Category: Federal Politics

No damage to Air Canada.

by Peter Lowry

There was a surprising guest editorial in the Toronto Star the other day. It was an unusual reaction to a speech by Michael Rousseau, chief executive officer of Air Canada. I have no idea what the speech was about nor do I know Mr. Rousseau or the writer of the editorial, an Éric Blais of Toronto. The point is that this is the kind of ignorant action we witness all the time in this country.

Canada is blessed with two official languages. That is a good thing. It enriches us. It is the people who get their ass in a knot over language who are working against harmony and progress in our country. We are constantly being force-fed BS from Quebec’s provincial assembly about protecting French. The simple facts are that the more bilingual that province can become, the better the economic future of those who live there. And the same is true for Ontario. This province has to get to work and also encourage bilingualism.

When the “minister of everything” Clarence Decatur Howe launched Trans Canada Airlines, in 1936, it was providing service in both English and French. When he left politics in 1957, he admonished the MPs to look after his airline. TCA, and later Air Canada, has dominated Canadian skies and traversed the world ever since.

I would assume that Michael Rousseau was chosen for his job by a search committee with bilingualism as a nice to have. The truth is that the qualifications to manage a world class airline do not include being facile in French. This is unlike the requirement today for air traffic controllers in Quebec to be fluently bilingual. This is a matter of safety in the air and makes it a job requirement.

But nobody cares if the Air Canada CEO can speak French except those petty péquistes in Quebec City. The facts are that it would look better if the airline’s CEO could speak in French occasionally for the sake of good public relations.

But decisions based entirely on the perceived public relations value, are not good decisions. If it sells more for the company, that is good. If it creates a bond with a large block of employees, that is also good.

It is just, by itself, speaking a local language is not in the first ten requirements for an airline’s chief executive.

He or she does not fix the planes. The job is not fly the planes. This person is busy looking ahead. The job is looking at next year and the years after. The job is to face the world. We pay him or her the big bucks for the ability to make decisions in a very volatile industry.

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By way of an apology: I have missed a few days of this blog. It was hardly the illness that kept me from writing, it was the damn pills.  

Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Liar, Liar, Pants on fire!

by Peter Lowry

Can you imagine prime minister Justin Trudeau telling the G20 country leaders that they have not done enough to save our planet? He told the G20 meeting in Rome last week that Canada “wanted a stronger and more ambitious agreement on climate change to emerge from the summit.” You have to admit that our prime minister is carrying hypocrisy to greater heights every time he opens his mouth on this subject. He is spending taxpayers’ money to twin the Trans Mountain pipeline to enable three times as much of the highly polluting Alberta tar sands bitumen to be shipped around the world.

Does Canada take less blame for the pollution when other countries process the bitumen into ersatz crude oil to continue the pollution chain?

And how is this for more hypocrisy? Trudeau’s office issued a tweet on Sunday (as he was leaving for the COP26 Conference in Glasgow). The twit’s tweet read: “Climate change cannot be denied. And climate action cannot be delayed. Working together with our partners, we need to tackle this global crisis with urgency and ambition.”

And when he got to Glasgow, Trudeau takes the microphone and repeats his promise to world leaders that he will (sometime in the future?) set a hard cap on emissions for the oil and gas industry in Canada.

Sounds good. Obviously, it means nothing to him. He tells us he wants to set targets on reducing global warming while his pipeline is accepting contracts for shipping Alberta tar sands output for the next 20 years. And the Kenney government in Alberta hopes it will never end.

But what is the Trudeau government really doing today to cut greenhouse gas emissions? Not many of us today are worried about his commitments for 2050. It is today that the seas are warming, the ice caps are melting, that coal is still be used in vast amounts to generate electricity, that we are generating more and more greenhouse gases. Commitments for the future will not cut it.

There are many ways Canada can speed the saving of our planet. We can adopt high-speed electric trains that can compete with the excessively polluting regional air lines. Canada needs high-speed electric trains from Halifax to Vancouver. We need more low-cost ‘green’ electricity to heat our more energy-efficient homes and work places. And we need carbon pricing that cannot just be passed on to the consumer.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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In for a tonne, in for a megatonne!

by Peter Lowry

And here we always thought that world meetings were fun? Here was prime minister Justin Trudeau and his minister of global warming, Steven Guilbeault, at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow fending off the sceptics and the other world leaders. “Why cannot Canada do more” they were constantly being asked.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) whines that Canada counts on the oil and gas industry as the country’s largest volume of export products, supporting as many as 500,000 jobs and representing about $30 billion in annual economic investment. They point out that the most greenhouse gas emissions are the fault of coal. They seem to think we are going to blame coal and let the oil and gas industry have a pass.

It seems to this writer that CAPP, the Alberta government and the federal government have to start finding new jobs for those oil and gas workers over the next ten years. And we certainly need to find a better long-term investment for that $30 billion.

CAPP’s answer to this is that the world needs access to lower emission natural gas and oil and given a friendly federal government footing the bill, Canada’s oil and natural gas industry would figure out how to do that.

So far, CAPP companies have figured out how to stuff some of the carbon, from upgrading bitumen to synthetic crude oil, back into the earth where the removal of tar sands bitumen has left the space underground. Whether that is a long-term solution remains to be seen? It hardly answers the question of what happens to the additional carbon from the use of that ersatz crude oil?

But in the meantime, the Trudeau government intends to place a hard cap on industries that are emitting greenhouse gasses. The only problem is that Trudeau’s minister of global warming and natural resources minister Jonathan Wilkinson have absolutely no idea how to do that and what the cap might be. They are asking for advice.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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A Former Radical?

by Peter Lowry

Canada’s new environmental watch dog and global warming minister, Steven Guilbeault is described by Wikipedia as a former radical. There will be many Canadians anxiously waiting to see what he has become. If Canada ever needed a radical approach to the environment, it needs it now.

With Trudeau posing as the Savior of all things environmental at the meeting in Glasgow this week, you wonder how Guilbeault is going to handle the hypocrisy. After all, our prime minister cannot complete twinning of the Trans Mountain pipeline on our west coast and save the world at the same time.

Trudeau’s pipeline is designed to more than double the amount of Alberta tar sands pollution to be piped from Edmonton, over the Rockies, beside rivers and over aquifers that provide water to British Columbia, to the Burrard Inlet at Vancouver, loaded onto ocean tankers in the Burrard Inlet and to sail them out through the Salish Sea and the Strait of Juan de Fuca to spread the blame for the most polluting form of ersatz oil around the world.

At a time when the world is trying to reduce its use of carbon producing products, Canada wants to export more of the worst.

This writer would prefer not to attack Guilbeault at this time considering that the conservatives in Ottawa are doing as much of that as they can. Calgary MP Michelle Rempel Garner was the latest critic when she said to the media the other day that the country needs policies that help spur economic growth and lowers greenhouse gas emissions in a way that “leaves no one behind.” Ms. Rempel Garner does not tell us what those policies are.

Truthfully, it is very hard not to want to leave the greedy and those who do not believe in global warming behind. It would be a shame to leave the folks at the Calgary Petroleum Club behind but they are already very much out of date. More than a decade ago, former prime minister Harper was promising us that the oil industry would find ways to curtail the excessive amount of environmental damage done in just bringing Alberta’s tar sands products to market. This was not even considering the pollution caused by the end use of the petroleum-based products produced from the tar sands synthetic oil.

I guess we will have to wait for Mr. Guilbeault to get back from Glasgow to see if he is still a radical and still smiling.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Death Wish of Conservatism.

by Peter Lowry

At a time when Justin Trudeau is busy busting liberalism in Canada, the conservatives are doing themselves no favours. It is as if there is no place for the old political parties. Even the new democrats are losing their grip. That old time socialism ain’t what it used to be.

But today, let’s stick with the conservative’s problems. And those, they have a plenty. Ruction in the ranks, pathetic provincial leaders and disparate directions are just a few. When you realize that Justin Trudeau is the longest serving first minister in Canada and that only one province and the Yukon have liberal governments, you get a sense of the problem.

And where do you start. Just because the Coalition Avenir Québec doesn’t call itself conservative does not mean it is not conservative. It has its own ideas on what is fair and the federal government is going to have to take the Quebec government to the supreme court to get them to stop discriminating against religion and the English language.

Ontario is likely to present the most ongoing problems. There are actually people who say they will vote conservative next June and if enough commit that act of lunacy the province would have four more years of an incompetent government intent on creating a dynasty. One almost hopes that Doug Ford and his buddies are stupid enough to turn down the federal offer of ten dollar a day daycare.

And none of the Prairie provinces is helping. There is a new gal in Manitoba, a nerd named Moe going nowhere in Saskatchewan and then Jason Kenney in Alberta. Things are so bad under conservative rule in Alberta that Albertans, at least in Calgary and Edmonton, are starting to vote liberal.

With Alberta and Ontario headed for provincial elections next year, we can have a contest to see who is the most distrusted conservative leader in Canada. The conservative party of Canada will be having a vote to see if Erin O’Toole has legs for the next federal election or is to be cast aside.

And to think there are liberals who are dissatisfied with the leadership we get in our federal and provincial liberal parties.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Why not shoot the messengers?

by Peter Lowry

Did you hear that they are creating a social media channel just for Donald Trump? That will teach those wimps at Twitter who dared to banish him. It will make the crap from Trump easier to ignore. Parents will also be able to block it as they would a porn site.  

As a person who used computers for communications and research before there was an Internet, I have never had any patience for social media. While I did some testing of how some of the early programs worked, I found I was neither impressed nor interested. Though the wife uses Facebook. Like many, she uses it to keep track of our far-flung family and the growing numbers of third and fourth generation youngsters. That seems an appropriate use for Facebook that was reportedly created in the beginning by Zuckerberg and friends to help get sex partners for college-age geeks.

But today, we read articles discussing social media as though its use defines this generation. Thankfully it is not my generation, although you can include writing a blog as a form of social media. While I might be too caught up in the dark side of politics today, it has not always been thus. I found politics fascinating and lots of fun back in the years of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. I enjoyed some of the perks and took many of the bruises.

I started this blog as just another test of the Internet and was pleased that people were reading it. I found that there was actually a need for insight into politics. It has become more than just a hobby. Of course, readership peaks during elections. There was also considerable interest in Donald Trump during his misadventures in Washington. Like many who follow politics, figuring out the appeal and ongoing influence of that despicable man is a serious challenge. He continues to act as a malevolent child.

Yet politics in Canada can also be depressing. It is hard not to get caught up in the name calling and recriminations. We wallow in poor leadership. You try to encourage the good guys and gals in elected positions even if they are so alone in the dreary political swamps of today. As Walt Kelly’s favourite possum Pogo used to say: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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The Bored of the Board.

by Peter Lowry

There are many boards of directors needing better chairpersons today. Boards can be skittish, they can be confrontational, they can be overly conservative. A good chair is the driver and needs to understand techniques that can help in getting that bus where it wants to go. It goes even further when a board has to always be ready to answer to regulatory agencies and politicians.

This subject is front and center today as the public spectacle of the rape of the Rogers empire’s board spends itself in the news media. It shows how little sympathy is left for that multi-billion communications conglomerate since the death of its founder. Ted Rogers is remembered as a giant, a progressive, a strategist and as a man whose success was ordained.

But his successor, his son Edward Rogers, seems to have fallen too far from the tree. Where Ted could use his board wisely, young Edward tends to abuse.

At a time when the Rogers operations are under microscopic study by three major government agencies as well as the commons committee on industry, science and technology, young Rogers has blotted his copy book. It will jeopardize the company’s effort to acquire Shaw Communications for some $26 billion in cash and debt.

If this merger is approved, Canadians would be almost guaranteed swiftly rising rates for cellphone services, Internet and television distribution.

Luckily lenders are leery of high price acquisitions when a company is having conflict at the board level. And when Rogers hopes to become the largest company in the industry in Canada, the Rogers’ scion is playing with fire.

As it seemed the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) had to consume lots of antacid to allow the collapse of CTV into Bell Canada, any further concentration of the industry has to be contra-indicated. At the same time, the Competition Bureau and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) are doing their own studies. Yet, when all is said and done by the various reviewers, it will still be a political decision.

But in this case, Edward does not have the political contacts and smarts of his father. I think he has driven the stake into his own heart.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Failing Voting 101.

by Peter Lowry

You would think that the scathing comments I get about first-past-the-post voting would discourage me. They do not. I also want to see change in the way Canadians vote. The only problem is that I see it as one of many changes needed in our constitution. And if you ask Justin Trudeau, he will likely tell you that he does not want to open that can of worms.

Canada’s constitution is a constantly aggravating mess. Having an appointed governor general is a bad joke. Having a non-elected senate is a disgrace. The growing disparity in population between provinces creates many of the problems our country faces. The ‘fathers of confederation’ could not see past their noses what this country was to become and they created the blockages in our constitution that exist to this day. We really need to decide whether we want to be a confederation of provinces or a country. And only the people can decide that question.

And just changing how we vote is no panacea. I watched most of the hearings of the government’s special committee on electoral reform in 2016. I was appalled at the number of so-called expert witnesses who came to share their ignorance with the committee.

Canada, as structured, has unique requirements. For example, we have services to people that need to be funded federally and yet are controlled by the individual provinces. And yet we have a province that ran a stupid referendum the other day that wants to end the equalization payments that attempt to balance out those problems.

What I find most annoying is the ignorance of our news media who let people write opinion pieces denouncing first-past-the-post voting as though it was some sort of criminal plot to muddle the minds of the populace. Even calling it first-past-the-post is denigrating. Our voting system enables us to choose who will represent us in parliament. That is an honour and privilege we should not take lightly. Lazy people just vote for the representative who stands for a certain political party. That is how we sometimes get the village idiot elected.

But luckily, even stupid people have the right to be elected, and often are.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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A Stomping Mouse.

by Peter Lowry

No doubt you are aware of the stalking horse that hides the intentions of another politician. You might not be as familiar with the stomping mouse. The stomping mouse is the politician who quickly deserts the scene when the news media start asking awkward questions. Some politicians are known to answer the question. Others are known to ignore the question. The classic reaction of the stomping mouse is to stomp out of there.

To my surprise and disappointment, I find that our deputy prime minister, finance minister and minister of anything else is a stomping mouse. The Honourable Chrystia Freeland PC MP, with all her savvy and experience as a reporter and editor herself, is a stomper.

And I am not just taking the word of Edward Keenan, the Toronto Star’s bureau chief in Washington for it. He reports, more in sorrow than in anger, I am sure, that Chrystia Freeland stomped away from reporters, away from the catbird seat in front of the U.S. White House last week.

And Chrystia Freeland is the heir apparent to the prime minister’s job? I doubt that very much. She has to do better.

I think we had a hint of this when she walked out of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) in Europe at one point. It seemed to be her way of negotiating. The only problem is that she knows there is no negotiation with the news media. It is like the broccoli your mother put on your plate for dinner. If you did not eat it, you were sure to find it still there for breakfast.

She knows that the news media are wolves that travel in packs and will tear the uninitiated to shreds, if they show fear. I have always been of the communications school that believed in overloading the answer to the point that the reporter would be all the way back to their typewriter before they realized that in your lengthy answer, you had, accidently, missed answering the initial question.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Learning Gerrymander.

by Peter Lowry

It looks like Ontario will have only one new electoral district after the coming ten-year redistribution of ridings, according to the latest census of Canada. It will also be an opportunity to repair some of the gerrymandering in the last ten-year redistribution.

And if you think there is no gerrymandering in Canada, you must have some other jokes to tell. The revisions in Barrie on the last redistribution were probably due to then conservative MP for Barrie, and now the news media’s favourite Brampton mayor, Patrick Brown.

At the time of the last redistribution, Patrick was concerned about Barrie, which, because of the rapid population growth in the city, needed to be changed. At the time, Brown was probably contemplating taking the north side of Barrie with a large chunk of adjacent rural voters added. He was going to give the southern half, with another large chunk of conservative rural voters, to his acolyte on Barrie council. His generosity was because he had turned a potentially bad situation for conservatives into two winnable ridings.

What he knew was that the growth in population of Barrie was from mainly Toronto-based voters moving up to take advantage of the lower cost homes and the convenience of GO Trains to take them back to the city to work. Not many were voters for his brand of politics.

Before the plan was fully implemented, Brown saw another more interesting possibility come up with the Ontario conservatives. With the conservative government in Ottawa likely to fall to the Trudeau liberals and the Ontario Tories needing a new leader, he lined up the support he needed from the immigrants from the Indian sub-continent based in Brampton and Toronto and easily won the Ontario conservative leadership. All those trips the federal conservatives had sent him on to India paid off with an easy win. What happened that made him end up as mayor of Brampton is another story.

What the liberals in Barrie need to do now is make sure there that there is a new electoral district created that is entirely within the boundaries of Barrie and hopefully get rid of at least one of the two do-nothing conservatives representing Barrie today in Ottawa.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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