Category: Federal Politics

When you are part of Canada’s parliament, you are assumed to be an adult. You are expected to act like one. You hardly expect Members of Parliament and Cabinet Ministers to act like children sent out for recess. It was still not surprising this past week to see Justin Trudeau give a couple Liberal MPs the boot from caucus. They are just the tip of the iceberg of those that need to be sent to the principal’s office.

One comment that needs to be made on this matter is that New Democrat Leader Thomas Mulcair shows how out-of-touch he is in accusing Justin Trudeau of making matters worse for the NDP MPs who made the complaints. Trudeau acted appropriately and quickly. He respected the NDPers’ privacy by not revealing their names. Mulcair needs to recognize that we can no longer bury this type of problem.

It reminds us of not too many years ago, an executive assistant reported that a constituent had called him and asked for the Cabinet member’s agenda for the week. The EA asked him what he wanted it for. The constituent seriously stated that he was coming to Ottawa for a visit and he wanted to follow the Minister and see if he could pick up any of his rejects. It seems the Minister’s reputation as something of a swinger was becoming common knowledge back in his riding. Whether it was admired by his wife and family was another matter entirely.

Rightly or wrongly the media are ‘hands off’ on the sexual antics in Ottawa. That particular minister enjoyed rubbing the media’s collective nose in it. The media still seem to have the caveat that if it is the elected person’s personal life, you do not comment. Nobody expects the media to go around being gossip mongers but the only way they could show their annoyance with him was in the poor media coverage he earned.

But the media are also letting us down. It would do no good for a blogger to tell you which elected people need to come out of the closet when a large part of the blog’s audience is made up of people who already know what is going on. Nor would it help to say where this MP or that Senator hangs his or her hat some evenings. Ottawa is a big town with a very small town feeling. What is important is whether this or that parliamentarian is really making a contribution to bettering our life in Canada. That is what this blog worries about.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

If there was ever a time to save Canada from the destructive direction of the Harper Conservatives, it is now. If there was ever a time for the Liberal and New Democratic parties to merge, it is now. If there was ever a time for the right decisions, it is now.

And when you consider that the 2015 federal election will be fought on the grounds of two distinctly different visions of Canada, now is the time to gather forces and make the win decisive. If the Liberal and New Democrat visions of the family are similar and in definite contrast to the ‘June Cleaver’ vision of the Conservatives, why should the two left of centre parties try to destroy each other?

Of course if you are a Conservative supporter, you might not like it. And some Liberal and New Democrat supporters might have to be allowed to grumble for a while. There is just no reason why the Liberals and the New Democrats cannot work together for the greater good.

There can be no greater calling for us than to put an end to where Mr. Harper is taking our country. After all what has Mr. Harper brought Canadians other than the disrespect of most of the United Nations? He has tried to lock us into a tar sands economy that offers nothing but more global warming. He has reduced the federal government to nothing more than a tax collector and ATM dispenser. He goes to war at any excuse. You know you are a minority in this country when he panders for your vote. He is a lackey of Britain’s royals for no reason. He and his hairdresser fly around the world making more enemies for our country.

But the Conservative defeat is so simple. All it takes is the opportunity for Canadians to cast one vote to be rid of the Conservatives. It just takes a vote for Canada’s new Liberal Democrats. The new party could have a June wedding and a summer to get its act together before the October election. And is there any question about who would win?

Canadians have shown for years that they are not in favour of the Stephen Harper brand of Reform Party extreme conservatism. They have never given a majority of support to his party. They have never seemed particularly keen on his lack of honesty, fairness, conciliation, truth or trustfulness.

In contrast, a New Democrat infusion into the Liberal Democratic Party of Canada would ensure Canadians of a more balanced left of centre party that would pay attention to all Canadians, respecting their rights, building their confidence and offering a fair and progressive government for all.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

It is time for Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau to make things happen. The challenge is in the federal riding of Whitby-Oshawa in Ontario. It is not because this is about him. It is about how the Liberals will win Ontario next year. It is the first real test of Stephen Harper’s vision for Canada. The ramifications of this bye-election will tell us much about the coming general election of 2015.

This is the first opportunity to pit the needs of Justin’s ‘middle class’ voters with the ‘June Cleaver’ vision of Stephen’s ideal family. It tells us if Canadians will willingly give tax breaks to the wealthy through schemes such as income splitting. These are clear and easy to explain concepts and Whitby-Oshawa is an ideal territory in which to see which way the voters are leaning.

Luckily Prime Minister Harper does not have MPP Christine Elliott running for her late husband Jim Flaherty’s seat. The fact that Flaherty won that seat with 60 per cent of the vote last time just means that Justin has his work cut out for him.

The Liberal candidate Celina Caesar-Chavannes has excellent credentials and is running a strong campaign but without the importing of masses of Liberal workers in the next two weeks, things could be dicey.

Caesar-Chavannes is up against a solid Conservative in the person of former Whitby mayor Pat Perkins. New Democrat Trish McAuliffe is likely not to be a factor.

But it was hardly a coincidence that the Prime Minister was in the riding recently to play up the federal support for the late Jim Flaherty’s favourite charity. It is also not surprising that he was in the Vaughan area the other day announcing government support for rich families with children. It is up to Trudeau and the Liberal team to show the voters the mathematics and realize how picayune the goodies are in real life.

Justin Trudeau hardly needs to match the allure of the Prime Minister’s goodies. He has to prove his impact on voters and show that he can turn out the support from his party. If he can turn out the troops despite his earlier missteps in leadership, it will bode well for next year. A loss for Trudeau at this stage could change the parameters in the province he must win next year.

This is Justin’s chance to show what he can do when everything is not going his way. There is no reason for him to lay back. Whitby-Oshawa does not belong to the Conservatives. It is definitely time for him to live up to the family name.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

MP Dean Del Mastro earned his reputation as a pit bull when serving as Prime Minister Harper’s parliamentary secretary. If the Prime Minister’s Office officialdom declared black was white that day, Del Mastro would stand up in the House of Commons and tell everyone that black was white. He got away with that for a while but he met a judge the other day who said that Mr. Del Mastro was not credible.

And now that Del Mastro has been found guilty of breaking election laws, he wants to keep saying that black is white. The only problem remaining for the voters is that we seem to have to wait for him to be sentenced to see if he gets his ass kicked out of our parliament.

Mind you, Del Mastro does not appear to think he has done anything wrong. That seems to be a common attitude of many Conservative politicians. In a television interview after the verdict, Del Mastro said that the judge did not understand that politics is a rough and tumble game. While he says he does not want family members hurt by it, he seems to see no problem with dirty tricks, vote suppression, exceeding spending limits or anything else he thinks he needs to do to get elected.

He is hardly the first to have that attitude. Many of his colleagues think cheating is not the problem. Getting caught is the problem. If you can get away with it, then it is obviously fair game.

When Conservative candidates see the national campaign using out-of-context attack advertising to trash their opponents and robocalls to suppress opposition votes in an all-out attack, what incentive do they see for themselves to be fair?

And what happens is that mean spirited campaigning begets retaliatory mean-spirited campaigning. It poisons the entire election process and that carries on into the House of Commons after the election. And do not even get us started about the situation in Canada’s house of sober second thought: the Senate of Canada.

This is not to suggest that all local Liberal Party election operations were always on the up and up. Nor were the New Democrats always virtuous. One of the problems a campaign manager has to address throughout every election campaign is to keep workers focussed on the objectives. You know that dirty tricks supporters want to play on opponents are usually a waste of time and resources.

Dean Del Mastro is hardly the first candidate to ever lie in his election returns. His mistake was to get caught. We hope that his sentence is salutary so that candidates for all parties will pay heed. And that they make sure he is no longer in our parliament!

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

It must be a time of more honesty. TransCanada Pipelines is now estimating that its Energy East pipeline proposal could cost as much as $12 billion. And the pipeline company is now being more truthful about the intent to export at least half of the 1.1 million barrels per day of Alberta Tar Sands bitumen the pipeline is designed to carry.

But this is not oil. This is the one lie that TransCanada seems to want to stick with. The company thinks Canadians are stupid and they would not understand that bitumen requires more highly polluting processing before it can become synthetic crude oil. And then, and only then, can you refine it into oil products such as gasoline for automobiles.

If the pipeline is approved and built, it will be the longest and largest pipeline in North America. And while there is considerable environmental concern about the pipeline, most knowledgeable experts feel that there is little chance that the pipeline will be turned down as long as the Conservatives are in power in Ottawa.

The pipeline company has at the end of October dumped a 30,000 page application on the Calgary based National Energy Board. The greatest effort by the energy board will be to deal with the expected objections from the governments of Ontario and Quebec. The objections from the more than 150 First Nation groups whose lands the pipeline will cross have been frustrated by the company buying off 60 of them and being able to produce signed agreements. It makes it look as though the objecting groups are just unhappy with the payoff and are holding out for more.

Ontario and Quebec can both be counted on to remind the energy board of the Enbridge Kalamazoo River spill in Michigan in 2010. That spill has already cost Enbridge’s insurance companies more than a billion dollars (US). With Enbridge’s Line 9 and TransCanada’s Energy East running across Ontario and then Quebec to carry bitumen to ocean-going tankers on the St. Lawrence and the Bay of Fundy, the question is when not if, there will be a similar spill in Canada?

While both major pipelines will be more rigidly inspected, the intent is to increase the pressure in the pipe to move the hydro-carbon diluted bitumen through the system faster. The only problem is that no matter how thoroughly the sand is washed from the bitumen, it will still be more abrasive and more corrosive than anything sent so far or so fast by pipelines.

Mind you, if by any chance the federal Conservatives get re-elected in 2015, the Canadian economy will be so tightly tied to bitumen, we better get used to it.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

The Hair, in his role as benevolent prime minister, was in Vaughan, Ontario the other day. The Hair and a large group of affluent looking Conservative families were there to tell the news media of the benefits voters can get by being married, having a big income, voting Conservative and having children. The Hair has this ‘June Cleaver’ image of marriage where the little woman stays home raising children and her man goes out in the world to earn to earn a living for both of them. Nobody has the heart to tell The Hair that times have changed.

The Conservatives have been promising for quite a few years now that when they got Canada’s budget deficit wrestled down to nothing, they would let rich couples with children share up to $50,000 of their income when one spouse does not earn as much as the other. That way, the couple can save up to $2000 in taxes each year.

On top of this largess from The Hair, he is increasing the child care expense deduction for wealthy Canadians with children next year. And if you cannot afford to buy your kids expensive hockey gear never fear, The Hair has a bribe for you too.

The Universal Child Care Benefit (the successor to our famous Canadian Baby Bonus) will be increased by $60 per month next year for children aged five or under. In addition, children from 6 to 17 will be eligible for a $60 per month handout from our taxes. This increase does not keep up with inflation but the Conservatives want to trumpet it anyway.

It does not seem to be a coincidence that these new Baby Bonus payments will start in July next year just a couple months before The Hair is supposed to be calling the October General Election.

If you are confused by all of these figures, you can just ask your accountant what it all means. If you do not have an accountant, you probably do not earn enough money for the income splitting or tax credits to matter.

Of course, in Vaughan, The Hair only showed off the Conservative view of the nuclear family. There were no same sex partners raising a child in this group. The Hair knows better than to rub Conservative noses in that.

And he was certainly not announcing these benefits in the House of Commons. Those other parties might have asked embarrassing questions. They might have also pointed out how discriminatory and unfair these benefits are as they mainly benefit people who do not need the money.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party Thomas Mulcair faces a fascinating challenge in the coming year. He is attempting to choose the right march music for his election band to play. There are three genres from which he can choose: He could select Ragtime of the party’s beginnings as the socialists of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). He personally might lean more to the era of Rock and Roll. And then he might adapt to crossover with today’s pop music.

It is to be assumed that Mr. Mulcair will reject the early Ragtime and swing tunes of socialism. The implied strife and revolution of socialism has been rejected in Canada over the years and those who fought for social justice in those early times were more often honoured after but never in their day.

There was a considerable uplift in the tunes of the Rock and Roll era as unions dominated the former CCF, renaming it as the New Democratic Party. While the earlier stridency for social justice still prevailed in the party, the union support muted the message to fit with the self-serving mantra of union solidarity. The satisfaction of the unions tended to stifle the social justice message.

But it is in the confusion of crossover in today’s pop music that presents Mr. Mulcair with his greatest challenge. In attempting to paper the past with the social democrat label, he is conflicted with the crowded central right of the political spectrum.

In Ontario recently we saw the provincial New Democrats go down in flames because they offered no alternative to the ruling Liberals. They were trapped on the political right of a supposedly left budget. And yet it was just a weak attempt at half measures designed to force an election.

So what is Mr. Mulcair to do? Is he fish or fowl? Here he has proved his ability in prosecuting the role of being the Official Opposition in parliament. Or has he left his party behind? Is Thomas Mulcair even a socialist? Is he a union supporter? Is he a social democrat? Or is he a Quebec Liberal?

And before you answer any of those questions, maybe you should look at his Quebec caucus of accidents. In the collapse of the Bloc Québécois in 2011, many Quebec voters parked their votes with the so-called Orange Wave. It was not much of a wave and more of an undertow. The vote gave the finger to the Conservatives and the Liberals, demolished the Bloc and threw the New Democrats into an imbalance with serious questions about its future in Canadian politics.

Mr. Mulcair needs to pick his party’s marching music. There is little time left.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

It paints a picture. Patrick. Brown, Babel’s Member of Parliament, was cowering with the Conservative caucus the other day when a confused gunman went down the hall in parliament outside the caucus room. This breach of security was an affront to Canadians and to our democracy. And what is Mr. Brown doing? He is texting his favourite reporter.

We have to be mindful of course that Mr. Brown is doing double duty these days. He is going to Ottawa to vote at his party’s call and he is running for the leadership of the Ontario provincial Conservative Party. He sees no conflict in trying to be in both roles at once. It is likely that last Wednesday he might have been wishing he was somewhere other than Ottawa.

But here was Brown, fulfilling his purpose in life—to get his name in the paper. This guy is desperate. He sends a text to the local reporter to say that he cannot tell her what has happened in the caucus room. He did admit that he was shocked by what was going on. He did not think it should be allowed to happen in Canada.

If Mr. Brown just paid attention to what is being said about the Islamic jihadists in Syria and Iraq by his government, he might have figured it out. If he had paid attention when Canadian fighter aircraft were sent to the Middle East to bomb the jihadists, he might have thought that the jihadists might like to get back at us.

The jihadists in Syria and Iraq are the product of a civil war in Syria and unsettled times in Iraq. They are among the best funded and public relations savvy criminals to ever come out of the Middle East. They know the value of propaganda. They also know that hundreds of thousands of Muslims have come to North America, where they are welcomed into a free, tolerant and open society. They also know losers among the younger generation of Muslims or converts can be radicalized to support their objectives.

But maybe that is all too deep for Mr. Brown to comprehend. Here is a guy who makes his political decisions as a retail politician. He thinks any publicity is good publicity. He leans on charities to give him coverage. He inundates his electoral district with poor quality mailings promoting himself. He is running for the leadership of the provincial party to gain more attention.

He sometimes gets the attention he wants. He should also get the ridicule he deserves.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

We were all deeply concerned the other day. It just takes time to think it through. How awful that this sad, mentally-deranged person with a gun be enabled to attack and kill one of our soldiers standing ceremonial guard duty at Canada’s national memorial to our dead of foreign wars.

And we also need to share the common concern for our parliamentarians closeted in caucus as a gunman runs amok in the Hall of Honour. This place is the core of our democracy and it has to be respected.

It is only in retrospect that Canadians need to better understand how the Hair and his cronies hasten along the crazies who see Canada as the enemy of Islam. He uses the rhetoric of bigotry instead of understanding. He promotes resolution by gun instead of dialogue. He preys on the fragile mind. He uses the words of a narrow and biased world.

And that is what helps create an environment for evil.

Just where is this prime minister taking our beautiful country? He poses as a great friend of Israel to win the votes of Canada’s Jewish citizens. Yet, can the Hair live with or understand the turmoil and retribution that influences the daily lives of the people of Israel? Instead of bringing Canada’s good will and negotiations to the Middle East table, the Hair brings partisanship. He helps nobody.

He hardly helps the Americans in their current concerns. Canada’s friendship with the Americans can hardly be forever sullied by saying ‘no.’ Good friends give honest advice not insincere flattery. A good friend stands ready to help when that is really what the friend needs.

Canadians want to be honest brokers to a peaceful world. We want to use diplomacy, not guns. Canadians know that the real bravery is in being peacekeepers, not warriors. Canada shares the cultures of many nations. It welcomes the peoples of all nations. It wants to be welcome by all nations in turn.

Canadians do not want to engage in senseless wars. They do not seek retribution. They want to seek conciliation. The Hair took away the control of long guns. It was a sick person with a long gun behind that caucus room door. The Hair has spoken in parliament to the destruction of the jihadists without understanding how he was sowing the dragon’s teeth for more of the same.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

It will feel like a year long federal election campaign between now and October 2015. Wars have not lasted as long. Yet, despite all the strategies at play, the key decisions by the real electors will not be made until September and October next year.

Much of the first six to nine months will be taken up with making sure of each party’s base vote. Regionally and demographically, you can define the base for each of the main political parties. In the same sense as most rich, white males vote Conservative, many mid-income, educated, females vote Liberal and a high percentage of unionized, working class vote New Democrat, you can see why inner cities tend to vote New Democrat, single-family suburbs tend to vote Liberal and prosperous farmers vote Conservative.

The political chore is to first shore up your own vote and, when time allows, you show the flag in enemy-held electoral districts. There are also 30 new ridings in play this year and no party is assured a win in those. They receive special attention.

While nobody trusts polls today, the fact that they consistently show Justin Trudeau and his Liberals in the lead, gives the Conservatives and New Democrats a target. In fact if Mr. Harper can find a way to keep the Liberals and New Democrats more evenly matched, the better the chance for his Conservatives.

But it is regional concerns that cause the most headaches in theses early stages. With the promised demise of the Bloc Québécois, many polls are showing the New Democrats as the recipients of that vote. What these polls are really showing is that there is no other place at this time that the separatist vote wants to go. They are unlikely to play on that swing before the end of September next year. They might dislike the Trudeau name but they hate Harper more.

The other likely regional shifts are in Ontario and British Columbia. With Justin Trudeau’s Liberals likely to win more than half of Ontario’s 138 seats next year, all three parties are spending a great deal of time and effort in that playground. British Columbia has a special place for Trudeau and if he can solve the Gordian knot he has gotten into in relation to pipelines, British Columbia can dish him up a very fine majority government.

We have lots of time during the year for Justin Trudeau to learn to look like a statesman, Thomas Mulcair to look smart and Stephen Harper to look human.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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