Federal Politics – Page 49 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Parsing Pierre Poilievre.

November 26, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Pierre Poilievre, conservative member of parliament for Carleton electoral district in the Ottawa area of Ontario, has described himself as a political junkie. He was born and educated in Alberta, worked for politicians such as Jason Kenney and Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day. He came east to find a riding that could be won despite his French name.

But he is still an Albertan and appears to think of the current prime minister’s father as the Great Satan. Poilievre impresses us as sitting on the extreme right-wing of Canadian politics—in seeming contrast to conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s talk of finding a middle ground for the party. Maybe Poilievre would be happier with a leader more like U.S. president Donald Trump.

But Erin O’Toole seems not to notice his finance critic’s flirting with extreme right-wing conspiracy theories and consorting with fake news.

Poilievre is currently running a petition to “STOP THE GREAT RESET.” He must think ‘the great reset’ means something other than the need for fresh thinking after the pandemic is over. Many politicians are concerned about those in our societies who have been most harmed by the pandemic. The great reset is nothing more than ideas for bringing these people more into the mainstream of our societies.

But an extremist such as Poilievre has no interest in these concerns and can ignore their plight. This is a guy with a political objective that could even include the prime minister’s office in Ottawa.

It has been fascinating watching him on Zoom in the pandemic parliament. He is one of the few MPs to appear on Zoom with full television make-up, professional back-ground set and lighting. He is not missing any opportunity to look sharp and seek greater fortune.

The only problem is that he still comes across as a mean little bastard. We do not wish him well.

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Back to the Bully Pulpit.

November 23, 2020 by Peter Lowry

It might have been a term coined by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt but our prime minister Justin Trudeau did the bully pulpit one better. It was living in Rideau Cottage while the official residence at 21 Sussex was under repair. Trudeau did a cuckoo clock single out the front door of the cottage to address the latest news of the coronavirus.

Where lesser Luminoso would need support by technical experts or henchmen, our prime minister does it alone.

It actually seems more crowded all the time at the Ontario political updates. Despite the team effort, Doug Ford is losing traction with his voters as he rants on. His problem is that he little understands the experts and leans heavily on his own solutions. People are questioning the science behind some of his answers. The largest puzzle he presented recently is closing virtually all small business in the most populous cities in the province while leaving the schools in operation. And it will not help to look to education minister Stephen Lecce for answers.

But even from his bully pulpit, Justin Trudeau knows better than to challenge how some conservative premiers are handling the pandemic problems. Health care is in the hands of the provinces and the feds would be crazy to intervene. All Trudeau can really do is support the provincial efforts and plead for public cooperation in these serious times.

Even when we have some vaccines in the offing, the rapidly escalating case loads of pandemic sufferers is of growing concern. Hospitals in some provinces are reaching capacity and there are fewer and fewer healthy health care workers to fill the gaps.

But what Trudeau can do is throw more aid money into the maw of the coronavirus. In some provinces we are looking at disaster as more and more of our small businesses are ordered to shut their doors, never able to re-open. We will suffer the sores of this pandemic for years to come.

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See no; Hear no; Speak no solutions.

November 20, 2020 by Peter Lowry

The three wise monkeys are alive and well and hiding from reality in Ottawa. At a time when a recent Environics poll shows that 64 per cent of Canadians support a guaranteed annual income program is a time for action. It is not a time to procrastinate, to put off solutions. It is not a time for our politicians to look like monkeys.

The first thing is to stop looking at a guaranteed income program as a massive support program. What we already have is a massive support program providing for our children, our seniors, our Medicare, Canadians out of work, our education and our programs for people living with disabilities.

What we need is a proper assessment by our politicians of what Canadians need and how to get the help they need to them. And what better time than when our country is torn by the rigours of a pandemic.

Our economy is a just as much at risk is our health. The two are too interdependent. At a time when our economy is in turmoil is the time to launch a guaranteed system. It addresses the immediate problems and builds strength for the future.

What we need to understand is that there are many benefits included in a guaranteed annual program. And there will be many adjustments to make as it proceeds. There will be the immediate impact on minimum wages. We can hardly pay people not to work. Incentives, benefits and self-worth are important considerations.

Raising the goods and services taxes a few percentage points will be an important step in balancing the costs of the program. The need for the money paid out to flow quickly back into the economy is also obvious. Giving it to people who will just put it in the bank is somewhat less effective but ensuring it eventually flows back to the government in a growing tax base is an important objective.

And just think of the good use all those civil servants in Ottawa could be put to when we no longer have a myriad of programs to run. We are quite likely going to benefit greatly from a guaranteed income.

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Searching for the real Canada.

November 18, 2020 by Peter Lowry

There is a Canada out there somewhere that we want to build on. It is a Canada led by those who can really lead. It is a Canada created willingly by our collective inspiration. It is a Canada built on equality and freedoms.

It is a country that inspires. It is leadership that you trust. It rejects the elitism and naiveté of a Justin Trudeau. It laughs at the conservative sham of Erin O’Toole, the desperate search for rationale of the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh and the foolishness of the Bloc’s Yves-François Blanchet. Real leaders mirror the aspirations of their followers. They present a path that we can follow.

It is not a country that ties itself to the concerns of 150 years ago. It is a country that concerns itself with a strong future. At the present, we have no leadership that can handle the changes that are needed. We are locked in the sham of royalty. We are appointing elites to positions of power. We are borrowing our security from the vagaries of the United States of America. We are living a fiction.

Instead of our industry working for us, it wants to reign over us. We sell it off to the highest bidder and think the wealth gained gives us strength. We are bought and paid for by the one per cent—the self-absorbed, who suck our blood, who seek to dictate an unequal future.

Instead of realizing a collective future, we are building walls between urban and rural. We are divided on religions, separated by skin colour, labelled by education, clinging to possessions, marked by professions, separating on languages, in wonder of wealth and defining ourselves by east and west.

Can we not understand that just being Canadian is a gift of immeasurable proportion? Tell that to the downtrodden of Africa. Tell that to the war-torn of the Middle East. Tell that to those torn by the religious turmoil of the subcontinent. Tell that to the down-trodden masses of Asia.

Yes, we need to bring our own house to order before we can address the rest of the world. The solutions are not in political ideology. They are in our humanity.

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Turkey or turmoil for Christmas.

November 16, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Do you ever get a feeling that something is off and you are not entirely sure what it is? It has been bothering me for a while. There is a feeling coming out of Ottawa that does not bode well. Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is salivating for an election. Federal cabinet members are going around talking to the news media as though they have something else on their minds.

A part of it might be the situation south of the border. Who trusts Trump? We might be wishing that we had are own border wall. That petulant child-man in the White House is cooking something in his mind that might just interfere with everyone’s wish for a smooth transition of power in Washington on January 20. We keep wondering what part Mr. Trump will play.

But Canadians have their own problems. We have legislation backing up in Ottawa as the pandemic takes precedence. The Trudeau government is starting to baulk at the mounting costs of mitigating the economic disaster we are facing. The prime minister is nowhere near as cocky as he was over the summer. The days are darker. The storm clouds are gathering. And the pandemic numbers are mounting.

What could Erin O’Toole possibly be thinking in wanting to take the government out of Trudeau’s hands? Has he any better idea than the liberals? What possible incentives could he be thinking of to get both the NDP’s Singh and the Bloc’s Blanchet on side? He is wasting his time if he cannot get them to help defeat the government.

An election at this time of year is not unprecedented. The last time Canadians had an election over Christmas, we ended up with what some of us thought of as the Mulroney effect. When Joe Clarke’s conservative government was defeated by the resurgent Pierre Trudeau and the liberals, Clarke was, in turn, defeated two years later by Brian Mulroney for the conservative party leadership.

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O’Toole’s Big Tent Dreams.

November 13, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Federal conservative leader Erin O’Toole is making his intentions clear and prime minister Justin Trudeau can ignore the intent and lose everything. O’Toole is attempting to mix the Harper base, the Jason Kenney ethnic strategy, the liberal union strategy and the frustrations of Donald Trump’s base.

There is no question but O’Toole is the natural to inherit the Stephen Harper base of Western conservatism. He is working hard at being the nice guy with the nasty friends. Being from Ontario, he can use his blandness to set him apart from the gaucheness of Ontario premier Doug Ford and the stridency and misogyny of Alberta’s Jason Kenney.

Yet it is the ethnic group inroads that Kenney made for the Harper government that O’Toole is trying to work to his party’s advantage. Did you think that all those walls of ethnic groups behind Harper appeared by magic? I thought the funniest one I ever saw was the group of boy scouts that Harper used once for a backdrop.

O’Toole is also taking a direct shot at the union support that the liberals had attracted away from the new democrats. It has long been a wonder why some of our more controlling unions did not recognize their affinity for conservatism. These are unions that will fight for the status quo to their last surviving member. There are many unions that consider ‘Solidarity Forever’ to be a conservative camp song.

The most recent lesson in building a big tent was the supposed aberration of Donald Trump as president of the United States. That should not have been as much of a surprise in 2016 as we made out. Even the most conservative of polling firms are still trying to find out where some of those Trump supporters originated. While the born-again Christians who formed so solidly behind Trump are more prominent in the U.S., they are also a strong element in Canada.

Another item O’Toole has outstanding in his big-tent mix is how to sell some environmentalism to the Prairie provinces?

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The NDP want voting reform.

November 11, 2020 by Peter Lowry

In a letter to Justin Trudeau last week, Jagmeet Singh, leader of the federal new democrats, laid out his plan for the minority government. It seems to be the best time to try to manipulate the liberals into changing the way Canadians vote. All the liberals have to do is go along with a change to proportional voting and it would likely change Canadian parliaments for all time.

Singh uses the argument in his letter that our first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system produces parliaments that do not reflect Canadian voters’ wishes. What he also should have mentioned is that alternative methods of voting can deny the winning political party the ability to enact some of its election promises.

And who wants to go to political rallies in an election where politicians say they will try to do this, or try to do that—if only one or more of the other parties allows them to make the change.

What Singh and his NDP caucus want is proportional representation in voting. This might give the NDP as many as 20 per cent of the seats of the members of parliament. That would mean, under proportional representation, almost 70 seats. What it would probably also mean is that we might never again have a majority government.

With FPTP voting, our conservative and liberal parties have been what are called ‘big tent’ parties. That means that they accommodate a broad range of voters wishes though maybe not all of them. What would happen over time with proportional voting is that these large parties would tend to split into smaller voting blocks. The negotiations and compromises people made before the election under FPTP will now have to be negotiated after the election. You not only get more parties but they spend much of their time arguing about which party gets this or that promise delivered to the voters.

In Mr. Singh’s letter, he tells the prime minister that 80 per cent of Canadians want this change. That might surprise Justin Trudeau but I hardly think Canadians would want to make such a change if they stopped and thought about it.

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The perplexed pollsters.

November 10, 2020 by Peter Lowry

How would you feel if the three times out of 20 you are wrong in your forecasts, and it all happened in the same election? That was the pollsters’ dilemma with last week’s election in the United States. They were just flat out wrong.

But you have got to have some sympathy for them. Historical data did not mean much. They only experienced one other election such as this for president and they got it wrong then. In the largest turnout in American history, the republican voter turnout set records. Luckily, so did the democratic voters.

But some states that were expected to be won by democrats were often won by the republicans and visa-versa. The Senate ended in the hands of the republicans and the democrats kept the house majority by a slim margin. It all took four days of concern and counting.

What surprised us Canadian political watchers that the pollsters had no way of verifying their polls. I think I was studying polling before I ran my first political campaign. I enjoyed politics more than working for the news media but I had always been fascinated by the studies that told you what publication readers read some or most of advertisements and editorial content.

And then I met a federal politician who used telephone calls to determine how voters intended to vote. This was back in the day when he had to use a card index for each voter. He used those cards to tell his workers who to get to the polls on election day. What we are so routinely doing today with computer programs, he was doing the hard way almost 60 years ago.

But I think his card system relied on better input. Today’s smart phones do not always get answered with blocked numbers. Those automated Robocalls calls might be cheap but they are less and less effective. Political parties might just have to revive the science of knocking on doors with what we call the ground game.

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A note to a busy Joe Biden.

November 9, 2020 by Peter Lowry

It was an impressive speech the other night from Delaware. It was the right tone to take with the Trump supporters. You offered them the olive branch and left it to them to accept. It was a class act.

No doubt, you have a lengthy ‘to-do’ list already but many Canadians want you to know that it will be okay with us if you want to put an end to the Keystone XL pipeline controversy. Yes, we are well aware that our government will be pressuring you to let the pipeline be completed but that is just an act. Our prime minister Justin Trudeau is just trying to mollify the schmuck who is premier of Alberta. The premier there is spending $1.5 billion of Alberta taxpayers’ money to get that pipeline to the U.S. border. From there it runs down to the Texas gulf ports for shipping that highly polluting, poor quality bitumen to Europe and Asia.

Your American refineries do not need Canadian bitumen from the tar sands. Refineries only take that stuff when it is discounted well below crude oil. Anybody with any concern for the environment refuses to have anything to do with the stuff.

Besides, with fracking, the Unites States is self sufficient in oil for many years to come. And the bitumen your refineries can get from Venezuela is of far better quality and cheaper to refine into ersatz crude, than the bitumen you can get from Canada.

We appreciate that you would like to do that nice prime minister of ours a favour but he really has a different problem. We have a lot of people out in Alberta who would rather keep polluting the environment than paying taxes like real Canadians. They are like Donald Trump supporters and they think that their premier is going to make life easier for them.

Think of it this way: you can help Justin Trudeau to be a better environmentalist by telling him where to stick his Keystone XL pipeline.

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To listen and to learn in Ottawa.

November 8, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Yesterday it was noted how quiet the Ottawa scene has been while history is made in America.

But we ignore Ottawa at our peril. You have to listen to buzz in the quiet. There is the testiness of the conservative caucus—planning for the partisan attacks to come. There is the disquiet of the new democrats hoping to build a new future. There is the hope for new leadership and new challenges among the greens. And the bloc MPs share their hopes for a future, no sitting bloc member can expect to see.

It is the nervous energy of the liberal caucus that spins Canada’s immediate future. Do they sit quietly in the balcony watching the high jinks of the country below or is there serious thought of the road ahead for their party, their leadership and their country??

Do they realize the crossroads where their country is at? Do they see the changes that move like the world’s tectonic plates?

Do they see the damage that Justin Trudeau has done to the once-strong liberal party? Is the liberal list of registered liberals just Trudeau’s handy ATM? And whose electoral district do you represent? Is it your riding, or Justin’s?

As a member of parliament, who do you represent? Is it the riding or the liberal party? Who do you speak for in parliament? Your political masters in the PMO? Or Canadians? And are you financially independent for the next election? Are you allowed to think or are you just a rubber stamp for the PMO?

And speaking of the PMO, is that collection of sycophants capable of keeping the prime minister out of trouble? Do you realize the naiveté of your leader? He learned so little at his father’s knee.

So, let’s give a passing thought to our MP’s. We will soon be seeing them at the hustings.

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