Federal Politics – Page 198

A pocket full o’ posies and some royals.

September 14, 2012 by Peter Lowry

‘And we all fall down’ is a nursery rhyme believed to date from the time of the Black Death in England in the mid 1600s. It comes to mind as the Brits continue to send their less luminous royals to grace us benighted Canadians with their presence. It is part of the Queen’s jubilee events being promoted by order of Prime Minister Harper.

Our current visitors are His Royal Highness, Prince Edward, Earl of Sussex and his public relations wife Her Royal Highness, the Countess of Sussex. Why they are visiting Canada is not quite clear. Why Canadians should care is also not quite clear.

But, for some reason, Stephen Harper is giving the British monarch’s diamond jubilee year a leg up. Mind you, we have nothing as exciting as Prince Harry’s recent visit to Las Vegas—which certainly overshadowed his father and stepmother’s visit to Canada earlier this year. You get the feeling that Her Majesty had a quiet word with her fun-loving grandson when he returned to England—something along the lines of a ‘jolly well-done!’

We will not be seeing as much of the Duchess of Cambridge for a while. According to the British tabloid media—who know everything—Billy has done his royal duty and she is pregnant.

Maybe Stephen Harper’s strategy is misunderstood. There is a form of aversion treatment that gives you too much of a good thing to break you of the habit. It is like the Senate. Stephen has decided to keep loading the Senate with mindless Conservatives to teach us that the Senate is useless. If he keeps displaying the useless progeny of the House of Windsor to Canadians, more of us will be hollering ‘uncle.’

It is also a sharp stick in the eye to Quebec. There seems to be an even stronger attitude there that the royals are a load of do-do. One can hardly blame Quebecers. Who wants constant reminders of a bunch of British red coats climbing the cliffs at Quebec City some 150 years ago? Canada has become a very independent country made up of many cultures since then and while we will always have strong connections to our country’s European origins, the English monarchy should be the least of them.

There is no excuse for politicians to continue to hold Canada back from the advances it needs to make in the 21^st Century. We need a Constitutional Conference of citizens and a referendum to set Canada on a new path. We need it sooner than later.

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Welcome to Mr. Harper’s Canada.

September 12, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Did Prime Minister Stephen Harper fly to Vladivostock without his hairdresser? Is she sick? Has she left him? That woman has become more important to Harper than wife Laureen. A wife is just to show the voters he is not gay. His hairdresser keeps him young.

Did you see in the news clips from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit? Poor Stephen was having a bad hair day. His toupee was out of kilter. It looked like it was glued in place about 2.5 centimetres to the left of its normal position. It was not the effect Stephen likes. He could never accept his recent award as statesman of the year with hair like that.

Did you hear about Stephen Harper being named Statesman of the Year? The award is from a Jewish organization in New York City. They want to remind President Obama that he will not even get their votes unless he gets in line with Mr. Harper’s denunciation of the regime in Iran. It does seem a bit perverse though to be named Statesman of the Year for cutting off relations with a country on the other side of the world.

Closer to home, there is a meeting in Montreal this week where people can vent about the growing control of television programming by the largest telecommunications company in Canada. Stephen’s friends at Bell Canada already own CTV, its sports channels and radio stations and are currently in the process of taking over Astral Media for a bit more than $3 billion. This is all in aid of Bell being able to screw a much broader range of consumers. Did we mention that Bell Canada is a major contributor to anything Stephen wants? Did we also mention that complaining to Stephen’s appointees at the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is a terrible waste of effort?

It is a good thing that Stephen got back in time to help destroy the lists of people in Canada who have registered their long guns. The Quebec Supreme Court has decided that the federal government had gone beyond its mandate to destroy the records in Quebec. That decision will now be fought out at the Supreme Court of Canada. Stephen needs to realize that there is something profoundly pathetic about watching someone like Public Safety (sic) Minister Vic Toews railing against what he calls the wasteful and ineffective long-gun registry. His problem is that by far the majority of police chiefs in Canada disagree with that view.

Oh, and did we mention that Stephen has appointed more Conservatives to the Senate that is already dominated by Conservatives. Stephen sure knows how to convince us that the Senate is useless.

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Harper failing at foreign affairs.

September 10, 2012 by Peter Lowry

What can you say about Canada’s relations with the rest of the world? Will we ever be able to dig our reputation out of the dumper where Prime Minister Harper and the Bobbsey twins have taken us?

It was bad enough when Stephen Harper let Flossie Bobbsey (a.k.a. Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird) lose us a seat on the Security Council. It was bad enough when Stephen Harper allowed Freddie Bobbsey (a.k.a. Jason Kenny, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) to put the screws to refugee claimants. The one-two punch of Harper’s Bobbsey twins is enough to destroy any country’s reputation.

And the Iran affair is beyond belief. Can you imagine a foreign affairs minister of any country to be so rude as to announce the breaking of relations with an unrelated country at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit? Why on earth would Canada’s foreign affairs guy do the deed when in Vladivostock, Russia? This is a gathering of some of the most powerful leaders in the world and if he had just farted, it would be glossed over.

But you cannot gloss over an announcement that had obviously been in the works for a while. This had been decided while Prime Minister Harper and Baird were in Ottawa. It had its roots in the recent visit to Ottawa of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This was the favour Netanyahu had come to Ottawa to ask.

It is hardly a gesture that does any good for Canada. It harms our reputation as peacekeeper. It smears our reputation for fairness. If it were necessary, it would only follow a long series of speeches and negotiations at the United Nations. For this act to be carried out, there had to be far more grievous concerns than are already evidenced. Is Harper copying George W. Bush with his fictitious ‘weapons of mass destruction’?

If Canada had the money and organization and the smarts to field its own Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it still would not have enough eyes and ears in Iran to replace our diplomats. Our embassy in Tehran might have seemed useless but it was a gesture that we were willing to listen. Only idiots stop listening.

Prime Minister Harper is micro-managing the Canadian government into foreign affairs positions where we should not go. Is he so keen to destroy the reputation we once had?

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Is equal representation a lost cause?

September 8, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Heard from someone the other day with who we shared e-mails strategizing on ways to block the foolishness of the proportional voting proposal in the Ontario referendum held during the 2007 provincial election. That must have been the first time we really wondered what planet Premier Dalton McGuinty was from. Our correspondent was curious as to what we thought should be done about federal electoral district redistribution in Ontario.

The honest answer was that we had put redistribution on the back burner to think about in October, before the hearings come to Babel. The problem you always face with redistribution is that the outcome is will always be unfair until there is an opportunity to change the Canadian constitution. And this is not the issue that will justify that event.

Canada has had many changes in its representation over the years that try to hone to the concept of representation by population. We fail every time because of the minimum seats required by Prince Edward Island, the sensitivities of Quebec, the continued growth of Ontario and the increasing weight of population in the west. As each commission realigns seats, we challenge the elasticity of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. That old building cannot have its walls pushed out further.

And what is the purpose of adding more members to the House of Commons when so many are there doing next to nothing now. As long as Canadians are willing to send people to Ottawa for no other reason than to support this or that political demagoguery, why bother? Why are we spending money on nebbishes?

Face it. It costs a lot of money to send someone to Ottawa. And it is far more than just the salary. It would be a delight to have someone from your district you can respect.

Here in Babel, the redistribution commissioners want to split the electoral district in two. What it would mean, in effect, is that old city would be linked to some of the townships to the north to create a district with a population of 102,361. The west and south parts of the city would then be combined with some of the rural area to the south and that would create a new district with a population of 104,730.

And anyone who lives in Babel will immediately understand the problem we always have with these commissions. They do not know Babel. The smaller northern electoral district will grow some over the next ten years but the bulk of the growth in Babel will be to the south. In the next ten years the district to the south could have a population more than 25,000 larger than the north district.

Yes, we do need to talk to the commissioners.

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Liberalism in a land of opportunity.

September 6, 2012 by Peter Lowry

It is a sad comment on the current state of the Liberal Party of Canada that a caucus of members of parliament and senators would involve more senators than elected members. Call it a low ebb for the party, if you wish, but the tide is about to change. The party is heading into a leadership contest that can set Canada and the party in new directions. And it is an ideal time and opportunity to redefine liberalism for the 21^st Century.

The success of liberalism in the 20^th Century was largely due to the success of a growing middle class in North America. Liberalism became increasingly popular because of its belief in the rights of the individual. Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy in the United States and Pearson and Trudeau in Canada offered the individual new freedoms and new entitlements. Liberalism made its greatest advances when dealing with the social standards and equality of opportunity.

But what surprised many of us middle class liberals was the vehemence of the opposition. We were told that liberals were too soft on the poor, the disenfranchised, the workers, the unionists and those who served the public. Our list of entitlements for the individual was considered unrealistic. Keynesian economics was vilified. The word liberal became a curse word in the mouths of the hard right and their ignorant followers.

In our trials, we let the nascent right wing of the Liberal Party become more powerful. We let this sneering right agree to campaign on the left so that they could rule on the right. They broke faith with the party. They broke faith with the voters. Nowhere was this more evident than in the party’s provincial rumps. They tried to save themselves by being more right of centre than their opponents.

For liberalism to meet the needs of Canadians in this century, we have to stay to the left. We have to welcome the true social democrats from the New Democratic Party. We have to talk entitlements. We have to offer the dental and national drug plans that people need. We have to ensure that education is free to everyone. We have to make it clear that we are the party that cares about the individual in our society. We have to make it clear that it is not an argument between big government and little government. It can only be based on good government.

The right wing sycophants of Stephen Harper are hurting Canadians in the name of political dogma. This is hardly good government. The NDP is a party dominated by the big unions. Big unions are not always progressive. Only the Liberal Party can properly represent the individual Canadian. We need good leadership to do that.

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Come out, come out, wherever you are.

September 5, 2012 by Peter Lowry

We know that Thomas Mulcair, Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition was at his party’s caucus meeting in St. John’s, Newfoundland. We assume he voted in the advance poll in Quebec but it is an interesting question as to which party he voted. Bob Rae and the Liberal Caucus were in Quebec and had ready comment on the Quebec election for the news media. It was a surprisingly shy Prime Minister Harper who was missing on the 10 pm news in Eastern Canada.

But then, Stephen Harper has been playing hide-and-seek with Canadians for most of the summer. In many ways, it added to the enjoyment of the pleasant summer weather.

But other than a comment earlier in the summer that he might launch a provincial NDP wing in Quebec sometime, Mulcair was also among the missing.

What does it say that the Federal Liberal MPs and senators were coincidently gathering at Montebello in Quebec? Timing is everything. Bob Rae, the news grabber that he is, knew to make the federal Liberals the saviours of the nation. The scene just needed appropriate music to give his statement the right drama.

There is no question that the federal Liberal MPs from Quebec are, collectively, far more experienced than the federal NDP members from that province. They continue to run rings around Mulcair’s people and have good access to the news media.

In contrast, Thomas Mulcair has to toe a very fine line in Quebec. His basic problem is that his NDP actually share the core vote in Quebec with the Parti Québécois. The PQ is the left of centre party in that province. There is no comfortable home in Quebec for a left-of-centre federalist. When you add the right-wing Liberal Party’s vote and the CAQ vote on Tuesday, you find that about 57 per cent of the voters opted for a federalist option (even if François Legault’s federalism seems temporary).

Keen observers of the Quebec scene are eagerly waiting for the re-opening of the inquiry into corruption in the construction industry. We expect that we might find that certain trades unions, some contractors and possibly some politicians have been chasing their tails for payoffs. We can all agree that cleaning up the construction industry in Quebec is long overdue.

While it will be very much a step backward, Mulcair will probably find that a cleaned up construction industry can give him a base of union support for a provincial New Democratic Party. It could ultimately relegate the Parti Québécois to the fringe party status that it deserves.

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Solidarity for now.

September 3, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Reflecting on unions on Labour Day is routine for left of centre politicos. When you have laboured with brothers and sisters of the movement, you want to give them credit for their solidarity, for their conviction, for their dedication and you want to lambaste them for their pig-headed obstinacy.

But what nobody is willing to understand is that when Harper and company have finished destroying labour unions in Canada, we will have also destroyed Canada’s middle class. The divide between the very rich and the rest of us will a wide and deep void. We will be the clones in Stephen Harper’s Brave New World. We lowly workers will have to learn to love Big Brother.

We are at a crossroads. Tomorrow is decision day in Quebec and where is Thomas Mulcair, leader of Canada’s New Democrats and saviour of unions? Is he leaving the field to Pauline Marois of the Parti Québécois? Where is Andrea Horwath, leader of the Ontario New Democrats and saviour of Ontario unions? Why is she letting Premier Dalton McGuinty blame teachers’ unions for the provincial deficit?

Despite the federal NDP turning to a professional politician such as Thomas Mulcair for leadership, this union based party is not doing the job. It is not making the case for what unions really mean in Canada. It was the struggle in the 1930s to bring management to the bargaining table that brought our nation out of the Great Depression. It was the momentum of manufacturing to support the Second World War that entrenched the labour movement as a Canadian institution. Our country survived that war, richer, more confident and with a more level playing field for our citizens.

The weakness for the unions was in the creation of the New Democratic Party as common ground for the old Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and Canada’s labour movement. Instead of putting their trust in the party, the unions wanted to run it.

It has left the NDP as a party of the past. It still lives in the strife of the Dirty Thirties. It has failed to move to a social democratic stance that can be attractive to all caring Canadians. It has failed to articulate the case for a modern union movement that is based on a partnership with the contributions of management.

The true social democrats in Canada are the left wing of the Liberal Party. These are the people who have to grasp their party’s upcoming leadership campaign and ensure that the new leader opens the door to New Democrats who want to defeat Stephen Harper and see the union movement move into the 21^st Century.

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The unnatural quiet in Harper’s Ottawa.

September 2, 2012 by Peter Lowry

When was the last time this summer we had something to complain about in Ottawa? It is far too quiet. The wife wants us to listen to the ads on television about Bell Canada being an unfair competitor. There is nothing new about that. The Liberal Party in Ottawa want us to rail against the F35 but that is already a dead issue. (Did you hear erstwhile young MP Chris Alexander back pedal like mad on the issue? He is going to ride that bicycle into a ditch.) What is being proved is the world will continue to revolve around the sun, with or without the Emperor running things from Ottawa.

Even our old friend Tom Clark abandoned Ottawa last week. He spent the week filling in on Global’s 6:30 pm national news. Tom is one of the best news readers in Canada and no doubt CTV got the point that they were really dumb to pick Lisa LaFlamme to replace Lloyd Robertson. Tom’s Sunday morning show on politics will be back in the fall (right after the Crystal Cathedral’s paid hour). That is a treat we look forward to each week. (Tom, not the Crystal Cathedral.) We will like it even more when Global Television gives Tom an entire hour and he can stop rushing his guests.

The media are so desperate for news out of Ottawa that we heard a news report about a Senator with dementia last week. After a very bad and tasteless joke about what is new about that in the Senate, we were shocked to learn that they were referring to Senator Joyce Fairbairn. Joyce was among about a half dozen senators who have earned our respect over the years. It has always been our contention that if we could just get rid of that useless institution, the few inmates who we could respect could still make an outstanding contribution to our country in some other capacity.

Speaking of respect, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird is still going around making enemies for Canada. He tends to say things only after peeking around the corner to see what the Americans are saying. If he likes what they say, he repeats it for the Canadian news media. If the media already have good coverage in Washington, they know Baird is just mimicking what the Americans said. There was a minor exception the other day when Baird complained about the Russians. He told the news media that it is “not just the veto at the security council, but moral support and other support that has allowed this regime (Syria’s al-Assad regime) to soldier on.” Maybe it is just our outraged sense of proper word use, we would hardly refer to murdering your own people as “soldiering on.”

And then there is always our local embarrassment of an MP. He held his Hockey Night fund raiser the other week and then ran very expensive advertising congratulating himself for doing it. Now just what column in the financial report covers this self-congratulatory advertising? Oh, you mean nobody has asked him for an audit? Do you wonder why?

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Flaherty’s friends frustrate our future.

August 30, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Who do you think John F. Kennedy was talking to when he said “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” He knew he would be wasting his time if he addressed that to business. Business decision making has little to do with doing the right thing.

That was why many people wondered last week when both Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of Canada and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty asked business to loosen their purse strings. Carney was told by somebody that Canadian business was sitting on $500 billion in profits and not buying anything. Just how they keep that close tabs on business, we have not figured out. It must be right because next thing our ultra-conservative Finance Minister jumps in on the act and also complains about business not doing right with all the money he allows them to keep in profits.

Now, just what is wrong with this scene?

On the spend side is a banker. A Canadian banker, we should add. Canadian bankers rarely tell people or businesses to spend. They are noted for their cautionary advice. They would hardly suggest that there be any rash investing or hiring of more Canadians. Even Scotiabank would rather pay $3 billion to buy ING Direct from the Dutch than to add more employees in Canada.

And then along comes our dour Finance Minister and adds his two nickels (he does not have pennies for two-cent deals anymore). He tells us that the government has given the economy its best shot and now it is business’ turn. He and the government are busy getting people off the government payrolls and saving a buck where they can. He is saying to business “don’t do as I do, do as I say. And I am telling you to dig into your piggy banks and spend, spend, spend.”

Jim Flaherty certainly sets such a fine example for us all. It is enough to make a Keynesian economist puke. When he and Harper decided to do something about the world economic crisis (back when Harper had a minority government) he came up with an infrastructure scheme that is now driving the municipalities that bought into the scheme into bankruptcy. And it got Harper a majority government.

Someone was telling us some time ago that Canada has one of the lowest business tax rates in the G20. What Flaherty and his friends such as the Ontario government do not understand is that business is in business to make money. Business will always support governments that keep their tax rates low. What government needs to do is to only give tax breaks to companies that prove they are good citizens. Those are the ones doing something for the country.

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How Harper can be hard on crime.

August 28, 2012 by Peter Lowry

The simple answer as to why Prime Minister Harper keeps bringing up crime and punishment is because it is so easy. Like much of his right-wing ideology, it preys on ignorance. It is rhetoric without reason. It is mindless cant.

And better yet, he knows he can get away with it. At a time when violent crimes against people are greatly reduced, Harper says we have to have harsher sentences for this type of crime. How do you argue against his stand without seeming soft on crime? He wants to build more prisons and it is tough to object—if he would close the dreadful old gaols that should have come under the wrecking ball many years ago.

The problem that Tories have with crime is clearly demonstrated by Harper’s Minister of Public Safety, Vic Toews. He has introduced more than his share of the more than 60 anti-crime bills brought to parliament by the Tories since 2006. The only things these bills share is that they are usually misnamed, misunderstood and mishandled.

Toews should always be pictured with a pitchfork as the quintessential Canadian Gothic. He is the guy who said if you do not support his electronic surveillance bill, you support the pornographers. Vic Toews also repeated former Harper minister of public safety, Stockwell Day’s observation that Canada needs more prisons because of the increase in unreported crimes.

You get the feeling about Toews that he must be convinced that if he keeps screwing up these crime bills, Harper will have no choice but to appoint him to the bench in Manitoba. We sincerely hope, when that happens, that all his cases have to do with business law and nobody ever appears before him for stealing a loaf of bread. Toews might try to have the person hung.

The Conservative attempts to explain their ‘tough on crime’ solutions have been described by some lawyers and academics as political marketing. They also have to note that the Harper Conservatives do not seem to worry about being too rational in their pitch. This is probably because the audience for such claptrap are already Conservative voters. If it is marketing, it would be like the automobile advertisements that are directed at people who have already purchased that model car. The manufacturers want to keep that user sold on the purchase.

There is a solid, but thankfully not large, body of right-wing voters who see people who are not in tune with society, because of poverty or lack of judgement, as a threat to them personally. They never want to have to deal with these people. As Charles Dickens claims Ebenezer Scrooge asked: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”

There are still people like Scrooge among us. Conservatives use their ignorance.

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