Federal Politics – Page 57 – Babel-on-the-Bay

After the Pandemic, Let’s Double Down.

May 11, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Canada is going to come out of this pandemic stronger, more determined and in a better position to build a stronger future. And we could come out with a national debt of more than $700 billion. And, so what? We could double that debt and nobody would sneeze. We have two critical issues that need to be resolved. The first is a national minimum income program for every adult in the country. The second is a project to bind this country more tightly together.

The minimum income is a step with which we will measure ourselves as a nation. It is the measure of our decency. It is a measure of our caring. It has to be in an amount that can keep a person sheltered and fed, keep a graduate student at his or her studies. It does not need to be the same for everybody but it must be for everybody. Nobody needs to sleep on a street. No Canadian needs to go hungry.

The second is of equal or greater importance. It is the project we choose to bind our nation together. Sir John A. Macdonald saw it as a band of steel. Maybe he had an idea upon which we can build an even stronger nation. Only this time, it is a train system that connects all our major cities. It needs to be high-speed and electric.

We will need jobs for people after the pandemic and this project will provide many thousands of jobs. And there are many years of work to be done. When finished, it will open new opportunities in recreation, tourism, shipping, business travel. Maybe it will only cost $30 billion to build. It will earn the money back in revenue and taxes.

The first step deals with our decency. The second deals with our dreams. And the two steps are linked because they will bring us the new citizens we need to reach the ideal of 100 million Canadians.

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The Great Canadian Gun Con.

May 8, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Watching that one-time cop, now Canada’s public safety minister, Bill Blair, blather on about guns is annoying. The liberal plan to do something about the proliferation of guns in our society is nothing more than a con job. When you are grandfathering the guns that are already out there, you are hardly banning them.

Canadians have been asking for a total ban on weapons other than those designed and registered for law enforcement, skeet and target shooting or licensed hunting. There is absolutely no need for collectors to have operable weapons. And collections need to be certified as inoperable by qualified arms experts.

What also worries me is the suggestion that Canada’s aboriginals should be collectively exempt from the ban. That would be a license to stock guns of all types along with the cigarettes so freely sold to anybody on first nation’s properties. I live 30-minutes down the highway from the Mnjikaning First Nation Indian Reserve No. 32 on Lake Couchiching, whose property includes Rama Casino.

At a rough guess, if the cigarette sellers on that reserve were selling only to residents of the reserve, every man, woman and child on that reserve must be smoking about 12 packages of cigarettes every day. Canada has more than a few unprotected borders.

What does not seem to be widely understood about firearms in Canada is that modern assault weapons, capable of continuous fire, are already banned. These are the weapons that can fire hundreds of rounds in a minute. Those weapons have never been approved for sale or possession in Canada.

But what city police really want to be rid of are hand guns. Nobody hunts game with a Glock. These sneak over the border from the U.S. and also go astray from legal (and illegal) collections. They are then passed around by kid gangs for serious mayhem. These untrained shooters are such bad shots that they often kill the wrong person—according to some victims’ families.

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Who Knew?

May 6, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Politics can be full of strange happenings. Canada had an election seven months ago. The guy who was prime minister is still prime minister and doing very well, thank you. He lost 20 members of his party caucus and his party came second in popular vote. You would think he would have something about which he might be embarrassed.

But no. It was the poor schmuck whose party won the popular vote and who led an additional 26 members of his party to Ottawa, who saw the handwriting on the wall. Party leader Andrew Scheer resigned before the party took a vote to tell him to get lost. Scheer resigned as conservative party leader and, it turns out, few want the job.

And yet there were other strange things that happened last October. The guy who more than doubled his number of MPs in the house of commons was the leader of the Bloc Québécois. The Bloc vote alone, handled carefully, could keep the liberals in power for the full four years of this parliament.

The guy who lost the most in the election was the leader of the new democratic party. Jagmeet Singh dropped 15 members of his caucus and did not seem to even consider it a bad-hair day. What? Him resign? I guess nobody in his party thought of it.

The person who really won big was green party leader, Elizabeth May. She not only won her own seat but she doubled the size of her caucus. She went from one MP to two. With this accomplishment under her belt, May promptly resigned as leader. She had had enough. She might have been the only smart party leader left.

I would dearly love to report that peace, order and good government prevailed after the election. And then along came a novel coronavirus pandemic and everything went to Hell. I am sitting here in my den, drinking my morning coffee, doing nothing, looking out at the world and wondering what I will feel like writing about tomorrow?

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Same-old, same-old Tory party.

May 5, 2020 by Peter Lowry

This conservative leadership contest is a disaster. What started out to be dull and boring has been made doubly dull and boring. We are now advised that we will know who has won the conservative party leadership on August 27. Surprise, surprise, Peter MacKay will likely be crowned. Boring wins again!

This commentary could probably end with that one paragraph. That is all it is worth.

But it seems that likely loser, Erin O’Toole, has a strategy. He is supposing that, for some reason, a slim majority of party voters decide that Peter Mackay is the most boring of all candidates. There are four candidates and O’Toole’s strategy is to try to be every conservative voter’s second choice. That way, in a tighter race, he could win on the second or third count. That is the beauty of the conservative ranked-choice balloting: It elects the most acceptable, not the most preferred.

What it means is that O’Toole needs to run a campaign savaging Peter MacKay and building up the confidence of the two other also-rans. He has to keep those other two in the running.

Mind you, it might be tough to keep social-conservative Derek Sloan in the race. When the MP made the gaffe of attacking Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief medical office of health, last week, many of his fellow conservative caucus members were calling for his head.

There might be other reasons to keep Leslyn Lewis in the race. It seems that $200,000 is a lot to spend on proving that the conservative party is not the white-bread party of old. When you listen to her social-conservative views, it is hard to think of her as a popular member of Toronto’s black community.

But even if Peter MacKay’s campaign never does shake its doldrums, O’Toole is almost as boring. He reminds us of the Porky Pig character that used to break through the drum at the end of Looney Tunes cartoons, saying, “Th-Th-That’s all folks.”

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Trudeau’s triumph.

May 2, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Fess up, guys, prime minister Justin Trudeau has won. The wonder kid has changed his spots and been exactly what Canadians have needed. Santa Claus came early this year. Even Bob Hepburn of the Toronto Star says that the Trudeau haters have been proved wrong.

While I pointed out a while ago that Trudeau lucked into his ideal positioning, I have had to admit that he has handled it well. He might still be an elitist but even an elitist can accept his good luck.

But I must admit that his appearances out of the cuckoo clock at Rideau Cottage have worn thin. There is no need for him to continue in his singles showcase and he can join with the hoi polloi from the cabinet and senior civil servants for briefings. Almost daily briefings make sense as long as the covid-19 scene keeps fulminating.

What Bob Hepburn is ignoring is that those Trudeau haters who blame Justin for everything, including the flooding in Fort McMurray, Alberta, will still hate him after the battle against covid-19 is over.

What I am hoping is what he has learned throughout this experience sticks with him. What has annoyed me about Justin in the past has been his unabashed elitism. You cannot remain elitist though when you are forced to understand the serious neglect our society has shown for those less fortunate. What he has seen so many times now that programs designed in Ottawa to reach these people are very hard to create and very difficult to manage.

What he has to understand is that the one-per cent with whom he has hobnobbed all his life are the ones who are out-of-step with being Canadian. I always got the feeling that the middle class to which he was always referring when campaigning existed only in his own mind.

I keep getting the feeling that this country is going to be very different after we shut the door on covid-19. I think we have learned too much about our short-comings through this first half of 2020, to ever want to be the same country again.

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On this day in May.

May 1, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Before we send out more distress signals, we need to take stock of our situation. We have been hiding in our homes for less than two months while essential workers carry on the battle of the pandemic. The coming battles will be to restore a battered and in-debt economy. And what, if anything, will be the same?

Anything close to ‘normal’ is months away from now. We still have to beat covid-19. We are not there yet. And how can we complain if this self-isolation is saving lives?

But what worries us is how we are penning up our most vulnerable in long-term care facilities, seniors’ residences and assisted living. It reminds me of the pens at the stockyards.

I have an older brother living in a classy residence in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. He is a virtual prisoner in his apartment, while very caring building managers keep him well fed and informed. My brother tells us that he wants for nothing but the one thing the managers cannot hide is their fear of this disease.

He was one of the brothers who joined a dozen family members yesterday in a meeting on the Internet program Zoom. It was noisy, disjointed and confusing, as is any meeting of members of my family. It was fun.

But it showed me that it is absolutely amazing that they could make a similar meeting for about 300 members of our Canadian parliament work—after a fashion. As I think I said the other day: they might learn how to do it if they had more professional help and would listen to those experts. To get it right, will probably take them until the next scheduled federal election in three years—or the end of the coronavirus pandemic, whichever comes first.

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Justin’s magic bag of money.

April 25, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Watching the daily news conference by the prime minister the other morning, I lost track of how much money he was promising. No doubt our news media people are keeping track. I was struck by the similarity to an election campaign without the opposition critics jumping on every announcement—to either better the offer or denounce it. It was as though the prime minister had a magic bag of money from which to draw the funds to solve all our problems.

This particular day was promises for our university students to keep them going through a summer when jobs will be scarce. The amounts were not all that generous, but by the time he had finished, some $9 billion had been lavished on Canada’s students.

As with all the aggressive spending to compensate people for the ravages of the coronavirus, there was the provision that the amounts had to be approved by parliament. Whether the opposition in the house of commons would suggest less than the government offered would be quite unlikely.

As it is, the government is constantly discovering people who have been missed by this program or that. The solution has been to simply add these people to the program and to worry later if the payment was really warranted.

This ‘by guess or by golly’ attitude is particularly applicable to the emergency response benefit package. Run through the Canada revenue agency, this is a very generous package. If you lost your job or even a potential job because of the coronavirus, you can apply for $500 per week for up to 16 weeks. To catch up with the program, this past week, people were receiving cheques for as much as $2000.

This just happens to be the amount that people who support the idea of a guaranteed minimum wage, think should be the starting amount for a national guaranteed minimum income program.

There is lots more money in Justin’s magic bag. At the end of his answering questions he was asked about what he intended to do for seniors. He said that is still to come!

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Is Chuckles shooting blanks?

April 22, 2020 by Peter Lowry

The lame duck conservative leader and leader of the opposition in parliament, Andrew Scheer, has a problem. Is nobody paying him any attention? Is it that difficult for him to squeeze past all the articles about the coronavirus and covid-19? Is the pandemic more important?

The answer to all three questions is ‘Yes.’

A lame duck leader, who is nothing but a place holder, until the party choses his replacement, is often ignored. Remember. he resigned to escape the ignominy of being voted out of office by the conservative party. It was the right thing to do. He should have known that the media would no longer come running to hear his words of wisdom.

And the current pandemic makes his situation even more difficult. Scheer’s comfort area is the house of commons. He knows this turf. He has had his best years there as an MP, as speaker and as leader of the opposition in parliament. He wants to keep this alive.

But in a pandemic, parliament is but a shadow of itself. Social spacing would force parliament to be a parliament of about 30 representatives of the people at a time. The other 308 members would be anxiously awaiting their turn.

And arranging for a virtual parliament with connections for all MPs is not an easy matter. Until adequate telecommunications can be made available for all members, some remote MPs would have to come into larger population centres to participate, until the high-speed, two-way connections can be completed in their ridings. Even then the management of sight and sound connections for more than 300 individuals, in isolation from each other, is a monumental task. It would require hundreds of technicians across the country and several hundred more in Ottawa. And do not forget that the parties have to be able to hold private caucuses.

Our parliamentarians are already learning from virtual committee meetings. No doubt they will be ready for a virtual parliament by the time the coronavirus has run its course.

And as for Chuckles, he is the forgotten man.

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In a half-full Canada.

April 21, 2020 by Peter Lowry

How many attractive countries are there to help alleviate the overcrowding, the poverty and the tensions of so many countries of this world? And of one of the more desirable outlets is Canada. The truth is that Canada needs at least three times its present population.

In the next 60 to 80 years, Canada needs to aggressively bring to our shores those who can adopt our freedoms, appreciate our rights and grow and prosper in a dynamic and progressive country. We need these people to claim and utilize our northern lands. We need their enterprise and imagination. We need new technologies and high-speed, green transportation.

We have the resources. We have the will. We can no longer hold our position in the world as a land half-full.

If we are going to keep our claim to those islands of the Arctic Circle, we need to use them. We need land access to the mineral wealth of our north. It could be a case of use it or lose it.

We hardly need military might to prove our claims, we need our people to be there. We need their loyalties.

Thinking back to a hearing on Canada’s constitution by MPs and senators in the early 1990s, I remember hearing from a person who had obviously been a citizen for just a short while. The gentleman was telling the parliamentarians of what Canada had done for him. He was an emotional person and he spoke from the heart. There were tears rolling down the man’s face as he told them what being Canadian meant to him. It was not easy for this man and his family. For in learning about their new country, there was much to unlearn from the old. It was not an easy experience for them.

But he saw the future for his children and their children. Maybe in those future generations, some would be taking this wonderful country for granted. Others might be looking south for the warmer climate. Yet, it is those who recognize the challenges, who will build Canada’s future greatness.

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Learning to love your local MP.

April 20, 2020 by Peter Lowry

In our time of need, do you not love the attention we are getting from our local politicians? I am thinking here of your federal member of parliament. This person is your lifeline to the decision makers in Ottawa. No matter what party they might represent, they also represent you. That is their job.

And this dual role is particularly important at this time of need. This is not a time of ‘politics as usual.’ No politician is going around shaking hands and kissing babies. When was the last time, he or she washed that hand? And try to kiss a baby at your peril.

Anything you want to do has to be at least two meters away.

This might be a good time for a serious talk. After all, do you really know why this person wanted to represent you in Ottawa? And you hardly want the usual B.S. about that. Do you know what committees your local member is sitting on and what they hope to achieve in those committees? There is a lot more to being a member of parliament than voting with your party.

If you want to talk about his or her politics, you could lead into it by asking what they think of the leadership position of their party. Even Justin Trudeau needs to be replaced some day. Canadians do not like elitists and they might catch up with the liberal leader soon.

But the most serious leadership problem is owned by the conservatives. These people drove away possible candidates when they made conditions for candidates to compete quite untenable. Their good ship Andrew Scheer is dead in the water and there is nobody left to steer the boat. As soon as there is a light at the end of the covid-19 tunnel, these people have to arrange for a fair fight for leadership.

And then there is the NDP. If you have one of those representing you and your neighbours, this could be fun. Ask what the heck they are going to do for leadership. If he or she tries to sell you Jagmeet Singh, you should vote for some one else next time out.

As for the greens, they might as well sell their services to another party that needs some environmentalists. It would not only make them more useful but it might do some good.

I think if more people took the trouble to meet and talk with their MP, we would have a very different parliament next time.

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