Category: Federal Politics

Did you see the latest poll from Forum Research? While you might be skeptical of the polling technique and its findings, Justin Trudeau must be pleased with being number one. Frankly it is the type of poll that can create arrogance in a neophyte politician. And we all need to remember that the Liberal leader is still a newbie. His inexperience is showing and his gaffes are currently outweighing his successes.

Young Trudeau has put himself in a box in relation to piping Athabasca tar sands product. How can you approve TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline through the American Midwest and then reject Enbridge’s Northern Gateway across British Columbia? Does that mean we do not give a damn about the American environment but will protect our own? There are far too many environmentalists in the Liberal Party to accept that policy. Nor can we accept the lies involved in support of TransCanada’s Energy East or Enbridge’s Line 9 reversal.

And why Trudeau’s friend and key adviser Gerald Butts, former head of World Wildlife Fund, has not pulled him free of the trap is worrisome. It is leading us to examine his other choices and there is major concern growing.

Trudeau’s choice of David MacNaughton as Ontario co-chair of next year’s election campaign looks like an error. It is probably not as colossal an error as having a civil servant such as Dan Gagnier in the national co-chair role but is indicative of the problem.

The simple success of an organizer such as the late Senator Keith Davey was his ability to spend the day on the telephone and at the end of the day, in his tiny cramped handwriting, on one-page, was a picture of the national attitude. Keith was the most effective conduit for feedback that any politician could ever ask for.

Many of Trudeau’s team appear to have come from the leadership club and not enough have worked their way there through the ranks. Some have never been there. There seems to be little understanding or communication by this group into the grass roots of the Liberal Party. Trudeau has to learn that before you drive a train anywhere, you had better lay some rails.

So far, Trudeau and his Ontario guy, David MacNaughton, have screwed up the by-election in Trinity-Spadina. Nobody is interested in their edicts about who will be the candidate after Trudeau rashly promised an open nomination process for the party. That promise was too important to many key Liberal Party organizers.

Justin Trudeau might think he is omnipotent but that brain trust around him is not!

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

It seems to be a growing trend in the Conservative Cabinet. Without the human understanding of the late Jim Flaherty, Harper’s hooligans have been running loose. Just one example is Joe Oliver from Toronto. He was a natural disaster as Natural Resources Minister and we are all waiting in anticipation for his first serious gaff as Finance Minister. As luck would have it, you have to do something to be wrong and so far Oliver has luckily done nothing.

But poor Jason Kenney has been in continuing trouble. How is our Employment Minister going to succeed his dear friend Stephen Harper as prime minister if he cannot run a simple foreign workers program? The program was to be used as a warning to Canadians to stifle their ambitions, not a wholesale replacement. When people found there were no low-paying jobs because they were all taken up by lower paid and, more reliable, foreigners some of them started to complain about it.

Long touted as having the ambition to replace Harper, Kenney needed more successes than he has had. This snafu will be costly. Canadians have watched Kenney lose control of the foreign workers program over an extended period. There was not just one blip on the radar, Kenney has been trying to fix this program for some time and the media has made him pay the price.

That is not like former Defence Minister Peter MacKay and now our inept Justice Minister. MacKay is the one who keeps finding cow pads to step in even when he is away from the barnyard. After seeing him show off his ignorance on the subject matter, his proposed bill on prostitution has enraged anyone who has any understanding and empathy for the sex worker. He should also be made to sit in a corner of the cabinet room with a dunce cap for his silly sexist comments on women judges last week. Harper should send MacKay back to Defence where he can play at being a pilot in F-35 mock-ups.

And yet it is people such as Calgary’s Pierre Poilievre, laughingly anointed Minister of State for Democratic Reform, who leave observers completely aghast at how far Harper will sink to achieve his objectives. Poilievre must have been sent back to his kennel after Harper finally conceded some (but not all) ground on the “Fair” Elections Act. We hardly think, Stephen Harper wants to turn that attack dog loose again in what remains of the Conservative’s time in office.

Mind you, the one cabinet incompetent that we also watch with interest is Foreign Minister John Baird. The other half of Harper’s Bobbsey Twins, Baird is a time bomb waiting to ignite. As it is, he is costing us in terms of the respect with which Canada was once held around the world.

Canadians will long rue the fallout from the Harper era.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Liberal Leader Justin has two by-elections coming up in Toronto on June 30 and if he does not win both easily, he is going to be in deep weeds. Mind you there is little more that Prime Minister Stephen Harper can do to make it difficult for the Liberals.

Calling a by-election for the Monday of a four-day Canada-Day long weekend in Toronto is probably the most evil thing that Stephen Harper could come up with. He likely had to offer the two Conservative candidates Senate seats to get them to even run. If they are the least bit smart, neither will make an appearance in their respective ridings.

But the entire Conservative effort in Toronto is to try to screw Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. And Justin’s problem is that he has more than Conservatives and New Democrats out to get him. He has some key Liberals who also want to teach him a lesson.

And it all centres in the downtown riding of Trinity-Spadina. It is hard to imagine the docile voters of Scarborough-Agincourt voting anything but Liberal but it was Justin who caused the trouble in Chinatown. It is like the Tom Hanks character in the movie Forrest Gump saying “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Many key Liberals throughout Ontario are appalled at what Justin has done in the run-up for this by-election. And it was more than just breaking his promise of open nominations in the party. He broke his word to the key volunteer organizers throughout the party in Ontario. Those people are a critical resource and Justin simply gave them the finger.

And then he disallowed the candidacy of long-time Liberal apparatchik Christine Innes in Trinity-Spadina. This was not only foolish but it was also spiteful. It was not Christine that some people wanted to stifle. It was her husband Tony Ianno. Many of us know Tony for what he is but, we never put the blame on Christine. To blame her for her husband’s real or imagined transgressions is both sexist and stupid.

But then our own Forrest Gump stuck us with his chosen candidate: Adam Vaughan. The young Vaughan cut his political teeth in that playpen of a City Council chamber in Toronto with his buddy New Democrat Mike Layton. Gee, welcome to the Liberal Party Adam. Why?

It will take a major effort to get out the Liberal vote in Trinity-Spadina on June 30. The New Democratic candidate is an expert at the ground game. He knows what he has to do. Does Justin?

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

So who is surprised? Prime Minister Stephen Harper has given Canadians the finger and approved the Northern Gateway pipeline to be built by Enbridge from Bruderheim, Alberta to Kitimat, B.C. The rhetoric will rage into the election next year. While we argue, three other pipelines will take up the task—and that is not counting the Keystone XL fiasco running south to the Texas tanker ports.

The only problem for the public is to learn the warning signs if they are being conned in regard to the controversy. The best indicator of bias is the language people use to make their case. These pipelines might have once carried natural gas or crude oil but the intent today of the pipelines—Keystone XL, Enbridge’s Line 9 through Toronto, TransCanada’s Energy East and Kinder Morgan—is to push heated and diluted bitumen at high pressure to its destination. That destination is usually an oil tanker because most Canadian oil refineries do not want the pollution problems with refining bitumen.

By no stretch of the imagination is bitumen oil. By removing impurities and much of the carbon molecules, bitumen can be refined into synthetic crude oil. It is not heavy oil, nor is it petroleum (petroleum is a product of crude oil). Nor is bitumen a made-up word such as ‘dilbit.’ It has to be labelled what it is because first-responders to a spill have to know what it is they have to do to contain it.

The reason why environmentalists go ape over bitumen is because it starts life with environmental damage and continues that damage until the carbon settles back into the earth and the process starts over. Currently washing bitumen out of tar sands uses massive amounts of hot water. This is disposed of in settling tanks in Alberta that leech chemicals into the ground water, the streams and rivers of our north country. This disposal does nobody any good.

The next step is to mix the bitumen with a polymer or other accelerant, heat it and then push it at high pressure through a pipeline that might have been originally built for natural gas or light crude oil. A sensible person does not suggest there “might” be a spill.” They simply say: “When there is a spill.” If the spill is on land, the lighter chemicals in the bitumen soup go into the ground water and the heavy stuff stays on the surface. In water, that process reverses. The bitumen gradually sinks to the bottom and you have an impossible clean-up problem and a lot of dead fish.

There is a businessman who is worried about a tanker spill in the ecologically sensitive coastal waters around Kitimat and he wants to build a large refinery and refine the bitumen in Kitimat. This is an interesting idea as the amount of refining needed for all that bitumen and the prevailing winds would produce a carbon footprint that would probably make Prince George and Edmonton uninhabitable within five years.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to peter@lowry.me

Calgary Centre Member of Parliament Joan Crockatt has more CRAP for us than we suspected. It seems to prove that she is really in the running for the best CRAP of the Year Award. The former journalist has the advantage that she can disseminate CRAP on behalf of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Natural Resources.

Fondly referred to as Crappies, CRAP Awards are named after the political practice of sending out news releases that are nothing more than Consolidated Reports on Approved Policies (CRAP). CRAP is the result of political party leaders not having the time to approve all the releases and speeches made by the members of their caucus and as long as the CRAP follows the guidelines of previously approved policies, they do not need approval. MPs are graded by the Leader’s office as to how well they stay within the approved guidelines.

The Best CRAP of the Year Award is saved for the politician sending out the best news release or making the most original speech based on a good CRAP.

Crockatt’s latest CRAP from the Natural Resources Committee tells us that Canada’s oil and gas industry has extended our average life spans. Not only that but an expert witness, University of Toronto geography professor Pierre Desrochers, assured the Commons Committee that every indicator of human well-being improved because we use carbon fuels. His theory is that we should share the benefits of our oil and gas with the rest of the world—“especially developing economies.”

Since there is no question but the Industrial Revolution of the mid 1700s benefitted from the ready availability of coal to power the invention of steam engines, you have to admit that the coal had benefit. It also created lots of pollution. Oil and gas came into common use later in the 1800s. That also created pollution but it also allowed science to move forward as more human labour was taken over by machines.

But since the Harper Conservatives are not interested in problems created by pollution or in solutions offered by science, they would much rather export oil and gas to developing nations that do not care about science or pollution either.

It is interesting to note that Crockatt tells us of the advice of one bureaucrat to the parliamentary committee was that Canada has an economic opportunity (with Alberta’s tar sands) but needs to act quickly. He might be right.

Ms. Crockatt’s CRAP is certainly earning her attention. She will probably continue to bury us in CRAP until the federal election next year.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to peter@lowry.me

We wrote recently that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had no friends. That was a lie. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott dropped by early last week and he and his friend Stephen Harper had a love-in. The Hair has to like Abbott, he is the only elected Commonwealth leader further to the political right than Canada’s prime minister. Like many Aussies, Abbott is a Libertarian, misogynist racist but then nobody is perfect.

Please do not assume that we have any apprehensions about Australians. There are no people with whom we would rather spend time drinking beer with than Aussies. They are great fun. They are industrious. They are tough. They are great story tellers.

But you have to empathize with their women. Aussie men can often act as sexist louts. Their treatment of the Australian aboriginals makes us look downright generous to our first nations. It is important to bear in mind that Australia got its start as a penal colony for Great Britain. Aussies can often be very proud of their linage from this cutpurse or that forger. The problem with Canada is that the people who settled this land either came here because they were bribed to or, at least, came of their own free will.

If you are confused by the Australian Prime Minister being both a monarchist and head of Australia’s Liberal Party, you should be aware that the name of the party was picked by the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia in 1944 when they needed a replacement for the white-supremacist fascists of the Australia First Party. The Liberal Party in Australia is to the right of that country’s Conservative Party. It would be like Canada’s right-wing Fraser Institute creating the Conservative Party of Canada. Come to think of it, did they?

This is not to suggest that the Hair’s friend Mr. Abbott is all that popular back home. Most Aussie friends asked about him tend to scream a lot about “that bastard” and then become thankfully incoherent. He is not expected to enjoy as long a tenure as Prime Minister as the more subtle Mr. Harper.

One of the first things Mr. Abbott did when he became Prime Minister down under was to cancel the carbon tax and anything else environmental that denied business the right to rape and pollute at will. He even scrapped Australia’s department of climate change in case it ever found out anything. His generous tax cuts for corporations make the Hair look like a left-wing cheapskate.

The Hair should pick his friends more carefully.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to peter@lowry.me

Canada’s prime minister received an interesting e-mail yesterday. It was from the hooker who tried to explain her profession to Stephen Harper back when the federal cabinet was discussing the need to correct Canada’s laws on prostitution. The hooker was less than impressed with Justice Minister Peter MacKay’s “Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act.” She put it rather bluntly: “You didn’t hear a God-damn word that any knowledgeable person said, did you?”

What seemed to stick in the hooker’s craw was the hypocrisy of the proposed bill. “By defying the Supreme Court’s intent in allowing you time to fix the problem, you are forcing the whole process to start over. You are solving nothing and pushing the question out another five to six years when the Supreme Court can again rule,” she said.

“In the meantime, you are presenting horrendous problems for the lower courts. After all, can you show me a John with a stiffy and the sense to demand the hooker show photo ID to check if she really is 18?”

She further asked: “What makes anyone think a judge can order something removed from the World-Wide Web? And if I work out of a bar where children are not allowed, why should the bar owner be charged with receiving a ‘material benefit’ for sexual exploitation?

“This bill is not addressing the concerns of either our Supreme Court justices, Canadian society or of prostitutes. It is regressive legislation that criminalizes prostitution. It is created by people who have no understanding of human sexuality or needs. This is not solving problems. This is adding to them,” she complained.

“This is the kind of legislation that just drives prostitution into the hands of pimps and criminals. It encourages abuse. It teaches children not of the fulfillment of sex but that it must be hidden away. Instead of sex being part of the adventure of life, it is relegated to the dark and unseen regions. It encourages abuse and rape in human sexuality instead of joy and understanding,” she concluded.

When the secretary was through reading the angry e-mail from the hooker, she shook her head. There was no point she could see in passing on the information to that dimwit Peter MacKay. She put it on the growing pile that the Prime Minister might read when he comes back from posturing at the G-7 in Europe. She knows it will do no good.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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