Category: Federal Politics

We have heard from the front lines of the coming federal election. Our first of many big, full-colour brochures from our local Conservative candidate hit the door last week just ten months before the coming election. This elaborate missive told us probably more than it wanted to about our Conservative candidate in Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte. (When you cut the City of Barrie into north-south halves, that is what they call the new north Barrie riding.)

The brochure has something of a colour-by-numbers quality. You can imagine the original front page that said “Your picture here.” The print is big to cover the lack of content. There is the obligatory casual picture with dog, friendly looking female, baby and candidate but no cutline that says who the dog, baby or lady might be.

The brochure has an amateur quality and what copy is in it is somewhat puerile. It actually says, the candidate is empathetic because he grew up in government-subsidized housing. What relation that can have to the Conservative promise of transferring $50,000 of your income to your spouse in income splitting, leaves you wondering.

This is the guy a few years back who was working as a trainee at a local bank and decided to run for the local provincial Conservatives. One of the rules of membership in the party is that people have to pay their own membership. He was only found out when someone noticed that the guy’s new memberships were paid with new, sequentially numbered bills that he had obtained at his bank. He lost that nomination and no longer works at the bank.

This is another reason that the young gentleman is running for the federal and not provincial Conservatives.

The brochure proudly mentions that this candidate spent the last two council terms representing a ward in the south end of Barrie. Whether he was effective in that role is a mute point as that ward is quite remote from his new federal electoral district of Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte in the north.

What struck us as fresh and new about this brochure was the statement that the candidate “believes that a Member of Parliament must represent our communities’ interests to Ottawa and not the other way round.” This seems to be a very harsh criticism of our previous Conservative MP and will not win this new kid any friends at the present Prime Minister’s Office.

Times must be changing.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Do you want honesty or do you just want to get rid of the Harper Conservatives? That seems to be the conundrum facing members of Canada’s Liberal Party. The fact is that Justin Trudeau has lied to the party. He did not have much of a platform when he won the Liberal Party leadership but we all heard him promise open nominations wherein the individual party members in each electoral district would choose their candidate.

Here we are ten months before the election and the party has lawsuits, people tearing up memberships and bad feeling right across the country. It feels like tiny talent time. The leader, his incompetent team and the party apparatus have obviously disregarded Justin’s only bloody promise.

And what do they think they are accomplishing? What really smells are the silly party spokespeople who marvel at how free, open and transparent the nominations have become. Do these people take lessons in Orwellian NewSpeak from the Harper Conservatives?

Just filling out the intrusive and demeaning forms required by the Liberal Party from potential candidates is a farce. The party officials often take different lengths of time to respond to individual candidates. It seems that different candidates get different—and highly discriminatory—treatment. Just the fact of controlling when the local party can have its nomination meeting is a control factor. And back-dating membership cut offs certainly sends a clear message about which candidate is preferred.

What really galls is that this very simple promise from Justin meant so much to some of the key riding association people in the Liberal Party. These are the local organizers needed to help the candidates. The amateurs in the Trudeau team are choosing candidates who need the help these organizers can provide. Talking to a newly approved candidate recently in a riding where the Liberals can win, it was a shock to learn that he had absolutely no acquaintance with the party people in the riding. He might have potential as a candidate but he was starting with some very serious handicaps.

What also seems to be the situation is that the party offices and the Trudeau team are getting untrustworthy intelligence about many of the electoral districts. In many Conservative held ridings, the Liberal Party has broken into a series of cliques. You have to be sure you are listening to the group that has a chance of pulling the Liberal supporters in the riding together.

Only a truly open nomination process has the chance of rebuilding and renewing the Liberal Party’s riding resources. Without open nominations, you might squeak by and elect a Justin Trudeau government but you will not have a Liberal government.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

We always knew that having fixed elections in Canada would cause the same problems as in the United States. You end up in an almost permanent condition of premature election. Take right now in Canada. The pundits and pollsters are already in full election mode when we are ten months from going to the polls. They are making their lists and checking them twice to try to tell us which politicians are naughty and nice.

Frankly, there is no percentage in telling you who has the best odds of winning that election before Labour Day of 2015. That will be when technically the Prime Minister is supposed to converse with the Governor General and the GG signs a Writ of Election. Mind you, Mr. Harper has lied to the electors before so you might want to hang loose in April for a surprise writ then.

If anyone is deluded about this election, it is New Democratic Leader Tommy Mulcair. He has found that Canadians are nice to him when he gets away from the House of Commons occasionally. What he has really found is that Canadians are nice people and they have no intention of hurting Tommy’s feelings. If they even let him keep his own electoral district next year, he will be lucky.

But the person headed for the worst surprise of the 2015 election is guy we affectionately refer to as The Hair. He is the most travelled Prime Minister in Canada’s history. Not even Brian Mulroney’s farewell tour to countries where people had once been nice to him was as impressive as the travels of The Hair and his hairdresser. Mind you old Brian never had his own Airbus A310 to do the job in style.

The Hair is also the most anal and micro-managing PM in Canadian history. At least Mackenzie-King got good advice from séances with his mother. And his dog helped too.

But the one to get the benefit of this premature election is Trudeau the Younger. While a better looking but shallower version of his father, Justin has been busy campaigning for the past two years. With occasional appearances back in Ottawa, Justin has been busy doing selfies with Canadians from coast to coast to coast. Nobody has a clue what Justin would or would not do as Prime Minister but he hopes to surprise people during the election by talking in continuous platitudes.

Somebody must have told Justin that people vote for the leader who annoys them the least. And what has Justin ever done to you?

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Hold on to your hats folks. Mr. Harper’s chickens have come home to roost. We let Stephen Harper blow off our manufacturing in Ontario and Quebec. We let the Conservatives spend millions on fictional economic action plans that neither made sense nor worked. And they built this Canadian oil economy that cannot compete.

The mathematics are at a grade school level. It costs more than $20 to get a barrel of Canadian bitumen ready for a refinery. It costs as little as a couple dollars for Saudi Arabia to pump up a barrel of refinery-ready crude. Does it take a genius to understand what happens if there is an oil glut and Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC members keep pumping their inexpensive crude? The price goes down. And OPEC squeezes the profits of marginal producers.

If you want to add to the headaches for Canada’s tar sands exploiters, you might mention they are also landlocked. Alberta and Saskatchewan do not have convenient harbours where they can fill up ocean going tankers to carry off their wares. Imagine the nerve of that B.C. premier who wanted to extract a toll for pipelines over the Rockies?

And American President Obama is in no rush to approve the Keystone XL pipeline to the Texas Gulf shipping points.

Since Hudson Bay is still frozen much of the year, it is not considered a good place to bring oil tankers. That leaves the Eastern route. There was a somewhat more complex playbook on this route. It started with moving the National Energy Board to Calgary and getting rid of a lot of government of Canada scientists. Getting rid of the scientists might not have been related but it certainly helped.

Enbridge Pipelines had a pipe that went from Alberta to Montreal that had been used at different times to send imported crude oil west and Canadian crude oil east. Through Ontario it is called Line 9. Through Kalamazoo, Michigan, there are other names for it because they are still working on cleaning up the June 2010 diluted bitumen spill in the Kalamazoo River. Taking an old pipeline and increasing the pressure to force heated bitumen through it does have its risks.

But not to be outdone, TransCanada Pipelines has an old gas line across Northern Ontario that it wants to convert over to high pressure hot bitumen. The company might not have a better solution but it certainly spends more on its public relations.

But neither pipeline will be completed if the price of crude oil does not improve soon. And their friend Stephen Harper might not be around long to grease their approvals.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Life is a journey and Gordon Gibson’s travels from the Prime Minister’s Office of 1968 to 1972 to being a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute in 2014 were unusual. Not that his ideas have improved much over the years. He wrote in the Globe and Mail last week that Canada can benefit from President Obama rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline. The solution is far-fetched but the expectation of what the American President will do might be bang on.

Gibson thinks that it would be a serious mistake for the Americans to kill Keystone XL but beneficial for Canada. His reasoning is that Canada should be refining the oil sands products into gasoline and diesel fuel products rather than shipping bitumen to world markets. He notes that the end products are easier to ship, less likely to create catastrophic spills and would earn more tax revenue for Canada. As logical and as naïve as his idea sounds, it would leave this entire country knee deep in carbon fallout within a decade. The consequences of the pollution caused would be appalling.

And his extolling the idea having a refinery at Kitimat to process all the bitumen coming over the Rockies instead of putting it directly on tankers is a pipedream of dramatic proportions. Mind you he points out that Enbridge has screwed up its public relations in regards to that pipeline in “a textbook case of incompetence.” The final proof of incompetence for Enbridge will be when its Line 9 through Toronto ruptures because of the high pressure of heated bitumen, they are going to try to force through it.

Gibson thinks that TransCanada’s EnergyEast is a “no-brainer” He believes it should just get built. What Gibson does not seem to understand is that there are many people in the East who think the people proposing it are the no-brainers and they should all get stuffed.

Gibson actually writes that just Quebeckers need to “accept a bit of reality therapy on this issue.” While Quebec is much more aware today to the very high risk for marine life in the lower St. Lawrence River, it is Ontario that has been sounding increasing alarms on these hair-brained eastern pipelines.

While the federal government has effectively blocked the more knowledgeable writers and environmental groups from filing meaningful objections to the pipelines with the Calgary-based National Energy Board (NEB), we have hardly been defeated.

Gibson is obviously not aware that Alberta already has the upgrading capability to convert more than a million barrels a day of bitumen into synthetic crude oil. The problem is that the province does not have the ability to deal with the pollution.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

What is this sham we are presenting to younger generations of Canadians? Our federal politicians seem to have their heads in their pants as they “tut-tut” about human sexuality. With no meaningful debate, the Conservative’s twisted new prostitution laws have come into effect. Justin Trudeau has punished two Liberal MPs for having sex with New Democrats. In this parliament: hypocrisy rules.

And judging by the headline news in print and broadcast these days, some entertainers must have far greater sexual stamina than the rest of us. We have always known the casting couch is a real place and there is also no question that there are women who notch their belts for the celebrities they bed.

But, at the same time, brutality is no part of sexual relationships. Beating a smaller, weaker person is the mark of a coward. Forcing a person to submit to sexual advances because of a position of authority should always be a crime.

But what is consent? There are words, there are actions, clutching and directing and simple murmurs. The best sex is by people who care about each others needs. Sex knows only the boundaries of human creativity. And sex is private.

Inviting a person to your bed is an invitation to new depths of relationship. It is neither a conquest nor a lasting commitment. If you do not make the offer, you will never know. And an invitation to return is a compliment.

But there is also morning-after remorse. It can be on either side. After a night of athleticism and learning, it can be somewhat shattering to believe you did not measure up. You have to remember that sex is as mental as it is physical. We are all individuals.

And that brings us to the world of prostitution of which unfortunately our politicians have no special understanding. Sex workers are of many shapes, sizes, genders, offerings and costs. They perform important services to society and they need our indulgence. To leave them to the dark corners and back alleys and to mistreatment by the less honest members of our society is to be ignorant of human needs and declares us to be hypocrites. Prostitution is the oldest profession because it is a basic service that deals in human needs. Only fools try to deny its existence.

And we are pleased to see that some Liberals and New Democrats are striving for a new plateau of accord. There is much that can be resolved in bedrooms and the participants should not be criticized for it. Messrs. Mulcair and Trudeau definitely need to be less stuffy about it.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

We are supposed to appreciate how the Hair helped Michaëlle Jean become the new head of la Francophonie. While not outwardly supporting Canada’s former governor general, the Hair reminded everyone at the summit of the $500 million Canada will be providing over the next five years to vaccinate children in poorer countries. Could the countries of the other five contenders match that?

Jean, by the way, is the governor general who allowed the Hair to prorogue parliament in December 2008 to keep the Conservative minority government from being defeated by a coalition of the Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Quebecois. She allowed the prorogation to save the Conservatives not the country.

La Francophonie job is likely Jean’s payoff for saving the Hair and his government back then. With African nations making up the majority of the organization of French-speaking nations, Jean would not have come out on top if the African nations had not been divided in their choice. Her being black, attractive, personable and originally from Haiti was also of some help.

If the Hair had come out openly to support Jean, she probably would have lost. He had to work behind the scenes. That was something he did not do four years ago when the United Nations refused Canada a seat on the Security Council where Canada had served so well in the past. The facts are that the Hair and his Conservative government have trashed Canada’s reputation around the world.

Travel anywhere in the world today and compare our country’s reputation with just 15 years ago and there is a serious difference. We used to be peacekeepers and today we are mercenaries for the Americans. We used to be a safe haven and we now put up signs for refugees saying Do Not Come Here. We used to welcome some foreign workers on temporary visas and now we exploit them. We used to fly the Canadian flag proudly all over the world and today we are closing consulates and hiding in British facilities.

Some pundits are betting that the Hair will be increasingly soft and fuzzy as the time of the election approaches. There is a deadline of October 2015 that he cannot go past. He has no choice but to face the electorate. He will need a miracle.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

You could barely hear over the running up of the A310 engines at Ottawa Airport. The Hair and his chatelaine stood at the door of the giant aircraft waving goodbye to their adoring throng from the Prime Minister’s Office. It sounded something like: “Suck it up folks. I’m going where it’s warm.”

And you can hardly blame the Hair for wanting to get out of cold and unwelcoming Ottawa. Those winds coming down the Ottawa Valley these days are winds of change.

And you really cannot expect the Hair, the hairdresser and the wife to travel all the way to Senegal for a meeting of the world’s French speaking nations in tourist class. That would be at least three airline connections and interminable waits in those holding pens they refer to as international waiting rooms.

But the Hair is sure leaving a mess behind. And why would he want to come back?

His legacy is in tatters. When his oil economy was steaming along at $100 a barrel, the Hair was king of all he surveyed. When real crude oil drops below $60 per barrel, he knows it is time to get out of town. Who wants to buy bitumen when real oil is cheaper?

And it is not as though anything else is going well. The premiers of Canada’s two largest provinces have formed a posse and they are out to get him. He not only owes them for killing most of their manufacturing but he needs to start keeping his word. He can hardly leave town for parts unknown anytime they come to Ottawa.

And that bunch of Tories he runs with is still the gang that can never shoot straight. That bumbling ex-cop who is supposed to look sympathetic with the veteran’s is going to get himself lynched. The kid who took the fall for the robbocalls got himself locked up and that is where the Hair’s former parliamentary secretary might also be headed. At least the guy from Peterborough had the good grace to resign his seat. And good luck on winning a by-election there!

With the Canadian dollar dropping like a rock, the Hair had better have some American dollars to buy fuel for that Airbus A310. Not that he is in a hurry to come home.

Why would the Hair want to rush back to listen to the snide comments from the Leader of the Opposition and that kid Trudeau. The last time he told the two other parties to go screw themselves, he had absolutely no idea that they would take him literally.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

After receiving various complaints from readers about the recent critical posting about Global Television’s Tom Clark, it is time to recant. The truth is that this writer has always been a solid fan of Tom’s work. It also helps that his late father, Joseph A.P. Clark was not only a good friend and mentor but preceded us as head of communications for the Liberal Party in Ontario back in the 1960s. (Tom was still at Upper Canada College at the time.)

The complaint about the easy ride given to Alberta Premier Jim Prentice on Tom’s West Block show was much more of a jab at Calgary-based Shaw Media than any criticism of Tom. He was just doing his job. And he does it well.

Some readers felt that Tom vindicated himself for the Premier Prentice soft lobs by ripping apart Conservative MP Colin Carrie on the following week’s show. Carrie, a chiropractor from Oshawa, is parliamentary secretary to the minister of the environment. Carrie was not particularly forthcoming in answering questions about the environment and did not seem aware of what Prime Minister Harper promised. You ended up with the impression that Carrie was sent to do Tom’s show as a sacrificial lamb.

Conversely, the show Tom did at the Halifax International Security Forum on November 23 was an outstanding bit of journalism and it should have been a longer program. The show hardly brushed the surface of what needed to be openly discussed. The questions about border security alone were good for more than a couple hours.

But like any news show of its kind, Tom’s West Block is only as good as the guests that the interviewer can attract. If Tom ripped apart every Conservative sycophant appearing on his show, he would soon be accused of being a Liberal supporter and the show would lose its balance and our interest.

It was also intriguing a while ago when Tom invited the three major party leaders up in his bush plane for a ride-interview. Justin Trudeau of the Liberals seemed to really enjoy the experience. We have not seen Tom Mulcair of the New Democrats yet but it might not be his thing. We know there is no way Tom Clark will ever get Prime Minister Harper out of his controlled environment. It is this type of thinking that makes Tom a leader in his field. We wish him well.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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