stuffy little Mr. Mulcair or on the darling of the middle class, Justin Trudeau. The Hair brought it all on himself. He said ‘tough’ as the east lost more of its manufacturing base. He was counting on tar sands for synthetic oil. He was counting on pipelines. He wanted Northern Gateway and an expanded Kinder Morgan pipeline to fill tankers in British Columbia. The TransCanada Keystone XL would reach the Texas Gulf ports. The old Enbridge and TransCanada pipelines to the east coast could fill even more. And there is back-up in rail and trucking. Who knew what problems would arise?

All that the Hair knows for sure is that fixed election dates for a country with a parliamentary system of government is a really dumb idea.

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Bobbsey twin booed by Bedouins.

January 21, 2015 by Peter Lowry

They are displeased with Canada in Ramallah. Palestinians threw eggs, shoes and insults at Canada’s foreign minister the other day in the acting capital of the Palestinian State in the West Bank. And this Bobbsey twin deserved every curse, epithet and derisive comment that he received. And he should get the same treatment in Canada for the damage he is doing to Canada’s reputation.

Foreign Minister John Baird along with his boss Prime Minister Stephen Harper has brought shame on Canada. By pandering to the Israelis to win votes from Jews in Canada, they have only angered the Muslim world and brought shame on us. This is not what Canadians expect nor want from its foreign affairs. Our ancestors came to this country to live in peace and harmony with all. Ours is a country where tolerance is treasured and respect for the individual is a right.

And someone such as Baird goes to the Middle East to stir the flames of intolerance and allow individual rights to be trampled. If he does not know how to act properly when representing us, he should be denied a passport.

It took many years of patient and thoughtful work at the United Nations and around the world for Canada to earn respect and admiration for its being an honest broker. It no longer has the respect nor is it an honest broker. With Harper and Baird manipulating foreign affairs, Canada is now known as a toady for the Americans, a panderer for domestic votes in Israel and the Ukraine and subservient subjects of the British Royals. It is embarrassing for Canadians who used to be able to be proud of their country no matter where they might travel in the world.

When Prime Minister Harper virtually bribed African countries with Canadian aid money to make Former Governor General Michaëlle Jean Secretary-General of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (assembly of French-speaking nations), it was an embarrassment. It was not the easy approval that one would expect.

It is why Canada has been repeatedly denied a seat on the United Nations Security Council where our country once served with honour. And while Canadians have already tired of the way the Conservatives are running the country and embarrassing us around the world, it will take many years for the next government to repair the damage the Conservatives have done.

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Oh, to be middle class again.

January 20, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Are you old enough to remember when being middle class was the place to be? That was back when you had a detached house in the suburbs with a two-car garage (full of bicycles), two kids and three televisions. You lived from paycheque to paycheque but you could still go to the Caribbean or Europe for a couple weeks at the right time of year. Well, now you are a senior, you are finding out how the poor people live.

And it is not just the upset of being called ‘Dearie’ by middle-aged cashiers but the fact that half your purchases are from the ‘Reduced to Clear’ table. Never mind that gas is cheaper, that old sedan has only so many trips to Walmart left in it. And the government is talking of reprocessing your driver’s license anyway.

The real problem is as a senior you have been forgotten by all the political parties. The Conservatives are only coming up with benefits for rich people with kids. It was like Ontario PC Leader Timmy Hudak who used “hard-working families” in every second line of his stump speeches in the last Ontario election.

If you were still middle class, even Tommy Mulcair’s New Democrats would still love you. No longer interested in the poor, Mulcair outlined his plan to go after middle class voters to his party last week. He wants to keep the Conservatives’ bribes for middle class child care benefits while establishing a $15 per day child care service. He intends to use the same funds as the Conservatives would have used for income splitting—and if that does not help, he will increase corporate taxes.

The blame for all of this middle class pandering rests with Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. He has been travelling across Canada as he says, from sea to sea to sea, taking selfies with as many middle class Canadians as he can find.

The only problem all the parties are finding is that the middle class is a quickly disappearing breed. The stretch today from poverty to comfortable in economic terms is a wide and mainly empty gulf. Back in the middle of the 20^th Century, a cocky middle class had just won a world war and nothing could stop us. We were defining the politics of the day and feeling empowered. The unions were strong and were bringing the labouring class into prominence and political heft as part of the middle class of the day.

We had the power and yet we were beaten back from the gates of true democracy. The one per cent had no use for Pierre Trudeau’s Just Society and we were the ones who paid the price for the inflationary times and then the alternating slide into recession. Unions were discredited, a degree was no guarantee of a job and the middle class became a myth. It only exists today in the rhetoric of political speak.

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What a difference a day makes in a Tory budget.

January 19, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Did you see Finance Minister Joe Oliver’s dance of the seven veils last week? This guy is right in his element playing Peek-a-Boo. At least it makes more sense than his budgets—if we even get one this year?

When last heard from the other day, he said he might have a budget for us in April—or maybe May. Or did we just come up with a reason for the Prime Minister to call the federal election this year in April?

While nobody gives the federal Finance Minister much credit for intelligence or wit or anything else for that matter, Mr. Harper just expects him to do as he is told. Mr. Harper has already announced goodies for the voters for this year based on there being a budget surplus. And he expects Oliver to deliver it. Since the budget surplus was forecast at $1.9 billion just last November, declining revenues from the oil and gas sector have obviously wiped out the surplus.

And Mr. Harper does not like to look foolish.

Even though the former Conservative Finance Minister, the late Jim Flaherty, had made it clear that income splitting for rich families was a really bad idea, Mr. Harper went ahead and announced its implementation for this year.

Most experts cannot see how Oliver could possibly announce an honest surplus this year even by wiping out the $3 billion surplus built into the figures. It shows how much this government relies on oil and gas revenues and how heavily Canadians have been taxed on their gasoline consumption.

Industry users and consumers are currently basking in gasoline costs at about two-thirds of previous rates. By gradually decreasing prices as crude oil prices fall, refiners and gasoline retailers have been maintaining their profit margins while provincial shares of the crude oil price have been falling rapidly. That is why Alberta, and to a lesser extent Newfoundland, have been feeling the fuller impact at a faster rate. With no sales tax, the Alberta government is finally paying the piper.

In his speech late last week, Joe Oliver admitted that “The impact of lower oil prices on the Canadian economy is complex and creates both benefits and harm.” We will hope that most of the harm befalls the Conservatives for their failure to take into account the volatility of commodity prices.

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