Category: Federal Politics

For Prime Minister Harper is the Hair. Hear him roar! Can the Hair not roar at the Russian bear? Can the Hair not send a token planeload of supplies to aid the Ukraine in its efforts to assert control over its own country? Can the Hair not stand foursquare behind Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as children and non-combatants continue to die in Gaza? It says it all when the American president calls responsible countries together to resolve world problems and nobody thinks to invite Canada.

The difference is that the American President is doing his job while the Canadian Prime Minister is just panning another ethnic stream for votes.

Is it any wonder that the once enviable reputation of Canada has fallen so far in the forums of nations? No seat is offered to Canada on the United Nations’ Security Council. Our country used to be a world peacekeeper of note and nobody remembers today. And Sunday was a day set aside to honour the peacekeepers of our country’s past. Neither the Prime Minister nor the Minister of Defence gave the ceremonies time in their summer schedules. Peacekeeping does not seem to be their kind of vote getter.

But all the Hair wants to do is posture. While American President Obama can speak straight to the Israeli people about the road to peace with their neighbours, the Hair continues to pander. While the Americans have raised concerns about the growing sectarian conflict in Iraq, nobody cares what Canada thinks.

And our Foreign Affairs Minister is an embarrassment. When he does not have the knowledge, we can only wait patiently for him to learn. When he does not have the interest, he is beyond hope.

The Hair is now focused entirely on the planned announcement of the European trade agreement in September. We have no idea of the concessions that have been made to the EU or how long it will take to peel off the gobbledygook and platitudes to find them.

It took Canadians a while to understand the free trade deal with the Americans. They finally realized that Americans only like free trade when they have the bully perch. The Europeans are even better negotiators than the Americans. Gains made when your government is pushing to make it happen to impress voters are few.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

The last time Canada had a real leader, it was Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. The least understood and the most vilified of the actions he took on behalf of Canadians was the National Energy Program (NEP) of 1980. It was an attempt to ensure Canadian control, self-sufficiency and sharing of oil resources. It was never an attack on Alberta’s wild ride on oil revenues but a reasoned proposal to protect those resources for all Canadians. The problem today is that when the bitumen bubble bursts it is going to take down Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau from their political pedestals.

Prime Minister Harper has led the parade in supporting bitumen exploitation and bitumen pipelines east, west and south. It is the hypocrisy of New Democrat Leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau that worries environmentalists among their political parties. Nobody really gives a damn about Stephen Harper but the spatter of the billions in bitumen losses will smear Mulcair and Trudeau as well.

The first thing that is going to happen is that a harried, lame duck President Barack Obama is going to go along with the environmental pressure and kill TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline. While Mulcair thinks he is safe on the issue, his limited support for Keystone and general bafflegab on the bitumen issue has annoyed many of his supporters. Trudeau’s unequivocal support for the pipeline to take bitumen to the Texas Gulf oil ports has won him no friends among environmentalists.

The second shoe in the pipeline fiasco will be the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline across British Columbia to Kitimat. Since Harper’s lapdog National Energy Board has already rubberstamped this foolhardy plan, it will take the determination of our native Canadians and the Supreme Court to end it. And it will be ended. It might even set a record for the speed of a decision from the Supreme Court judges. Mulcair and Trudeau will be lucky to be sidelined on this as they both turned thumbs down on it.

The opposition leaders will meet their most serious test when the fight boils down to the twinning of the B.C. Kinder Morgan pipeline to Surrey and the pipeline plans of Enbridge and TransCanada to send bitumen to the east coast. The recent vote of East Portland, Maine citizens to tell the pipeline company what to do with its bitumen was a fine example of democracy at work. Nobody wants to ask the Saint John, New Brunswick citizens if Irving Oil should build a tanker loading dock for bitumen. The good news is that Irving Oil is making no moves to refine the highly polluting bitumen at its refinery.

But before the first litre of bitumen can be heated and forced through one of those east coast bound pipelines, the Canadian economy will already be in the tank. The collapse of the bitumen bubble in Alberta will ricochet around this country and around the world. The Chinese hardly need more pollution for their cities caused by bitumen refining. The European Union does not want bitumen. The Americans have lots of their own. And unless we start to build things in this country that cannot be easily moved to low wage areas in the U.S. and Mexico, the Harper Conservatives will have won.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

One of our favourite movies from the 1930s was the British-made H.G. Wells Things to come. The movie starring Canadian Raymond Massey was considered dystopian at the time as it was the opposite of utopian in a pre-War II world. And yet it was the immediacy of the televised images in the advanced world shown that helped create the chaos at the film’s end. The body that seems to be encouraging that chaotic immediacy of television in Canada today is the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

And it is in the interest of furthering changes in how Canadians view their television. What today’s CRTC recognizes is that how people use television has changed dramatically and the industry has kept falling further behind its audiences. The most important long-term change has been the weakening of the family unit that used to watch television together. Despite the larger and higher definition screens in the home theatre, television viewing is now becoming more individual or closely shared with just one other person.

Regulation cannot buck such trends and the CRTC recognizes that it has to go with the flow. The most serious concern of the industry and the regulator is where is the cash flow to pay for the changes? There is no question but that previous CRTC rulings have put a stranglehold on program producers by the cable and satellite suppliers. And the CRTC has to figure out how to get a reasonable share of the money down to the production houses.

One area of serious concern is news collection and distribution. The biases of the distributors, the starvation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio Canada by the government and the seeming lack of interest among youth have pushed hard at real news and what passes for news today. The networks have no excuse for the five and six-day old video clips they run behind spoken updates. There is too much going on in the world of importance to Canadians.

Everyone seems to want others to pay for their weaknesses. Free money is the cry heard up and down the television food chain. Distributors are too fat, video companies live off the past and Netflix is a leech, we are told. And to make matters worse, the Directors Guild of Canada and other worthies tell the CRTC that the public should be barred from commenting at hearings because they do not know what they are talking about.

Nobody was thinking of the movie Things to Come when we argued for the creation of the CRTC back in 1966. What we were doing was stopping the former Board of Broadcast Governors from hamstringing the industry in Canada because it thought it had to protect the CBC from all comers. Maybe we were a bit precipitous.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

You have to admit, the Conservative Party of Canada makes it look easy. You want a Conservative candidate for the coming federal election? You get one appointed from Ottawa. It could not be simpler. No fuss, no muss, no lawsuits, not like the Liberal Party.

Our new federal riding of Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte has a home-grown young nebbish ready and willing to be the popular choice to go to Ottawa to and do nothing. It’s something of a tradition with Babel Conservatives. They were all weaned on Gilbert and Sullivan’s song on how you get to be ruler of the Queen’s Navy. You “go to parliament at your party’s call, and never ever think for yourself at all.”

And they have the perfect young gentleman for that. He would have been the Conservative candidate in the 2011 provincial election but he made the mistake of paying for his supporters’ memberships with sequence-numbered bills from the bank where he worked at that time. He lost that nomination and soon left that somewhat embarrassed bank for one of its competitors.

But this young gentleman has ambition. He really wants to go to Ottawa and will not be satisfied with just seeing the changing of the guard ceremony on Parliament Hill. He wants to live dangerously off the taxpayers. He wants to be self important. He has prepared himself with two terms on city council, doing nothing there and, when talking, confusing everybody.

But, hold everything! The news is that the nebbish might have some tough competition from the Liberal Party. The other day we signed the nomination application for Trevor Owen, a Babel lawyer, who works with his father’s law firm on Owen Street here in Babel. We know Trevor to be bright, have wit and ideas and a charming wife. He would not go to Ottawa to sit quietly in the back benches and only vote at his party’s call.

But we will not be happy if Trevor Owen is similarly appointed by the Liberal Party. We want a competition. We want choice. We want dialogue about the needs of this riding and how best to represent it in Ottawa. We believe citizens of Babel deserve no less.

Maybe the name of the political party should be removed from the ballot once again so that the people who vote have to vote for the best person first. Would that not be a novel way to do things? With Babel to be split down the middle in the coming federal election, it will never do for us to elect two useless MPs.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

The American penny dreadful National Enquirer must have been named before Fowler’s Modern English Usage encouraged people to say ‘inquire’ for asking and ‘enquire’ for an investigation. Or maybe not. Nobody cares about the proper use of English anymore.

But something that caught our attention last week still has us puzzled. Why would the Department of National Defence be the biggest spender in the Canadian government in doing research into the opinions of Canadians? It is bothersome. One rarely thinks of our National Defence Headquarters staff of having enquiring or even inquiring minds.

Are we finding out with whom Canada should next go to war? Do Canadians want their navy to have a battleship? Or just some more tug boats? And yet we find that the Department spent almost $600,000 in the last fiscal year on researching public opinion.

Surely it could not be about the Joint Strike Fighter F35. Canadians have no general awareness of the strengths or weaknesses of this American fighter aircraft and since the Harper government has absolutely no clear idea of what the aircraft might cost, there is no point in asking the public for an answer.

And if you think that the amount spent by National Defence is odd, Citizenship and Immigration Canada spent close to $550,000 on public opinion polling. Are they inquiring as to whether immigrants like it here? Are they asking if there is more the government might do to make them comfortable?

And what is the point of this anyway? Do you recall how accurate the pollsters were in calling the last federal election? Or how accurate the pollsters’ forecasts were on the last provincial elections in Alberta, British Columbia, Quebec and Ontario, to name a few? The pollsters have not only been consistently wrong but their forecasts can no longer be trusted. They are embarrassing.

But what Canadians should be concerned about is the cumulative information gleaned from millions of dollars spent across Canada can be useful, even if not trusted, by a political party. And the only political party with easy access to all that information happens to be the Conservative Party.

Why does Prime Minister Harper know that the number one priority of Canadians is the economy? He has all those polls giving him that information in considerable detail. It should also be causing him concern. He has been telling Canadians that he has that problem solved. He might have solved it for the one per cent. The rest of us are still waiting. We also have enquiring minds.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Having at one time tried swimming off the government dock at Cold Lake, Alberta, we can assure you that the lake is accurately named, year ‘round. There is not much in the way of entertainments around the air base located near by and it did not take many ‘Dare yah’s’ to get young airmen to jump into that frigid water. Nobody could stay in for long.

But now we find they found a use for some of that water. A company called Canadian Natural Resources Limited is reported to be using a technology that involves heating water to steam and pumping the steam into deep wells in the Cold Lake Tar Sands area. What this company mines is not by any stretch of the imagination oil. It is not even ‘heavy oil.’ What comes from these wells is bitumen, sand and seriously polluted water. It is certainly not in an emulsion.

And once you find out what it is doing, we also find that the company is not very prompt in telling us about some of its technical problems. Canadians are only hearing now about problems that appear to have originated at least two years ago. There has been either one very serious spill or a series of spills that is effecting the local environment. How do you minimize the spill of some 1.2 million litres of polluted water, sand and bitumen?

While the company admits to the sighting of some 100 animal carcasses that were probably killed by the spill, it is actually a rather chilling statistic. Small carcasses would have been removed by predatory birds who would have in turned died and the loss of local wildlife would encompass many, many hectares of very sensitive land.

But this is a company that does not want to tell you very much about their processes and problems. It is targeting to mine and process and refine up to 500,000 barrels of synthetic crude oil from bitumen per day. That comes to roughly $50 million per day in revenue for the company. And you can do the math from there. What are a few dead animals, a polluted environment and a carbon footprint that will reach across Canada compared to that type of money?

So you might lie a little. You can make up words that cover up what you are doing. You hide the little mistakes. Heh, what is a million litres of bitumen when you have billions of litres? Though, it is probably not as much fun getting your buddies to jump off the government dock at Cold Lake today.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

If we can have a ‘do not call’ list, why can we not have a do-not-mail list? It does no good to put a ‘no-junk mail’ admonition on your mailbox but even if Canada Post is not very automated, surely it can handle a ‘Do not mail’ list. All we really need is to eliminate the junk mail from our Member of Parliament.

If it was ordinary junk mail all you have to do is sort your mail near your blue box. To-day, with electronic billing, you rarely get bills and even the government uses direct deposit instead of cheques. Our Christmas cards are all shifting quickly to the Internet.

But that crap from our MP is the problem. You are too mad at what it says to want to send it to recycling. It could pollute your blue box. You want to crumple it and feed it to him. This man and his staff are so ignorant that they send you blatant lies and think you are going to buy in.

Can you believe that they can send out one of those badly printed, ugly flyers telling you the Harper government has more than tripled the number of countries Canada has free-trade agreements with (sic)? You know they have not.

And to say that Canada and the European Union have a free-trade agreement is the stupidest lie of all. Canada is lucky to be given the time of day by the EU. It seems that the possible agreement that we are supposedly working on with the EU is being considered a stalking horse for the American agreement with the EU. It seems the Germans are the ones who blew the whistle on the possible Canadian agreement. Yet there are few countries in the EU who give companies such unfettered rein that the North American courts are cluttered with companies in lawsuits with government.

But our MP here in Babel is far too ignorant of these problems related to international trade. You are sometimes amazed to note that he can lace-up his own ice skates.

But the good news is that we have heard that this gentleman is going to run again in the new riding that encompasses the south half of the old Babel riding. We are lucky enough to live in the north half of Babel that will now run as far north as the fabled fun little town of Mariposa

Mind you, the local Liberal Party in Babel figures Babel voters are going to get a two-for-one deal here. We could quite easily end up with two Liberals elected here instead of one useless Conservative. That would be okay.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Those Harper Conservatives really know how to turn up the rhetoric! First of all some dimwit thought it would be appropriate to have a rally in support of Israel on the lawn at Queen’s Park. The participants would have been smarter to stay in their comfortable rocket-free homes in Toronto and buy more Israeli bonds.

But you can hardly have a rally at Queen’s Park without greetings from the Prime Minister (of Canada?). Sure, Prime Minister Harper has never seen a mob he disliked. To be safe though, he sent Toronto MP John Carmichael to read an incendiary letter. There were the expected roars of approval when the MP read that Hamas’ reprehensible actions require Israel to defend itself. It seems that Mr. Harper stands four-square for Israeli soldiers killing civilians and children in Gaza. That was it for calming troubled waters or easing the tensions in Queen’s Park.

It seems that some people who might disagree with the killing in Gaza found out about the peaceful Jewish rally. Many of these people strongly disapproved of war and some might have had relatives trying to live in Gaza. These people decided to show their own flags and to shout a lot. Luckily the Toronto Police made a demarcation line down the centre of the park so that the various protagonists could shout obscenities at each other but no touchy was allowed.

This worked fairly well until one young jerk arrived carrying a placard that looked like an Israeli flag with the Nazi swastika replacing the Star of David. Obviously the Toronto Police on site did not seem to understand the legal or practical definition of ‘Incite to riot.’ The news media did and the cameras had their pic of the day. A stalwart, reported to be from the Jewish Defence League, took understandable exception to this placard and crossed the line of demarcation and proceeded to physically remonstrate the young gentleman. At this point a police officer interceded and took the young gentleman and his stupid placard from the scene. We are told no arrests were made.

What should have happened is that cooler heads in the Toronto Jewish community should have realized that no good would come of this event and it should have been discouraged. They should also have recognized that greetings from the Prime Minister would be nothing more than pandering for the Jewish vote and it should also have been discouraged. And the rest of us, who might disapprove of killing on any grounds, would like everyone involved to go home, in peace.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

By the time you finish reading Alison Loat’s book for the Samara Institute Tragedy in the Commons you are in a state of despair. You wonder why collectively these former Members of Parliament who were interviewed for the book ever ran for office. Eager or reluctant, they chose their own road to perdition. And yet, in leaving parliament, they had much to say about what is wrong but little to say about how we can fix the growing problems with our political system in Canada.

The concept of the book is something like asking weevils to explain how to restore a tree to health after they have bored their way through it.

It is not until you come to the end of the book and are amazed at the list of 80 former parliamentarians who had so little insight for this book. Most are never even quoted. And yet there are names missing who might have had much to say. Maybe the late Rt. Hon. Herb Gray’s ill health prevented an interview but his insight, intelligence and experience were some of the obvious reasons why he was so respected in parliament.

Knowing many of the people interviewed helps to understand some of their quotes. Having watched parliament with great interest from the Diefenbaker Détente through to the Harper Horror, it is easy to recount the obvious failures of parliament to adjust to the changing needs of Canadian society. It is also easy to see how party leaders have increasingly abused the trust of the parliamentary process.

When Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau once said “Just watch me” to the news media, he was admitting that he understood the lack of safeguards on the power of his office.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper treats the parliamentary process as Penelope’s tapestry that can be woven in daylight and the stitches removed in the night. He can prorogue parliament at will and has turned the custom of question period into a farce of questions with no answers.

The Samara Institute did Canadians a regrettable disservice with Tragedy in the Commons. It does little more than stick a toe into the waters of how Canadians are served by governments. It ignores the systemic failure of our governments to further democracy to meet the needs of a very different society than that of the time of federation.

Canada is a society today that is built on diversity. We are capable of greatness as a nation. It is our governments that fail us.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

There must be an election due in the next year. Why else would the Harper government minions be running around in the heat of the summer pandering to Conservative interest groups? Take the inappropriately labelled Public “Safety” Minister Steven Blaney, for example. He showed up at a Northern Ontario gun club the other day to announce convenient changes in the rules for happy gun owners. These changes might make some sense in such a remote rural setting but he should try to explain his changes to people at Dundas and Yonge Streets in Toronto.

But you have to admit, the gun nuts love the Tories. We are not talking here about the farmer who keeps a varmint rifle to deter four-legged chicken thieves. The Tories best friends are the wing-nuts who think a fully automatic assault rifle is for target practice. These are the ones who cannot wait for their next home invasion to try out the killing power of their new 45 calibre hand gun.

You would think these people would still be honeymooning with the Tories since the killing of the long gun registry. And the Tories are the people who were going to protect Canadians from financial waste. The destruction of that life-saving aid for our police forces was probably the worst waste of our money (other than Mr. Harper’s hairdresser) since the Tories won a majority in 2011.

But if you are going to pander to your interest groups, you might as well do it well. Take the duplication of licenses needed to own and use firearms. With a single license covering both ownership and use, the Tories are encouraging the collector to take that collectible off their wall and shoot someone or something. It sounds like something they should think about a bit more.

And, typical of the Tories, they are thinking of also causing confusion between federal and provincial regulations. Restricted firearms need a provincial permit to be transported in some provinces and the federal government is thinking of over-riding that requirement. It shows how helpful our federal government can be to its friends.

Meanwhile the police are asking the Ontario government to allow cops to confiscate the auto and the driver’s licence of individuals found with an illegal weapon in their vehicle. And the feds should really reconsider the title of the Public ‘Safety’ Minister.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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