Category: Federal Politics

The Dangerous Goods Driver’s Handbook for Canada starts with a disclaimer that states:

“The transportation of dangerous goods is subject to complicated and changing Government regulations. Transport Canada has a comprehensive set  of regulations, which must be observed when transporting dangerous goods.”

And it is law. If you are going to ship dangerous goods in Canada, you are subject to these government regulations. If you fail to comply with these regulations, you are committing a criminal offense. And it seems logical that if anybody dies because of your criminal offense, one of the charges will be murder.

And that is why we are waiting for the other shoe to drop on the Lac-Mégantic disaster. On September 13 The Financial Post said that the Transportation Safety Board had found that crude oil in the rail tank cars had been mislabelled. It was further stated in the article that the responsibility for the labelling of the material rests with the importer who provided the bill of lading for the shipment of these dangerous goods through Canada. The Financial Post claims this was the responsibility of Irving Oil of New Brunswick.

Since 47 people have been determined to have died in the events at Lac-Mégantic on July 6, 2013, it appears to be the second most serious mass murder in Canadian history after Air India Flight 182.

While to the average person, crude oil is crude oil, there are actually three different transportation categories. They require increasingly rigorous precautions, containers and safety measures. What works against safety is that the lower the flash point or simply the more flammable the crude oil, the more it costs to ship it safely. And this is in a mainly self-regulated industry.

Somewhere between the North Dakota origin of the crude oil and its crossing into Canada, that crude oil was labelled as less flammable than it actually was. That was why the 72 tanker cars were suitable for a safer product but not for the real danger.

While the Sûreté du Quebec has informed the media that they are going to make an arrest soon, they lack the authority to make an arrest in Saint John, New Brunswick. And, while it might be a bit of a stretch to arrest one of the late K.C. Irving’s sons, it seems appropriate. Despite everyone looking for a middle management scapegoat, it is the top people in the company who are responsible for the company’s ethos. And dear old KC left us with an ethos of greed.

-30-

Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

They took New Democrat Leader Thomas Mulcair to Saskatchewan this week. It was like bringing him home to be baptized. Here they were in Saskatchewan, the home of Tommy Douglas socialism, and Mulcair is a gruff old bugger in a suit. And both he and the suit are ‘pur laine.’

Pur laine (pure wool) is the Quebec French expression for those who trace their roots back as real Quebecers. Mulcair can trace his roots on his mother’s side back to Quebec Premier Honoré Mercier. He also holds duel citizenship in Canada and France.

But he is no Jack Layton. Layton grew up in the Quebec Anglo community of Hudson and his family left with other Anglos in the rising tide of Quebec nationalism and stricter language laws. Layton’s ragged colloquial French of his childhood with the simplistic New Democrat policies appealed to Quebecers who had tired of going nowhere with the Bloc Quebecois.

But it was a one-time thing. Mulcair thinks he can fight Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the economy and he has no credibility or background that says he knows the subject. He lacks the openness of Justin Trudeau. He lacks trust. He is neither of the working class nor of the elite. He remains an enigma in both of Canada’s solitudes.

Watching Mulcair in the House of Commons, you can see how he enjoys the attack. He sees the opportunity and the weakness of the Harper government but he fails to take the attack outside the House. He is not translating the language of the Commons into the more cutting and expanded language of the news media. He fails to reach the voters.

In Saskatchewan he told his caucus that they have two years to go before the election. That is a tight timetable for a political party to pull everything necessary together for what will be a tough three-way fight. And Mulcair is the least equipped to take on both opponents. Both he and Harper will try to trivialize Justin Trudeau but Trudeau will ignore them both while he drives at motivating and delivering the younger vote with challenges, ideas and idealism.

Jack Layton could never handle Stephen Harper and never really tried. The surprise for Mulcair will be that the Harper he dealt with in the House of Commons is not the man on message that he will face on the hustings. He will have a tough learning experience.

-30-

Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

It must be the high turnover in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). Did nobody notice when the last speechwriters left? Yesterday we found out that the Hair needs until October 16 to finish writing a new throne speech. We appreciate that a speech of this magnitude requires broad input and lots of approvals but more than a week for the job is excessive. Unless, what you are really doing is stalling?

One possibility is that the office is waiting to hear from President Obama about the Keystone XL pipeline. The Hair has asked Obama for an environmental to-do list so that the American President can approve the $5 billion project to take Athabasca tar sands bitumen to the Texas Gulf Coast shipping ports. This wait might be in vain as Mr. Obama currently has his hands full with questions about Syria.

Is the Hair so really bereft of ideas? Can the Fraser Institute not help him? Has Finance Minister Jim Flaherty run out of corporate taxes to cut? Cannot the government find some new boats for the navy? How about solving the need for modern helicopters? How about scrapping Statistics Canada altogether so we do not have to hear how the gap between rich and poor keeps widening? And then there is Environment Canada. Can we not put it out of its misery? And could not the Hair replace the National Energy Board with a simple rubber stamp?

Cost savings are so simple for ignorant people. The Hair and his Conservatives are very good at saving money. It is the smart person who knows how to invest in the future. That is why there is no future for the Hair and his friends.

But a speech will be cobbled. That is what governments do, eventually. This will be a geared-to-election speech full of platitudes and promises of the nirvana to come. The Governor General will read the speech as though he wrote it himself. This unelected representative of the Queen will tell us what his government is going to do about the unelected Senate. We are going to hear more about the government’s battle with the telecommunications companies to bring order and lower prices to cell phone usage.

The problem we have with forecasting what will be in the throne speech is that the Hair and his friends have an entirely different set of priorities than someone who cares about people and how the rest of the world feels about our Canada.

-30-

Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

A ‘Hail Mary’ is that final play in the football game where you have to go for the goal or nothing. That is the play Prime Minister Stephen Harper is making to U.S. President Barack Obama to get him to approve TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline to carry Athabasca tar sands bitumen to the Texas Gulf Coast. It is likely the most hypocritical move the Conservative Prime Minister has ever made.

Harper has put Obama in the position of being able to save Canadians from their own leader. And there is no reason why Obama would. Our only hope is that he recognizes the play for what it is. It is desperation. It is a lie. It cannot be done.

Harper is offering to see if Canada can meet any environmental standards that the Americans want if the President approves the Keystone XL pipeline. Since any attempt to fill that pipeline with bitumen slurry would require a huge increase in pollution just from having it extracted from the tar sands, the offer is hollow.

Where the real lie lies is in the processing of that bitumen into synthetic oil. That is what lays the carbon footprint far and wide. The objective in sending the tar sands product to the Texas Gulf Coast has never been to refine it there. The Texas Gulf ports provide access to ocean tankers that can take the bitumen to countries that do not care about the pollution. If you cannot see the carbon pollution does the loss of the polar ice matter?

What is most infuriating about Mr. Harper’s hypocrisy is that he has been running advertisements ad nauseam on the taxpayer’s dollar telling Canadians how the government is controlling pollution in the tar sands. They have not. Every deadline for the release of those environmental standards has been missed. And we suspect that it is the unwillingness of the tar sands exploiters to agree to any controls and the Harper government is letting them dictate to us.

If Obama agrees to the Keystone XL pipeline, what will happen is that Harper will not be in office when the Americans realize the falseness of his claims. And neither will Obama be in office for that matter.

What could bite America in the ass with this travesty is a very large, very polluting spill of bitumen slurry somewhere in Middle America. That might be justice but let us hope beyond hope that it never happens.

-30-

Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

The local Sun Media newspaper in Babel is very thin. It has very little advertising and little budget. It therefore welcomes free articles from local writers. Some of these writers are from the political fringe. An example this week was an article by a political hopeful boosting a September conference at Geneva Park near Orillia. Attendees at the conference hope to resurrect the idea of proportional voting in Canada. This idea has been firmly rejected by voters in Ontario and defeated twice by voters in B.C.

The premise the fringe keep harping on is that voters are wasting their votes under the present first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system used in Canada. Their argument is that if they can win five per cent of the popular vote in an election that they should have five per cent of the seats in the parliament or legislature. In a simplistic way that might make sense to some people.

The problem is that to make proportional voting work, you have to vote for parties rather than people. The reason that voting for parties is common in some parts of the world is because of the low literacy rates in those countries. Parties are identified by symbols and people vote for the symbol of the party they prefer. Under proportional voting, the percentages of the votes are calculated and party members are appointed to the parliament in the ratio of the vote. If the Greens, for example get five per cent of the vote, they are given five per cent of the seats. This includes the party leader and his or her choice of who they want with them. In Canada, we are literate enough that we do not need party symbols. We can vote for the person we prefer to have represent us.

It is that basic. We have more than enough people who will vote for the party leader instead of looking at what the local candidate can contribute. To encourage more of that type of voting will turn parliament and the legislatures into nothing more than sheep pens for the party faithful. If you have ever wondered why it is so difficult for Prime Minister Harper to put together a strong Cabinet, you just have to look at some of the nebbishes who have been sent to Ottawa to support him.

And if you want a good example of the kind of parliament you will have where Members are selected by the Prime Minister of the day, take a look at the Canadian Senate!

-30-

Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

Somebody took away Prime Minister Harper’s big stick. Verizon has declined the opportunity to come up here and play in the Bell-Rogers-Telus sandbox. Do the Canadian telecom trio look pleased? Yes they do. Did they scare off Verizon? Not really. You do know who is going to get screwed now, do you not? Okay consumers: just open your wallets and assume the position.

Face it. Somebody has to pay for the millions of dollars in advertising that was never necessary in the first place. Bell, Rogers and Telus wasted all that money and they want it back from the consumer. You only thought you were paying too much for cell phones and all those cute whistles and bells that come with them? Just you wait.

Have you ever thought how cheap it would be to make a cellular telephone that was nothing other than a voice-communication device? Or a nice little tiny camera that would allow you to record people doing stupid things and then transmit the video to others? What about a little hand-held computer or television? And how about having something just for texting? Texting should be a junior cell phone device that allows for even adult-size fingers to send little messages to other people who cannot spell.

But no, you only think that you need a device that can do all those tricks. And that is why they want three year contracts so that they can squeeze every nickel out of you for using the device. Do you know there are Canadians who have never taken a picture with their cell phone and would not know how if the opportunity came along? It is you people who want your cell phone to do everything that are driving up the prices. The people building those complex devices are usually earning less than a dollar an hour. Guess who the thieves are who make all the bucks on them?

Even the funny farm people at the Fraser Institute have come out in favour of a more competitive market without the government kissing up to companies such as Verizon. The Institute wants to end any restrictions on foreign ownership rather than give preferential treatment to one large foreign-owned company. True to its origins, the Institute says a more competitive market should be the government objective. It is a $19 billion market in Canada and you would expect there should be some room for more innovation, competition and much lower prices.

-30-

Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

It has been a tough summer for our parliament’s Leader of the Opposition. Thomas Mulcair of the New Democrats has been leading from the rear. We have seen more of some of the party’s spokespeople than we have seen of its national leader. It has been a time of Canadians coming to the realization that of the two national party leaders from Quebec only one is a natural leader. And it is not Mulcair.

While the House of Commons was sitting, Mulcair could use his official opposition position to keep the guns blazing over the Senate woes. It was a safe subject for the New Democrats as they carry no brief for a body that has no New Democrat Senators. The only problem was that he had a much smaller audience after Parliament recessed for the summer. It is tough time to keep issues alive and to find a receptive media audience.

It was even more frustrating when the leader of the third party took the marijuana issue away from the NDP. Justin Trudeau was doing barbeques and town halls for the summer and he spiced up his dialogue with the promise to legalize and control marijuana. Here it was an NDP issue all along and all Mulcair could do was complain and mutter.

Mulcair has been counting on being able to refresh and renew the attack on the Senate when the House was to resume in September. He was obviously less than pleased when Harper once again prorogued Parliament to extend his holiday into late October. Harper is taking an inordinately long stretch to write a new throne speech.

But Mulcair’s more serious problem is Quebec Premier Pauline Marois. As a former Quebec Liberal Cabinet Minister, Mulcair is expected to speak out about Marois’ proposed legislation against wearing religious symbols by people paid by the province. If he speaks out against Marois’ legislation, it could cost him the support of many of the former Bloc Québécois who voted NDP last time and could also cost him more than 50 seats in Quebec in the next federal election.

Of course, he could keep quiet about the Marois legislation and anger fair-minded NDP voters in the rest of Canada. He is stuck between a rock and Justin Trudeau. Quebecers expect Trudeau to oppose any such draconian legislation and it will not change the level of support he is building across the province.

Mulcair might as well enjoy the perquisites of being Leader of the Official Opposition while he can. His time will be limited unless he can find a way to come out of the 2015 election ahead of the Conservatives.

-30-

Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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

 

It is really not our favourite topic. Bitumen is boring. The conundrum we are facing is that the Harper Conservatives are so bereft of any solutions to our country’s economic malaise that they are putting more and more reliance on selling the output of the Athabasca Tar Sands. As long as this was a minor activity and the problems with pollution were kept in Alberta, it was of merely academic interest. Now it is becoming a serious problem for all Canadians.

This came to mind this morning while contemplating a full-page color advertisement in the Toronto Star for TransCanada’s Energy East Pipeline. What do these people think they are selling? The writers, reviewers and approvers of this advertisement do not seem to know the difference between hyperbole and lying. They certainly spend a great deal of money on whichever. And the full page picture of a blond lady seems to bear no relevance to the copy but what does that matter? It caught your eye did it not?

The headline “What is the Energy East Pipeline?” is neither catchy nor clever. It is just to lead you into misleading copy. The opening line about TransCanada planning to build a pipeline that will transport oil from Western to Eastern Canada does not only appear to be misleading but it promotes the big lie. It is not oil they want to send in that pipeline. They want to convert the old cross-Canada natural gas pipeline to push bitumen slurry to the East coast. The only new section is from Montreal to Saint John, New Brunswick.

While the tar sands companies and their pipeline pals like to call bitumen by other names, it is not oil. It is not heavy crude. It is not some made-up name such as ‘Dilbit.’ The ultimate objective of this pipeline is to ship bitumen slurry to Saint John, New Brunswick where the Irving interests will build a loading port to put the stuff on ocean-going tankers. Nobody wants the serious pollution concerns of refining that stuff into synthetic oil in Canada.

But how can Canadians hold up their heads before the world and ship this stuff to countries that do not care about the pollution?

Maybe that blonde lady in the color picture is a tourist checking out one of the old world cities before the black rain of pollution makes that part of the world uninhabitable.

What in God’s name are these people thinking?

-30-

Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry

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