Federal Politics – Page 193

Good on you Marc Garneau.

February 14, 2013 by Peter Lowry

When chatting with MP Marc Garneau when he visited Babel last weekend, your friendly blogger made some negative remarks to the Liberal leadership contender about the party debates and the boring love-in being presented. Marc defended the party, as best he could, but was hopeful that the upcoming format in Mississauga might be better. He also nodded agreement when it was suggested that somebody needed to stir things up. And yesterday, he did.

Not only did Marc stir it up, in a release to the media, he landed it right on Justin Trudeau’s chin. The former naval captain knew just where to attack. Like the rest of us, Marc has become impatient with young Trudeau’s rhetoric on the middle class, youth engagement, his ‘bold’ plan and his ‘clear’ vision—without telling Canadians what any of this means. Marc equates it to being asked to buy a car without being allowed to test-drive it.

Marc, of course, softened his attack by lauding the excellent job Justin has done in signing up people to the Liberal Party and contributing to party funds. It would never do to have two such stalwarts of the Liberal caucus really angry at each other.

Marc made his point very clear for the media when he said, “Too often in the recent past we have put our faith as a party in one individual without asking the tough questions: Where do we stand? What is our vision for Canada?” Marc wants the party to do better. He said, “Now is the time to get it right. In this race, we must know what it is we are voting for, not just who we’re voting for.”

Go get ‘em Marc.

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On tar sands, politicians, pipelines and greed.

February 12, 2013 by Peter Lowry

If you like how you have been ripped off on gasoline prices, you have to love the Alberta tar sands exploiters. Whether corporate or political, these are the same people who have been lying to you for years. And, like it or not folks, the bastards are winning.

There are just too many pipeline strategies at play for an ecologist to track or to fight. It hardly matters the tragedy that Enbridge caused near Kalamazoo, Michigan a couple years ago. People forget, unless you live there.

And what is the difference between Kinder Morgan and Northern Gateway in British Columbia? Is Northern Gateway just the stalking horse for the Kinder Morgan plan? After all, the first stage of the Kinder Morgan route is in place from Edmonton to Burnaby—now they just want to triple the volumes.

Did you know that experts for the pipeline people have testified that bitumen slurry from the tar sands is lighter than water and therefore floats? Those living along the Kalamazoo River in Michigan can probably point out that the bitumen, as would any form of asphalt, eventually separates from the slurry and sinks.

The one excellent use for bitumen is to pave highways. And these roads are not gold as your Alberta politicians think. Alberta’s Premier Alison Redford is weeping buckets these days because the tar sands exploiters are getting ripped off by the Americans who have adequate supply and are not as committed to buying that bitumen. Would you want to refine gunk that pollutes about three times as much and costs more to convert into gasoline or heating oil?

We would never want anyone to freeze in the dark but Canadians from outside Alberta probably expect Albertans will eventually pay taxes like the rest of the country.

Can you believe that New Brunswick Premier David Alward actually thinks the Irving Refineries in Saint John will want to refine bitumen sent through reversed pipelines from Alberta? Those pipelines are to be used at high temperature and under high pressure to get that bitumen slurry to sea ports where it can be shipped to the markets that will pay for it. It will work—as long as the pipelines last!

And then there is the conundrum of poor President Obama. The guy is listening to pleadings from the Canadian government to okay the damn Keystone XL pipeline to the Texas coast where bitumen can be shipped to countries that do not care about pollution. What is a guy to do when a good neighbour pleads? And if he rejects the TransCanada Pipelines bid, there is always the Enbridge back-up route through Illinois as an alternative. As Mr. Obama can tell you: it is tough to care about the environment!

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Our MP astronaut lands in Babel.

February 10, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Liberal leadership contender MP Marc Garneau came to Babel yesterday. He was doing the route from Sudbury to Toronto, down Highway 400—stopping for an hour here and an hour there along the way. There were about 20 Babel Liberals and one belligerent drunk at a local bar to greet him.

At least 20 of the locals liked what they saw. Garneau is a very sophisticated, charming gentleman. He needs to stop wringing his hands while talking but that is a habit the best of speakers can pick up if they do not have it pointed out to them. His stump speech showed him to be a kind and concerned person but it lacked the spark of leadership that the party needs. When he was finished the set piece, your impression was that this is someone you are glad to know and you desperately wish there were more like him in Canada’s parliament.

Garneau is a highly intelligent man and, within his fields of expertise, he probably has few who exceed his knowledge. At the same time, even his empathy for people failed him when one chronic complainer got him caught in the complexities of federal-provincial responsibilities. He listened very politely and then honestly told the person that he could not provide an answer but that he shared her concerns. That was when the drunk chimed in and started to harangue the MP for not answering the question. Luckily the electoral district president is a large person and he went down to invite the gentleman up to join the group to ask his questions. The gentleman decided nursing his beverage was the better idea.

That left our guest from Ottawa standing there looking as though he had stepped in something soft and squishy in our barnyard. We quickly got into some softly lobbed questions to cover the balance of the hour he had promised us.

One question that was asked during the question period was how he described a liberal. It drew a lengthy response. It was the wrong answer. It was the kind of answer with which a truly progressive conservative would be comfortable. Garneau never once mentioned the liberal concern for the rights of the individual in society. Nor did he really describe the party as reformers.

Marc Garneau is a Quebec Liberal and you have to make allowances for that. Quebec Liberals think of themselves as good managers and they attract many of that type. They are just not philosophically liberal.

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Now is the winter of Mr. Harper’s discontent.

February 8, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Prime Minister Harper might see himself in the role of Shakespeare’s much maligned Richard III but he must still reap the rewards of his own perfidy. When he sought to carelessly swamp the Liberal Senate with instant senators, ready and willing to do his bidding, he did not choose overly well. In that other place of supposedly sober second thought, there was no guarantee of sobriety, honesty or parsimony. And now what is a Prime Minster to do?

Harper must be keeping constitutional experts burning the midnight oil to find him a way to either rid himself of the Senate or to change its errant ways. While a signatory to the idea of an elected, equal and hopefully effective senate, Harper would probably be happiest just to get rid of the damn place. At a cost of more than $16 million per year for the Senate, Harper probably figures he has enough useless Members of Parliament in his caucus in the House of Commons without paying for more in the Senate.

And what guarantee does he have that a Triple ‘E’ Senate would have a majority of Conservatives. He knows as well as the next politician that an election can be a crap shoot and he could end up with another Liberal dominated Senate.

He wants to rid himself of those pesky Senators. Not the ones that play hockey out in Kanata but the ones who call themselves parliamentarians. And he has a particularly large mad on at the moment for Senators such as Brazeau and Duffy. He sent those guys to the Senate to do what he wanted not for them to do what they wanted. Brazeau can be a bit of a blowhard and he cannot even beat young Trudeau in the boxing ring. New Democrat MP Charlie Angus had the best line in the House of Commons the other day when he asked what Anne of Green Gables and Senator Mike Duffy have in common—they are both fictional residents of Prince Edward Island.

The problem facing the Prime Minister is that the constitutional experts are explaining to him that the only way to get rid of the Senate is with the agreement of the provinces. And he is hardly going to start horse trading with that bunch just because some senators are annoying him.

The problem we have folks is that even if the Prime Minister and the provincial people could ever agree on anything, the Canadian people have the last word. And we all know what happened to the foolish Charlottetown Accord.

The process has to be reversed. We have to start with a popularly elected Constitutional Conference, followed by a referendum. That way, what the provincial politicians think becomes academic as their own people will have had the say. And that is democracy.

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Liberal-NDP merger: Not easy, just necessary.

February 7, 2013 by Peter Lowry

While many have been worried about it for years, it can now be reported that there is a serious disconnect between the people running Canada’s political parties and the rank and file of the parties. It happens much too often with top-down management. The leadership think they are omnipotent and important and the party think the leaders are impotent and unimportant. And visa-versa, of course. The problem is that without some real leadership, nothing is going to be done about it.

First, we have to deal with the fact that large numbers of Liberal and New Democrat party people at the electoral district level across Canada want to work together. Maybe not all party members would agree but certainly a high percentage see that as a way to defeat Harper’s Conservatives. If we did polls of individual electoral district party members across Canada, there is good reason to suspect that a high percentage of them would opt for cooperation. Liberal MP Joyce Murray from Vancouver Quadra might just have a good idea.

Joyce has been saying during her leadership campaign that Liberals should offer to cooperate with New Democrats at the riding level. Front-runner MP Justin Trudeau can hardly scoff at the idea as he is also promising more power to the ridings and to MPs.

He has been talking a good story and this is an excellent place to start. Assume that the Liberal Party people and the New Democrats in every Conservative-held riding across Canada have a vote. You can bet that you would have enough ridings that are winnable by a Lib-NDP consortium to not only defeat the Conservatives but to totally confound Stephen Harper. He would have to contend with two party leaders at the national level while the odds defeat him in the ridings.

After we defeat Harper’s Conservatives is when the fun part of the process begins. Since neither the Liberal leader nor the NDP leader will have sufficient members of just their party to form a government, the Governor General is duty bound to ask the one with the most seats if he (or she) can form a government. Obviously by adding the Lib-NDPers to the numbers, that party will be able to form a government.

And that leaves what is left of the party that came third which would obviously include some experienced and knowledgeable MPs. Its members can join the ruling party and govern or it can sit as a rump in the House of Commons. That second choice might not sit well with the rank and file of their party. Think about it.

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Cowards work hard for half measures.

February 6, 2013 by Peter Lowry

When laughing at Prime Minister Harper the other day for being a royalist, it is likely that we all ignored the reality of what he is afraid to do. Whether addressing a change in the British Law of Succession or the changes he wants for the Senate of Canada, Harper cannot do it effectively without opening the Pandora’s Box of Canada’s constitution. It is the same with MP Joyce Murray trying to win support for her Liberal leadership bid with promises of support for proportional voting. They are working hard for half measures. And they will fail.

Half measures usually do fail. It is like renovating an old house by starting with the basement. You have to prop up a lot of crap to make the changes in the basement.

Mr. Harper’s problem with his wish-list of changes is that he has to involve the provinces and get them all to agree. That might take the wisdom of Solomon to accomplish and that, Harper does not have.

MP Joyce Murray thinks she has only agreed to changing how Canada votes. Like many people, she has not carried her thinking past the voting stage. Proportional voting represents a drastic change not only to how Canada votes but how our government and legislatures function on our behalf.

Thankfully, both British Columbia and Ontario voters have firmly rejected proportional voting in referendums. The voters realize that this is no panacea.

At a time when voters are starting to realize that they have not been paying enough attention to the people they are electing, why would we switch to making the people we elect more remote? Canadians are used to voting for people to represent them. To just vote for parties is to destroy the level of democracy we have developed in this country.

Obviously people are dissatisfied with the fact that Prime Minister Harper is not the choice of the majority of Canadians. What they can do to solve that is go to a system of preferential voting that creates a virtual runoff election when no candidate gets a majority. Under a preferential system, we would ensure that individual Members of Parliament and legislatures are, at least, the first, second or third choice of the majority in their electoral districts.

But we are not going to make a change that serious without a Constitutional Conference and then a referendum to verify it. Okay, step up folks. Who is brave enough to fight for real change?

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Ms. McCrimmon: You are off that island.

February 3, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Babel-on-the-Bay kicked David Bertschi and George Takach off the island and out of the Liberal leadership race after the Vancouver fiasco. After another of the badly planned events in Winnipeg Saturday, we have no choice but to ask another candidate, former Lieutenant Colonel Karen McCrimmon, to leave the island.

It is only fair. Even in a horse race, you expect the horses to be fairly matched by age or by being non-winners of their last three races but this is not even a race. It is an embarrassment. Let the losers stop wasting their money. If they had a clear policy to sell to the Liberal Party or the Canadian people, they might have a reason to take part. They do not. They are doing nothing but wasting our time.

Take Deborah Coyne, for example. She is obviously a very intelligent person. She was also more on her game in Winnipeg. She handled bad questions cheerfully. She made a reasonable contribution to the ill-planned show. Maybe, in the course of these events, she will tell us why she is taking up our time. Ms. Coyne is far too smart to think she has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting anywhere this way.

This is not to say that the Liberal Party of Canada does not need more brains. Did the inept organizers of these efforts actually try to circle the wagons to ward off the Indians? They could have had one-on-one conversations with the candidates without charging people $20 to attend. Does an interview style program not require a competent interviewer? And better thought out questions? Did we really want to know that Marc Garneau likes to vacuum? Did they really want to know that Justin Trudeau misses his kids?

After all, Justin told the organizers very clearly what he thought of the process when he took off the jacket and tie. It was good to see that some of his father’s panache rubbed off on young Trudeau. It would never do for us to call a halt to the entire foolish process and it would never do to crown the Dauphin so early in the game. We just have to hope that he grows into the job. His comments on crime and punishment were thoughtful and showed an insight that we did not expect. His answer on foreign ownership could easily be enshrined as Liberal policy.

It should also be noted that young Trudeau left a zinger on the stage for former MP Martha Hall Findlay on her arguments against supply management. If she keeps providing such an easy foil to the contest, she might outlast former MP Martin Cauchon on the island.

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A truly loyal subject might object.

February 2, 2013 by Peter Lowry

The Harper Conservative government has proposed a bill to change the law of primogeniture. The fact that Canada does not have a law of primogeniture on its books does not seem to be relevant. Nor does the fact that laws of succession are ceded to the provinces under the Canadian Constitution Act, 1867, seem to have any relevance to the Harper government. The Harper government is changing the law of primogeniture because it was asked to make the change by British Prime Minister David Cameron.

This matter stems from British royal succession laws and the fact that the Duchess of Cambridge is pregnant. Obviously that piece of news is wildly exciting for royal watchers and monarchists and people who care—all 1123 of them from coast to coast to coast across Canada.

But the number of people interested in the matter should not be the barometer by which we judge legislation. The relevance is the need. It seems that Prime Minister Cameron has taken on himself to be modern and forthright and just in case the Duchess of Cambridge has a baby girl, he wants the lass to have a crack at the British throne.

It seems that the Duchess’ father-in-law—the guy with the big ears—has first crack at the royal counting house when mummy goes to her richly deserved reward. And when the lovely Camilla—who will not be queen—dons her widow’s weeds, her stepson Billy will be an automatic King and the Duchess will be Queen Kate. Realistically folks, we could be talking another 30 to 40 years here of already planned royal succession.

Mind you, Cameron knows to plan ahead. We should not forget that Billy, Duke of Cambridge, and second in line for the Brit throne, likes to play around in Sea King helicopters for the Royal Air Force. Those are notoriously unsafe conveyances and they have been known to create more than a few widows and widowers. And as things stand, should anything happen to Billy, that wastrel brother of his, Harry, will suddenly get second dibs at the throne and Kate’s little girl will have no daddy and no throne.

And that is why there is expediency to getting all the ducks in line and having all the Commonwealth monarchists supporting the newly revised law of primogeniture. By having the entire Commonwealth on board, the Brit throne will be secure for decades to come. The child of the Duchess of Cambridge will not only not need to worry about being a boy or girl but will also be free to marry a Roman Catholic.

But hold on here a minute. The Brit throne has a responsibility to the Church of England. Is something being snuck by those loyal subjects? Maybe it would be more proper for that part to be decided by the Church of England. Would those loyal subjects withhold consent to such an arbitrary measure?

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The tribalism of the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair.

January 31, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Is it some sort of right of passage in Quebec? Is it an inferiority complex? Or is it just the political games of Canada’s politicians? Since the not so quiet revolution of the 1960s, we have had Quebec politicians jerking around the rest of Canada about imagined slights and questionable rights. And every Quebec politician, of every stripe, wants in on the act. Now, we have a separatist premier in Quebec kicking sand at the nationalists and the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Ottawa joining her in that political sandbox.

It certainly puts the lie to NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair’s federalism. He is engaging in the cheap theatrics we have seen from Quebec politicians for many decades. Mulcair has decided that he wants to win kudos in Quebec for talking about emasculating the Clarity Act. This is the act passed by the Chrétien Liberal government in 2000 to ensure that questions about secession be asked honestly and that a realistic majority have voted for it. And Mr. Mulcair wants to throw his galoshes into that soup.

To be fair, it was not Thomas Mulcair’s bill. Toronto-Danforth MP Craig Scott acted as the Judas Goat to propose the bill to save the NDP from having to vote for a similar bill proposed by the Bloc Quebecois. In the usual machinations of Canada’s parliament, the NDP version of the bill will never see the light of day again. The entire act was just a play to Quebec voters.

But you may be sure that Quebec Premier Pauline Marois is paying attention. She will use every chance she gets to show that Thomas Mulcair is on her side. This is the lady that even uses the proposed separation of Scotland and England as a rational for her own political ambitions. All she has shown in her statements is that she seems to have no idea of the history involved and the complexities of the relationship of the Scots and the Brits.

In comparison, Quebec’s relationship with the rest of Canada is very simple. The Scots and the Brits, at least, speak a somewhat similar language. They are of the same race as are the early French and English-Irish-Scots and Welsh settlers in Canada. The problem in Quebec is tribalism based on language.

But Scotland belongs to the Scots. Quebec belongs to Canadians. Quebec separatists cannot put their supposed tribal rights ahead of the individual rights of Canadians. As Pierre Trudeau explained many times, tribalism does not override individual rights.

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The Hair reviews the Conservative troops.

January 30, 2013 by Peter Lowry

There is a ‘tell all’ photo in the Ottawa Citizen today. It was provided to the Citizen by Canadian Press. It is sure to be in many other Canadian newspapers. The picture is about the Hair doing what the military calls ‘trooping the line.’ You often see the Queen doing it—going up and down the lines of well-turned out troops, stopping at intervals to make some minor pleasantry. It is as close as the Conservative backbenchers are allowed to get to the Prime Minister.

What the Prime Minister and the Hair are doing back in Canada, we are not sure. Maybe he is filling in for Finance Minister Flaherty who is off for his annual holiday in Davos, Switzerland. When not attending the World Economic Conference in Davos yesterday, Minister Flaherty could have been entertained by a group of ladies staging a topless demonstration. We are not sure what these ladies were protesting but, according to the news photos, they were certainly well equipped for it.

But we digress from the Hair. As he trooped the line, you could imagine the backbenchers peering quizzically at the Hair, trying to determine where the real hair ends and the world famous hairpiece begins. The consensus of the caucus is that probably only his staff hairdresser knows for sure.

Protecting the secret of the Hair is becoming quite an elaborate process and there were serious questions in the House about these expenses. The cost, for example, of shipping armoured limousines to India last year was just one incident. To have the Canadian Forces use a C47 Globemaster to fly the two limousines to India was claimed by the NDP critic to have cost more than a million dollars. That does seem like a lot of money to protect the Hair.

When Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird put down the protest, he pointed out that India has a poor reputation for protecting Prime Ministers. He failed to note that India has a good reputation for protecting tourists. It is just their own Prime Ministers whom they sometimes assassinate. Most Indians wave respectfully to limousines with a Canadian flag on the fender. Frankly, the RCM Police can rest assured that the people of India have too many relatives here to want to mess with the Hair.

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