Federal Politics – Page 4 – Babel-on-the-Bay

No Ties That Bind.

September 18, 2023September 16, 2023 by Peter Lowry

We note that the majority of Canadians have realized that there is no reason for Canada to continue to have a monarch. Charley definitely does not cut it. His wife is an embarrassment. His kids by Princess Diana have their own quarrels. Yet they have entitlements to which Canadians cannot aspire.

When polls show that four out of five Canadians feel no attachment to the monarchy, it is time we did something about it. I would suggest that no federal politician is rushing to open discussion on the constitution. That is a can of worms that only provides opportunity to the unwary.

It might fall on the provinces to make the course correction on the monarchy. We could start by not feeding crap about the monarchy to our school children. There would be greater justification for them to learn some American history rather than believe the fancified records of the movies and television produced in the U.S. British history might, in reality be less boring than what our textbooks tell them. Nor should we take them out of their classrooms to provide audiences for those boring visits by this or that overly entitled and titled person.

But leave their statues standing. They provide a welcome perch and a place to poop for pigeons. And besides, only the foolish among us want to hide history. We are not all suddenly woken to the faults of our ancestors. Yes, when John A. Macdonald was prime minister, he was a drunk. It is likely that many who voted for him were also drunkards. But that drunk had a vision of Canada that benefits us today. Give credit when credit is due.

And I personally want to see John Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau on our banknotes. We can also stop messing with the ten-dollar bill and restore John A. Macdonald to where he was immortalized.

It is appreciated that the Netflix series, The Crown, did much to inform and explain the monarchy’s role for us but it did not excuse the elitist attitude that allows the monarchy to continue to bore us.

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The Promise of Canada.

September 15, 2023September 14, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Did Justin Trudeau break the promise of Canada to followers of Pierre Poilievre? No. It is not true. For the promise of Canada is opportunity for all. That’s it. It is the chance for any Canadian to be prime minister, or maybe just achieve a little more than their parents did before them. What Poilievre fails to add is the promise has two sides. Nobody has taken the promise away from you. It requires effort.

Nobody wants you to go hungry. We are a civilization that cares and if you are unable to help yourself, we want to help you.

And if you want to become prime minister of Canada, we can help you along the way. It would help, for example, if you had some life experience that shows you what help people need and want in this country. To set out early in life to be just a politician is not equipping Mr. Poilievre with the background of understanding this country.

Understanding Canada also requires knowledge and experience in other countries. And not just in tourist havens. It is like there are many fine restaurants in Quebec City. You have to realize though that the province is much more than that. Quebec has many people, industries, farmers, teachers, entrepreneurs and more. The province and its people contribute much to Canada’s economy.

Canada promises all its citizens and those coming from other countries the same opportunities. They come with equal opportunities to learn. And there are many opportunities to learn. Apprentice training or community college credits or university degrees. It is up to the individual. The efforts are yours. We all share in recognizing your success.

And, in the same sense as Canadians are good citizens of their country, Canada is a good citizen of this world. We have trading partners, defence partners and when people are faced with the ravages of nature, we send help. That is what this world should be, a place where people help people.

A hollow slogan such as “Bring It Home” is showing a selfish nature that disparages Canadians desire to help other countries, to trade with them and help defend them when attacked by tyrants. Canadians come from all parts of this world. We can only set an example for others.

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Poilievre’s Petulant Promises.

September 14, 2023September 13, 2023 by Peter Lowry

When Pierre Poilievre—the guy I think of as Little Boy Blue—gave his speech last week to conservatives in Quebec City, he was not speaking to a broad swath of Canada’s intelligentsia. In fact, you really had to remember this was an audience of conservative party faithful and donors. These people are probably able to translate Little Boy Blue’s hyperbole into concepts that conservatives can understand.

And they would certainly be able to appreciate a stupid joke such as “It was so cold last winter that Justin Trudeau was seen with his hands in his own pockets.”

But it was when you go down the short list of promises he made that you wonder just where this guy is really taking his party? The one promise that seems to continue is the promise of a dollar-for-a-dollar law. He tells us this means that for every new dollar the government spends, it must take back a dollar from some other program. A simple way to look at it would be if the government was to give people making over $200,000 per year a two per cent tax break. It could have to take two per cent from the old age security (OAS) payments to seniors.

It also seems to mean that to build a building that might last 100 years, you have to cut some existing programs to pay for it.

The one thing that really does come through with Little Boy Blue is that he does not like spending money. His trite slogan “Bring It Home” seems to mean that he does not intend to spend any money outside of Canada. He belittles Justin Trudeau’s travels in aid of building Canada’s trade relations. Poilievre does not seem to understand that Canada has to buy some requirements from other countries and, in exchange, has to sell things to other countries. Canada is a trading nation. Without our international trade, Canadians’ standard of living would hit rock bottom in a hurry.

I must admit that I have no knowledge of Canada giving much foreign aid to dictators. I do know that we encourage democracy. But if he thinks the prime minister should stay home and not go to all these ‘gab fests’, it will probably be just as well that Canadians don’t really want to have Poilievre as prime minister.

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Leave No Cliché Unused.

September 12, 2023September 11, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Does Pierre Poilievre, our little boy blue and leader of Canada’s conservatives, now have some conservative concerns to help him do his job? He met with conservatives in Quebec City this past weekend and they were supposed to tell him of their concerns and policy wants. They even thought they were there to help make Canada great again. It was like a wedding. They had clichés borrowed and Little Boy Blue.

It took an hour to get to the close of the new leader’s speech, when little boy blue, once again, told us that he is going to “Make Canada the freest nation on earth.” Mind you, the conservatives who cheered his speech still voted against youth making their own gender selection and complained about who could use which toilets.

Not to worry though. Under the conservative party’s constitution, the party leader chooses to say what will be promised come an election. And he has already told us that he will axe the carbon tax. Maybe there are a few people in the conservative party who understand economics and will explain to Mr. Poilievre that the prime minister’s responsibilities do not include telling the Bank of Canada to print money. That might disappoint Mr. Poilievre. He complains that Mr. Trudeau has not only printed money but has doubled Canada’s national debt. He really needs to come down on one side or the other. And yes, the national debt, which is quite manageable for a country with the gross domestic product of Canada, did take a major hit during the pandemic. We are recovering quite rapidly. Blaming Mr. Trudeau for COVID is illogical.

But the basic problem with the speech was that sometimes you were not sure where the truth ended and the slurs and inuendo took over. The audience was not helpful with its mindless chants of “Bring it home” and “Canada is Broken.”

What was concerning though was the lack of attention to the war in Ukraine. Mr. Poilievre made it very clear that he was not interested in spending any money outside of our country. While Boy Blue normally ignores Quebec, being in Quebec City, and some better polls lately, encouraged him to give Quebec some recognition. I think a smart leader would have also talked more about climate change.

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Poilievre’s Posturing.

September 10, 2023September 9, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Where does conservative leader Pierre Poilievre get off referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a foreign dictator? That was what Poilievre inferred in his speech to the conservative party meeting in Quebec City Friday evening. It was important enough for him to be read from a teleprompter instead of just more off the cuff and off the wall nihilistic invective from a nasty little man.

I have written many speeches for politicians over the past 65 years and I forced myself to listen to every word of that one-hour and six-minute diatribe. I could boil that speech down to less than 20 minutes by not using all the repetition, exaggerations and outright lies. It was a speech deprecating Justin Trudeau as prime minister. It made it simple to understand why Poilievre is the designated thinker for Canada’s anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers and other nihilists. It is also to the delight of those of us who know what the World Economic Forum is about, that Poilievre dumps on the forum every chance he gets. He doesn’t realize that the WEF is something like the Fraser Institute on steroids. It is a place for conservative business people to dump their profits from world-wide inflation, so that they will not be taxed on them.

Poilievre keeps telling people that this is his common-sense solution. It reminds me of Mike Harris and his common-sense revolution. Harris led the conservative party in Ontario as premier from 1995 to 2002. He sounded quite similar to Poilievre. It did not work. Ask any Ontario resident, old enough to remember the e-coli outbreak in Walkerton and the shooting in Ipperwash Provincial Park.

It struck me that Poilievre was desperately calling on his hapless party to bring back the Steven Harper era. The conservative leader was quite definite about Trudeau being responsible for doubling our national debt. He could have just as easily blamed that on the pandemic.

The one thing we know for sure in all this hectoring of the liberals, is that, as prime minister, Mr. Poilievre is going to do things differently. One thing is for sure is that the conservatives will axe the carbon tax. That was covered more than a few times.

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Good News, Bad News.

September 9, 2023September 8, 2023 by Peter Lowry

There was a note on Pierre Poilievre’s desk when he reported in after his summer holiday:

Sire: We have good news and bad news. It seems that the generation Zee or Zed voters prefer that you be elected Canada’s prime minister. The bad news is that this is the most difficult bunch of voters to get out to vote.

It is hard to really rate the Ottawa cowboy’s summer. Yes, more Canadians got to know him a little bit. He laid all the blame for inflation, grocery and home prices on Justin Trudeau. He has been hoping that this weekend’s policy conference for the conservatives will give him something glib to say about climate change. He has been struggling to come up with a workable way to blame climate change and destructive wildfires on the liberal leader.

It has been difficult enough with walking into the odd wall and squinting all the time without his glasses. One benefit of the clothing change is that his wife has been freed from her duties washing and starching all those shirts. She has been out seeing the countryside—albeit from the perspective of conservative donors’ backyards.

It is a bit disappointing to hear that his message has been getting a better play among the younger voters. They are the impressionable youth, though not necessarily trend setters. Plus, we understand that these interview subjects are people who opted in to Internet panels and are not randomly selected respondents.

But good or bad news for the liberals can change over the next few years to an election. It seems unlikely that the conservative leader’s message that Canada is broken will carry for too long. When in all the criteria of what makes a liveable country is added up, Canada always comes in among the top ten countries in the world. It is hard to convince us older folks that Canada is broken. We are the ones who have lived here for a while and know that Canada is a pretty darn good country.

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The Importance of Being Liberal.

September 5, 2023September 4, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Oscar Wilde published The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. It was a farce for its time. The importance of being a liberal is something of a farce for our time. What annoys me the most is that I have no proof of being a liberal today other than the constant e-mails the party sends me asking for money. Back when I was more active in the party, during the last half of the 20^th century, we had more purpose.

I have come to the conclusion after watching Justin Trudeau in party functions that he really does not like the party. It is quite obvious that our party leader is an elitist. Which is fine with me. I am still a liberal. The only time I have ever respected Justin was when he was trying to bring the country through the pandemic with his television appearances in front of Rideau Cottage. Our country was desperate for clear leadership at the time and he did provide some.

But when he denied and belittled the many years of party experience in the Senate and denied the liberals their label of honour from the party. It was as though he was getting even for the party’s demands on his father’s time when he was a child living at 24 Sussex Drive.

What Justin does not understand while his father did was that the party chooses the leader. The party is responsible for the training and having organized canvassers ready for the ground game when elections are called. The party is supposed to have a say in the party’s policy direction and in basic platforms. And the leader pisses on the party at his peril.

I don’t even think of Justin as a liberal. The dictionary definition of a liberal is not all that helpful. There will always be the dichotomy between the right and the left in the party. There are the progressives and there are those who drag their feet. Where we all come together is on individual rights. This is what we all fight for. At the same time, there was nothing wrong with being progressive. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau used to joke with me that we were both charter members of the ‘Get Off Your Ass’ (GOYA) group within the party.

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Say ‘No’ to Singh.

September 3, 2023September 2, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Federal new democratic party leader Jagmeet Singh wants the liberal government to come up with another one-time benefit payment of $500 for low-income families. This is the same as the payment in 2022, that the liberals had issued to Canadians to ease the impact of inflation. It did not do all that much last year and is unlikely to do more this year. Nor was the payment appreciated all that much last year.

Singh’s approach is similar to the rhetoric of a union leader snarling at corporate management for the sake of some publicity. He hopes the liberals will refuse and give him an excuse to be more critical of their lack of action on behalf of Canadians.

What would make more sense is for the liberals to lower the tax rate on low-income Canadians and to increase the Old Age Security payments to seniors. That would put more money every month into the pockets of those who need it, instead of a one-time payment that soon disappears.

Canadians should realize that inflation is also benefitting government revenues. A reasonable decrease in the low-end of the income tax rate is justified and would be easily covered by the higher tax levels.

Of course, the conservatives under leader Pierre Poilievre will be outraged at anything that smacks of an increase in taxes for the well-off. Typically, conservatives are not impressed with anything that even maintains the balance in our country’s graduated tax system.

As for the new democrats, they do not want to be forgotten and the strategy is to be critical of the liberal regime without upsetting the accord they have with them that is keeping that party in power until 2025.

For the liberals, the key is to get the home building across Canada moving. It is going to take a complex program of incentives. This could include tax refunds on certain basic building materials and tax benefits on completed geared-to-income housing.

The current government needs to look at the home building programs that got millions of homes built in the years just after the Second World War. Those incentives were put together by a liberal government that understood the needs.

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Guilbeault’s Guilt.

September 1, 2023August 31, 2023 by Peter Lowry

If, by some miracle, the twinning of the Trans Mountain pipeline is completed this year, where will the tar sands bitumen come from to fill that greedy sucker? On one hand, federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault ignores the need to recover at least a portion of the $30 billion cost of the twinned, high-pressure line and on the other hand, he is threatening tar sands companies, such as Suncor, with a cap on greenhouse gas emissions in the oil and gas sector.

Mr. Guilbeault wants it both ways! Not, that we really expect the twinned Trans Mountain pipeline to be ready to boogie that early. One would be hopeful that there is a lot of testing to be done before anyone would want to try to force three times the bitumen through the new and high-pressure version of the 70-year-old pipeline.

And besides, the pipeline people have already worn a path to the Canada Energy Regulator’s office complaining about the non-co-operative British Columbian tribes resisting change in their agreements. It is something like the housewife who has been promised a new sky-blue kitchen and the contractor trying to get her to accept a shocking pink kitchen instead.

Guilbeault threatened the tar sands industry with a cap on emissions after the Suncor chief executive officer, Rich Kruger, said the company was disengaging from non renewable resources in favour of short-term tar sands profit. That was akin to sticking the minister in the eye with a sharp stick.

Suncor’s most current figures show the company emitting 17.4 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2021. The entire tar sands production of bitumen contributes 13 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions but that does not count the emissions after the bitumen is refined into crude oil products and used in heating oil and gasoline, diesel fuel and other products.

The tar sands companies, led by Suncor, are going to make carbon capture their thing and they promise that they will be “net” zero in carbon emissions by 2050. While I, for one, might not be here to witness that miracle, I side with the more technical experts who think that promise is ridiculous. It would cost too much in the long term.

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Confusing Conservatives.

August 31, 2023August 30, 2023 by Peter Lowry

It is hard to compare the conservatives in opposition in Ottawa and the conservatives in power at Queen’s Park for Ontario. The main difference must be the anger in opposition and the arrogance in power. In neither case does it speak well for the conservative party of Canada or its provincial fledglings.

Take the Ontario situation. Please. Talking to an Ontario liberal the other day, I asked him who he liked in the current leadership race for that party. He gave the following answer: “I’ll go with whomever sends a shiver down the fat boy’s spine.”

This liberal should not worry Doug Ford as much as active Ontario conservatives who are deeply embarrassed by the chicanery and dishonesty of the Ford administration. They will turn their backs on Medicare and let him make profits for specialized clinics but they are not pleased with his catering to dishonest developers. Conservatives understand the purpose of the Greenbelt and are hardly pleased with Ford’s self-serving mishandling of that portfolio.

Mind you, if you listen long to federal conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, you would swear that conservatism is headed for Hell in a handbasket. Mr. Poilievre is not only a mean and vicious little man, but he knows of no difference between a truth or a lie.

Poilievre is a classic failure of a politician. He has one only person he wants to please: himself. He has no empathy or caring for people. He wants to inflict a dystopian form of conservatism on our country. He wants a country that does not care about its people. He wants a dog-eat-dog capitalism.

This Ottawa cowboy only seems to understand libertarianism. He does not want a future for our country. He seems to see only the pleasures of the day. He cares nothing for the problems with the environment. He might think of himself as a conservative but he has no understanding of what is worth conserving. He hardly wants a better country for all, he wants a better country for him and those who choose to follow him.

It might be hard to choose between Justin Trudeau and his elitism over the sad plan-less Pierre Poilievre. You will get to decide soon. We can put up with Justin Trudeau. You would hate the alternative with Pierre Poilievre.

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