Federal Politics – Page 181

If Jean Charest was a Liberal.

August 21, 2012 by Peter Lowry

A very knowledgeable francophone writer wrote today that Jean Charest’s Quebec Liberals were going the way of their federal counterparts. If she meant that the Quebec Liberals are headed for third party status in the Quebec National Assembly after the September 4 election, she could be right. What she should not have done was confuse the Quebec Liberal Party with the Liberal Party of Canada. She must have done that to keep the explanation simple for her Anglo readers.

Charest’s Liberals are the successors of the Quebec governments of Jean Lesage, Robert Bourassa and Maurice Duplessis and any relationship with liberal philosophy is purely coincidental. The only progressive Quebec governments in that time were Parti Québécois and if they had not been so hung up on constant infighting, tribalism, parochialism, elitism and separatism, they would have done a better job. When Charest passed the draconian anti-demonstration laws against the students earlier this year, he lost any connection he had with liberalism and showed his true colours as a Conservative/Union National adherent.

What is happening at the moment is that François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec is draining off some of the Charest Liberal’s right-wing votes and putting Pauline Marois’ Parti Québécois into the lead in the polls. While there is still time for a turn-around by any of the parties involved, it is starting to look like an interesting minority government situation. Making such a government work, will be a fascinating political challenge.

Just to confuse things, Thomas Mulcair leader of the federal New Democrats is speculating that he might want to help get a provincial NDP wing launched in his province. That would bleed off some of the union and left-wing support for the Parti Québécois and ensure a minority government situation in the Quebec National Assembly for the foreseeable future.

What needs to happen is for true liberals to take over the Quebec Liberal Party when Charest quits after this election. That way when Mulcair’s federal NDP merge with the federal Liberal Party, the Liberal/NDP in Quebec will be the strongest possible combination. It could put an end to separatism for a long time. And federally, it could also put an end to Stephen Harper’s reign in Ottawa.

And if Jean Charest was a liberal, it would be so easy!

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Liberal leadership hopeful looks for support.

August 20, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Montreal Liberal MP Marc Garneau has the various stages of a leadership campaign a bit confused. He is currently looking for the ideal team to run a campaign for him that will win him the leadership of the Liberal party of Canada. Maybe if he can find this ‘dream team,’ he will get around to telling us why he should run.

And it is probably a good story. We just need to hear it first. All we really know about him now is his time as an astronaut. As a naval engineer, he represented Canada while taking part in the U.S.’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) programs. While elected twice in a safe Liberal seat, he has yet to make his mark in the House of Commons. He lost to Bob Rae in the selection of an interim leader when Michael Ignatieff resigned. (It was probably because Rae had much more experience.)

Garneau’s political persona to-date comes across as a bit bland. Not that this is necessarily a problem in taking on Stephen Harper, king of the bland. The good news is that the MP has no difficulty in proving he is smart. What he has to do is show some political smarts. At 63, he has no time for on-the-job training.

But who in the Liberal Party with the expertise he needs for his team is going to buy a pig in a poke? If he does not already have a senior bagman out beating the bushes to see what the fund-raising expectations are, Garneau is wasting his time. And the leader of the team has to be someone, he personally knows and trusts. This person is not going to appear by magic and say, ‘Here I am.,’

Everyone loves to discuss the various strategies but most of the effort needed from a leadership team is the hard work on the telephones. While we all pay lip service to the new electronic media opportunities, the reality is that you build your initial workers at the national and regional levels through networking. And there you have to have personal contact. Politics is still built on IOUs and in a leadership contest you have to call on many of those IOUs and you earn more.

What this leadership contest has to say is that the Liberal Party is the party of Canada’s future. It is the party that can see the future and believe in it. Our new leader has to know where we are going.

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Brown’s bounty.

August 14, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Babel is certainly blessed. Where would we ever be without Brown’s bounty? Just yesterday, Babel’s city council voted to once again provide the Barrie Molson Centre for his annual Brown Appreciation Night at a small portion of the real cost. This was after a lengthy debate earlier in the meeting about taxpayers having to foot the bill each year because our local hockey palace does not pay its way.

New readers should be advised that we are referring to the guy Babelites know as ‘Little Boy Brown MP.’ In his role as Impresario Brown, he has never found a charity that he could not use for self-promotion. As he has no role in Ottawa other than as ‘King of the ten-percenters,’ in which he has proved he can out-spend all other members of parliament. In Ottawa, he is a fetcher, carrier and voter for the Prime Minister. In Babel, he is always looking for ways to ingratiate himself with voters.

His favourite of all his promotions is his hockey night every summer at the Barrie Molson Centre. It is year five this Thursday night and he has yet to provide the voters with an audited statement of how much goes to promote him and the Conservative Party and how much goes to Royal Victoria Hospital.

As churlish as it might seem to complain about the crass propaganda of these events, there is no doubt that such an event could be even more successful without the political overtones. For example, it is something that could be arranged and promoted by the hospital’s highly regarded volunteer organization. Then, we could all contribute.

We could also move the event to a cooler time of year when it costs less to cool the building and create an ice surface.

Of all these events, the one in 2011 was the most blatant propaganda for the Conservative Party as Conservative Leader Stephen Harper took part.

While city councillors never once mentioned Brown’s role in this event, it was obvious that some had been getting static from voters. Council has regularly turned down requests from charities for reduced costs of recreational facilities for fund-raising functions and the fact that most of the councillors are Conservatives has been duly noted. Now staff is being asked to recommend a policy on charitable use of city facilities.

But that is a standard answer to many questions in Babel: it is under study by city staff.

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The perfidy of Ma Bell!

August 7, 2012 by Peter Lowry

It is a knee-jerk reaction in this country. It is like a Canadian’s instant recognition of the old Hockey Night in Canada theme music. Canadians have a visceral reaction to certain stimuli. In Western Canada it is to the CPR. In Ontario and Quebec it is to Bell Canada. It is a vague feeling as though you were weaned on it. It is somewhere between fear, hatred and loathing. Canadians can rarely articulate the why of those feelings but they are there.

If Canadians had listened more carefully to a gentleman named Jean Monty in the 1990s, they would have better understood those feelings. Monty was the guy who set up Bell Canada to get even with Canadians. A critical first step was when as chairman of Bell Canada Enterprises, he dumped Nortel Networks on the unsuspecting public. What used to be the jewel in Bell Canada’s crown turned out to be a stick in the eye to investors.

Monty’s long-term goal was not the technology of communications but the control of what was communicated. His hero appeared to be George Orwell, author of 1984. Like Orwell’s Big Brother, Monty left Bell Canada in the ideal position to tell Canadians what to think. As the dominant supplier of radio, television, telephone and hand-held communications, Internet services and satellite deliver of television in Canada, Bell continues its climb to power.

The only problem is that as its interests have soared into these new fields of endeavour, the company has lost all sight of what gave it the muscle to achieve these objectives. Why would any high-flying Bell Canada director ever think of the millions of kilometres of copper wire that guaranteed their loans from Canada’s banks? Why would they care about the millions of land-line customers that built Bell Canada? Customers are just a marketing statistic, of little interest to these entrepreneurs.

It is no longer Ma Bell, stock of widows and orphans, but Big Brother Bell, dictator of that land north of the United States of America. Bell’s directors have little to fear from Prime Minister Harper and his minions. The current flurry of interest in Bell taking over Astral Media is but a minor step in the Monty roadmap to power. The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission is but a limp-wristed vestige of what used to be a regulator with muscle.

The only good news lately has been the millions that Bell has lost on the Olympics. The bad news is they will have to write it off and raise the rates for your telephone again!

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So, where’s the beef?

August 3, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Okay, all you Liberals out there. The time has come. Your party needs you. The leadership contest must be in the phony war stage. Nothing is happening. Are we or are we not going to have a leadership contest? Sure, we mentioned that everyone needed time to assess their chances and test the waters for financial support. Do you need the entire summer? This is August for goodness sake.

One of our spies in Ottawa—who is in Toronto for the summer—filled us in on the strategy the other day. “They are all waiting for Justin,” we were told. He has already said he is not running but seems to want to have a second chance at maybe not running again in September. He is spending the summer judging the size of the crowds he draws at events across Canada.

“Does that mean he will not run if he is not pleased with the size of the crowds attending these events?” asked your enquiring reporter.

“No, it just means he will reassess the possibilities,” was the answer.

That is therefore the story of the Liberal Party this summer. We will call it “The Summer of waiting for Justin.”

And that leaves Bob Rae sitting in his backyard watching the grass grow. It leaves a good bet for party leader such as New Brunswick MP Dominic LeBlanc attending party barbeques and waiting for Justin.

What Justin does not realize is that while he has put everything into limbo, the party still needs leadership. And that explains why Justin should say ‘No’ again in September or as soon as possible.

There are issues the party and caucus have to address now. For example, by hook or by crook Stephen Harper is going to find a way to get bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to a seaport. It will be by Enbridge’s Northern Gateway across British Columbia, south to the Texas ports through TransCanada’s XL pipeline or east by reversing old pipelines from Saint John, New Brunswick. That tar sands gunk has to be processed into a lighter, synthetic crude oil before it should be shipped anywhere. It is too dangerous to our environment in its bitumen state. We cannot let Harper win on this issue just because we have no leader.

Before Justin Trudeau runs for anything, he has to find out where he stands. He has to know about the issues and he has to care about them—not the numbers coming out to see Pierre Trudeau’s son.

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Our CBC Olympians!

August 2, 2012 by Peter Lowry

What were we saying about former CTV head Ivan Fecan the other day? His chickens have really come home to roost. Bell Canada’s executives are the chumps. And it could not have happened to a more deserving crew of capitalists. It often happens that the experts on screwing the public are the most gullible.

The news reporter on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) National News last might could hardly contain herself: the CBC has won the Canadian broadcast rights to the next set of Summer and Winter Olympic Games. When CTV bid $153 million for the Vancouver and London Games to the CBC’s paltry bid, estimated at about $50 million, it set up CTV’s future owners—Bell Canada—for Olympic losses in the tens of millions.

Bell Canada has absolutely no concept of the showmanship and chutzpah involved in the television network business. Ivan Fecan seemed to be playing a very complex game to convince Bell that ownership of both the mobile telephone networks and the television networks was the future route to great riches. It is also the route to great losses if you are ignorant of the wants of your potential customers.

All that Bell is ending up with is a television network business that they paid too much for and that the executive group does not understand.

The only risk in all of this is that the Bell bosses might get mad and try to get their good friend Stephen Harper to do something about that damn CBC. Actually there is not too much more he can do to the people’s radio-television network. Everyone knows he hates the CBC and keeps cutting its government funding.

The keen observers of this Olympic television rights fiasco are just waiting for the end of the London Games and getting tickets to watch announcer Brian Williams going into the CBC English-language headquarters on Front Street in Toronto. Thousands would pay big bucks to see Brian begging the CBC brass for his old job back. And he will probably get it, at a reasonable cut in pay!

But it is Ivan (pronounced like Yvonne) Fecan who is doing all the chortling in retirement. He not only made the big bucks for himself but he did a service for all Canadians: he stuck it to Bell Canada.

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The perfect hair of Stephen Harper.

August 1, 2012 by Peter Lowry

It is amazing what can get readers interested. A story the other day mentioned the Prime Minister’s exquisite hairpiece. Lo and behold, we get e-mails pro and con the idea that the guy wears some hair that might not have his follicles. So what? Only his hairdresser knows what is real and what is not.

Okay, hands up everybody who thinks that is all Stephen’s real hair. Quiet. We are counting here.

Next, can we have hands up by everyone who is sure that Stephen wears a rug.

That settles it. Readers of Babel-on-the-bay are a pretty knowledgeable bunch. They ‘ayes’ have it. Stephen’s rug appears to be general knowledge.

Having viewed the various iterations of Stephen Harper over the years, it is obvious that the first hairpiece was in place in the 90s. It was lank and lacked the iron-grey strength of today’s more professional pieces. After all, he could only get the cost of his full-time hairdresser covered after becoming Prime Minister back in 2006. With all Stephen Harper’s travels around the world, his hairdresser probably has more air travel time in an Airbus A310 than most of the Canadian Forces Air Transport Command pilots.

This is probably the same hair and make-up specialist that Harper hired away from CTV back when he defeated Paul Martin and moved into his first minority government. Stephen seems to keep her busy. We hear that she not only does his hair, fixes his make up—you can see the eye-liner when he does a TV bit—uses a lint remover to fix his suits and, we suppose, even does the fast check of his clothes, shoes and makes sure his fly is done up. Hey, maybe that is why he is often late for media and photo sessions.

To really see the scope and placement of his hairpieces, you have to have a camera person shooting tight head and shoulders shots outside on a windy day. You will notice that the straight front of the hair across the forehead will sometimes shift slightly, as a single piece. It happens when she has not used enough glue. It would take a force eight gale to disturb a single strand of that hair with all the lacquer she sprays on it.

Maybe we can have some fun criticizing Stephen’s hairpiece in our blog but it is hardly a subject worthy of the lads and lassies of our nation’s fourth estate. They need to check for substance in the man. And if they ever find any, maybe they could let the rest of us know about it.

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It is all in the staging.

July 30, 2012 by Peter Lowry

The buzzword in Ottawa used to be ‘optics.’ When asked about the optics, it meant you were supposed to understand how things looked politically. Whatever the current buzzword might be must have been flying around last week when Prime Minister Harper agreed to meet with Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. There must have been a storm of messages texted back and forth from Harper’s people to Ford’s people to get the meet organized.

The first concern was the meeting place. The standard arrangement is that the junior politician has to go, on bended knee, to the place where the senior politician reigns. That was waived this time because the Prime Minister had a great photo-op (a likely picture in all the major papers and on TV that night) in Oshawa where he could be seen crowing over the supposed success of Harper-style economics and the financial accomplishments of General Motors Canada.

That did not mean that he would then travel to Toronto City Hall. That would send the wrong message. Mayor Ford had to meet him halfway. That meant they had to meet in Scarborough. (And that really is foreign soil for west-ender Ford.) Next they had to agree on a place. Somebody suggested that since they were meeting ostensively to talk about guns and policing, they should meet in a police station. The next trick was to find a cop-shop with a big enough room for the news media, a bunch of flags and egos as big as Ford’s and Harper’s. They found there was such a place.

The advance team from Stephen Harper’s office probably sent out a rush order for more lights and more flags to decorate the room but it looked fine when the media gathered to witness the meeting of these two leaders. The Prime Minister was, as usual, perfectly dressed in a buttoned-up virgin wool suit and finely coifed in his exquisite hairpiece.

Mayor Ford, on the other hand, was himself. With his gut hanging over his belt, suit coat undone, tie askew, unbuttoned sweat-stained shirt collar, spiked hair and jowls quivering, Rob Ford was every inch his worship, the slob.

These are two very different men within a common political vision. They did the meet and greet for the news media.

The media wondered why they were both so closed-mouth about their private discussion. The truth be known, they had nothing to discuss other than a common interest in fishing. Did the media think they would tell them that?

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The Brits can certainly handle royalty.

July 29, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Who would not have enjoyed that jolly send-up of the Queen in the opening of the London Olympics. Even many of Her Majesty’s Canadian subjects could understand those odd bits of British humour that made the obligatory opening celebrations a delight to watch. Director Danny Boyle, who produced the living movie, as he described it, must have thought he had died and gone to Heaven when he got that assignment.

The Queen (a stand-in at least) parachuting out of a helicopter with filmdom’s current James Bond (Daniel Craig) was about as broad as British humour gets. Mind you, actor Rowan Atkinson—in his Mr. Bean persona—was much funnier in his skit with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Watching the ceremonies, you had to admit that the Brits really know how to do pantomime. At the same time, you have to admit that British designers should never have been allowed to dress any of the cast of thousands. When one hears the words “British design, one automatically thinks of the word: dowdy. Mind you, for the Mary Poppins portion, they had to stick with the period.

Even during the entry of the athletes—pronounced ath-letes, not ath-el-etes—those costumes on the escorts where ridiculous. If the attempt was to be sure not to overshadow the athletes’ costumes, they certainly succeeded. And the ladies with the stand-up letters over their heads, for each country, were hardly dressed in anything close to haute couture.

But, backing up to the royals, that was supposed to be the highlight of the evening. Even the Queen’s corgis got into the act. Those little dogs were much better actors than the Queen. They certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves in their role—much more than Daniel Craig. When Craig jumped out of the helicopter, you understood why he wanted to do it, seemingly without a parachute.

And this is just another reason why Canada should not use the British royals for its head of state. Canadian politicians would never agree to the Queen doing acting stunts like that in this country. Our Canadian politicians are far too bloody uptight for that.

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Mr. Harper’s China sale.

July 24, 2012 by Peter Lowry

There is probably no ideogram among the thousands of Mandarin characters for a ‘pig in a poke.’ It is more likely that the Chinese language has its own derogatory term for really dumb purchases. A case in point is the offer to purchase Calgary-based Nexen Inc. by the state-owned Chinese oil company CNOOC Ltd. for some US$15 billion.

Canadians should be delighted to see that Stephen Harper is really sticking it to the Chinese government. We figured he must be selling something to them but we never figured he would get such a hefty premium. There is more than US$4 billion in that deal that is pure profit for the Nexen shareholders.

Nexen has energy assets around the world that the Chinese want. What they might not have bargained for are the problems surrounding Nexen’s Long Lake tarsands operations in Northern Alberta. While part of Canada’s vast tarsands oil reserves that all countries are eying, Nexen has had constant problems getting into production.

Nexen has been using the solution of processing the tarsands bitumen into synthetic crude oil before shipping it. The company has been struggling with its refining processes and with production targets.

Other companies are counting on shipping unprocessed bitumen through the Northern Gateway pipeline across British Columbia. As designed, this Enbridge solution is really two pipelines. A smaller diameter pipe running parallel is designed to carry light crude oil to the Alberta terminus where it will be mixed with the tarsands bitumen to, in effect, grease the way, for the combination to be shipped at higher temperature and higher pressure to the terminus at Kitimat, B.C.

It was the same type of bitumen and crude oil slurry that was spilled in Michigan two years ago by Enbridge. What the company proved for all to see was that its inept disaster planning was inadequate, careless and irresponsible.

The recent demands of the British Columbia Liberal government seem to ignore the dual pipeline aspect of the Northern Gateway proposal. While it is hard to envisage all the conditions being met, it would appear that the demand for a better share of the profits from the pipeline shows us from where the provincial government is coming.

The Chinese might not be too pleased with their purchase if the only way they can ship their new tarsands production is through the American Midwest via TransCanada Pipeline’s XL pipeline to the Texas ports on the Gulf of Mexico.

Canadians will be puzzled to hear that Stephen Harper, super salesman, is now wearing the mantle of Stephen Harper, protector of Canadian ownership. We wonder how long he will take to approve his own deal?

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