Federal Politics – Page 209

Liberal demise: A premature report.

November 19, 2011 by Peter Lowry

Peter C. Newman has done it again. As the lead drummer and chronicler of the Conrad Black Memorial Marching Band, Peter has again announced the death of the Liberal Party of Canada. Peter has been wrong before. He is no prophet.

The first problem with Peter’s report is that his conclusion was based on interviews with former party leader Michael Ignatieff. One can well understand that Michael is a bit down at this time on the future of the Liberal Party. We can only hope that Michael will be the last person chosen to lead the Liberal Party without knowing where it wants to go.

There is no question but the Liberal Party of Canada does have some self-destructive tendencies. As does any political party. It is a safety mechanism for the voters. Our voting system of first-past-the-post also provides wild swings in party representation. In comparison, proportional voting would provide glacial change and the country would stagnate politically.

As gloomy as Michael and some others might be about the Liberal party, its current condition is really an opportunity. Political parties have to be able to renew themselves. New ideas, new solutions are available to those who seek them. An open and democratic party can not only refresh its direction but lay out a better future for Canadians.

What the Liberal Party might never find is a way to rid itself of those who would hold it back. To admit that naysayers are necessary is to admit that you need internal checks and balances on your arguments for a future. And you accept the inevitable. You let them stay because you need the early warnings on the arguments of your enemies.

But they have to be open to change. That is part of being liberal. Liberalism should never be a fixed target. It moves with the times. It has to be in the current century. While liberalism in Canada might have its origins in the muddy streets of 19th Century Toronto, it has embraced a country stretching from Labrador to Vancouver Island.

In his book When the Gods Changed, Newman concludes that Canada no longer needs a Liberal Party. In the same manner, one can also conclude that Canadians no longer need a Conservative Party. And while Canada very much needed a Tommy Douglas, the union-dominated New Democratic Party has proved itself an anachronism.

We certainly need a new Liberal Party.

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Is fear alone derailing our future?

November 16, 2011 by Peter Lowry

Franklin Roosevelt said it best in his 1933 inaugural address that the “only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That certainly helps explain the pitiful excuses from both Ottawa and Queen’s Park to again shy away from high-speed train service in the Windsor–Quebec City corridor. These so-called politicians do not serve us well.

When something is so vital to the political and economic future of our country, why are we letting it be blocked by the callow, the myopic, the self-serving and the ignorant? “It’s time for us to pause and reflect,” says Ontario Premier McGuinty in answer to questions from reporters about the high speed train service. If he had told Ontario voters that, during the recent election campaign, he would have been doing his reflecting today back in his law practice in Ottawa.

Neither Prime Minister Harper nor Ontario’s Premier understand that, in times of adversity—such as today’s economic problems—the country needs clear, non-partisan direction. It needs determined and understandable leadership, not ideology. It needs bold moves forward, not quavering inaction.

They think of high speed trains down the Windsor–Quebec City corridor as train tickets. They have little understanding of how those rails of steel can hold this country together. If they keep letting Quebec isolate itself from the rest of the country, they will never notice when it leaves. It is important to remember that the Quebec government also wants this high-speed rail service. We have to build for togetherness, not separation.

Today, we know that the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal part of the scheme is doable, economically viable and essential to our nation. The only people who will hate it are the people who own Porter Airlines.

The right of way exists, the train stations exist, the dire need exists. All this country really lacks is leadership.

And with all the electricity that the two provinces generate, the trains have to be electric as an example of Canadian engineering to the world. At 300-plus kilometres per hour, Canadians could even learn to enjoy on-time rail service

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Defining 21st Century Liberalism.

November 14, 2011 by Peter Lowry

Liberal Party of Canada President Alfred Apps is a brave guy. In his paper Building a Modern Liberal Party, he tries to define modern liberalism. He roots around in the muddy middle ground of politics attempting to assemble a representation of the big red tent of Liberalism.

When you consider that this is the party of Mitchell Sharp, Bill Graham and Paul Martin Jr. on the right as well as Herb Grey, Lloyd Axworthy and Paul Martin Sr. on the left, you can be excused for thinking the party covers a broad spectrum of ideologies. Today, this broad spectrum is the party’s weakness.

It is our opinion that Canadians are getting tired of the Liberal Party posturing in a fictional middle ground. We need to pick a path to the future.

Apps touches on where we should build on our strengths when he says, “We believe in the ‘servant state’.” There is an entire philosophy to be built around that statement. It is one that we need to believe in beyond anything else. And yet Apps is wrong when he says, “We are capitalists, not socialists.” To be an effective servant, you must be both.

To serve, to engage and to lead is a long road that liberals need to travel. It has little to do with modern technology and has much to do with our beliefs. Believe first. Earn the trust and then the mechanics are easy.

Alf needs to learn that there is no such thing as a “balanced middle road.” The question always has to be: Are we effectively serving the needs of our people?

Liberals are not the natural government of Canada. That is arrogant. You have to earn the right to be the government. Or you could learn how to lie and steal and cheat your way into government the way the Conservatives have learned to do it. If you can earn peoples’ trust, you could come up with programs people want to make life better. Or you could just run scurrilous attack ads against your opponent and not offer anything positive.

Alf admits that he does not understand the emotional rationale of how people vote. It is probably just as well that he is not likely to run for the party leadership in 2013.

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Toronto Star needs better research.

November 13, 2011 by Peter Lowry

There are people who consider Toronto Star editorials as gospel. Their numbers will be decreasing if the editorial writers do not pull up their socks and do a little more research before pontificating. The editorial (Nov. 13, 2011) on the delay of Trans Canada’s Keystone XL pipeline is a good example of the lack of research.

The headline was that the pipeline delay was a shabby rebuff from a friend. They could have started with a little better understanding that ‘the friend,’ by the name of Barack Obama, is fighting for his political life and Trans Canada Pipelines is not even in his vocabulary. What President Obama saw was a concerted effort by major environmental groups to derail a plan for a pipeline to get Alberta oil-sands crude toTexas Gulf coast refineries. Those environmentalists are Obama’s supporters and he needs them to help keep his job in the 2012 elections.

The Star editorial writer just sees this as another rebuff from Obama after the ‘Buy America’ provisions of his $447 billion American Jobs Act.

Has the Star writer even considered that Canadians might not want to ship their expensive, polluting crude from oil sands to American refineries? Maybe Canadians think that there should be enough refinery capacity in Canada to handle what crude we have to produce from oil sands. That would at least keep some of those refinery jobs in Canada, if not the profit from doing the refining in Canada.

The Star writer thinks it is just rotten, crass American politics that Trans Canada Pipelines is not being allowed to go ahead with the creation of 20,000 jobs (mainly in the United States of America) to build its pipeline.

What that writer should read is the posting in Bloomberg News about Mr. Obama’s decision. Bloomberg, in case the writer does not know it, is a well respected business news network that pays attention to matters such as U.S.-based pipelines and new construction plans. Bloomberg says that Trans Canada’s loss is probably Enbridge’s gain. Enbridge is a Calgary based energy company that runs pipelines from Alberta down through Illinois. Enbridge would like to compete for the contract to ship the oil-sands crude through Illinois and, from there, down to the Texas Gulf coast. Bloomberg’s conclusion is that Trans Canada’s loss is Enbridge’s gain.

It seems Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is also unaware of the Enbridge plan. When he heard about Obama’s delay of the Trans Canada proposal, he suggested a pipeline to the West Coast so we could ship all that crude to China. Flaherty must also be an environmentalist. It seems nobody wants to refine Canadian crude in Canada. The Toronto Star writer never thought of it.

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“If there were ever a time for Liberals to be bold,”

November 12, 2011 by Peter Lowry

“It is now.” The headline and those three words are from a discussion paper released by Alfred Apps, a prominent Toronto lawyer and President of the Liberal Party of Canada. The title is “Building a Modern Liberal Party” and we think that Liberal Party members should certainly be bold and tell Alf Apps to stuff it!

The document is supposed to provide warm-up thinking for the Liberal Party of Canada’s biennial conference in January of 2012. While we had some trepidation in trying to read a 79-page document by a lawyer, it turned out to not be a lawyer’s document. Somebody with a marketing background was involved. It is a pure marketing. It is a treatise on how to sell the Red Tent of Canadian Liberalism.

Judging by the definition of liberalism in the document, that red tent would have to be made of spandex. And that is only its first mistake. By trying to be all things to all people, his visions of liberalism come to nothing. Alf’s big red tent goes nowhere.

And where was our party president when he points out our failures in the last federal election? What was he responsible for in that lacklustre performance by the party? There was no forgiveness for poor Michael Ignatieff. Who decided that Alf Apps gets a pass?

There is far too much in Alf’s document that needs to be discussed and even more that is not there. In the run up to the January convention, it is obvious that the party ‘bosses’ are heading off the growing demand for party democracy that is coming from activists throughout the party. The basic step of returning power to the electoral districts is being brushed aside in favour of another ‘commission’ and the commission’s recommendations are to be vetted by the council of party electoral district presidents. Nothing will change.

Alf’s paper does not recognize that the top down management of the party is what has left the party with almost a third of the electoral district associations becoming moribund and more about to join them.

We will come back to this subject but in the meantime, Alf Apps needs to understand that before you market something, you need to understand the people who might buy it.

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Bob Rae does not do economics.

November 10, 2011 by Peter Lowry

Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae spoke to the Economic Club of Canada in Toronto this Wednesday. We know it was a Liberal speech because he quoted Wilfrid Laurier. Anyone looking for a liberal insight into solving the current world economic situation was bound to be disappointed.

The last lesson in economics that Rae ever listened to was from Thomas d’Aquino, when d’Aquino headed up the Business Council on National Issues in the 1990s. At the time, Bob Rae was the New Democratic Premier of Ontario. After listening to d’Aquino, Bob Rae soon became the ex-premier of Ontario. He tried to sell his Social Contract to NDP supporters and they turned on him.

As economics and socialism are not compatible sciences, Bob Rae became a Liberal and offered to replace Paul Martin as Liberal leader in 2006. The road from Martin to Rae was fraught with too many hurdles and Rae came third to Dion and Ignatieff. When he won a seat in Parliament in 2008, he again put his name forward for the leadership but the party executive chose Michael Ignatieff. When Ignatieff’s leadership garnered fewer seats than the NDP in the 2011 election, Rae won the interim leadership by default.

But being interim leader does not guarantee instant liberal wisdom. It did him little good to heap praises on Paul Martin’s management of Canada’s books in the 1990s. Martin balanced the country’s books on the backs of the poor, the unemployed and by cutting provincial transfer payments. While he was at it, Martin burned the red book and blocked all the liberal promises of the Chrétien Liberals. Some role model!

Rae’s speech in Toronto called for a simpler, clearer tax code. And he wants to have a comprehensive review of tax spending to make sure we are getting value for the money. He does not think we are right now. You can hear that in any Conservative economic speech.

Rae complains that the Liberals find they are competing with two other parties with simplistic messages. Bob needs to keep thinking. Eventually, he will come up with some simplistic messages for us.

It was very much a kitchen sink type of speech. There were not many economic clichés left out. One good idea that was lost in the speech said we had to support innovation. It was too bad that Rae had no idea how to do that. Instead of beggaring our municipalities with debt through infrastructure programs, Canada should have realized that it could shovel more liquidity through the economy faster by a mix of programs that put money in the hands of entrepreneurs. You do not do that through tax credits alone.

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Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has a revelation.

November 9, 2011 by Peter Lowry

It must have come to him in the middle of the night. It was an insight that said, “Jim boy, you are not going to get the country’s books in the black as soon as you have been telling people you will.”

It was not one of those hard and fast Word-of-God kind of things. It was more in the form of friendly advice. It just said, in a kindly way, that he had better stop lying to Canadians about their excellent financial position because of their wisdom of having him drive the economy along with his good friend Stephen Harper.

The only problem is that Stephen is busy travelling around in a Canadian government A300 Airbus solving world economic problems. Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney is in Europe straightening out the eurozone crises. And here, the Canadian economy has gone into the toilet. This is Jim’s mess to fix.

The first thing he did was order a new backdrop for when he made his speech. “It has to be positive,” he told his staff. “Base it on the old Action Plan backdrop, people liked that, and make sure it is Conservative blue and has lots of arrows going up. That always makes things sexy and positive.”

Next Jim looked at the programs he is proposing and decided he would give employers a tremendous break. He would only increase Employment Insurance premiums by half of what he intended. He thought that would please them. At the same time, he decided another sop would be to extend a minor work-sharing program that did not cost the government much. He was ready.

They also had decided to make the announcement in Calgary. They knew that there was no Occupy Calgary demonstration allowed in that town. And the media is kinder to Conservatives there. After all, it is Stephen’s adopted city and, because of the annual stampede, it is used to horse manure.

So that was what Jim Flaherty gave the news media. The only problem was that while the staff had done a perfect backdrop, they had forgotten the box behind the podium for Jim to stand on. He looked like a little boy, peering over the podium with a surprised look on his face.

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How do you like the Harper agenda now?

November 7, 2011 by Peter Lowry

It hardly took long. Mr. Harper does not take too much time to get to the business at hand. There is little warm-up or foreplay involved. He is an ideologue with an agenda and he only has four years to change this country into what he wants. And the country he wants is not particularly caring, nor safe, nor trusting, nor kind.

He started by taking public funding away from the political parties. He hardly wants a level playing field for politics. He can pander to rich and let the other political parties scrape for pennies.

He is already ensuring that environmentalists do not interfere with selling oil sands crude to the Americans. He is sending jobs to the Americans to build a vast pipeline to transport Canadian oil to the refineries in Texas.

He can now sweep the excesses of the G8 and G20 under the parliamentary rug of a majority government.

He can now restrict infrastructure support to ridings that voted for his party.

He can now pass his omnibus crime bill. The one that is a crime! He is not even allowing his own party time to digest it.

He is cheering on his friends at Sun Media who are trying to destroy the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Harper has been hoping to do that for years and did not have the nerve.

While Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission Chairman Konrad von Finckenstein has only tried a few times to show the Conservatives that the CRTC is supposed to be independent of politics, they have told him to get lost. There is expected to be a new Conservative lackey taking over the CRTC’s top job in January.

As a sop to his western farmer base that they will probably regret, Mr. Harper has told us he will be getting rid of the Wheat Board that has been doing such a good job for all Canadian farmers over the years.

Another sop to Canada’s red necks is Mr. Harper’s removal of long guns from the Canadian Firearms Registry. You might not have expected Mr. Harper to be working for the American’s National Rifle Association but by including the destruction of the long gun records, he is catering to their kind of ignorance.

By speeding up the passing of his current ideological bills, Mr. Harper is expected to prorogue Parliament as soon as possible and bring in a new Throne Speech. It should be full of goodies for happy Conservatives.

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Babel’s Brown, the half-million dollar man.

November 4, 2011 by Peter Lowry

It was another banner year for Babel’s MP Patrick Brown. In the federal government’s 2010-2011 fiscal year, he was once again, among the top ten spenders in Canada’s Parliament. On top of a salary of over $150,000 a year, Brown managed to spend $551,426.82 in expenses. That amount obviously made voters notice him and return him for another four years of doing nothing but promoting himself.

There should be a prize in each of those years for the person in Babelwho can name three accomplishments by Mr. Brown in Ottawa. Mind you, over the past four years, you would be hard pressed to name one accomplishment.

Some of the other big spenders were people such as the late Jack Layton who was required to spend much of his time travelling to all parts ofCanada as a speaker at major events. We would suspect that nobody is particularly eager to listen to a speech by Mr. Brown. Besides speaking in a nasal, whiny voice, he does not seem to have anything interesting to say.

Mr. Brown spent most of our money last year (and in previous years) on sending mailings to Babel households to promote himself. To give him an excuse for the mailing, it is often about a charity that he is using as an excuse for the mailing. While the charities often resent being used in this way, they seem to feel that it is better to get some publicity for their cause instead of none.

His big event as an impresario is his hockey night. This is the one where the city gave him the Molson Centre free of charge this year to promote himself and his political party. Being an impresario must take a lot of his time and could even take some of the time of his staff, for which we pay.

It has been obvious for quite some time that it would be far more cost effective to send somebody to Ottawa who could make a worthwhile contribution to running our country. If this person would just use a little discretion in their spending, we could then afford to hire an impresario in Babel to look after promoting our charities. It would not only be cost effective but we could certainly get someone more skilled in communications and could really help our charities.

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Are the NDP flying high on Layton’s legacy?

October 29, 2011 by Peter Lowry

Commenting on the Jack Layton funeral event in our August 28 blog, the question was asked if Canada’s New Democratic Party can fly to greater heights on Jack Layton’s image. The article ended with the statement, “Ask that question again in October.” We now know the answer is “No.”

Provincial NDP Leader Andrea Horwath hardly needs to share any of the credit with a ghost for her party’s increase of seven seats in the recent provincial election. The provincial NDP, taking just one seat from the Liberals in Toronto, hardly swept the city Jack Layton claimed as his base. She did better in Northern Ontario because of McGuinty ignoring the area.

In the meantime, a field of eight has emerged to do battle for Layton’s leadership of the federal NDP. Three are front runners. They are MP Thomas Mulcair from Montreal, Brian Topp, the party president, and MP Peggy Nash from Toronto. They are, in turn, the maverick, the choice of the greybeards, and the woman candidate. None of the three holds a candle to Jack Layton.

And yet, the one to watch is Peggy Nash. She is old school. She is the real socialist of the three. She has also proven herself in making a comeback in the 2011 election to win over Liberal star Gerard Kennedy to regain her Toronto-High Park seat in the Commons. Her Canadian Auto Workers background will work for her in an election in which every member of the party has a vote.

If it were a delegated convention, an apparatchik such as Brian Topp would have an advantage with his support by the power brokers of the party. His union, ACTRA (Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists), cannot add much to his numbers in an all-party vote and it is also hard to decipher what his lack a seat in parliament will mean to the rank and file.

Thomas Mulcair, the Montreal candidate, is an enigma. As a former Liberal Cabinet Minister in Quebec, he has a long way to go to be known and accepted by the NDP outside of his province. The sparseness of party membership in that province makes his task almost insurmountable.

As one Quebec-based journalist mused, the media has no way of guessing how the all-party voting will go. She is right. And neither can the party be expected to know.

There will be no Layton legacy but it will still be an interesting race for the NDP leadership.

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