Federal Politics – Page 182

Whoring with the Ottawa press gallery.

August 25, 2013 by Peter Lowry

You used to be able to take a story to the Press Gallery bar. It was right there on Wellington across from the Houses of Parliament. The drink prices were reasonable. You met on the media’s turf. The conversations were relaxed and casual. It was a convivial relationship back then.

It is no longer convivial. Today, a public relations person willing to buy the drinks and with a story to tell is suspect. The atmosphere in Ottawa is more confrontational. The government and the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) are now in the propaganda business. The media can buy into it or bug out. Compromise is impossible.

Look at the incident with the Chinese reporter at the end of that “news event” travesty across the Arctic with the Hair, the hairdresser and the PMO. The tame and cowed news media had been told that they would be allowed five questions at the end of the Prime Minister’s non-news conference. It was agreed among the media that they would let the Chinese reporter ask his question as they were also curious about the possible answer.

They did not count on the discrimination and lack of common sense by the Prime Minister’s propagandists. They not only denied the Chinese reporter his question but sent a woman to tell him to get out of line where he was waiting patiently to ask his question. Current media chief in the PMO Andrew MacDougall still has a lot to learn about international media. Canadian reporters might be whores but they also have no concept of ‘face.’ To this Chinese gentleman, the loss of face in this situation was the equivalent of emasculating him. He had every right to be damn mad.

And the RCM Police should have stayed out of it. They had no right to manhandle the reporter away from what was left of the non-news conference. They had the good sense to let the gentleman go once he had calmed down but the damage was already done. They had aided and abetted totalitarianism with a person who knew all about that type of system. RCM Police who we used to work with showed better judgement.

And goodbye, Mr. MacDougall. Your replacement at the PMO will probably be just as ignorant as you. Treat the Canadian media people as whores if you wish. We should warn your replacement though that people sometimes find ways of evening the score with those who mistreat them.

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It’s always April Fools’ at the Fraser Institute.

August 24, 2013 by Peter Lowry

You have to wonder how anyone could come up with anything as ridiculous as the Fraser Institute. For these people it is always April Fools’ Day. For the past 35 years, the Fraser Institute has been the antithesis of public policy think tanks. It has built its questionable reputation on a premise of denial.

This sudden interest in their sodden soliloquies is spurred by the high humour of their latest findings. In an effort to promote parenthood, the Institute has published a study claiming that it costs much less to raise a child than we previously thought. In fact, the Ontario professor (a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute) says that you should be able to raise a child for between $3000 and $4500 per year. It really makes you wonder if this professor has any children that survived.

Obviously the study could not include some of the critical factors in raising a child. Providing adequate shelter, clothing, video games, health care and treats from the ice cream truck might have been missed. And obviously, the professor did not include any early childhood education. Maybe he has never had to keep growing children in properly fitting ice skates and related hockey gear. And if he does not think that is a necessary expense for a Canadian kid, he has not been in this country more than a month.

If Adam Smith—the guy who invented capitalism—were alive today, the sage old philosopher would have drummed this professor out of the field of economics. Even a right-wing ideologue like Stephen Harper gets photographed taking his kid to play hockey. Just wait until the Prime Minister finds out he is only supposed to spend up to $4500 per year to raise each of his kids. Next thing you know the government is going to reduce the tax deductions for having kids.

Please, please do not send a copy of this blather to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. Can you imagine how Flaherty could get rid of the deficit by ending subsidies for kids and allowing more child labour?

Now that we think about it, we have never seen one of these silly ‘studies’ for the Fraser Institute that was supposedly done by a woman. If the institute can find a female academic—one with children—who will do a follow up on this study, we would be most interested in the findings. The only proviso is that we get a listing of the budget items and the associated costs.

If the results are anything similar to Professor Sarlo’s findings, we intend to sit down with the wife and find out what the hell she did with the rest of the household budget.

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Remember Justin, pot is just small beer.

August 23, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Ok, point made. Moving on, Canadians have far more important issues to consider than legalizing marijuana. Let us not keep gilding the cannabis. Sure the news media are always in a rut with their questions but there is certainly more exciting news. What about the way Prime Minister Harper is saying things in the high Arctic unchallenged by a responsible opposition. You cannot allow him free rein up there to destroy peoples’ lives and livelihoods.

But we are also concerned about the current process Canadian Liberals are using to develop their policy options. Where are the open discussions taking place? What are you doing to ensure that all Liberals get an opportunity for input? Who is posing the questions that need to be asked?

You have to remember that rebuilding a largely moribund political party requires the best thinking of academics, politicians, community leaders and the rank and file. The same as candidates having to come from the electoral districts so do the policy ideas—from everybody and not just selective elites.

One of the Liberal policy team members came to Babel recently and was fed a number of ideas. It was not a broadly based discussion but supposedly involved those capable of thinking. One of the suggestions proffered was to depoliticize our federal civil service.

While Canadians have always maintained a certain fiction in regards to how politicized the senior levels of bureaucrats might be, this suggestion was that we deny the politicos of the day the right to hire and fire those senior bureaucrats. The gentleman proposing this was suggesting the system used in the United Kingdom model as the ideal. (It was also the system that suggested the hilarious British television series Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister in the 1980s.)

There are some of us still around who remember when Canada had a Chinese wall between its senior civil servants and politicians. It ended with the Pierre Trudeau era in Ottawa in the 1970s. There is a reasonable balance between these positions.

The only good thing about that suggestion was that the person suggesting it thought it was particularly good because he did not think it would cost anything. And that Justin is why policy needs to be more thoroughly discussed before you wing it!

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How to tell if the publisher is angry.

August 22, 2013 by Peter Lowry

The best gauge newspaper people have to tell the publisher’s mood is by the placement of his signed editorials. If it is on the editorial page, he probably has just a mild case of heartburn. If it is on page two of the paper, this is serious dyspepsia. And if it is on page one, save the women and children first. This came up yesterday when Publisher John Cruikshank used page two of the Toronto Star to rail against Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He feels that the PM is mistreating Cruikshank’s telecommunications friends at Bell, Rogers and Telus.

Of course, Cruikshank discloses that he owns shares in Bell Canada. (Doesn’t everybody?) What he fails to add is that the three cell-phone purveyors are also currently spending an inordinate amount of money on full page advertising in the Toronto Star to vent their spleen at Stephen Harper for being an ideologue. Being somewhat out of touch with display advertising rates, we can only suspect that these ads are paying the publisher’s salary each month with money left over to pay half the Star’s editorial staff.

Frankly, Cruikshank is behind the curve on this subject. Mr. Harper has passed the baton in this relay to Industry Minister Jimmy Moore. The nice young man from B.C. has been sharpening his teeth to take on Canada’s telecoms. Like Shakespeare’s three witches toiling over their cauldron of trouble, Bell, Rogers and Telus have brought this on themselves. Yes, they will tell you that they love Big Brother but that is not going to make them better citizens.

What Moore and his boss understand as well as most Canadians is that our three home-grown telecoms have been screwing their Canadian customers for far too long. Their collective greed is the stuff of legends. If one does not get you, one of the others will. They conduct a triumvirate of terror in the cell-phone industry.

But, to be fair, Harper’s choice of Verizon to whip the Canadian telecoms into shape is not Cruikshank’s choice, nor is it ours. Bell, Rogers and Telus might think they are the experts at rape and pillage in the telecom business but Verizon leaves them in the dust. The company is neither a better corporate citizen, nor any cheaper in price, nor does it have better technology nor does it do any better at customer relations. As we have explained before, Verizon is the Walmart of cell-phone sales. It might be five times as big but it is also five times as ugly.

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Hair today, gone tomorrow.

August 21, 2013 by Peter Lowry

The Hair is doing Canada’s north. That just might be the only part of this country where the Hair can find a friendly audience. He took his hairdresser, his wife and his PMO flacks, boarded his jet and headed for Whitehorse, Yukon. Only in front of a friendly audience of what were Certified Conservative Supporters did he announce his intent to run again in 2015.

The Hair also used that dread word “prorogue.” Where in the past prime ministers have used a few days or at most a week or so of prorogation to prepare for a throne speech and a new session of parliament, Harper’s Hair takes the time for an extended holiday from the quibbling of his parliamentary opponents. He considers democracy such a spot of bother, you know.

But in front of this friendly Conservative audience who might not have heard much about the Canadian Senate, the Hair could be positive and confident. He told these quiet people that once again, he intends to run on his magnificent management of Canada’s economy and all the jobs he has created for Canadians in their new Target stores. And, we should not forget those wonderful high-paying jobs he created for the elite in the Senate!

The Hair might have disappointed his audience as to when he expects to have an environmental policy to do something about the tar sands people who are trashing northern Alberta. It would also be helpful in the north as his government promotes less restricted mining to try to balance the costs of assisting people trying to live above the frost line. He did announce that his government is going to train the local people to work in the mines instead of their traditional seal hunts. Those mining skills might not really pay off when the mines are played out.

Yet it was the Hair itself that was the big surprise for everybody. For the first time in quite a while, Canadians were seeing the Hair in better balance with the Prime Minister’s fringe. The new piece has more white in it and it blends better. It actually makes the Prime Minister look more distinguished—if not older. After all it would never do for the Prime Minister to have the sun glinting off his dome on those long days of August in the far north.

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The environmental waiting games.

August 19, 2013 by Peter Lowry

The games are endless. Only the representatives of the people change. The current combatants are President Obama of the United States and Prime Minister Harper of Canada. Both have finite time left. Harper will have to face election in 2015 and Obama will be out of office in 2016. The American President grandiosely wants to save the planet. The Canadian Prime Minister just wants to save the tar sands investors.

But before then, President Obama will have to give a yes or no to the Keystone XL Pipeline. What he needs, to allow the pipeline, is Canada’s introduction of stronger rules to protect the environment in the extraction and processing of the tar sands bitumen. The solution to that does not seem to be anywhere on the horizon.

Harper’s process is flawed. His government is negotiating with the tar sands industry and with the Alberta government and it is hard to say which of the parties is more obdurate in their negotiating position.

The industry has failed to do its job. Its task was to find a way to reduce the environmental damage in the Athabasca region and instead, it continues to pollute the rivers, destroy the livelihood of our aboriginal peoples and demand that others find solutions to shipping bitumen slurry. And the Alberta government remains blind to the irreparable environmental damage caused by the extraction of bitumen from the tar sands.

But the province does recognize that refining tar sands bitumen into synthetic oil in Alberta is an absolutely no-win situation. The province and its political leaders are fighting to ship unprocessed bitumen by any means possible. They want that bitumen far away from the Alberta when the highly polluting refining is done.

But Canada cannot say in its new environmental regulations that it intends to ship billions of barrels of bitumen to third-world countries that do not care about pollution. This leaves Environment Canada with egg all over its faces. With taxpayers paying for the extensive advertising that promise environmental regulations for the tar sands, it is becoming more and more obvious to Canadians that their government just might be lying to them. Those regulations were supposed to be issued last year.

Meanwhile President Obama is in no rush. He can keep TransCanada Pipelines dangling over the Keystone XL pipeline as long as he is in office if he wants. The only problem is that Canada’s tar sands exploiters get a huge chunk of the money they need from American investors. That causes a bit of pressure on the President’s decision.

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Buffett’s Berkshire buys into bitumen.

August 17, 2013 by Peter Lowry

When the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, buys, Wall Street listens. That is why the recent $500 million investment in Suncor Energy Inc. by Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway investment company was good news for all the companies in the tar sands. It certainly tells us that business interests are not the same as those of us who care about our environment and the future of our planet.

Industry analysts tell us that Buffett recognized the depressed price of the tar sands companies because of the distribution problems. They say he saw the arguments as an opportunity rather than a problem. Americans are quite up to date on the waffling of President Obama’s administration on the Keystone XL Pipeline and are aware of the strong American environmentalist lobby helping fight the Northern Gateway pipeline across British Columbia to Kitimat. They are less aware of the growing fight against reversing the Enbridge pipeline to Montreal and the proposal to switch TransCanada’s main eastern gas pipeline to higher pressure bitumen slurry. Buffett has bought into a hornet’s nest but, as usual, he has an ace up his sleeve.

Even if all the current pipeline proposals were approved in Canada and the United States, that would be only half of the capacity that the tar sands people will want within ten years. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway interests include the key alternatives to pipelines. Besides a major American railway, this also includes Union Tank Car, one of the few companies building railway tank cars today that can carry crude oil. Despite the Lac-Mégantic disaster and despite the likelihood of more stringent safety demands on the railroads and on tank cars, this is still a major relief valve for the tar sands shipments.

Buffett’s bullishness is bound to impress and motivate other members of the Wall Street fraternity to jump into tar sand stocks and the pressure will become even more intense to override the objections of the environmentalists. As it stands, the oil sands industry has been able to stall the government on announcing the new environmental regulations that it tells Canadians about in the ads that are currently promoting the tar sands. The industry has put the government in the position of lying to the Canadian public and more and more Canadians are becoming aware of the duplicity.

But Mr. Buffett hardly seems to be concerned about the chicanery involved with bitumen from the tar sands. He is out to show the world how smart a businessman he is before he dies. He hardly seems to care about the environmental catastrophe that converting bitumen to synthetic oil creates for future generations.

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Settling the Senate problem is only a start.

August 16, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Reading the rambling discourses of the pundits, you would think that the current outcry against the Senate is easy to solve by simply abolishing the place. If it was that simple, we would have been quit of the foolish waste of money in the last century. What all these pundits are missing is that we also have to replace the Senate with something that would bring balance back to our system of government.

If the Senate is not working as a safeguard in our parliamentary system, it needs to be replaced. Canada has to have protections to preserve its democracy. When devised, almost 150 years ago, the Senate was that protection. It was never considered back then that a government, such as the current one, would corrupt the Senate by wholesale, ill-considered appointments. Harper’s Conservatives are reaping what they sowed.

But the Senate is only a part of the problem. Nothing will be solved if we just dump it and try to carry on. If you thing the current parliament is useless, just wait until there is no Senate and there is no recourse for democracy but the courts. The Supreme Court can barely function under its current case load. And the Prime Minister’s Office already has far too much power.

In 2017 Canada will be celebrating 150 years as a nation. It was nice of Queen Victoria to be supportive of the creation of our nation but she can hardly object if we now take a thorough look at where we are and where we need to be.

Like many countries founded that far back, our democracy is more of an ideal than a fact. Canada was an idea of that generation and, in 1867, a modern democracy was hardly more than a glimmer in the distance of time.

We can make it that ideal if we citizens decide that we want to. Sure there are all kinds of safeguards to prevent any wholesale changes in Canada’s Constitution because that is the way it is done. In the United States of America, there are so many restrictions on change that the country just bumbles along from one government crisis to the next.

Only the people of the country have the power to make change. The Supreme Court, if it ever rules, will tell Stephen Harper that he does not have the power to abolish the Senate. Only we can do what Harper cannot. If Canadians vote for a constitutional conference, we will have one. If Canadians vote in a referendum for some changes, they will be made. For that is the only democratic way to change how we are governed.

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What’s with the turnover at the PMO?

August 15, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Reading Andrew MacDougall’s farewell to the turnstile at the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) yesterday, you have to be puzzled. You wonder that, after the experience of serving Prime Minister Harper as his communications chief, MacDougall is not only leaving Ottawa but leaving the country. How bad can that job be?

That makes seven communications chiefs in that office in seven years. MacDougall says in his farewell that until he joined the PMO as a communications underling, he had never dealt with the news media. It might come as a surprise to his new bosses in an international communications firm that he still has not. The only thing the news people in Ottawa have written about him is that he is a good golfer and is polite.

But he obviously bought into the Anglophilia of Prime Minister Harper. He is going to work for a British communications firm in London. That might sound exciting but we expect the English media will have him for lunch. Maybe if he wears one of those inflatable sumo wrestling suits when working with them, it might save him from some serious bruising.

The problem is that the principal form of communications used by the PMO is better known as propaganda. That is what is practiced at that office.

They do not deal with the news media, they dictate. By no stretch is what they do considered reasonable negotiation, or even reasonable. They corral and control the media and it is only the equal fear some reporters have for their editors and news directors and their desire to keep their jobs that keeps things on an even keel. The communications people spew endless propaganda, call it information and the news media can like it or not. It is there for them and you get that or nothing.

The PMO communications people are the only ones we know who can pick a perfect locale for an announcement and then put up a trade show backdrop to put behind the speaker. And the traditional back shots of the speaker are not allowed.

You would like to think this is all a matter of opinion and this is just another Liberal diatribe over the Conservative way of running the country. If you are not aware of the constant lies this government uses our money to promote in advertisements on radio, television and in print, you are part of the problem.

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Big Brother becomes capricious.

August 10, 2013 by Peter Lowry

You have seen the full page advertisements in the newspapers. You have wondered just who the big telecoms—Bell, Rogers and Telus—are trying to reach. And you also wonder why they are spending so much money in the process. It seems to all boil down to their not wanting to allow Verizon, the huge American telecom to come to Canada. Big Brother thinks that Verizon will give the Canadian telecoms some competition.

With revenues in excess of US$100 billion per year, Verizon could have the Canadian companies for lunch and be hungry before dinner. With its beginnings as Bell South in 1983 after the breakup of American Telephone and Telegraph by the courts, Verizon emerged as the giant of American telecoms. It can be compared to Bell Canada in how it parlayed its copper base into a world of fibre and wireless communications. It can also be compared to Bell Canada for its poor customer relations. Verizon is also noted for its willingness to release information on customers to federal agencies.

What Bell, Rogers and Telus do not want and what they are crying buckets about is any competition from Verizon. They are outraged that they are not being allowed to buy small Canadian competitors but Verizon can—supposedly to gain an immediate foothold in the Canadian market. The Canadian dreadnoughts are also being restricted in bidding for new radio frequency spectrum. This will prevent them from blocking Verizon as a competitor for new Canadian business.

It’s not that Bell, Rogers and Telus do not enjoy competing with each other. They are constantly swapping customers with new offers and new technologies. That is friendly competition. They feel that Harper is turning a piranha loose in the fish tank by opening the door to Verizon. Verizon does not compete, it crushes. It is Walmart dolled up with technology. It just lacks the moral standards of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Big Brother does not know what he is doing. After many years of outrageous protectionism that made Bell, Rogers and Telus the fat cats that they are, they are getting screwed by their friend Big Brother. They forgot that he is an ideologue. It hardly matters that they love Big Brother, he wants more competition. Canadians are already paying and paying for their telecommunications needs. Despite at one time being world leaders in the technology, Canadians are now just consumer sheep to be shorn.

Bell, Rogers and Telus can continue to weep their crocodile tears if they wish. They should remember that this is their turf. They know the lay of the land and they know the quirks of Canadian customers. They can easily compete with Verizon for the Walmart class of customers while building a stronger relationship with customers who care. At one time, they did know how to treat their customers properly.

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