Category: Federal Politics

It is supposed to be flattering that Babel-on-the-Bay receives so many news releases from so many sources every day. Some of them are interesting, a few are funny, some are useful, and most get a quick check and delete. It is with deep regret though that we have had to bar the Green Party of Canada for spamming us. The Green Party overdoes it.

The Green Party communications person must be a machine. It sits there in the Green Party office in downtown Ottawa and churns out unnecessary news releases indiscriminately and much too frequently. We now know where the local Greenie gets all his stuff that he grinds out on a regular basis.

What we did not expect was to be wished Happy New Year the other day on the occasion of Rosh Hashanah. While we might on occasion smile and wish a Jewish friend (yes, we have friends) Happy New Year before the Hebrew High Holidays, It does not seem appropriate for Elizabeth May (an Anglican) to wish us (an agnostic) greetings for Rosh Hashanah. That is spreading the media net a bit too far.

And it is not that we do not admire Green Leader Elizabeth May. She is a very smart and capable person. It is a delight to have her in parliament where she can do her own assessment of the hell this country is headed for in a leaky bucket. To be honest with you, we think she could do a better job for Canada as a member of the Liberal Party.

As a Liberal Party of Canada member, it would be a pleasure to help her put the party leaders’ feet to the fire and roast them regularly for not protecting our environment. As a Liberal, she could help us rail against Justin Trudeau’s weaselling on tar sands exploitation. He needs to be educated on the subject and then held to what he promises. We simply cannot allow the continued massive carbon output of extracting and refining bitumen from the tar sands.

And we should also note that Elizabeth May could contribute to almost any portfolio in a Liberal Cabinet. We will never forget her outstanding contribution in the televised Leaders’ Debate in the 2008 federal election. She was the only party leader present who understood and was willing to say how serious the world financial system situation had become. Mr. Harper had another agenda and he was not about to reveal it to Canadians.

And please be advised Ms. May, we will welcome your more thoughtful releases any time if you will just dial down that e-mail production machine in the office.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

The last thing the Hair needed this week was another state dinner. The guy is going to finish up his imperial prime ministership next year weighing close to 300 pounds (136 kilograms). People are beginning to notice the way he is packing it on around the middle. And it has been a telling week. He passed up addressing the nations gathered in New York to do something about global warming but then showed up for dinner.

And was the speech in New York by Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq supposed to be some sort of a joke? Here she was telling the gathered nations that Canada was doing something about greenhouse gasses in the transportation and electricity sectors, never mentioning Canada’s huge and highly polluting oil and gas sectors. This is an international blackeye to Canada and what we stand for. If anyone important had bothered to stay for her speech, they would have booed.

Canada’s standing with the United Nations was further emphasized when the Hair came later in the week to address the General Assembly. The hall was virtually deserted. Lame duck President or not, Barak Obama was there at the United Nations. He stood up for the environment. He got a great reception. The Hair does not give a damn about the environment. He got the reception he deserved.

And you would have thought that the Hair would have done better during Question Period in the House of Commons last Tuesday instead of having his foolish Parliamentary Secretary Paul Calandra (Oak Ridges-Markham) make an ass of himself again. It reached the point that Leader of the Opposition Thomas Mulcair had to appeal to the Speaker to ask Calandra to put some relevance to his answers. The Conservative Speaker denied Mulcair the right to ask further questions that day.

It took an entire day for Speaker Andrew Scheer to think about the problem. He delayed Question Period on Wednesday to lecture the House on the lack of substance in the answers to questions. He also lectured the Leader of the Opposition for the effrontery of questioning his neutrality. It was regrettable that the Hair was not there to hear what the Speaker had to say on substance.

And to add insult to injury, the Hair was at the same time telling a meeting of mainly Canadian business people in New York that President Obama had asked him to do more in Iraq. Was he lying to these people about what his Parliamentary Secretary was stonewalling the opposition on back home in Ottawa? It is something to cry about.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

We hardly live a totally sheltered life here in Babel. Sun Media owns the only daily newspaper and the odd free copy takes about three minutes to thumb through and discard. We are supposed to get Sun News on our Bell Fibe television service. We have never bothered to find it. And knowing the Péladeau’s, père et fils, we would probably not be interested anyway. The combination of those sleazy tabloids that the senior Péladeau created in Quebec with the witless Toronto Sun holds no level of interest.

But, at the same time, Justin Trudeau is getting bad advice from his media advisors. He should take a page from his father’s book and simply give this guy Levant the finger.

What was explained to Justin’s father more than a few times was that ignorant people are entitled to their opinion. There is a readily available supply of media people prepared to pander to that ignorance. We just did not have today’s Sun Media back then that is such a good example of the problem.

The people who read or watch or believe what they see or read in Sun Media might not be the brightest bulbs on the tree of life in this country. The truth is these sad Sun Media people are preaching to the choir. They are simply telling ignorant people what they want to hear or painstakingly read. Some people get off on things rude and obscene. You can think of someone like Levant as though he is the CBC’s Rex Murphy after a lobotomy.

But if nobody talks to Levant, his sponsors might eventually get the message that he is ineffective. It could be wrong to assume that everyone from Sun Media is just as obnoxious. It could also be a mistake to bar the door against all Sun Media reporters. Even ignorant readers and viewers deserve to hear the truth.

And besides, any sensible person seeing that picture of the bridal group on a sailing ship with Justin Trudeau kissing the bride’s cheek would be absolutely charmed by the picture. The respect and appreciation Justin shows for the bride is obvious. You can be sure the bride will treasure that record from her wedding day for the rest of her life.

For this ass Levant to belittle the event is rude. And to use it as a reason to attack Justin Trudeau’s parents shows bad judgement and despicable manners. While Pierre Trudeau did not always suffer fools graciously, he was a gentleman. Trudeau’s son Justin has always shown himself to be very much a gentleman. Mr. Levant of Sun Media quite obviously is not a gentleman. We can ignore him.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is telling us that the party now has open nominations. You really hate to be a killjoy but the party still has a long way to go to have truly open nominations. The process is about as open as a bank vault at midnight. Becoming a federal Liberal Party candidate today can only be described as expensive, intrusive, demanding, demeaning, and by no stretch of the imagination is it democratic.

And the fact that the Conservative Party is just as undemocratic does not excuse it.

The New Democratic Party would laugh at the Conservative and Liberal methods of choosing candidates but that party has its own problems finding candidates for all 338 electoral districts next year.

But the truth is folks, the current Green Light approval process to become a Liberal Party candidate is not just bad, it is vile. It is a poke in the eye to our democracy. It is a start on a downhill slide to totalitarianism. It is hard to believe there are any political science academics in this country that are not aghast at where this degree of control by the major political parties is leading us?

Liberal hopefuls start with the outrage of paying their party $1000 to consider their possible candidacy for a party nomination. This is not a repayable bond. The party keeps the money whether you win the candidate spot or not. A hundred or so dollars earnest money is one thing; a $1000 from your pocket that you need to spend on communications in a contest to become the riding candidate is simply not justified.

And we hear from potential candidates that the entire Liberal Green Light process is currently taking as much as two and three months. If Stephen Harper dropped the writ tomorrow there would be a lot of Liberal candidates caught with their skivvies around their ankles waiting for the Liberal Party proctologists to check out their bona fides.

And this is not even discussing the forms you have to fill out, the information you have to supply, the questions that you are asked, the promises you are expected to give and the overall insult to your intelligence that is involved.

What is more worrying than the people who struggle through the process out of their sense of duty and desire to make a contribution are the people who look at it all and say: “Screw it!” We must be losing many interesting candidates. Some might have mattered.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

This needs to be clarified. Nobody owns your body but you. A true liberal recognizes the right of men and women everywhere to the freedom of control of their bodies. It is why a liberal sees abortion, prostitution and euthanasia as moral issues but not legal issues. A liberal decries the efforts of narrow minded people to try to use the state to resolve issues of conscience and personal choice.

But at the same time, nobody has the right to tell you how to think. We all have the right to our own set of principles. At the same time as we stand firmly for the rights of the others, we cannot deny ourselves our own feelings and our own choice on the issues.

And that means Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is wrong. You cannot tell people how to think. You cannot tell a potential Liberal Party candidate, for example, that they cannot be a devout Catholic. That does not mean they can use parliament or party platforms to proselytize for the Roman Church. The church might be an anachronism but it has also done much good in helping people and raising standards of decency around the world.

Nor is the attitude of many of the more rigid churches, synagogues, temples and mosques about same-sex marriage a deterrent to their members participating in liberal dialogue, membership and candidacy. We cannot be guilty of some form of reverse discrimination because of what liberals might wish to believe in for themselves.

As liberals, we will have a major problem with the Conservatives’ ignorant and ill-considered answer to the Supreme Court on prostitution. Sometime in the first four years of the new Liberal government, the Supreme Court will be throwing the Conservative solution back at parliament for repair. It is a non-answer. If anything, the Conservative law makes matters worse. It drives prostitution into the back alleys and into the hands of less savoury elements in our society. Nobody believes that prostitutes are criminals. Nor are their customers criminals. As liberals, we have a responsibility to keep these people out of the hands of criminals.

As for Justin Trudeau, he needs to use his very good brain before he opens his handsome mouth. Leadership is very much a team effort. It helps to think of others before saying what you think.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

 

It was like old times at the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) hearing last Friday. You could see the anger rising in the commission chairman’s face. The only problem was that it was not the previous chairman Konrad von Finckenstein who had led the commission into the digital age of communications. It was Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s choice of chair, civil servant Jean-Pierre Blais. Where von Finckenstein would have blown a gasket, Blais called a washroom break.

The witness Chairman Blais left at the microphone was American lawyer Corie Wright global public policy director for Netflix. The streaming video company is believed to have over two million Canadian customers and the regulating commission wanted lists and revenue figures. Until now the company has been operating under an exemption from having to supply competitive information on its Internet-based service.

What needs to be understood about this incident is that it was the Harper government that wanted Netflix exempted under an open Internet policy. At the same time the CRTC is charged with regulating the telecommunications and broadcast industries in Canada and Netflix has been operating at a considerable advantage over its Canadian competitors.

It is simple enough to understand. Bell Canada, for example, has a vast network today of fibre optics that enables it to supply high bandwidth service called ‘Fibe’ to customers for their telephone, television and Internet services. One of the services Bell supplies its television customers is a somewhat limited pay-per-view service. And say what you like about Bell, it does pay taxes and other charges to government to pay its way.

Netflix is an American  streaming video service that uses the broadband Internet service you are already buying as its carrier. Netflix bills you for access to the extensive Netflix portfolio.

The only problem is that as competition for Netflix grows and more bandwidth of the telephone and cable companies gets eaten up by video streaming, somebody is going to have to pay for the additional capacity required. And if money is to change hands, the government wants a share and the CRTC wants to get its fingers into the regulatory pie.

The good news for that lady from Netflix is that if she cooperates a bit with the chairman of the CRTC, she will find he is not that disagreeable. In fact, he is actually a bit toothless. He works for a Conservative ideologue and is not about to upset any commercial enterprises. And a little cooperation here with the Prime Minister’s friends at Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Telus, etc. will keep everything running smoothly.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

What a bother! That fussy Mr. Mulcair is making trouble for the Hair again. He wants Canada’s Prime Minister to ask parliament for permission to send troops to Iraq. It seems a lot of bother for a matter of just 69 soldiers going to the aid of Canada’s friends in Kurdistan and Iraq. After all, the Hair’s buddy, American President Barack Obama, has the power to send help to the Iraq government without calling Congress together to discuss the plans.

But Canada has a different system of government. The Americans have a republic wherein the President heads the administration and has substantial executive powers. He has to also deal with a bicameral Congress that controls taxation. Canada has a parliamentary system of government where parliament is the ultimate authority. As much as the Hair gets frustrated with the constraints of reporting to parliament, he is not brave enough to call a constitutional congress to change how Canadians are governed. Hell, he would have enough problems with his own party if he tried that.

And as much as the Hair tries to ignore that fussy little Mr. Mulcair, the gentleman is the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and he has the responsibility to call on the Prime Minister of the day to account to parliament. It is much more fun for the Hair to belittle the leader of the third party in parliament, that flighty Mr. Trudeau. The only problem with that is that public opinion polls, as useless and as inconsistent as they might be, are telling him that if an election were called today, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is likely to become Prime Minister.

So what is the Hair to do? He can hardly keep proroguing parliament every time he is pissed with the questions and heckling he gets there. There are news media people sitting there and reporting on his intransigence. He can hardly bully all the media owners to sit on such a good running story. Maybe Bell Canada will listen to him but that company is in danger of a revolt by the CTV News Department. The media people are all waiting gleefully for Senator Mike Duffy’s story of his bribe from the Hair’s Chief of Staff to be told in Ontario’s provincial courts.

The reality is though that Canada’s parliamentary system is not as rigid as the American congressional system. It has lots more flexibility. And the Hair has always been a rapt student of the loopholes and side doors of our parliament. It is as simple as considering the right of Mr. Mulcair or even Mr. Trudeau asking him a question in parliament. They certainly have the right to ask questions. Nowhere in the rules though does it have any penalties for failing to answer them.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

They were all in Ottawa for the opening of parliament. They were the Conservative Commons and Senate parliamentarians, the Prime Minister’s and ministerial staffs, MPs’ and Senators’ staffs, local Conservative Party members and their guests. They were all there to welcome home the Hair.

But they were not in the parliament buildings. The Hair detests parliament. It is a bother for him. People stand in parliament and criticize him. They do not recognize the greatness that the Hair sees in his vision of Canada. They ask long and boring questions. There is the tedium of votes.

The Hair prefers to talk to these loyal supporters as though he is the laird responding to the fealty of his household staff. He has journeyed far for them. He has dealt with worldly problems and concerns. He can report his successes. He can speak with benevolence. In a large room in a conference centre draped with large Canadian flags he reported on his successes and launched his party into a year-long election campaign.

God help us, he set his sights on a Conservative victory in 2015. Who else would he expect to be given control of the Canadian economy? He also stands for retribution for criminals, consumer rights, stamping out prostitution and solving the world’s problems.

The Hair spoke of the strengths he and his loyal followers are going to take into this campaign. He believes in his foreign policy, such as it is. He continues to pander to the Canadian Jewish community and our country’s voters of Ukrainian extraction. And he continues to stand ready to sign any so-called free trade deal anyone puts before him. He thinks this is statesman-like.

The Hair told his sycophants that they will need to make short work of the upcoming work of parliament this fall. He wants to be ready for a self-aggrandizing throne speech and a laudatory budget in the New Year. This will continue his theme of tax cuts and smaller government while catering to the oppressive priorities of his Conservatives.

The Hair managed to go through all of this foolishness as though he was a farmer spreading manure on his fields. His hand picked audience appeared to have bought it.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Fair’s fair. Babel-on-the-Bay would like to file a complaint with the Canada Revenue Agency. The complaint is against the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute and its offices in Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. This pseudo think-tank enterprise has been found to be biased and one-sided. It is more of an unthinking-tank as it has a clear bias on its research subjects and seems to only hire researchers prepared to support that bias.

What has brought about this demand for retribution is the outrageous treatment of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The Canada Revenue Agency is harassing the centre with an unnecessary and vindictive audit. The agency has not told us who made the complaint. The Centre for Policy Alternatives is a think tank that actually encourages thinking. It is honest about its bias. It is concerned about people and their needs. It appears to be left wing because the policy alternatives it studies are alternatives to right-wing government action and, in many cases, inaction.

Have you ever seen a more obvious prejudice than auditing the Centre for Policy Alternatives and not the Fraser Institute? This is trashing the reputation for fairness earned over many years by Canada’s revenue agency. It makes the agency look like some kind of lackey for the Harper Conservatives.

And what is enraging academics across Canada is that it is obvious that the Harper government is using the government agency to carry out a partisan political agenda. If the agency cannot stand up on its hind legs and say ‘No,’ it is only hurting its own reputation with Canadians. It is obvious that the Conservatives have expanded their vendetta that was originally just against environmentalists and scientists to any people who do not think like them.

What is particularly wrong is that the Conservative government has given the CRA a special budget of $13.4 million to harass specific charities that appear to be targeting Conservative policies. These include the lack of environmental policies related to the exploitation of the tar sands in Alberta, the promotion of pipelines to move bitumen and now general policies that are impacting Canadian citizens.

A letter demanding an end to this practice of advocacy-chill was signed recently by more than 400 Canadian academics. They want this form of intimidation to stop.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Wow. When you read the Liberal.ca website now it looks like Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau invented party democracy. It not only says he believes in party democracy but he is working to assure Liberal Party members of open nominations. He seems to not only be recanting his heavy-handed approach in the recent Trinity-Spadina by-election in Toronto but maybe he expects us to pretend it never happened.

But we should not let him off the hook for just some well chosen words. We still have to see some positive action. We still have to get the heavy hand of the party off the so-called “green-light” process of nominating candidates. Winning a battle is not resolving the war.

Many Liberals believe that the power to vet candidates belongs at the electoral district level. Maybe the local party could ask for assistance if it does not have all the resources needed to check credentials but the decision has to be made by the riding executive. The names of those who sign the nomination papers for a candidate for example, tells the local executive a great deal about a candidate. The meaning of the names is lost on senior levels of the party. Senior levels look at candidates in a different manner than the local party executive.

The truth is that truly democratic nominations can change the face of the party. They bring in more people, new ideas and changing demographics. They create greater volatility and sometimes some tensions. They accommodate the occasional maverick and create challenges for the party leadership.

But without the challenges within a Canadian political party, it fails to grow and evolve to meet the needs of an ever-changing population. The needs and desires of Canadians will always change as they process through the cycles of aging, maturing and renewing. We are human and not static. Our wishes and needs evolve and our politics have to be able to change and evolve to meet those needs.

And it is liberalism ahead of all other political movements that can best meet these societal fluxes. The ideologues of the right and left of politics are hide-bound in comparison. Only liberalism has the flexibility to seek the constant renewal of ideas and solutions to meet societal change. Our liberalism requires the freedom to grow with the changes.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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