Category: Federal Politics

An e-mail a few days ago said: You gotta support Michael Chong’s private member’s bill to democratize Parliament. The initial response to the request was to ask why waste time on a bill that does nothing more than remind Members of Parliament of powers they already have. The fact that too many Tory backbenchers have no ambition other than to do what they are told by the Hair’s staff is a problem for the Conservative Party.

Of critical importance is the ability today of as few as a dozen or so of the Conservative Members of the House of Commons to support a motion of non-support for the current Prime Minister. It does not take 15 per cent of the caucus. It just needs enough support to upset the government’s majority. The Governor General would have to either call on the Leader of the Opposition to ask if he could form a government or call a general election. This is basic to the parliamentary form of government.

But what Mr. Chong is asking of Members of Parliament is to be principled. That might be more of a problem. Even a person of principle, has to review their retirement plans before standing in Parliament and saying ‘No’ to their party’s leader.

Where Mr. Chong does have a point is that we must take away the ability of the party leader to appoint party candidates. What Chong does not understand though is that we must still have some sort of litmus test to see if the proposed candidate is really part of the party. Letting the caucus have control of who may or may not be part of the party caucus could be a mistake.

Serious study of Mr. Chong’s bill shows that he does not seem to have a high opinion of the Conservative Party. His bill takes powers that would normally belong to the party and gives them to the caucus. He fails to understand that the caucus constitutes only the parliamentary wing of the political party. The party leader leads the parliamentary wing while the party president leads the party. There is a division of responsibility there that seems confused in Mr. Chong’s approach to the problems. While the party president works in the background, the person can hardly be ignored.

Justin Trudeau has already shown that he does not need Stephen Harper’s excessive level of control in the Liberal Party. The result is a renewed, strengthened and eager Liberal Party. In the meantime, the party of MP Michael Chong and Prime Minister Stephen Harper is in crisis. It needs a house cleaning.

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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

A person with just so much money to last until the next cheque, learns to manage money. They have to and they can become very careful and frugal. Conversely, persons managing billions of dollars can be very wasteful. And to make matters worse, these persons managing billions—who think they are being careful and frugal—are the most wasteful of all. Take the Canadian government:

Just one example of government waste in the past four years is the huge increase in consultanting fees paid with taxpayers’ dollars. In the last fiscal year, Canadians paid over $10 billion for temporary staff or consultants. And not all departments were forthcoming about the reason they needed these people.

The simple answer to this in many cases is that the consultants are doing the work normally done by department staff. The Conservative government has cut department budgets and put a freeze on staffing. In a desperate attempt to do their job, the departments hire consultants. The worst part of this is that many of these consultants are former staff. They are now being paid three to four times their normal salary to do the same work on a short term basis. Any business person can tell you that this is bad economics. Only Treasury Board President Tony Clement will argue otherwise.

That is what happens when you are dealing with politicians rather than business people. Politicians are different. Politicians lack business school disciplines. They can also be ideologues. (Those are the worst kind of politicians.) They put their ideology first. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is an ideologue. Flaherty controls the government budgeting. His friend from Huntsville, Tony Clement, is the Cabinet colleague who approves the consulting contracts.

Since the Conservatives promised Canadians all kinds of right-wing type goodies after 2015 (the next federal election) if Jim Flaherty could get rid of the annual deficit. That is not easy to do in a still shaky economy. It meant putting the civil servants feet to the fire, cutting staff and freezing budgets. God forbid, a Conservative ideologue would ever increase taxes!

The Conservatives are effectively maxing out Canada’s credit cards. They are building mountains of debt for the next government—which is obviously not going to be Conservative. The few Tories left in Parliament will have the fun of telling the new government that they do not know how to manage. It is a cycle that goes on and on.

And if that is the worst of the problems the Conservatives leave us, we will be lucky.

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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

What does Prime Minister Stephen Harper think he is? He sure is not the fourth wise man. Besides, the Hair and his hairdresser are not going to be in Israel until after Christmas. When the taxpayers are paying, why settle for Miami Beach?

Harper is hardly the first Canadian politician to go to Israel in search of votes in Toronto and Montreal. He even announced the trip at a Jewish dinner in Toronto the other evening. The dinner was to commemorate naming a bird sanctuary in Israel after Mr. Harper. It is likely to be the only conservation site anywhere in the world in which his name will ever be involved. Only the Israelis would understand it was their way of flipping him the bird!

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a single objective with Harper. He wants him to add pressure on American President Obama over Iran’s nuclear energy objectives. He is understandably nervous about Iran being allowed any continuation of its nuclear program. Bibi (as Netanyahu is called by his friends) might have a point. He would at least like to have Iran promise not to go through with the Persian’s often stated objective of wiping the State of Israel from the face of the earth.

It makes you wonder if the Hair and the Bobbsey Twins (Foreign Minister John Baird and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney) are swimming in deep water where they do not belong. For sure, the Bobbsey Twins have been out playing in the sun without their sun hats lately.

It seemed at first that John Baird was mad at the Americans and five European powers for not including him in the Geneva talks with Iran. He ignorantly scoffed at the deal that had been painstakingly achieved. He told reporters that “We have a made-in-Canada foreign policy.” If we do, Canadians would sure like to know what our foreign policy is?

Meanwhile Jason Kenney was sending out e-mails to people who are or support gay, lesbian or transgender causes telling them how broad-minded the Conservative Party of Canada might be on these issues. He noted in his e-mail that they are particularly supportive of the people who support these causes in Iran

Besides pandering to anyone who might have a vote in the 2015 federal general election, the Hair and the Bobbsey Twins are the main spokes people for the Conservative Party of Canada. The people who have supported that party should feel very embarrassed–and concerned.

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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

There ought to be a law. In fact, there has to be. We cannot continue to allow these disrespectful scoffers to ridicule our parliamentary system of government. And that is exactly what Stephen Harper and his henchmen are doing. They are dragging the Parliament of Canada in the mud.

And they are doing it to both Houses of Parliament. The current problems of the Senate can only be laid on the doorstep of the Prime Minister. Until Mr. Harper started his wholesale dumping of Conservative hacks into the Senate, it was quietly doing the job that Senators are paid to do. Whether you agree with having a Senate or not, these men and women were providing a House of sober second thought. The problem was that Mr. Harper did not want that sober thinking on his government’s bills.

While setting a record for the highest number of Senate appointments by a single Prime Minister, Harper scraped the bottom of some unusual barrels. Not all his appointed Senators could be described as honourable ladies and gentlemen. They seemed to have an entitlement problem. And then, to make matters worse, the erstwhile plumbers in the Prime Minister’s Office got involved.

Meanwhile back in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister became tired of all the knitty-picky questions in Question Period from those people on the other side of the chamber. These people were actually inferring that he had serious memory problems. This was not only annoying to him but he was becoming concerned that he might have made an occasional slip in his answers. He needed a new answering machine.

Since Mr. Harper’s pet question answerer Dean Del Mastro from Peterborough was charged with falsifying election documents, he had to resign as the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Secretary and as a member of the Conservative Caucus. Mr. Harper misses him. He replaced Dean Del Mastro with a back bencher from Oak Ridges-Markham by the name of Paul Calandra. In his new position, Mr. Calandra is not making friends for the Conservative Party of Canada.

Probably the best way to explain what Mr. Calandra is doing is that he is disgracing his party leader, he is disgracing his political party and he is an embarrassment to all Members of Parliament. While the Speaker of the House of Commons has the power to censure Mr. Calandra for his antics, he has failed to do his job. Mr. Calandra stands up and talks about things totally unrelated to the question. Even if he is dyslexic, there is no excuse for him to be speaking on inane subjects on behalf of the Prime Minister.

In the meantime, Mr. Harper is hiding from his Parliamentary responsibilities. Obviously only the voters can censure him.

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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

We are not talking about Santa here. We are talking about the Harper Conservatives. And they want more and more information about how you feel and what you think. Now they want real-time access to your social media attitudes and what you say in your blog. And if Babel-on-the-Bay suddenly disappears, you will know that we finally pissed off the Prime Minister by writing too much about his silly hair piece and his private hairdresser.

But this is a serious topic. This is invading the privacy of all Canadians. Public Works and Government Services Canada is advertising now for a high-tech firm to monitor Canadians on the Internet 24/7. And it can be done. It is even easier to analyze publicly posted material than to check on your e-mails and they are already reading those over at National Defence’s Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC). That agency is believed to be spending more than half a billion of your money each year reading our e-mails and listening to international communications. Exactly what they are looking for is being kept confidential, even if they think what we say to overseas friends is not.

Many people will welcome more attention to their blogs but that is until you realize that the blogger is not the only Internet user who can access Google Analytics. It is who reads your blog that is of interest to Big Brother. He wants to know just how much influence your blog is having on Canadians. That can be measured and Big Brother can find out just who among us is convinced that the Prime Minister wears a hair piece.

It is important to remember that the World-Wide Web is basically nothing more than millions and millions of addresses. When you go to a web site, you are basically giving the site an address to send you information. The web site keeps your address and sends you the info. And that is not necessarily a fair exchange.

While blogs and social media are there to be read, the involvement of the government in analyzing this is definitely questionable. What is wrong with the analysis is that we have no idea of the questions and who is asking them. Studying blogs to see who is naughty and nice towards the government is just too much for many civil rights proponents.

Mind you, if Big Brother accedes to Access to Information requests and readily publishes annual reports on the information gained, who could complain? Until such time, we will reserve judgement.

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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

Can you believe that the Toronto Star paid Robin Sears for an opinion piece on political spin? In it the former NDP stalwart explains that by-elections are a political spin master’s dream. He alibis the New Democrats for failing to win any of the four ridings at play on November 25. He explains that the Liberal wins were simply a triumph of political spin.

We should be so lucky.

By-elections are a lot of damn hard work and for Sears to put it down as spin is to insult the work done by his own party. Toronto Centre was a tough, hard-fought battle between the Liberals and NDP. The New Democrats had an outstanding candidate and were able to draw on the entire city for their best workers. They tried to smear the Liberal candidate at every opportunity. And it did not work.

In Bourassa, a riding next door to NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair’s, the challenge was greater and the access to good workers was not as easy. It was expected to remain Liberal and it did. That is not to say the NDP rolled over and played dead. They fought, and, to their credit, fought hard. For Sears to write off the situation as a “rotten borough” is an insult to every political worker in the riding. Sure, it was a riding that rode out the Orange Wave but that is history.

And, not satisfied with disparaging the work of his own party, Sears takes on the national news media by referring to Brandon-Souris and Provencher in Manitoba as ‘flyover’ communities. He implies that the national media cannot be bothered to learn anything about these ridings. Well, they found out on Monday night how the Conservatives can screw up their own turf when they trample on the local riding association. The Liberals were far more of a challenge in Brandon-Souris than expected and came within 400 votes of a major upset.

And what has spin got to do with that?

If the Liberals in that riding had more workers, Brandon-Souris would now be Liberal red and Justin Trudeau would look like a hero. Mind you, Provencher was much more of a challenge and, to nobody’s surprise, the Tories held on to Vic Toews’ old riding.

But it is always nice to hear from an old political opponent such as Sears. If we can borrow the old army recruiting slogan: Politics; There is no life like it.

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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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