Federal Politics – Page 199

Mr. Harper tries to win the North.

August 25, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Does Prime Minister Harper earn Air Miles for all his travels? The answer is ‘no’ when you consider that he uses a VIP A300 military transport jet for those long distance hauls. Some people are concerned about his lack of attention as to what is going on in Ottawa. They know that the Conservative government has little on the agenda for the fall sitting and that the Conservative majority might try to force through some of their more right-wing agenda items.

But it is a mistake to think Harper is out of touch with Ottawa when he is not there. With today’s communications, he has thorough briefings from Ottawa while travelling. Where he is out of touch is with the Canadian people.

You can see that lack of contact and lack of empathy in his announcement of the new national park near Norman Wells in the North West Territories. We might as well call it the new park as few in the south are going to learn to pronounce its aboriginal name. What was immediately obvious about the park is how it had been gerrymandered to allow for mining of known mineral deposits. Many of the native leaders were very disappointed and they had a right to be. Harper had been playing to the natives the opportunity for resource jobs for them but many of their leaders were not buying these temporary opportunities for employment.

The other big event of this trip was the public introduction of the military’s Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2). This heretofore very secret weapon of the Canadian Forces has been around for some time but never on public display. To show how they might go about securing a boat at sea is to allow law breakers to study their techniques and prepare to defend against them. If you are Prime Minister, you can order it but Defence Minister Peter MacKay standing around in the background had a responsibility to try to talk the Prime Minister out of the foolish idea. It did Canada no good but then Peter MacKay does little of any good either.

Mr. Harper’s visit to the north is supposed to be an annual event. Such visits will be more worthwhile when the government can do more to make life more liveable for people up there. To suggest that people move south is to abandon our north to those countries that have learned to live in colder climates. If any country is in the category of those who know how to live in the north, it should be Canada.

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The beatification of Saint Jack.

August 23, 2012 by Peter Lowry

The Roman church has a strict schedule for the creation of saints. It is a long and rigorous process. This process could severely try the patience of the New Democratic Party (NDP). There might also be some dispute between the church and the NDP as to what constitutes a miracle.

The NDP used to think of winning any parliamentary seat in Quebec as a miracle. Yet, there was no divine intervention in what happened in Quebec in the last federal election. Jack Layton happened to be standing at a crossroads in the province and got the advantage of it. The Conservatives were dead in the water and both the Bloc Québécois and the Federal Liberals were running on empty. Those parties had taken Quebec voters for granted for too long. It was the NDP’s turn to take them for granted.

It was also hardly a miracle when the largest circulation paper in Canada, the Toronto Star, stabbed the Liberal Party in the back and told people in Ontario that it was alright to vote NDP. The paper’s political pundits should have told the editorial writers that the net effect of their foolish ploy was to hand Stephen Harper a Conservative majority.

The two most telling moments of the 2011 federal election were in the English-language television debate between the major party leaders. The first was when you saw how Jack Layton responded to Stephen Harper. It was clear for all to see that there was no way an ill Jack Layton could handle Stephen Harper. The second was when Layton tried to knife Ignatieff on his attendance in the House of Commons. What was telling was Ignatieff’s complete surprise and inability to handle such a spurious and unfair attack.

Jack Layton was no saint. That was a straggling ‘Solidarity Forever’ march behind his casket at that public funeral. The oratory at the event was a lament for what might have been. Stephen Lewis’ eulogy was brilliant, in the tradition of Marc Antony for Julius Caesar. It was a similar call to arms for the mob.

Now we find that Layton’s burial place is to be a shrine. That clichéd, trite, over-written letter that was released after his death is supposed to be some sort of civics guide for school children. Thomas Mulcair has yet to wrest the leadership of his party from a ghost.

Those of us in other political parties who worked against Jack Layton in Toronto through various elections knew him as a strong opponent. When we won a tough one against him, it made the win sweeter.

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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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