Category: Federal Politics

Toronto Star needs better research.

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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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

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

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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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Bob Rae does not do economics.

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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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has a revelation.

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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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

How do you like the Harper agenda now?

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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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

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

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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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Are the NDP flying high on Layton’s legacy?

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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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Let’s have a Parliament with rubber walls.

by Peter Lowry

Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae is worried that if any more members are added to Canada’s parliament and they will be spilling out onto the front lawns.  He is also worried about 30 additional MP’s costing us another $25 million a year.  Better we should worry about the quality of people we send there.  If we choose more like we are sending today, a rubber room might be the most practical answer.

In successive Canadian parliaments, constantly fixed with band-aids since Confederation, myopic governments continue to ignore the desperate need to review how this country is governed.  The criminal waste, the frustrations, the rising divisions, the ill will and the injustices of the present form of government must be addressed.  There are just too many fixes that are too long overdue.

The Senate of Canada makes a mockery of democracy.  The monarchy in Canada is a failed fairy tale.  People only think there is impartiality in Supreme Court appointments. Your civil rights are protected in Canada—if you can afford a lawyer.  We continue to mistreat our aboriginal peoples.  We awkwardly try to ape the American political system with a British form of government.

And every ten years, after a census, we are told more lies about representation by population.  The entire population of Prince Edward Island is the same as the Barrie electoral district in Ontario. PEI’s population of 135,000 is represented by four Members of Parliament.  That makes PEI voters about fives times better represented than the citizens of Barrie, Ontario.

Now Prime Minister Harper has proposed that the electoral districts in Ontario be redistributed and Ontario get 15 more members of parliament.  That is still not representation by population but is the best he can do until we fix the way this country is run.  He will also allocate more seats to Alberta and British Columbia to reflect but not completely compensate for the growth of population in those provinces.

But Mr. Harper is still giving three new seats to Quebec so that Quebecers will not be too mad about their lessening lock on Canada’s governance.   It is the province’s own discrimination in immigration and its draconian language laws that discourage people from coming to the province.  It is a part of the country that has much to offer all of us but the notables continue to try to enforce a quasi separation for their own ends.

The only way we could ever get a representation by population in parliament, the way it is presently being done, is to have about 700 new members.  With over a thousand members, the walls would really have to be made of rubber—and we would need to be able to lock all the doors from the outside!

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Getting used to a majority government.

by Peter Lowry

Political Ottawa is feeling its way these days.  Nobody is used to the new regimen.  It has been too long since Canada had a majority government.  And the political naiveté of the official opposition might be the least of the problems.

It seems to be Harper’s people who have yet to get their minds around the etiquette of a majority position.  Hell, these people were arrogant in minority, what else would you expect when in a majority.

Take Treasury Board President Tony Clement from Muskoka.  (Please.)  Sure, he was wallowing in the pork barrel last year with his lavishing G8 funds on his riding but why does he need to stonewall the opposition?  It just makes him look doubly guilty.  Someone has obviously finally said to him that he can go talk to the parliamentary committee on the subject and, since the committee will be a majority of mindless Conservative backbenchers, they will do what they are told.  Case over!

The truly lost lambs of Ottawa are not the accidental NDP MPs of Quebec but the cannon fodder Conservatives that Harper dragged to Ottawa on his coattails.  The first one of them that tries to buttonhole Harper to ask him what to do is in trouble.  Not only will the miscreant be beaten severely by the Emperor’s staff but they will discover that Harper has had a pillory placed behind the Parliamentary Library just for such upstarts.

Mind you, buttonholing Harper will be quite a trick as he busily plans his next four years of world tours and triumphs.  Remember that those generals, R.C.M. Police Commissioners and pretenders to the throne such as Peter MacKay are cheapskate frequent flyers compared to the Imperial Prime Minister when it comes to the use of government jets.  He gets the real big planes!

What has really confused people is the haste that Harper is giving to his conservative agenda.  His own back bench get to see this new omnibus crime bill one day and it is gone the next.  Why he does not want his majority government to flaunt the legislation is a bit of a puzzle.  He has not even allowed time to see if things are spelled properly.

We all understand Harper’s right wing direction but is there something else about this legislation, he does not want us to see?

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]