Category: Federal Politics

One for the Good Guys.

by Peter Lowry

Michael Coteau won the nomination for the federal liberals in Don Valley East last weekend. It is rare when you get a guy who is really dedicated to helping people. That is my take on Michael. I have only met him once but I have followed his career in politics closely. He grew up in an area of Metro Toronto that I watched turn from farmers’ pastures to urban living, old two-lane roads became multi-lane thoroughfares and where the Don River had to share its valley with an expressway.

Before he won the provincial seat in that area, Michael had won notice for his community concerns as a school board trustee. He moved to provincial politics in 2011 and served in a variety of cabinet positions in the Wynne liberal government. He withstood the rout in 2018 and was re-elected to Queens Park. As one of the few liberals there, he put his name forward for the party leadership. It was not his time.

He will find Ottawa is a very different milieu from Queen’s Park. The separation from family is a serious consideration. The constant travel becomes an irritation. The party’s whips become a frustration. It is a constant struggle to remain true to oneself and to one’s constituents.

One solution in Ottawa was expressed to me a long time ago by another liberal in Michael’s area. It was David Collenette, the long-time minister of transport. David suggested that the newcomer pick a subject, own the subject in debates and in committee and convince the party leader of your expertise.        

The effort often wins you attention from the party leader but not necessarily into the chosen portfolio when a cabinet post is available. It is good advice.

Whatever happens in the coming election, I think that the voters of Don Valley East will be pleased to have Michael Coteau representing them.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Paul Hellyer: Rest in Peace.

by Peter Lowry

It is a form of masochism to be drawn to the obituaries these days. Too many of the good ones have gone to their reward—such as it might be. I have only one story about Paul Hellyer that helps explain the complexities of politics in Canada. Politics frustrated Paul. He was a man of deep convictions—in his politics, in his religion, in his family and in his many other interests.

It was in December 1967 and Paul had announced that he was running to replace Lester Pearson as leader of the liberal party and prime minister. The official announcement was in one of the large meeting rooms at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. There were about a thousand liberals milling around us as Paul and I stood in the middle of the room, deep in conversation.

There were more than a few people there watching us. They each had a different idea of what we were talking about. They were all wrong.

Paul was much taller than I, he would have had his head down to be sure I could hear him. Believe me, it was no prayer meeting. Paul was leaving on a winter holiday after the Royal York event. We were standing there chatting about the wonders of Tahiti where Paul was headed. We never mentioned what others expected us to discuss.

Paul’s executive assistant had probably had to brief Paul on the fly as were most briefings. He wanted me to run the coming leadership convention set-up for Paul. The minister was expected to close on the agreement. He forgot. He had visions of Tahiti to consider.

The person most pleased with Paul and I’s tourism discussion was the president of the Ontario liberal party. He wanted me to run industry minister Bob Winter’s convention organization. Which I did.

Of course, Pierre Trudeau announced his candidacy shortly after. We had a fun campaign for Bob Winters but it was Pierre Trudeau who enjoyed the victory party that I had planned.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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In the land of the laissez-faire.

by Peter Lowry

When Milton and Rose Friedman published Free to Choose in 1980, laissez-faire economics was at a peak. Reaganomics was all the rage in the United States and Thatcherism was tearing up the buffers of social justice in the United Kingdom. Canada was left struggling in the economic storm. The Friedman’s basked in the rhapsody of millionaire sponsors.

Keynesian economics and liberalism were left out in the cold, to supposedly die a slow, struggling death.

It was not until the market crisis of 2007 and 2008 that people began to understand that deregulation was wrong, small government could not be trusted and not all of us can fend for ourselves. We were leaving too many of our people on the streets to die. The rich are stealing from us and their henchmen are our politicians.

Canada never had sub-prime mortgages to collapse. We suffered anyway. We found that Paul Martin was just a conservative in a liberal suit and tie.

Canadians would not settle for a pale copy and went for the real thing. Enter, Stephen Harper, chortling. There were dark days ahead for Canada.

America had to struggle through the Bush years. George the father was not bad compared to George W. Bush, the younger. George W. was dumb as a post and he lied to Americans and the world about weapons of mass destruction.

And Canadians foolishly loaned our armed forces to the Americans for their Mid-East and Afghan wars. The Americans were defeated and our Canadian forces were dishonoured.

In the United States, Barack Obama stepped into the presidency. Not all Americans joined the celebration of an articulate, black, smart, and liberal president. The sides for coming conflict were being better defined.

In the land of the laissez-faire, you cannot have just a president to care. We saw the hardening of positions as Obama tried to fight Medicare through the House and Senate. We saw a failing democracy.

And it opened the door to the debacle of the Trump presidency. And few have the confidence that President Biden can win for more than a term against the cause of laissez-faire.

We are watching the struggle of good and evil on a world-wide scale.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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When Daylight Comes.

by Peter Lowry

It will be like having another Christmas. We’re gonna have an election, we’re gonna have an election. Thinking about this opportunity for Canadians, I was musing the other day about Erin O’Toole’s chances. No, no not his chances of being elected prime minister. That horse left the stable a long time ago. I am talking about his slim chance of winning in Ontario’s Durham riding. A lot of good liberals live in that electoral district. What if they got off their asses and booted out that carpetbagger O’Toole?

There is going to be sure to be another conservative leadership event anyway. And this time, the Tories might be smart enough to do away with preferential voting. After all, what they got the last two times should have taught them something about voting systems.

There are only two things wrong with Mr. O’Toole’s proposed conduct of the campaign. Their names are Jason Kenney and Doug Ford. And frankly Canadians are tired of Alberta premier Kenney whining about how badly his pollution-producing province is being treated. This is the province that, in the fat oil-rich years, cheerfully told easterners to freeze in the dark. It is a province that has never had a provincial sales tax. Premier Kenney is a phony and a fool and we all know it. He invested a billion and a half dollars in a pipeline that was promptly cancelled by in-coming President Joe Biden of the United States.

And yet Kenney bitches and whines some more about prime minister Justin Trudeau who is busy building him a doubled pipeline over the Rockies to Vancouver. This pipeline is to pump the most polluting oil source in the world—from the Athabasca and Cold Lake tar sands—to ocean going ships and send it around the world.

But we can hardly leave Ontario premier Doug Ford out of the equation. This neanderthal is prime minister Justin Trudeau’s secret weapon. In vote rich Ontario, Doug Ford spells the death toll for conservative ideas and policies. He is hardly going to hide in his kennel for the duration of the election.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Election Breezes.

by Peter Lowry

Don’t you feel those fresh election breezes from the Rock, flowing up the St. Lawrence River, across the Great Lakes, kissing the Prairies and cascading over the Rockies to say ‘hello’ to Vancouver Island? Maybe I am a sucker for elections but this one cannot be soon enough. My guess is that the election writ will be dropped sometime in the next three weeks. Justin Trudeau could have a lot to be thankful for by our October 11 Thanksgiving.

Regrettably, there is no space on the ballot for ‘None of the Above.’ You take what you can get in this wonderful country. If you do not vote, you are a damn fool. This is your opportunity to comment. Don’t miss the opportunity to vote and then bitch about what you get.

This election reminds me of that Hollywood movie Some Like It Hot and the wonderful closing line: ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ The Billie Wilder motto for the movie is believed to be “Fake it until you make it.”  And, boy, does that ever apply to the upcoming election!

If you loved the way our prime minister would pop in and out of Rideau Cottage during the worst of the pandemic, you might be a masochist. Okay, the cottage is no cuckoo clock but you had to stop wondering when he would get a haircut.

My guess is that he has already got this election in the bag. He will still be an elitist, an actor and a pale imitation of his mother. His name is still his crutch. And you might have noticed that a plurality of Canadians are liberals.

I don’t think enough of us are mad at him. He might even run a better campaign this time. He had to learn something over the last couple years.

But then the other parties are also hopeless. That fool O’Toole on the right-hand side of the house has no idea where he is going or how to get there. He is engaged in the old Mackenzie King attempts to say one thing in one part of the country and something quite different in another. When he promises to move the federal government operations to Calgary from Ottawa, you will know he has gone too far.

I would like to say something nice about Jagmeet Singh and his policies but I keep waiting for someone in the NDP caucus to say something nice first.

And as for the Green Ms. Paul, her only problem is her party. She reminds me of the old Pink Floyd song High Hopes. She’s got ‘em.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Defining Danger.

by Peter Lowry

For all the arguments we have seen and heard about the danger of Enbridge’s Line Five at the Straits of Mackinac, nobody bothers to specify the danger. The arguments rage between Michigan, in the person of the state governor, Gretchen Witmer, and Enbridge, the Canadian pipeline company. Washington has also become involved in support of the Michigan governor. And the unlikely alliance of Ontario premier Doug Ford and Ottawa’s Trudeau government are supporting Enbridge.

You can hardly blame Michigan governor Gretchen Witmer for her stance. Her one experience with an Enbridge pipeline spill is the event in 2010 when Enbridge Line 6B spilled close to a million U.S. Gallons of diluted bitumen into Talmadge Creek near Marshall, Michigan. That is before Talmadge Creek flows into the Kalamazoo River. That was a catastrophic spill.

More than 10 years later and the spending of a billion U.S. dollars on the clean-up, there are still 40 kilometres of rivers in South Michigan with compromised ecosystems. A similar spill of diluted bitumen at the Straits of Mackinac would also be catastrophic. It would impact life in five states bordering on the Great Lakes as well as the Province of Ontario on the Canadian side.

The expenditure of a US billion dollars would not start to clean up a bitumen spill in the range of a million US gallons in the Great Lakes. The millions of people living downstream from the spill would have their drinking water compromised, their fisheries gone, their beaches and tourist businesses destroyed. Imagine the destruction of Niagara Falls with the pollution of oily bitumen.

And that is what the Michigan governor wants to prevent.

Many different materials are sent through Enbridge’s Line Five. It is twinned pipelines that carry raw and refined products either way. It delivers propane to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and refined products for gas stations and industry throughout the mid west. A spill of most of these materials can be quickly contained and cleaned up. Enbridge is prepared for that, if it ever happens. The most dangerous spill would be of diluted bitumen—usually on its way to the Koch-owned refinery in Detroit. This bitumen is from the Athabasca and Cold Lake deposits, mainly in Alberta. It is the one material that floats for a while and then, as the diluent is washed off, starts to sink. You could never contain or completely clean up a large diluted bitumen spill in the Great Lakes.

If Enbridge could just contain its greed and arrange for diluted bitumen to be shipped by truck or train until the new Enbridge pipeline tunnel is finished being built under the Straits of Mackinac, we could ease up on the arguments between the two friendly countries. We both have too much invested in the Great Lakes to want to see any parts of them destroyed.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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A Spectre from the Past.

by Peter Lowry

He’s here to save us all from “rampant government spending.” Former prime minister Stephen Harper stuck his oar into Canada’s economic confusion last week. In a podcast, Harper warned Canadians of government spending “without end or purpose” as not being able to hasten recovery. Since the current spending is in aid of maintaining the economy until the end of the pandemic, we can only assume that Mr. Harper was agreeing with the current strategy of the liberal government.

To confuse things, conservative finance critic MP Ed Fast thinks the Trudeau government spending is “reckless” and “the problem is getting worse.” In addition, the conservative’s unofficial finance critic MP Pierre Poilievre is using his better produced ZOOM comments to complain that all these pandemic payouts are going to bankrupt us.

In contrast to all this gloom and doom, we can report that Loblaws had another record quarter of profits thanks to the rapidly escalating prices for groceries. The oil companies are also doing their best to cut global warming by raising gasoline prices at the pump by about 30 per cent. Luckily, we have the Bank of Canada ready and willing to nip this inflationary activity in the bud. And since the bank’s only instrument for redressing inflation is to raise interest rates, it might not be wise to awaken that spectre.

But while Stephen Harper talks the talk and walks the walk of a tax-cutting conservative, he has been known to opt for deficit-financed stimulus packages when all else fails. And all else does tend to fail.

Stimulus, as the word infers, is intended to cause other sources of funding to want to get into the opportunities, the stimulus creates. For example, the current Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) payments are stimulating service industry wages to rise to a living wage level that could entice people away from the government largess.

And, contrary to the gloom and doom of conservative leader Erin O’Toole and his two finance critics, the world will not end as more stimulus is applied to rebuilding our economy. Even Stephen Harper could explain that.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Don’t fool with us Mr. O’Toole!

by Peter Lowry

Federal conservative leader Erin O’Toole is starting to puzzle Canadians. Here is a guy with a fairly straight forward reputation as a bland, do-nothing conservative. Okay, he might even be a nebbish. What did you expect: bells, bands and women throwing him their panties everywhere he goes?

O’Toole is puzzling political analysts across Canada. Why is he bothering to encourage social conservatives such as former MP Brad Trost and that ilk to run? Don’t we already have enough social conservatives in parliament? Frankly, we should be concerned. There are continued reports of O’Toole and his staff promoting the extreme right of the conservative party. And it is not even the left of centre politicos who are noting it. It seems it is other conservatives who are doing the complaining about O’Toole’s preferences among new candidates.

Did we even know this guy might secretly be in favour of stopping abortions in Canada? That is supposed to be something that liberals whisper to each other in the confines of their same-sex boudoirs. Maybe he has one message for the hoi polio and another for Canada’s social-conservatives.

But here we are, likely within weeks of the clarion call for an election, and the complaints are piling up about their leader. The conservatives are starting to think of him as their very own “Elmer Fudd.” You know, the guy from the Looney Tunes cartoons who “thought he saw a wabbit!”

This just might be overreaction to the polls that show the conservatives in the second-place doldrums. The conservative MPs are all looking at each other and wondering who will not be there for the next session of parliament. Mind you, there is a lot of dead wood warming the benches in Ottawa and we should all welcome the opportunity to do a little housekeeping.

When you consider the help guaranteed from stalwart provincial conservatives such as that obliging premier Doug Ford in Ontario and “pipeline king” premier Jason Kenney in Alberta, there is a growing opinion that Canadians are definitely in danger of having a Trudeau majority for Thanksgiving dinner this year!

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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An election is no distraction.

by Peter Lowry

They obviously did not teach any Canadian history at the private school in Michigan attended by NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. He seems to be unaware of the King-Byng-Thing. That event was in 1926. It was when prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was reputed to have given the one-finger salute to Lord Byng of Vimy, the British Field Marshall who was serving as Canada’s governor general at the time. It was the last time a governor general had the nerve to say ‘No’ to a Canadian prime minister.

Not that Jagmeet is the only complainant. There was an op-ed in my Toronto Star recently by a writer suggesting that an election would be an unnecessary distraction at this time. My problem with this was that I was not sure what the critical issues where from which it would distract us. Most Canadians are so bored with this pandemic that we really need something to distract us.  We need to get a life.

Personally, I have always enjoyed elections. They are a time of important discussion of where our country is going and how we are going to get there. It is a time when you can reject one political party and take your chances with another. It is a time of entertainments when your incumbent MP can beg you to return him or her to parliament—thus becoming eligible for an excellent pension later in life.

And what is wrong with the prime minister calling an election? It is a tradition in Canada for the prime minister to tell the governor general that it is time for an election. Even when parliament decided to have an election every four years, there was still the proviso that the prime minister could always call for one when he or she felt the need.

It is hardly of concern that the liberals are leaving more than a few things undone. If there was nothing left for parliament to do, would you want to send them off for a sabbatical? There are always things to get done. If there were not, why would we need a parliament? In case you have not noticed, parliament tends to follow the need, not get ahead of things.

And, as for Jagmeet Singh’s complaint: When it comes to Privy Council matters with the governor general, the leader of the third party in parliament does not get a seat at the table. Maybe we can refer to the matter as the King-Byng-Singh-Thing!

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Where are the Greens?

by Peter Lowry

With smog from out-of-control forest fires on the west coast stretching over North America, blistering heat in the south west, Prairies without rain and tornados in Ontario, we need politicians who know something about Mother Nature. Yet who is to help when the liberals are acting as hypocrites, the conservatives are skeptical, the new democrats have no plan and the Greens are fighting with their new leader?

Many Canadians are concerned that Justin Trudeau’s liberals are spending billions twinning the Trans Mountain pipeline to pump Alberta tar sands bitumen to Burrard Inlet in Vancouver. The liberals can hardly be concerned about the environment when they want to ship the world’s most polluting bitumen to other countries, so that someone else can refine it.

The pro-pipelines conservatives are at least honest in admitting they don’t know what to do about pollution. Their problem is in telling eastern voters they are concerned while assuring westerners that they will support their dirty coal and even worse bitumen extraction from the tar sands.

The new democrats had the Leap Manifesto giving them some impetus on an environmental plan for a few years, but this was allowed to die from a lack of support and the problems of the pandemic.

And that leaves Canadians with a Green Party in disarray. With polls showing the Greens with the same low numbers as before the selection of a new leader, it leaves supporters wondering why they care. Their new leader is busy trying to win a seat in parliament in a rock-solid liberal riding in Toronto—the heart and soul of liberalism in Canada.

And what is really frustrating for Canada’s Green supporters is that the arguments that envelope their party have nothing to do with the party’s environmental concerns. Why would a party that has never had clear policies on international affairs waste the time of a leader over the party’s stance on the problems in the Middle East? We have problems here in Canada.

It would be smart for Canadian Greens to look at this and realize how far they have to go. To do it, they need to stop the infighting and get to work.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]