Federal Politics – Page 43 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Pick your battles.

March 30, 2021 by Peter Lowry

If you want to win, in war or in politics, you pick the battles you can win. Losers fight any battle that comes along. It is the problem facing the major opposition parties in the coming election. It is a special problem for conservative leader Erin O’Toole. He is between the proverbial rock and the hard place.

O’Toole’s conservatives need an environmental platform that will convince eastern Canada that the party is sincere about saving the world from greenhouse gasses. At the same time, they have to convince the climate change deniers in the west that, under the conservatives, they can continue to pump up the bitumen from the tar sands and knock down mountains for coal.

‘Simple,’ you say? You must be forgetting the master-servant relationship between Erin O’Toole and Alberta premier Jason Kenney. Who do you think touched O’Toole’s shoulders with the sword of approval during the recent conservative leadership contest? It was Jason Kenney who gave O’Toole the Western Blessing. It was a Jason Kenney who was riding high in the saddle at the time and could promise O’Toole those western votes.

Jason Kenney might have fallen on bad times recently; but never forget, he is still one of the slipperiest politicians in Canada. When Stephen Harper was making his retirement plans in 2015, Kenney was plotting his triumphant return to Alberta.

The federal new democrats have a different problem as they have had the Leap Manifesto since 2016. A radical environmental approach, the party still does not know what to do with it. At the time it was introduced, leader Tom Mulcair was trying to stake out a middle of the road platform and the Leap Manifesto was too radical for him. No doubt, Jagmeet Singh would like to revive the manifesto now. The question is, Jagmeet might lead with it but whether the party would follow is a different question.

The best bet for the opposition parties is a ‘Cap and Trade’ policy. We already have that in Quebec and British Columbia. Ontario was also partnered with Quebec and California in a ‘Cap and Trade’ plan until the Ford conservatives came to power and cancelled it. Like most Canadians, Ford did not understand it. That might help the opposition get voters to support it.

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Liberalism Betrayed.

March 29, 2021 by Peter Lowry

You hear it too often. It is the jerk who tells you that they are socially a liberal and financially a conservative. Does that mean that you want to do the right thing but you do not want to pay for it? Is this like the idiocy of the conservative budget recently in Ontario? The treasurer stood up in the mostly empty legislature and proposed accumulating an increased debt of $33 billion with no new taxes. It makes you wonder how stupid a conservative can be.

It is beginning to look like this pandemic is the biggest rip off of all time. The richest among us are having a field day—earning profits by just being wealthy, while the weak and vulnerable among us are being kicked into the gutter.

Why do we keep hearing that the fix is in for rapacious Rogers to acquire Shaw Communications? What does two billion buy you but a guarantee of the highest profits ever for the triumvirate of telecoms in Canada.

And what are these complaints we hear about the supreme court judges usurping the rights of our elected politicians. Has not the prime minister made it clear to the world that we are a country of law? If parliament is writing ill-considered laws, are not the judges entitled to rule on them?

But where did the sunny days disappear to? We thought Winter was behind us. What happened to the promises of Justin Trudeau? Has voting reform been forgotten in the cold of reality? Is the prime minister forgetting the promises of environmentalism? Is equality of the sexes only for those women parliamentarians who do what they are told? Can the PM be an elitist? Can his family not benefit from the WE charity and friendships with the rich and famous?

And why does our liberal leader spend far more time asking Canada’s liberals for money instead of their opinion?

In this time of the ravages of a pandemic, in this time of concern for all, why are so many being forgotten? What ever happened to the decency of liberalism?

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The knocking on Trudeau’s door.

March 28, 2021 by Peter Lowry

Like the late-night tapping on his door, as written by Edgar Allan Poe, Justin Trudeau dares not fail to answer this summons. It is at the heart and soul of liberalism in Canada. It must be answered with fairness and justice. It is in the face of the rape and pillage, so long the hallmarks of Canada’s big three telecoms—Bell, Rogers and Telus.

The visitor is not Poe’s raven, but a chance to reform. We were promised the reform during the 2019 election. The Trudeau liberals promised Canadians a 25 per cent reduction in broadband fees. It can be matched with more competition in telephones and fees. They still have time to bring this reform into legislative reality before the coming election.

Fool us once Mr. Trudeau and there will not be a second chance.

We have, for too long, seen the failure of the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The commission is the weak sister—for too long the brunt of the telecoms’ manipulation. It has failed us. It no longer serves the users but is obsequious to its telecom masters.

Let the telecoms set the stage for reducing costs by decimating the lobbyists that work for them. These people work against the needs of Canadians. They are an affront to our members of parliament.

We need commissioners of the CRTC who represent the users, who understand the industry, and who can resist the blandishments of lobbyists.

And we need members of parliament who can truly represent their constituents. Nobody is stopping them from standing up in caucus and asking that the liberal government keep its promises. Nobody denies them the right to report the desires of their constituents. Nobody denies them the right to be liberal—in practice, as well as name.

Those MPs who act as though they are sheep will be shorn of their positions and pay in the coming election. There are worse things than the visit of a raven ‘on a midnight, dark and dreary.’

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Do we really understand China?

March 27, 2021 by Peter Lowry

They are known to most Canadians as ‘the Two Michaels.’ They have been in prison in China since before the pandemic. Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Michael Spavor, a businessman, were arrested in China just days after the RCMP arrested Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei, in Vancouver on a warrant from U.S. authorities. Many Canadians think we should get tougher on China but if we do, we might get both of the Michaels executed.

It all comes down to the quaint Oriental custom of saving face. During the 1970s and early 1980s an interesting aspect of my job with a computer company was hosting delegations from countries around the world. These delegations came to better understand the large-scale computers we were manufacturing in Mississauga at the time. Many of them were from the Peoples’ Republic of China.

The Chinese usually came in groups of four or five. It did not take long to figure out who was the party cadre and who were the technical experts. The party person was usually the official interpreter despite some of the technical people being quite fluent in English. When the groups were larger, we would often have an additional interpreter from the Canadian government.

And these visits produced millions of dollars in sales—mainly in support of seismic analysis for China’s oil industry. And there was never any direct selling involved. We treated these visits as information exchanges and no sales pressure was used.

As the sales indicated, the technique worked well with the Chinese. I also found that it led to invitations to functions at the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa and when there was an important delegation coming to Toronto.

I remember one time I was at a function in the Royal Bank board room high up in that gold-colored building in downtown Toronto. I was standing looking out a window during a washroom break and the head of the Chinese delegation came over and joined me. He was just as bored with the proceedings as was I. He was quite intrigued as I pointed out the different parts of Toronto around the Hearn Generating Station—with its towering smokestack. He asked about the fact it was not emitting smoke and I explained that it had recently been decommissioned to improve the air quality in the city. He thought that would be a good idea for Beijing. I only mention this because he looked very much like a younger version of Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

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The upcoming battle for the GTA.

March 25, 2021 by Peter Lowry

Some pundits are under the impression that the key battle in the coming federal election is in the greater Toronto area (GTA). They might be able to give logical support for their assumptions but I would not suggest that it is all a done deal. Some things have changed and we need to pay attention.

It takes a while for population shifts to be recognized by census and there will certainly be some new electoral districts to be considered in a few years. In the meantime, there will be some surprises in store as assumptions are not met.

To start with there is a band of ridings that starts outside of Ottawa on the east and heads toward the Windsor area. It is what we used to think of as dominated by rural conservative and Ontario Landowner voters. Many of these ridings have been absorbing newcomers who are former city dwellers and quite often liberal voters. This offers some opportunities for aspiring liberal candidates.

It is unlikely that Trudeau and his trusted henchmen will understand it. Even more serious, they could not take much advantage of the situation. They have let those ridings drift away from them. They have destroyed the base of liberal support in that area. When you have spent the last six years doing nothing with the liberals there but demand they send money, there might not be much organization left.

And we should also wonder about the shape of the liberal organization in Toronto itself. There could be a few surprises for Trudeau’s liberals in the 25 liberal seats in the city. Why? It is a tired vote. The supposed liberal supporters will be harder to motivate. These people have been taken for granted by the Trudeau liberals and some are looking for an alternative. A couple ridings could even fall to the green party—to the disappointment of the new democrats. It should come as no surprise that a higher green vote will be mostly at the expense of the NDP. What will be concerning is the slightly higher percentage of conservative votes. Combined with a slightly lower vote for the liberals could put four to five ridings at risk. Justin Trudeau should not bank on moving back to a majority government.

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Kenney sugar coats dishonesty.

March 24, 2021 by Peter Lowry

We get lots of promotional stuff in our Internet in-boxes. It usually only takes a second to click on the little garbage-can icon.

But the other day, with my finger hovering, I took a minute to think about one of them. This promotion was by the Canadian Energy Centre—better known as Alberta premier Jason Kenney’s taxpayer-funded war room. It was promoting a petition they were sending to Canada’s members of parliament. It was saying that this citizen is standing up for pipelines. My first reaction was to think of a nasty reply about where they could stick their pipelines.

What I was feeling was not anger but frustration. It was caused by the sense of futility about taxpayers’ money being used by governments to fight the environmentalists. It is a lop-sided fight.

How can Canadians who care about global warming fight their federal government when it is providing billions of our money to twin the TransMountain pipeline? And how can Canadians support the State of Michigan in its fight to protect the Great Lakes from a catastrophic pollution in the Straits of Mackinac?

The State of Michigan knows very well the hopelessness of trying to clean up the spill of diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands in a major waterway. The clean-up of the spill into tributaries of the Kalamazoo River has never been complete despite the expenditure of more than $700 million U.S. dollars.

To have a catastrophic spill from the under-lake pipeline at the Straits of Mackinac would just take one more tanker dragging its anchor through the shallow straits.

And shipping for this bitumen from Burrard Inlet and through the west coast’s Straits of Georgia is just as risky. It is the summer feeding grounds for the endangered Orcas.

The American administration of president Joe Biden has made it very clear that they neither need nor want diluted bitumen from Alberta fed through American pipelines. Neither do clear-thinking Canadians.

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In the leadership wilderness.

March 23, 2021 by Peter Lowry

Canada’s major political parties have a leadership problem. We have to face facts folks: Trudeau of the not-a-party liberals is a hypocrite; O’Toole of the mainly western conservatives cannot get his party to back him; and Singh of the new democrats is taking his party nowhere. None of these three is the right answer to rebuilding our economy after the pandemic. Canadians do not seem to like them or trust them.

Prime minister Justin Trudeau obviously learned nothing about leadership from his famous father. And how he thinks he can talk the environmentalist talk while building a second pipeline for highly polluting bitumen across the Rockies, is an affront to every conscientious Canadian.

And to make matters worse, he is destroying the liberal party in Canada. He uses the so-called supporters on the liberal list as a convenient ATM to fund operations, totally centered on and controlled by his prime minister’s office (PMO). He uses elitist methods to make bad choices for appointments to the governor general and lieutenant governor positions, the senate, government agencies, commissions and the judiciary. And you can only hope that he has finished making badly thought-through decisions.

The conservatives have a different problem in that they are not in the least interested in going where their current leader thinks they should go. He wants to convince people that a conservative government would be a reasonable one, taking a middle of the road position. He even thinks the conservatives should embrace carbon taxes and environmentalism. Fat chance of that after his letdown by the virtual conservative convention last weekend.

With three provincial governments hoping for a ruling from the supreme court this week on the provinces claim that Ottawa did not have the authority to put in a carbon tax, his timing was terrible. While many think the court will rule against the provinces, stranger things have happened.

I would tell you about the two other party leaders but I do not know very much about them. And that is the same for most Canadians.

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Not your father’s Tories.

March 20, 2021 by Peter Lowry

This has probably been said before but it bears repeating. I used to know conservatives that I liked. Not that I would ever vote conservative but these were actually likeable people. I lived next door to a member of the provincial conservative cabinet. He was a good neighbour. I always had a chuckle with conservative premier Bill Davis when we had a chance to chat.

This changed. Brian Mulroney was just not as forthright as I expected. In my humble opinion, I found Ontario premier Mike Harris to be a stupid person. Why did I expect the more astute people in his conservative caucus to tell him how ill-considered some of his actions might have been and so harmful to Ontario residents?

I could tell you that Donald Trump was the most destructive right-wing politician of the 21^st Century. You would like to think that nobody could top Trump. And maybe we should leave a window open for Jason Kenney in Alberta to claim the prize. We know he is a misogynist but he seems to hate women and everybody else. I am just glad I live in Ontario and only have to live with our hapless premier Doug Ford.

But provincial or federal these days, the Tories are electing some of the meanest, uncaring and unsuited members of both the federal parliament and provincial legislatures.

The federal Tories deserve the incompetent Erin O’Toole as leader. He fits so well with an incompetent caucus. From O’Toole to his deputy leader on down, they are a mean, uncaring bunch who only seem to want to use their elected offices for personal gain.

I hardly think the two former councillors from my local city council are missed as they pretend to be serving their constituents in Ottawa. The worst embarrassment here in Barrie is the Attorney General of Ontario—a carpetbagger from Severn whose main interest seems to be in raising funds for the next election. He might be in for a surprise in that election.

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Thieves, Scoundrels and other Telecoms.

March 19, 2021 by Peter Lowry

Canadians will have every right to be angry at the neo-liberalism of Justin Trudeau and the failure of regulatory agencies such as the Canadian Radio, Telecommunications and Television Commission (CRTC). The planned takeover of Shaw Communications by fellow telecom Rogers has to be stopped. Without more, not less, competition by Canada’s telecoms, we will be at the mercy of the rapacious rates of the few.

Canadians already pay the highest rates of any developed country for their telephones, television and Internet services. Why should any government agency or understanding member of parliament condone this limitation of services to Canadians along with the price gouging they already suffer?

It is not as though the Shaw family had not already cashed out a substantial amount of their holdings. They had sold off Corus Entertainment, that controls the Global Television Network, along with a variety of specialty channels, available on cable service across the country. That was the first half billion dollars realized by the family.

They should get better tax advice than to add another couple billion dollars to their loot so soon. I would sure hate to have their amount of taxes to pay. While it is hard to imagine the debt load that Shaw Communications would carry, the family should find a better way to take out their money and, at least, consider a non-competitive purchaser.

Rogers probably figures the company has a lot of leverage with the liberal government to get this through. Yet it is liberals across Canada who work to get those MPs elected. They are the people who are being ripped off on the cost of telephone, television and Internet services. These are the people who will be urging their MPs to turn thumbs down on the Rogers takeover.

This is not the United States where politicians are practically traded on a pseudo stock market to do business’ bidding. Business has to recognize the concerns of consumers. They are not to be ignored.

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Write Big or Go Home.

March 17, 2021 by Peter Lowry

If you expect a federal budget in the April timeframe, you might be guessing right. There are still arguments against it but the scenario is an April budget and a May call for the election that will be held in June. Finance minister Freeland has a serious task to deliver that budget. Much hangs on it.

And the budget has to be reasonable, doable and responsible. It has to present an open and exciting era of opportunity for all Canadians. It needs to build better and ensure a stronger economy in the outcomes. It has to reflect on what she has heard from Canadians from former Bank of Canada governor and former Bank of England governor Mark Carney to the man-on-the-street.

Chrystia Freeland has to consider infrastructure needs and opportunities. She has opportunities for public-private partnerships. She can borrow at low rates and pay back in inflated dollars. She can expand upon the current Ontario plan to electrify the commuter trains bringing people into the Golden Horseshoe by launching of high-speed rail in Canada in, at least, the Quebec City and Ottawa to Windsor corridor.

She has to recognize that her budget will have to survive the sniffs of the conservatives, the venom of the new democrats, the Holier-than-thou derision of the Greens and the scatological comments of the Bloc. And she will need support from the man-on-the-street to survive the attacks.

She knows this is no ordinary budget. The continued reign of the Trudeau liberals depends on her. Her conundrum is that her continued success is tied to Trudeau. Adrift in a sea of conservative blue is no place for an aspiring new liberal leader.

And I have one final word of advice for Chrystia Freeland. I expect you will have a fairly extensive budget proposal to put before Canadians but if you, even once, use the words ‘middle-class Canadians,’ they will turn on you like wolves enjoying their dinner. Those words will label you for all time to be a political hack. You will lose credibility. Be honest with yourself and Canadians.

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