Category: Federal Politics

Say ‘No’ to Singh.

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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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Guilbeault’s Guilt.

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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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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Confusing Conservatives.

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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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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Singh’s Song.

by Peter Lowry

New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh’s turbans might be bright and colorful but his beard is graying. It is also showing a little more trimming, in contravention of the dictates of the tenth Sikh Guru. Canadians might never choose the NDP for governance under an observant Sikh but they are more than willing to see him as the balance point between the harshness of the conservatives and their tiring with the acting of liberal leader Justin Trudeau.

Even without his glasses, Pierre Poilievre can see the tenuous nature of the liberal- NDP agreement that is supporting the current government. He enjoys sniping at their arrangement. He is in a constant state of readiness for the slug-fest to come.

But like Canada’s aboriginal peoples, the NDP also have their stories to be told. The NDP support works, they can say. “We are holding the liberal feet to the fire.” They will tell you: “We are getting things done.” And that is the song they will sing to their voters.

Poilievre, of course is there to try to convince voters that the NDP are just liberals with different hats. He is trying to redirect some of the rage, that he has been laying so heavily on the liberal doorstep, on the NDP. Whether this is going to work or not is open to question.

Thinking back over the years, we saw an NDP support agreement with the Pierre Trudeau liberals in the 1970s. The federal NDP leader, at the time was David Lewis and his party never won any dividends on that investment. In the same era, Ontario provincial NDP leader, Bob Rae, did benefit from his party’s support agreement with the Peterson liberals in the last half of the 1980s. That was in the 1990 provincial election when Peterson slipped and slid into oblivion leaving a surprised NDP in power in Ontario.

Yet, the question is, will the NDP story be heard, in the ongoing bombast of a federal election fought between a weasel like Poilievre and an elitist like our current prime minister? It could be that the new democrats will, once more, be the detritus left on the battlefield between the two larger political parties.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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Time To Go Justin Trudeau.

by Peter Lowry

Your sunny days are done, Justin. And few voters want to watch you being defeated by the Ottawa cowboy, Pierre Poilievre. We hear that your effort to provide Alberta with a pipeline for its tar sands product over the Rockies has now become a $30 billion plus disaster for our country.

You have spilled those billions down the Rockies to Burrard Inlet. Even the BC tribes who bought into the pipeline promises to cross their tribal lands, are now questioning their support. And even in a country as rich as Canada, we cannot accept these losses.

And why is your chief critic, conservative leader Poilievre, saying nothing about the failed expansion of the pipeline? Did you build it for the Ottawa cowboy? Will he be there when the first ceremonial barrels of tar sand’s gunk flow through the expanded high-pressure pipeline? Will Poilievre take the bows for you when the first ocean going tanker is loaded with bitumen in Burrard Inlet? Will he take any of the blame when the first ocean tanker spills bitumen into the summer playground of the Orcas in the Strait of Georgia?

The Ottawa cowboy was not as prominent when you bought Trans Mountain five years ago. It only cost taxpayers $4.5 billion at that time. We should not forget that the original pipeline has been in service now for 71 years. And you are going to triple the pressure in those rusty old pipes. And the taxpayer’s final bill for the expanded pipeline is going to be north of $30 billion.

I certainly admire your trust, Justin. I do hope the engineers who planned the increase in pressure through the pipeline for you are still around. You might find you want to get our money back from them that you paid for their opinions. And please do not suggest that the aboriginals buy the whole mess. We would certainly like to see more of the tribes be entrepreneurial but we can ill afford to see the ones who buy into Trans Mountain pipeline, be bankrupted.

We have heard from the Ottawa cowboy about your supposed generosity during the pandemic. We have heard from him about your supposedly taking of Canadian news from the Meta people. Why is he so silent about more than $30 billion?

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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It Isn’t Intelligent.

by Peter Lowry

It was confusing the other day when the Toronto Star ran an opinion piece about artificial intelligence being discriminatory for black people. It was not until you read some of the story that it was clear that the article was about computer programs for facial recognition. This is not as much about artificial intelligence as it is about the world’s peoples, their languages and their facial characteristics.

Back in the 1970s there were many serious programs going on at universities aided by computer companies to facilitate language translation. The computer company I worked for in Mississauga at the time, became something of a clearing house for exchanging thoughts and solutions on many of these problems. In many ways the work played into your sense of humour. To make a correct translation required that you not only programmed in the meanings of words but how they were expressed in the other language’s cultural and logical thought process.

This thinking came in handy when two of my brothers and I started up a company to combine our computer-related experience. As I was the least technical of the brothers, I got the job of running the company.

One of our first projects was to work with the Metropolitan Toronto Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to find a way to computerize the millions of photographs of people who had been photographed by one of our police forces. We quickly found that developing the programs necessary would require millions of dollars. Not having that kind of funding, we moved on to other projects.

One of the realities of facial recognition is the same as in language translation. Different racial characteristics are more complicated than the world’s languages. And people of mixed racial background are sometimes in a class by themselves. You actually need to determine the predominant racial characteristics before allocating the individual to a particular database.

I can well appreciate the problems with the black racial characteristics but the range of characteristics is as broad for the Asiatic.

The only places I know that are trying to upgrade their facial recognition are Ontario’s casinos. Back during the pandemic when the casinos were still open, you were smart to wear a mask. They asked you to stop on the way in and lower your mask so they could get a clear picture. They have some shots of me with my bare face and a middle finger raised. Who do they think they are kidding?

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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Blaming Voting Systems.

by Peter Lowry

One of Justin Trudeau’s promises in the 2015 federal election was that it would be the last time Canadians would use first-past-the-post voting. And you know how far he got with that idea. His first error was to give the challenge of change to a minister who seemed to have little understanding of how democracies work.

What should have been beneficial was the special committee of parliament that was created to study the subject. The committee hearings were streamed across the country for the edification of anyone interested. I might have been one of the few who watched, listened and felt I was gaining a better understanding of how Canadians approached the subject.

I have also had the advantage of visiting countries around the world with different voting, varied political structures and different results. You might have a good laugh at the city hall in Stockholm but the politics can be boring and slow on the uptake. Another riot in the Diet in Tokyo can be puzzling but the results aren’t too bad. I was impressed with the run-off for president in France. The French aren’t opposed to trying new approaches. Watching the Lords in London is just another exercise in watching paint dry. I always think of Washington D.C. as a city of monuments, many of them in the U.S. Senate.

But Canada is a special problem. I think of our system as a failure of British colonialism. The Brits bequeathed us with a copy of the British parliament but screwed us by giving too much power to our former colonies, in the form of provinces.

I was not as disappointed with some of the political science professors but it was not as encouraging to listen to their views as I hoped. When the committee seemed insistent in listening to so many of them, you would have thought the odd good idea might come along with some solutions. No such luck.

That was one of the few times when Canadians saw an impasse in a special committee. It was one of those times when, divided down party lines, the committee agreed to disagree. There was no acceptable solution.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Poilievre’s Passion.

by Peter Lowry

It is hard to believe that MP Pierre Poilievre has made it as far as he has. His summer travels seem to be a cross between Adolph Hitler’s rants in Bavarian beer halls and Donald Trump’s preaching to the ignorant in America. What we are hearing is lies, lies and more lies. I apologize for laughing when I first heard of Poilievre’s attack on the World Economic Forum (WEF). I could not imagine a less dangerous organization.

The WEF is an opportunity for the rich and famous of the world to get together and pontificate. It can be quite harmless. Demonizing the WEF makes no sense. If Mr. Poilievre needs some organization to demonize, he should look to the Fraser Institute. The Fraser Institute is the antithesis of the WEF. The WEF is looking for ideas. The Fraser Institute pays academics to write opinions that favour the politically right-wing tenets of the Fraser Institute.

 In demonizing the WEF, Poilievre is counting on his audience not to do their own research and find that WEF ideas are usually not that threatening. And he certainly is not interested in discussing it with a reporter who might have a university education. Mr. Poilievre finds it more rewarding to concentrate on building support among the foolish and the uneducated.

One of his more interesting scare tactics at the moment is that Justin Trudeau is planning a digital identification (ID) for all Canadians. I can hardly think of any reason to bother anyone with that idea when it has already been accomplished with your social insurance number.

Some academics consider this to just be a phase Poilievre is going through on his determined march on the prime minister’s office. They think he will pivot once in power. I would question that when you consider how much he is like the former American president Donald Trump. Mr. Trump never let truth stand in his way.

Neither would the truth stand in the way, once Poilievre was in power. If his lies and slurs get him that far, he would have little reason to stop. As Mr. Trump has shown, there is little concern for the fact that power corrupts. And he has also proved that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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Our Daily Bread.

by Peter Lowry

Why do we have government? When did we start praying to the government to “Give us this day, our daily bread?” Is this a democratic government? It is not God, that is for sure. And yet, if it is a democratic government, should it not look for ways to ensure its people can be fed in this 21st century? Is it not the welfare of all its citizens that should concern our government?

Canadians have a convoluted system of government that is so wrong in this day. It has a federal government and provincial governments and they each can blame the other for their failures. The recent coronavirus killed more than 50,000 Canadians. It was remarkable how fast the federal government was able to obtain vaccines. It was remarkable how the provincial governments let their hospitals collapse under the weight of patients sick with the disease. Lock-downs meant different strategies in different provinces. And federal lock-downs conflicted.

Today we have run-away inflation and people are starting to grow hungry. Our grocery stores are more worried about shoplifting that can eat into their windfall capital gains. What do our governments do? They point the finger at each other.

And how is Canada going to house its burgeoning population. Our country needs more people and we cannot accommodate them. The federal government makes faint promises and provincial governments are exploiting the opportunities to their political benefit.

And what do we do about this? Those who think we can change our constitution have a fight on their hands. It is a carryover of our British-crafted colonialism. There are more ways to say ‘no’ than there are to say ‘yes.’ And you can align the ‘nos’ with the provinces. We will even have difficulty in dispensing with the monarchy—despite the majority of Canadians who don’t give a damn about them.

You can almost forget the possibilities to have a democratic constitution. The smaller the fiefdom, the harder they will fight to keep it.

I have always imagined a constitutional congress in Canada. Boy, that is a battle I would love to take part in!

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Poilievre’s Gold-Plated List.

by Peter Lowry

It makes you wonder. I never answer phony polls like those your local member of parliament sends out. They are not real polls and even if they frame it as a petition, it rarely goes anywhere.

But I am appalled that Pierre Poilievre made money off of his silly petitions. I believe him when he says he has harvested more than 190,000 names and addresses off those years of phoney petitions. Most of the questions I have seen over the years are quite juvenile and I really would question what age group he was targeting.

My favourite though was the one to “Stop the Great Reset.” This is the proposal from the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) in Switzerland to help the world overcome the problems left to us from the pandemic. Did anyone who signed that petition know what the hell they were signing? That stupid petition even got then conservative leader Erin O’Toole mad at Poilievre. It was reported as being the reason he was pulled off the finance committee, where he was starting to build a following.

What bothers me about those petitions is I do not recall that there was a permission acknowledged anywhere on them that gave carte blanche to Mr. Poilievre to make use of the name, address, etc. for any purpose he might consider appropriate. It also amuses me that the firm in Edmonton that evaluated his list as being worth 2.15 cents per name for a total of $4,098.12 might have had some help from Mr. Poilievre finding that ridiculously low price.

That list is what those in the confidence game might consider gold-plated. It is a true sucker list. It is a list of people who have already proved their gullibility. Asking them to join the Conservative Party of Canada for just $15 and to vote for Mr. Poilievre was a no-brainer.

Getting them out to vote is usually your major problem.

But back to that list. If those petitions were on Mr. Poilievre’s parliamentary website, then they were paid for by the citizens of Canada. I would suggest to you, that at this point on the road to the prime minister’s office, Mr. Poilievre has made a mistake.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]