Category: Federal Politics

The handwriting on the wall is clear and unequivocal. It says “Justin Trudeau, you have been tried and found wanting.” Both the Conservatives and New Democrats are going to attack down that street. And they will give no quarter. Their claims will be that as Liberal Leader, Justin has no direction, experience, knowledge, nor purpose nor training in leading our country.

And he is running out of time to correct the perception of Canadians that his detractors might be right. One of the major arguments for Mr. Harper to call the election in April is that he can use the excuse of the economy while catching the Liberals flat-footed.

While the obvious answer is that the economic problems are very much of the Conservatives’ making, it still begs the question of Mr. Trudeau’s ability to solve them. Solutions offered today are worth twice that of solutions announced post-writ.

In February or early March, the Liberals need to find a major international venue for Mr. Trudeau to speak on the world’s economic problems. It has to be a speech venue that allows for compassion, concern, cooperation and ties well to the failure of Canada’s resource-based economic approach under the Conservatives.

And then the speech needs careful crafting and a more subtle sales pitch than this type of thing normally gets. It has to be able to grow as a theme. It has to be a turning point. It has to earn a life of its own—with a little help by social media. It has to be referenced positively throughout the election. It must give direction to a better future for Canadians.

We deserve a better future than the constant rape of our land’s resources for short term profit. We have greater capabilities, learning, energy and ideas for which our own leaders fail give us credit. Liberal Leader Sir Wilfrid Laurier told Canadians that the Twentieth Century belonged to us and we passed it over to the Americans. It was the cautious conservatism of our leaders, two world wars and our failure to address periodic economic recessions that held us back.

If Canada is ever to live up to its promise, we have to have bold leadership, commitment in economic direction, consensus in how we are governed and a belief in our future. It is time for Justin Trudeau to take the podium and state the case for our future.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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

No matter when the Prime Minister decides to call the election (we will still give odds on October), the only important question is: Can he be beaten? We would advise all you pundits, pollsters and politicos to hold off your bets until the writ comes down. That is when Babel-on-the-Bay will publish its much awaited Morning Line.

And who knows? The election at that point might be an easy ramble for one of the three parties. It could also look like a dead heat. We just do not know at this time. There is ground to cover.

Coming from the back stretch the Hair has the most negatives to overcome. He has been slammed, reviled, belittled and found wanting. And that is just within the Conservative Party of Canada.

His Finance Minister has yet to present the budget that will show the hole in the tar sands plans. The Hair is tempted by the terrorist ticket. He is going to look for more involvement in the current Crusade in Iraq. The Hair is a wily one.

And he disquiets Canadians. They see the Hair as cold and autocratic, a mean man who micro-manages a parliament that he appears to despise. And yet, for all his foolish economic failures, they think he is the best manager of the economy. Here is a guy who panders to ethnic and religious groups for their support and yet gets solid support from the white-bread one per cent.

The one thing you can say about the Hair is that you either hate him or love him. There is little middle ground. As long as there are two other parties, the Hair has a chance of winning the election.

What is obvious is that the Hair has to destroy the Liberal chances. He has to make sure that the New Democrats keep the majority of Quebec seats. The Hair has no chance in Quebec. They hate him there. We should hate him even more in Ontario.

Ontario and British Columbia are the only two provinces where it is a straight out three-party battle. With the Conservatives and New Democrats constantly bashing the Liberals for the next nine months, Liberal candidates need to be made of sterner stuff.

There will be more testing of the waters in the spring and summer but by Labour Day, the die will be cast. We will be better able to handicap the parties and their leaders by then. Just bear in mind that no matter how many times we have forecast winners, no handicapper can see the future. There is no sure thing.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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

Never try to compare the mausoleums and monuments of Washington to the pathetic honours of Ottawa. Today might or might not be the 200^th anniversary of Sir John A. Macdonald’s birth in Scotland. (The records are confused.) He deserves our remembrance, our thanks and our criticisms. Creating our wonderful country is no minor credit on the plus side.

Sure the old bugger was a drunk and a scoundrel and a racist but probably no more or less than others of his time. He was no saint. How was he to know better? We are suffused with knowing and politically correct blue-stockings today—something he never had to suffer, sober.

Many years ago, we took the family on a pilgrimage to where Sir John was buried and it was a shock and a sorrow. Back then, it was not even in Kingston where he once practiced law. The gravesite was in Cataraqui, Ontario before it was swallowed up by Kingston so that town could claim Sir John.

At the time, the family burial plot was tiny, weed infested and barely marked. Where it not for a local burgher walking his dog, we would likely have missed it. The small wrought iron fence was ramshackle and was about to fall, still a perfect height for a small dog to pee on. The stones were at odd angles. The footstone for Sir John was pathetic.

And this visit was long after the declaration of the gravesite as a national heritage site in 1938. Since our visit, Parks Canada has put a new, higher wrought iron fence around a greatly expanded area and someone has been weed-whacking the underbrush. (It must have been our spare-no-expense Conservatives—the Liberals think confederation began with Wilfrid Laurier, our seventh prime minister.)

But we should take umbrage at whoever put that cross up at the site. It is not only spanking new in shiny granite but it sure as hell is contrary to Sir John’s wishes. He would not want anything so ostentatious where he is buried.

What Sir John gave us was the leadership that created Canada as a country from sea to sea. He got us a cross country railway by hook or by crook—mainly by crook. His idea of railroad building was not particularly considerate of incumbent Indians and métis. He created the North West Police and ‘tamed’ the West.

Sir John left Canada as a legacy. That is no small feat.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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

That certainly was a great international junior hockey game between Canada and Russia the other evening. The teams were highly charged and competitive as they went for the gold medal and the hockey was fast and furious. It had you enthralled from beginning to end. It was no time for politics.

But the Hair had to be there. He took off his tie and put on a Team Canada jersey. It was his time to be with Canada’s common people. There is an election in the air.

His day started well. He removed the embarrassing Minister Julian Fantino from his position in Veterans’ Affairs. Fantino went to the boneyard of failed politicians as an associate minister of defence. If the ex-policeman never makes a public statement again, the Hair will be happy.

His next trouble spot was Toronto. He had to beard the lioness of Ontario in her den. If his New Years’ resolution was to try to win some votes, he had to start with Ontario’s Premier Kathleen Wynne. He had to ignore her gaff a year ago in telling the media that he smirked at her. We know that they had to talk about Ontario’s infrastructure support needs from the federal government. We hear that their meeting this time was productive but each will reveal the results in due time.

He also had to prove on the trip that he is a man of the people. Yet he had nobody to take to the hockey game but his RCM Police protection detail. And one of them had to sit on the concrete steps. Tickets were that hard to come by. And that cop looked like he really did not like hockey. Or maybe he did not like that aspect of his job.

Not that the Hair was not bothered. Bell Canada’s TSN was televising the game and we had the highlight of a sports reporter getting a quick interview with the Prime Minister. They were strictly soft-ball questions and the Prime Minister easily lobbed them back.

But nobody wanted to watch the Hair. This was hockey at its best. Those young players could literally fall and bounce back up from the ice. They skated hard, they played hard. They did us proud.

It is too bad that the Hair does not learn things from these young Canadians.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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

The gimmick was solid. Tom Clark of Global News’ West Block show was offering a flight in his little single engine airplane to the three party leaders. All they had to agree to was an on-camera interview in the air. Both Liberal Justin Trudeau and New Democrat Tom Mulcair accepted and the interviews were aired. Nobody expected a control freak like the Prime Minister to accept and we thought that covered it.

But we forgot about the wannabes. Just because the Prime Minister said ‘no’ that hardly means that those potentially vying for his party leadership would not want coverage. The Bobbsey Twins must have whined a lot to Tom. While he might have been able to take them both, the twins are overweight and if the choice is between taking two twins or enough fuel, the sensible pilot opts for fuel.

And that was why Canada’s Minister of Employment and Social Development Jason Kenney was shown flying around in Tom Clark’s little airplane this past weekend. Not that there was much learned from the interview. While Kenney makes much about the workload of being Minister of Employment and Social Development, both jobs are low on the priorities of the Conservative government.

It took Kenney about a year to negotiate the changes provinces demanded in the federal training program to get the program working. This hardly deterred the Harper government though as it had immediately spent millions promoting the training program as a cornerstone of its mythical Economic Action Plan. It is likely more money has been spent by the Conservatives telling Canadians about the program than on any training.

Kenney is also Minister of Multiculturalism. In this role, he mines new Canadian ranks for potential Conservative voters. He was the guy credited with creating those mixed racial walls of people who stand behind the Prime Minister at news conferences to make Canadians think that people of all races support the Conservative government. The participants always look so bored he frankly would have done better to hire the old musical group The Village People.

The only insight that viewers might have gained from the interview was that Kenney was once a Liberal until he found out that he was really a social conservative. That does happen sometimes.

Hopefully we will hear something more substantive when Tom Clark gives a lift to the other Bobbsey Twin, Foreign Minister John Baird. Being from Ontario, Mr. Baird has never seemed to have a problem knowing which way he leans.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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

If no environmental regulations are required when times are good in the tar sands, why is it ‘crazy’ to impose them when times are bad? Yet that was what the Prime Minister told the House of Commons early in December. The country has been aghast since then.

The main problem with what the Hair told the House of Commons was that there was an immediate assumption that regulation would include penalties to the oil and gas sector of the economy. What he said exactly was “it would be crazy economic policy—to do unilateral penalties on that sector.”

What the Hair seems to have made clear is that there will be no environmental controls for the oil and gas sector under a Conservative government.

Heavy carbon pollution, pipeline ruptures, train derailments, trucking failures all have free rein in Tory territory.

Which begs the question, why do oil and gas sector advertisers in Canada show beautiful scenery in their extensive television and print advertising? If that is the image the oil and gas sector want the public to believe in, why are there no incentives from government towards achieving that objective?

What they might not want you to know is that production of tar sands oil creates approximately three times the carbon pollution of normal crude oil refining?

The one thing for sure is that very few members of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) are smiling when the price of the standard barrel of crude oil drops below $60. It means no tar sands exploiter is making money. No oil refinery wants to pay premium prices for that tar sands bitumen to make synthetic crude.

And the CAPP members are hardly saying nice things about the Saudi oil marketers as they deliberately lower the price of crude oil. The Saudis can still make money at $20 a barrel if they have to. The Saudis just love our free market system. They are teaching an object lesson to Canadian and Venezuelan ‘heavy oil’ producers.

And the Hair is caught in between. While consumers are enjoying the partially lowered prices at the gas pumps, he is not about to be the one telling the mid-East oil producers to raise their prices. Nor would he impose environmental rules on the tar sands when Venezuela has no controls. The Hair is a free-market guy.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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

There is a warm feeling to being needed. And judging by the carefully crafted e-mails from the political parties these days you know that it is really your money that is needed. It is a sign of the times. The end of subsidies to political parties and the anticipated election called by act of parliament for October this year, are the reasons.

The end of public subsidies to political parties was a bravado act by Canada’s Conservative Party to gain advantage over the Liberals and New Democrats. They had little realization that the other two parties would quickly learn the art of modern political base fund-raising. In the past two years the combined opposition parties have exceeded the Conservative dollar figures. The Liberals have even shown what asking for $3 can achieve. It is all very scientific today and it works.

The Conservative effort over the year end was based largely on fear. The Harper government is in trouble and its supporters are aware of it. To the chagrin of the opposition, Conservative supporters have deeper pockets and the Tories will have more than $15 million to fund an October campaign.

And as much as the Conservatives would like to go early and catch the opposition off guard, they are more likely to try a new strategy this year. They think they should surprise everybody by keeping their word. That will make the October 19 date a go.

While the Liberals will probably have to work with less than $15 million for the central campaign, the banks likely stand prepared to loan them what they need to close the gap. There will be no free ride for the Conservatives this time out.

And everyone smells blood. While the New Democrats are being realistic and at least hope to hold some of the seats from the Orange Wave in Quebec, they know the Liberals are going to dominate in the east. With at about half of the money to spend as the Liberals, they will still try to be the spoilers in vulnerable Ontario and British Columbia ridings. Their hope will be for a minority Liberal government and leaving themselves with the balance of power.

But this is just the beginning of truly public funded politics in Canada. New demographics selections will soon be hearing the siren call for political money. Just use the Internet enough and your likes and dislikes will be noted, recorded, categorized and the right party will ask for your contributions.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

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