Federal Politics – Page 204

It is not who leads. It is where we are going.

April 2, 2012 by Peter Lowry

In the next year, the Liberal Party of Canada will choose a new leader. Who the leader will be is not the question at this stage. First we need a direction. The Liberal Party has had no direction for the past quarter century and look at the mess the country is in.

Not since the mercurial days of Pierre Trudeau has Canada had a clear direction. From then we have foundered. The Mulroney Conservatives tossed the dice on our future until frustrated voters threw them out in 1993. The Chrétien years were conflicted with the schizophrenic agendas of Chrétien’s left-wing cabinet members and the right wing around his Finance Minister Paul Martin. On his own, the voters soon rejected Martin’s brand of conservatism. It still took six years for the combined Western Reform and Eastern Conservatives to finally wrest a majority government from a less than determined Canadian electorate.

But now we know where the right wing will take us, it is time for a liberal-social democratic union of the left. This is the politics that Canada needs.

Canada needs a political stance that maintains the rights of the individual in society. It is a right to earn and to learn. It is a society of full employment—each individual able to fulfill to their capabilities. In this society, unions must become the trainers and provide services for their guilds. It needs to be a society where invention, innovation and ideas are continually addressing the human condition and opportunities.

It is a Canada that welcomes its role in the world as an honest broker, a conciliator, a peace keeper, a caring nation. To be less than that ideal is a betrayal of our armed forces, our heritage, our sacrifices and our history.

For most of us, our ancestors came to this land for freedom and opportunity. Canadians worked this land, they shared its bounty. They harvested the furs of the wild, they dug for minerals, they farmed the forests, they fished the waters and they tilled the soil. The land has given much. We are indebted to it.

As liberal-social democrats, we must firmly reject the cold heartlessness of the right. Government must be as large as required to do the tasks we set for it. Taxes must be as high as to pay for the tasks we set. We need to ignore the mantras of the right. Individual rights must always be put ahead of property rights. People’s rights come before those of business. And when the people of this and other lands have banished poverty and ignorance, hunger and squalor, fear and danger, war and pestilence; then we will have earned our rest.

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In this corner, in the red trunks, Premier McGuinty.

April 1, 2012 by Peter Lowry

It seemed to be the week for political pugilism. Many of us were appalled at MP Justin Trudeau and a Conservative Senator actually putting on boxing gloves. They claimed they were doing it for charity and few of us were sorry to see the Conservative with a bloody nose. The better fight was between old adversaries, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty.

Frankly, few could see the difference between the federal budget and the Ontario budget. Neither budget was a people pleaser. It was not until Jim Flaherty was back in Toronto on Friday and slammed the Ontario budget effort that we knew there was a difference of opinion between the two levels of government.

Despite the fact there was little real action in the coming year in the federal budget, Jim Flaherty took a roundhouse punch at Ontario’s budget ‘mismanagement’ at the staid Canadian Club in Toronto on Friday. Maybe he was just supporting Tiny Tim Hudak’s position against the budget. Even if it was as simple as that, his comments seemed to be somewhat extreme.

Instead of getting angry about the slurs, McGuinty chose to damn the federal budget with faint praise. It actually was funny to hear the Ontario Premier compliment the federal budget as a ‘measured effort.’ Just think of all those rabid Conservatives out there across Canada who now believe that Flaherty’s federal budget is a failure because a supposedly Liberal Premier praised it.

Neither the federal nor Ontario budgets get any praise from us. They both attacked civil servants unnecessarily. They failed to rebalance both our corporate and personal tax systems. The feds did more for job creation and that was not much. They both complained about the deficits and then did almost nothing about them. They were posturing and they looked stupid doing it.

The continued attacks on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio Canada by the Harper Conservatives are beneath contempt. And after looking at some of the sunshine list published by the Ontario Government the other week, you feel embarrassed to live in Ontario. Just take a look at the poverty you see on the streets in Ontario and wonder about all these people paid over $100,000 per year by our provincial Government. And they are just the tip of the iceberg.

Maybe young Trudeau was fighting mad, in his way, but pugilism is not the answer. In the upcoming fight for the federal Liberal Leadership, he is probably outclassed. He should get behind a real contender now.

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MP Brown is but a player on the stage.

March 31, 2012 by Peter Lowry

In the rollicking discourse of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the bard points out that our lives are but a brief part on the human stage. It would likely be the preference of many that their words be penned by the popular writers of our day. We are not all as fortunate as Babel MP Patrick Brown to have sage words prepared for us while enjoying a foreign holiday, courtesy of Canada’s taxpayers.

In case we wondered where our Member of Parliament might be, we have been told he has returned from traveling abroad with Prime Minister Harper. This was a special treat for the boy because he has been such a staunch supporter of anything Stephen Harper tells him to do. What use he could be in South-East Asia or Japan during the Prime Ministerial travels is cause for wonder.

But, as soon as he had rested up from the travels, he has been put to work. He was told to get out with the other members of the Conservative caucus and tell the populace of the wonders of the budget of Finance Minister Flaherty. Not being a quick study, Mr. Brown was given his Coles Notes on the 2012 Budget and sent out to spread the word.

Mr. Brown must have been reading from those notes to the reporter from the Babel Disabler (otherwise known as the Barrie Examiner). All the reader has to do is try to imagine Mr. Brown actually saying the quoted words in a conversation. They might read like the hyperbole a writer might use to extol Mr. Flaherty’s budget. They are not words that any of us would use conversationally.

In fact the quotes all read like a Conservative advertisement. Not that it would bother a slavishly Conservative puff organ, owned by Sun Media.

It is not until you get to the last third of the article that you are treated to some less Conservative comments from the Liberal and NDP candidates in the last election in Babel. These more balanced observations about the budget do not get much prominence.

But what enquiring minds in Babel really want to know is what Mr. Brown was doing while the Prime Minister was conducting the affairs of state on this recent trip? Did these countries have some sort of spouses’ program arranged for the retinue of MPs accompanying Mr. Harper? Maybe the reporter should have asked Mr. Brown about the free trade deal being discussed in Japan? Does Mr. Brown know anything about that?

Maybe Mr. Brown needs broader, more interesting scripts during his minutes of fame.

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The political centre cannot hold us all.

March 29, 2012 by Peter Lowry

There are political scientists who will claim there is no such place as the political centre. To them, the centre is just an imaginary dividing line between politicians of the left and the right. Conversely, there are politicians who see themselves as being in the centre and looking at fences on the right and left over which they dare not climb. The three current federal party leaders in Ottawa see themselves that way. They think they are in the centre.

There are, of course, those who will think it is a crock to suggest that Prime Minister Stephen Harper stands anywhere near the political centre. The problem is you have to deal with his view of things. Harper thinks he is standing in the middle when he rejects the social conservatism of the lunatic fringe of his party. And we are damn lucky he does.

You might want to argue that Thomas Mulcair is hardly going to lead the New Democratic Party down the middle of the road. Yet, he knows and has said publicly that he wants to move the NDP out of the socialist international into the guise of social democracy. He has the same weight of extremists on the socialist left in his party as Stephen Harper has on the lunatic fringe of the right of his. And yet the two leaders are arm wrestling in the centre.

That leaves Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae looking like a referee between the two protagonists. And Rae thinks the centre belongs to the Liberals. His problem is that he is in the weakest position to keep the peace between the right and left wings of the Liberal Party. He is a glib and industrious interim leader but the degree of trust in him by either right or left of the Liberal Party is not very high.

While these three leaders are scuffling in this supposed middle ground, few, if any, are paying attention to Canadian voters. Anyone who has done political surveys can tell you that the voters are not as easy to label as are politicians. Sure, you get the occasional ranting right or left winger but you often catch them contradicting themselves on issues. It is like you expect Danielle Smith, leader of Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance, to be a raving fanatic for the right until you discover she is not Pro-Life. People can differ on issues.

Maybe all the parties need to spend a few thoughts on where they stand. The NDP just went through the exercise of choosing a leader and it became very clear in that process that there was a division between the strong union supporters and the members who put social issues first. Mulcair won for social democracy but the unionists who coalesced around Brian Topp on the final ballot were no small rump.

The Conservatives are likely to wait about five more years before they will need to find a replacement for Stephen Harper. A strong candidate from the extreme right might tear that party apart to drive out the red Tories once and for all. We might be able to return to having two parties clearly on the right.

The Liberal Party will start to determine its direction in the next year, culminating in a leadership convention in 2014. There will be a growing chorus by then supporting a cooperative arrangement, if not outright union, with the NDP. Liberal leadership contenders will not be able to use the ‘big red tent’ approach but we can expect that some will try to maintain that liberalism is based on the rights of the individual in society and can exist with both right and left wings.

Judging by how the voters reacted to Paul Martin’s right-wing Liberal Party during 27 months from 2003 until 2006, the Liberal Party should finally make a decision about what it wants to be.

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Canada’s Conservatives face war on two fronts.

March 26, 2012 by Peter Lowry

The news media will be paying an inordinate amount of attention to the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair for the next while. He won that party’s terribly dull leadership race and earned the attention. It would be a mistake though to think this means a breather for the Liberal’s Interim Leader Bob Rae.

The Conservatives ensured there would be no break for Rae with those ridiculous attack ads that are inundating the Harper-friendly television networks. We have listened to many theories about this attack from Conservatives, as well as seasoned political observers, and it is still not clear. It is like a bunch of young ruffians poking sticks into a wild animal’s den. You hope the creature is not rabid when they get bitten but they will certainly deserve a few scars. All that the Conservatives have proved so far is that they have more money to spend than they need. And they are not very imaginative.

We can only hope that Liberals do not respond to Bob Rae’s plea for additional funds from the party to pay for Liberal attack ads. If Bob Rae has a shred of dignity left, he will make all his attacks on the Conservatives in the House of Commons.

And that is where the most telling assaults will be made for the next year. The Conservatives are vulnerable on many issues. They lack depth (and brains) in their front bench and will have a difficult time fending off two aggressive opponents in the House.

The worst result of the stupid attack ad is that Rae might decide to enter the race to be leader of the party. That would be a mistake. What Rae did in the 1990s in Ontario was not what the attack ad says. What he failed to do at that time as Premier was to lead his party. He is a very experienced and articulate politician. He is just not a leader.

By having Bob Rae working in parliament during the Liberal leadership contest, the party will be in far better position than the NDP during their contest. The Interim Leader of NDP was virtually ignored while the NDP front-bench was out chasing the leadership. This will not be the case for the Liberals.

The one-two punch of Mulcair and Rae spell trouble for Mr. Harper. If Harper was weak in Quebec before this, he is now guaranteed that his way is blocked in that province. And Mulcair and the NDP are not the only beneficiaries of knee-capping Harper there. The Liberals can only grow in Quebec and we have hardly heard the last of the separatists.

We can look forward to the renewed challenge to Mr. Harper in the House. Just remember guys, the enemy of my enemy is my friend!

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John Fraser defends the monarchy. Why?

March 25, 2012 by Peter Lowry

The last thing we need today was another book extolling Canada’s relationship with the monarchy. Can people find nothing more irrelevant to write about?

But John Fraser wants to entice people to read—wait for it—The Secret of the Crown.

The secret is out: John Fraser is a monarchist. The Master of Massey College, entrusted with the coddling of the impressionable minds of the elite among graduate students at the University of Toronto is a staunch defender of the royals. He was so thrilled with the visit of the newlyweds, Billie and Katie, to Canada last year, he had to write about it.

Fraser sees the monarchy as having a stabilizing affect on Canada. He is concerned about the dire consequences of dumping the monarchy for he knows not what. He claims the monarchy protects our traditions, customs, laws and rights. He fails to explain how the monarchy achieves this feat. The royals do not even understand a tradition such as Hockey Night in Canada. And even John Fraser might not understand a custom such as ending our sentences with an interrogatory ‘Eh!’ And we can only hope that the Supreme Court will keep our laws and rights safe from Harper’s Conservatives.

But Mr. Fraser’s admiration of the monarchy is his right. And it is our right to feel the same as many Canadians. There are those of us who do not care about the monarchy. We figure the monarchy’s best before date expired about a century ago.

What we object to is that the monarchists among us are very much afraid of an open discussion on the subject of the monarchy. They do not want us to question the role of the monarchy. Even the royals themselves have finally decided that the law of primogenitor was so obsolete as to be embarrassing. They now agree that the rights of women are equal to men in our modern society. And it certainly was not the Monarchist League that advised them to make the change.

Mr. Fraser has his right to be a conservative (in the proper sense of the word). That means, he has the right to resist change. He can help preserve old customs and quaint traditions. He can join in re-enacting the Battle of the Boyne for all we care.

But we will fight his resistance to change in how this country serves its citizens. A constitutional conference is something that has to happen. We can no longer live with a 19^th century constitution. We must have thorough discussion of how we want our country to be run. And then the voters will decide.

If Canadians want the monarchy in preference to some possibly updated system, so be it. At least we will have decided. We will then work with whatever we decide.

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The NDP cannot get their vote out?

March 24, 2012 by Peter Lowry

The one thing you always assumed in working against the New Democratic Party in an electoral district during an election was that the NDP would get their vote out. If that was one of their targeted ridings, you knew that they would do the job. That was why today’s leadership convention was full of surprises.

With a claimed membership of over 120,000 across Canada, to have an average of only 50 per cent vote for leader was not expected. It made no sense. If you sell a membership to someone, do you not take them by the hand to make sure they vote for your candidate? If they are a long-time NDPer and voting is sacrosanct with them, you still leave nothing to chance. Even the Conservatives know better than that!

The NDP embarrassment could be creating concerns for the Liberals. The Liberal Party is planning to have a vote by every member at their upcoming leadership convention. If the Liberal executive gets cold feet, they could try to pull it back into a delegated convention. That would be a smack in the face for democracy in the Liberal Party.

Mind you there was one aspect of the NDP voting that caught us off guard. The party officials promised the news media that the first ballot results would be announced at 10 am EST. And, to everyone’s surprise, they were.

Liberals almost pride themselves on never doing anything on time. That never was a problem at Liberal conventions because we always had spies in communication to keep us fully apprised on how the vote count was going. If you did not have the figures in advance, you did not feel involved.

Even with the very long voting times needed to handle the vote, it was an impressive, well run convention. You might criticize the organizers for not having enough bandwidth and servers to handle the traffic but you have to realize their first concern was security. With only about half the potential votes to handle, it makes you wonder about the simulations that they surely must have run.

The convention hall in Toronto presented some awkward logistics with which the organizers did the best they could. The candidate bleachers, where they could present a wall of signs, were a rather dated approach but the NDP is also dated. And as for the drummers for Thomas Mulcair’s entrance to speak on Friday, that was the same stunt we used 44 years ago to shorten Liberal leadership contender Robert Winters’ speech to the essentials. Mulcair’s only mistake was to try to talk fast.

The NDP have chosen. M. Mulcair is their new leader. It is certainly going to be a new beginning to some interesting times.

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And Mont Royal has two Members of Parliament?

March 23, 2012 by Peter Lowry

If there is a lower-class, sleazier way of conducting themselves in office, the Conservatives under Stephen Harper will find it. The latest is that they have dug into the taxpayer-provided Heritage Ministry funds to pay a salary to the Conservative candidate-in-waiting for Montreal’s Mont Royal electoral district. And the guy has the audacity to complain to the news media that he is not being paid enough!

Remember that Stephen Harper and friends just recently cut off government funding for the opposition parties. To then use public money to blatantly pay a political wanna-be to harry a sitting MP is chutzpah that only gonnifs like the Conservatives would attempt.

Liberal MP Irwin Cotler has served Canada and Mont Royal well for the past 12 years. A highly regarded law professor and a human rights advocate, he has been Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. The Conservatives were way out of line in using one of their call centres to recently lie to Liberals in the electoral district that Mr. Cotler was resigning. As an attack on Cotler and the Liberals, it made no sense.

It seems to be all the Conservatives know how to do is attack. It must be some sort of pit bull instinct. It is like the current attack on Liberal Interim Leader Bob Rae. Why? Do they think they are going to have to run against him soon? Bob Rae is laughing at them. If those are the nastiest things they can use against him, they are years behind the times. Stupid attacks like that might encourage him to run for the Liberal leadership.

The point that the Conservatives are missing is that you have to be a better than average representative for people to win election against the money and dirty tactics that the Conservatives use in elections. People such as Cotler and Rae are elected by the people in their electoral district to represent them in our Parliament. As an MP and as a representative of those voters, they deserve respect. They are hardly the nebbishes that the Conservative Party encourages to run for them and then do nothing in Ottawa but vote for Conservative bills when told.

As for this person Saulie Zajdel who ran for the Conservatives in Mont Royal in the last federal election, we have little comment. As a ward healer in the Cȏtes des Neiges area of Montreal, he spent a number of years on city council. If he wants to be paid as much as a Member of Parliament, maybe he should get a real job.

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Canada is not just an economic union.

March 22, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Never tell a Canadian they do not have a country worth fighting for—not unless you want to start a fight.

But we have many problems eating at our country and we need to find a way to fix them. You cannot write a constitution in the 1860s and expect it to meet the needs of an entirely different type of country in the 21^st Century. We have left the country to fly on autopilot for far too long.

The changes made in 1982 did nothing more than remove Canada’s constitution from the British parliament and bring it home to Canada. It left us with impossible conditions for modifying the document and a country that is harder and harder to govern.

A paper written about 20 years ago makes the point that most of the formal discussions on the constitution have been about economic matters. Since the destructive effort of the Macdonald Commission was undertaken in 1982, Canada has had nothing but failed attempts at addressing our constitution. We had the Meech Lake Accord and the Charlottetown Accord, then the Beaudoin-Dobbie Report and the Allaire Report and proposals for co-operative federalism and asymmetrical federalism. Canadians had every right to be thoroughly disgusted with the business of trying to build a country. They feel it is not worth the hassle and the upsets watching politicians fight for territory.

And yet, the writer of the paper felt that Canadian voters had learned from it all and were using unemployment levels, the rate of inflation and the rate of economic growth to judge the performance of government. The writer, an academic and an economist, obviously knew nothing about government or voters.

Even those who understand voters find it easier to tell you what voters do not want than what they want. For example, Canadian voters do not want the constitution to be discussed behind closed doors. They do not want it left to politicians. They do not want it wrapped in academic mumbo-jumbo. What they might accept is an open and transparent process that ensures them a vote on any and all proposals.

What that process might be, needs to be debated. And we need to decide on the process before we get into the specifics of what needs to be discussed. We need to accept the premise that anything related to our country has to be free to be discussed. There are no sacred cows. The future makes no guarantees.

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The Harper Conservatives are selling us cheap.

March 17, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Canada used to have some rules about concentration of news media. Mr. Harper and his pals have sold us out. With the announced sale yesterday of Astral Media to Bell Canada Enterprises, Canada’s news media are now mainly concentrated under the control of four huge companies. And these four companies hardly have the best interests of Canadians at heart. Nor are they politically neutral.

While the Astral deal still needs approval from the Competition Bureau and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), this will be a pro forma exercise. Both federal agencies have been gutted by the Conservatives and will do what they are told. Harper and friends work on the be-with-us-or-be-gone approach with supposedly independent federal agencies. With the early dismissal of CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein, the Harper government has made the point very clear.

And Bell Canada knows it. When von Finckenstein made too much of Bell’s buying CTV network, Harper’s people made it clear that if the CRTC did not agree, the Cabinet would override the agency. Today, the CRTC is there to act as a servile head waiter, ready to meet every demand of the four media giants.

All four of the companies are quick to support Harper’s Conservatives on the federal level. The only television holdout left is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada and Harper’s friends at Pierre Karl Péladeau’s Sun Media are waging war against the CBC on Harper’s behalf.

Quebecor’s Péladeau might be Harper’s friend but he still supports the separatists in Quebec with his major Quebec print media. He is hardly a wise choice for broadcasting licenses by a federal agency.

But not liking someone does not seem to be the criteria today. Bell Canada has long deserved its position right up there with Canada’s most hated corporations. Consumers have been bruised, berated and belittled by that corporation for years and Bell continues on because the banks will give them all the money they need to buy whatever they want.

Shaw’s Global almost looks politically neutral until you note the position the Wildrose Alliance leader’s husband holds in Global’s Calgary operations. Maybe that is why Danielle Smith has those TV programs to promote her cause.

Recently Rogers has become more aware of its competitive position in trying to become more hated than Bell. Roger’s call centres are starting to work on being nicer to customers. It is a very pleasant change.

Mr, Harper put these four corporations in their current position of power and he is getting full court press from them to promote him. You have to wonder why it is not working.

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