Category: Federal Politics

What’s gender got to do with it?

by Peter Lowry

Sometimes, prime minister Justin Trudeau can be a pain in the ass. What the hell has gender got to do with someone’s qualifications for being in the federal cabinet? He can have all women in the cabinet for all most people care. I know he has to have people from each region. That is a given. Would it surprise you to learn that, at least in the past, it was so that there was a minister responsible for political patronage in each region across the country?

But who gives a damn about the gender of a cabinet minister except their now or future significant other? Having a gender balanced cabinet is just simpering silly. In this day and age, women have the right to be respected for their capabilities and not to play second fiddle to the men in the room.

For the prime minister to make a game of it is to take women back to the dark ages when they needed to be so much better than any man available to have a chance at the job.

But this silliness about gender parity is what caused Trudeau some problems in his first cabinet. A good example was Miriam Monsef former MP for the riding of Peterborough-Kawartha. Heralded as one of the youngest in the cabinet, she also lacked any political experience. Yet Trudeau gave her the politically sensitive job of minister for democratic institutions. She was in trouble from day one. Here she was to pilot the prime minister’s foolish promise that 2015 would be the last time Canadians would use first-past-the-post voting.

Trudeau went down with that ship along with his gauche minister. And yet he kept her in cabinet, though switching her to first to international affairs and then to rural economic development. Her star did not shine in either of those jobs and the voters finally send her to defeat in the 2021 election.

What probably puzzled many Canadians was that Justin Trudeau, a professed feminist, did not have a very good record in dealing with women who worked with him. One need only read parts of former MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes’ book about her experiences as Trudeau’s parliamentary secretary to wonder why he handled her as he did. And the awkward relationship with former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould was front and centre in the news for much too long.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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The Face of COVID.

by Peter Lowry

Don’t you hate those obituaries that read: ‘Died peacefully with family in attendance.’ And you know it is B.S. written by an unimaginative and unctuous undertaker. The person probably passed away kicking and screaming and fighting, while the family was in the waiting room arguing over the estate.

COVID-19 needs a new face. The next time someone dies of COVID in your local hospital, their agony needs to lead the six o’clock TV news, be spread across the front pages of the newspapers and replace the placebos of FaceBook. This is a wrongful death. It is no less than a murder. It is death by COVID, spread by the uncaring of the unvaccinated.

And that does not let the idiot politicians off the hook. If we had smart politicians, vaccination would have been mandatory from day-one of vaccines becoming available. It never was intended as an option.

Nobody has the right to spread death. The unvaccinated have become modern-day lepers. We need to put them in cages, send them to die among colonies of the unvaccinated, not beg them or pay them to join the human race.

We don’t want the unvaccinated in our homes, in our stores, in our workplaces, in our parks or places of amusement. If they don’t want to join us, then make them go away.

Did we really want to spend the past year and more looking at statistics, watching politicians reading scripts on the advice of administration doctors, who might not have diagnosed a patient in the past 20 years? This was not reality. This was a farce written by incompetents and screened by political speech writers. They never bothered to show the horror,

We would have been smarter to get some of our western friends off the range and let them rope and hogtie the unvaccinated—so we can brand them with vaccine where it hurts.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Doing a Dance with Doug.

by Peter Lowry

Ontario premier Doug Ford isn’t much of a politician but whomever is advising him on the day care file isn’t either. The feds are offering Ontario $10 billion to get on board the federal day care deal and the Ontario conservatives are hemming and hawing! They have to be clueless to not understand what this deal will add to the economy of Ontario. This is a dance Ontario doesn’t need.

Would you believe that the conservatives are suggesting that Ontario deserves more than $10 billion? Ontario and Quebec are the only two provinces that could do this on their own. They don’t really need the federal largess.

Maybe Doug Ford is waiting for Premier Kenney in Alberta to make the decision first. He would hardly be waiting for the other holdout, New Brunswick. Isn’t it amazing that three conservative premiers waited until after the election to even talk about the proposal?

But you hardly want to annoy a large number of women voters by dragging your feet on this issue.

Typical of conservatives, the Ontario dim-wits are questioning if the province can afford to subsidize day care to get it down to $10 per day. The truth be told, Ontario cannot afford not to. Every new day care space created, adds to the Ontario economy, helps create jobs and frees another person to get a job.

And that is the challenge. The $10 billion offered Ontario is to kick-start the creation of day care spaces, the training of child care workers and a chance to be creative. Private companies can create many of those spaces as the major users are their own employees. The same goes for government offices, schools, hospitals and churches. There is space to be converted to safe, comfortable, controlled and inexpensive day care. New building is another opportunity with condos, rentals, offices, shopping centres and services to include properly planned day care space.

And, one other point. Is that $10 per day in 2019 dollars or in 2026 dollars? There has to be some flexibility for cost of living here. We hardly want another fiasco such as Doug Ford’s famous ‘Buck a Beer.’

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Lessons for the NDP No. 2.

by Peter Lowry

The impression on the ground in the last election was that the new democrats were drinking their own Kool-Aid. Where did the B.S. about the boost in votes come from? No party stood to gain in that election. Least of all, the NDP.

I will try to keep this further update simple for the slow thinkers in that party.

The best illustration of the problem I can think of was a news clip on the television news the other day about a young Sikh in Nova Scotia who was beaten to death in what appeared to be a racially motivated attack. It was a shocking and awful incident made even more horrifying by the TV people being unable to pronounce ‘Sikh.’ They made the word sound like ‘sick’ instead of ‘seek.’ We used to have properly trained news personnel at one time.

But that ignorance explains the problem. What I carefully explained before is that Jagmeet Singh, with his colourful turbans and customs, is an observant Sikh. With a half million Sikhs in Canada, Sikhism is little understood by the majority of Canadians. Jagmeet is easy to like. He is personable. He is smart. Those are givens. He even amuses children on Tik Tok. He is just quite unlikely to ever be prime minister of Canada and the NDP need to face that reality.

But the other reason the NDP have nowhere to go is the constant blurring of their direction. Why do they think that a party that is going nowhere has anything to offer Canadians?

As a young Canadian, I admired the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). When David Lewis and Tommy Douglas bought into the linking of the party to the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and becoming the new democratic party, it was a new game. They bought into the muscle but not the brains. The CLC was on the decline. It is why the NDP has continued to lose the support of the more progressive unions.

The NDP have to face the reality that the party has the same problems as the conservatives and the liberals. All three parties have the next two to three years to get their acts together, choose more effective leaders and do some serious thinking about the future of our wonderful country.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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How Liberals Won?

by Peter Lowry

It was a lengthy read. If you would even bother to count the number of words in four pages of a broad-sheet newspaper, you would come up with about six thousand words. They were written by Althia Raj. This is the smart lady who ran the editor’s desk for Huffpost in Ottawa and Quebec City and does such a good job on the CBC National’s At Issue panel. She recently started working for the Toronto Star.

Raj claims to have interviewed 57 liberal party insiders with puffed-up egos to provide an insiders’ somewhat glossy version of the recent liberal campaign. And they were not just making ketchup. They spent a lot of their credibility with their supporters, to, in the end of it all, find themselves standing in place.

The liberal braggards could only call it a win if you measure from midway through the campaign. That was when the notoriously inaccurate pollsters told them the conservatives had moved into the popularity lead. The liberal arrogance was taking its toll.

As much as I admire the work national party director Azam Ishmael has done for liberal party organizations, both provincial and federal over the years, I would argue that the recent federal campaign failed us. It was an over-managed, elitist and self-destructive campaign. The call of the election was of no surprise to anybody. The outcome should not have surprised them either.

If anything, the campaign proved that the Ottawa management of the liberal party was completely out of touch with what was left of the party across the country. There was minimal effort wasted on ridings that the Ottawa elite did not see as winnable. They had little understanding of the local organizations and relied instead on polls that could be wide of the mark, when they were trying to dig into how people were going to vote in specific electoral districts.

In orphaned ridings, there was little consideration given to candidate selection and the subsequent campaign. The ground game came second to the supposedly scientific use of digital ads and there was little effort at ‘get out the vote’ where the liberal management did not think it mattered.

I’ll share a lesson learned the hard way, many years ago. You will never convince anybody of anything, if you do not start by listening.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Trudeau Defines Hubris.

by Peter Lowry

Marching across the sands of a wind-swept beach in B.C., an angry Justin Trudeau walked away. He carried his hubris—his arrogance and haughtiness, in the stiffness of his back. His conceit carrying him away. Once again, his actions, ill-planned, ill-advised needed to be supported, not confused, by a bumbling office staff back in Ottawa.

Even an actor needs down time. The prime minister had just gone through a grueling, unrelenting election campaign, noted for its reversals and pressures. The intrusion on the beach could be called unfair. It could be, where it not a product of his own cynicism. Did Canada really need another bank holiday between Labour Day and Thanksgiving? It was proposed and implemented on his watch. It was his day. Who told Trudeau that he did not have to be there for Canada’s first day of honouring ‘Truth and Reconciliation’? All he was guilty of was bad timing. And, he has been there before.

There does seem to be a disconnect between the prime minister’s office and his family holidays. He needs a resident seer in his office to tell him when to avoid the Ides of March, the Agha Khan, trips to India, the angst of angry attorney generals and visits to the governor general.

He lucked into those pop-up appearances at Rideau Cottage throughout the worst of the pandemic. It might have reminded us of a cuckoo clock but it was a note of government stability through the months of Covid-19. It gave hope.

And yet, Justin is his own worst enemy. The cronyism, the elitism of the present prime minister’s office (PMO) defies what his father learned—as should his son—that the political balance is also a critical issue at all times in the PMO. In his father’s time, the political worker bees where also welcome at the Langevin Block.

Looking ahead, our prime minister needs to look to his legacy. If we could have our druthers, we would have him go to Glasgow and show the world what he has done to save our planet—not what he plans to do.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Big Tent, Little Tent Tories?

by Peter Lowry

You often hear the conservative and liberal parties referred to as big-tent parties. We would therefore assume, in contrast, that the greens, new democrats and peoples’ party are just little tents. And that would leave the united conservatives of Alberta and the cranky bloc Québécois as pup-tents. Whatever size, we know that these tents are quite flexible and all parties like to think of their tent as being of the marquee class.

In our latest federal election, it was obvious that, conservative leader Erin O’Toole thought his conservative tent was ready to expand as he invited Canadians to step into his party. He had started through the leadership contest that was held for his party to tell everybody that he was a “true blue” conservative. This was taken to mean that he would accommodate everybody from the social conservatives to the progressive conservatives and even the united conservatives of Alberta. He assured these diverse conservatives that he would rid them of carbon taxes, gun control and abortions.

But, to our surprise, come the election, Mr. O’Toole sought to further enlarge the conservative tent. He really wanted everybody to be able to crowd in. He proudly pointed out to his fellow conservatives that he was from the greater Toronto Area (GTA) and he knew how to win there.

The O’Toole solution was simple. To win in the GTA, all you had to do is support carbon taxes, agree with gun control and go soft on abortions. And Mr. O’Toole was sure the conservatives who hated carbon taxes, hated gun control and probably hated abortions would understand if he made slightly different promises to voters in the GTA and in Montreal and in Vancouver.

To Mr. O’Toole’s surprise conservative voters were not all pleased with his solution. Some were so surprised at his changing promises that they decided to vote for Mr. Bernier’s peoples’ party and some did not even vote.

And to make matters worse for Mr. O’Toole, the conservative knives are out for him. If he thought ‘Chuckles’ Scheer got the bum’s rush as leader, he should not wait to test the party’s venom.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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At War with Michigan.

by Peter Lowry

The ongoing war with the State of Michigan is heating up. Canada’s federal government has now invoked a 1977 treaty that supposedly says that Canada can destroy the fresh water viability of the Great Lakes if it is in aid of ensuring self-sufficiency in oil to both countries. What we really need to do is resolve this matter before American tanks start rumbling across the Ambassador Bridge into Windsor, Ontario.

And the entire imbroglio is regarding the status of Enbridge’s Line 5 from Superior, Wisconsin to Sarnia, Ontario. The general on the American side is Michigan governor, Gretchen Witmer. The Canadian contingent is led by Calgary’s Enbridge pipeline people.

It started when the Michigan governor realized that the same material that caused a major catastrophe on tributaries of the Kalamazoo River in southern Michigan was being piped under Lake Michigan at the Straits of Mackinac. This is a particularly sensitive area where Lake Michigan flows into Lake Huron and down through the Great Lakes.

The culprit in this case is diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. From where Line 5 crosses Lake Michigan, it delivers the diluted bitumen to Detroit as well as Canadian refineries. It was close to a million gallons of Albertan diluted bitumen that destroyed the fishing on the Kalamazoo River for years to come. After spending close to a billion US dollars in the clean-up attempt, there is still bitumen polluting the Kalamazoo River.

And nobody needs to be a scientist to guess what would happen if there was a major spill in the Straits of Mackinac. It is not just the fisheries on the lower Great Lakes but the fresh water for millions of Americans and Canadians that would be at risk.

The fact that Enbridge has already acknowledged the danger is made clear in its current construction of a tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac to eliminate concerns for any spills. They really need a compromise by ensuring that no bitumen be allowed to flow through the current pipeline. And it might just end the war.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Blah, Blah, Blah.

by Peter Lowry

I have never paid much attention to that young Swedish environmentalist, Greta Thunberg, but she certainly has good writers. The other day there was a clip on the news about her announcing the upcoming world environmental conference in Glasgow. All she said on the clip was: “Blah, blah, blah.” And that will likely be the sum of what is to be said.

And why are we wasting our time? We all know that prime minister Justin Trudeau is a hypocrite. He is going to Glasgow on another holiday. He will hob-nob with his betters among the world’s elite. He has no meaningful contribution to make.

In the meantime, before heading for Scotland, he has to reconstruct his cabinet. And if Trudeau places gender equality ahead of competency again, we will know, he is a damn fool. Canadians would not care if he had an all-female cabinet, as long as it did its job.

Which reminds me. This is a bit off-topic but I would love to know who is the humourist in the prime minister’s office. I was sending some material to the Canadian Radio Television-telecommunications Commission (CRTC) the other day and I looked up the current chair and commissioners to see who I was sending it to. Would you believe that the male chairperson is the typical long-time bureaucrat and all the regional commissioners are women? They are mostly lawyers, of course.

But back to the climate conference. While Mr. Trudeau is in Scotland, might be the right time for cabinet to cancel the twinning of the Trans Mountain pipeline. Just think of the tonnes of carbon that would not be sent off-shore to help destroy our planet. By not sending those millions of barrels of Alberta tar sands bitumen around the world, to be turned into ersatz oil and its by-products, our world might have a few more years of life left to it.

Maybe if Greta Thunberg’s writers find out about our prime minister’s pet pipeline project, they might get some people to pay attention. Nobody seems to listen to the usual environmentalists.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Lessons for Conservatives.

by Peter Lowry

My advice to conservatives among us is just to be what you are. That might be simplistic but there is concern that your party’s philosophy is wandering too far off the mark. One meets many conservatives over the years and I think the problem is that you are losing track of what conservatism is all about.

If your objective is to only win elections then you might consider changing the name of your party to something more upbeat and modern. At one time, your conservatives changed the name to ‘progressive conservatives.’ That was an oxymoron. I think the first progressive conservative I ever met was a populist from Saskatchewan, John George Diefenbaker. He was prime minister at the time. I found him interesting to talk with but when I remembered what he did to the Avro Arrow interceptor project, I was less impressed. I simply did not consider him very progressive.

Being from Ontario, I liked William Davis when he was premier. Bill understood the need to be progressive. He might have talked the talk of being conservative but he was a long way past the austerity of former premier Leslie Frost. Bill had a sense of humour.

But, being a progressive and a liberal, I found that it was better to encourage the progressive liberals and discourage the hide-bound conservatives. To me, the conservative philosophy was a basically selfish approach to life that said “I will look after you after I have looked after myself.” That attitude seems to also encompass the union attitude of “I’m alright, Jack.” Which might explain why people who have so little will vote conservative—against their own interest.

Yet recent experience in the 2021 federal election was that conservative leader Erin O’Toole would promise you anything if you would just vote conservative. I think this confused Canadian voters.

It must have seriously confused many conservative voters. In the Prairies, for example, where more than 50 per cent usually vote conservative as an article of faith, some stayed home and others voted for the extremist right-wing parties. Mr. O’Toole’s pseudo liberalism might be the reason that the extremists have been enjoying a bit of a renaissance.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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