Category: Federal Politics

Go angry into the night.

by Peter Lowry

Canada went to bed angry last night; a failed decision behind us. We had bought into distrust and grievance and discord. We set aside our normal fairness and caring. Greed seemed to be the only compromise. It was a failure in leadership and trust. The next election is not in four years but anytime that there might be an advantage.

Some of Quebec’s francophones gave the rest of us Canadians the finger last night. They chose to send a group of separatist Bloc Québécois members to parliament—but not to contribute to the common good. Thankfully, they did not win the balance of power.

The harshness of the Prairie choices was a more critical critique of confederation. And the failure of the greens to grow and to take their commitments to parliament spells continued conflict over pipelines.

But Jason Kenney in Alberta has to realize that by failing to address his anger in parliament, he is but a dog barking in the night.

Conservative leader Andrew Scheer can take off his clown make-up and let his party stew over his poor leadership. When is the safe time to replace him?

Jagmeet Singh and his NDP took their losses but retained party status and can offer the support the liberals need to govern. Maybe the NDP will end up with a direction after all.

And the liberals suffer from the same dilemma. Justin Trudeau has much to learn about politics, political parties and leadership. The difference might be that he is still teachable.

But he let us down here in the catbird seat in Ontario. Once again, we had a winnable candidate, we had the skills and we had the desire to win and the party let us down. There were important lessons learned in Milton. Political campaigns do not start when the writ comes down. They start the day after the last campaign.

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

“Mommy, It’s over!”

by Peter Lowry

The sign-off for the Just for Laughs television show seems quite appropriate for this election. Though it was hardly just for laughs. There are still a lot of tears to be shed over this 43rd Canadian General Election. Having a green monster wailing to his mommy seems the right tone to end it.

There were lies told and vulgar language used. It was just not always comedic. As in any show of this type, you have to rate the actors individually.

The prize for most improved went to the boy born at Sussex Drive. Did you note that he was no longer saying ‘Aahh’ while thinking of the next part of his answer? He had obviously been quietly taking elocution lessons as well as training on the use of teleprompters.

‘Chuckles’ Scheer, on the other hand, is still a work in progress. The high cheek bones that earned him the clown title are most often hidden under make-up and his handlers are trying to expand his current repertoire of two facial expressions (surprise and puzzlement). His wife is often with him on the hustings late in the campaign, in a further attempt to soften his image.

But the growing meanness and cruelty of conservatism in this age still nags at Scheer and his candidates. He can hardly deny premiers Ford and Kenney and their unfeeling cuts, refusal to understand global warming and failure to understand the critical relations with other countries that Canadians have gained around the world.

Jagmeet Singh might have stirred the cold hearts of the news media but the growth he has claimed during the campaign has been among the NDP supporters who had given up on him. He is still facing serious losses of previously held seats in Quebec, no potential for growth in Ontario and lost hopes on the Prairies.

Election-day reality in Quebec is most likely to be conservative and NDP losses to the Bloc and the liberals.

What surprises me is that there seems to be no organized effort in B.C. to move to Elizabeth May and the greens and guarantee the end of the Trans Mountain pipeline.

And then, maybe my sources are wrong!

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Thoughts on a dystopian election.

by Peter Lowry

It was not been pretty. These fixed elections absorb the politicos and the media for almost ten months. Before it can officially be called an election, we are tired of it. They are more about what could have been than what should have been.

I felt like a lone voice in the wilderness in that seemingly never-ending winter of 2019. I had the nerve to suggest that Justin Trudeau resign while we still had time to choose a replacement. That hardly endeared me to what is left of the liberal party that I had loved so much.

Like millions of other Canadians, I voted in the advance polling. I think we all wanted to get this damnable act over with. And I voted liberal. Luckily, I like the liberal candidate in my riding and he deserves to win. It looks like liberal central agreed with me for once. Justin came to our riding twice and I hear the donations to the local liberal campaign exceeded the budget—which is always good news. I wish I could have done more to help the candidate.

But overall, it has been a mean-spirited, dark and dreary campaign across the country. The conservatives have changed over the years and I find their campaigning today to be based on greed and selfishness and ignorance of the needs of our peoples and our environment. It is their denial of global warming that I consider reprehensible. For a few creature comforts today, these people seem willing to burden their children’s children with a planet on which mankind might no longer be able to survive.

Maybe this election brought out the worst in people. Nobody can be proud of those television debates. The Internet has become a cesspool of false news, personal aggrandizement and vanity. The traditional news media are promoting second-tier parties and their candidates, spawning stories of breakthroughs and minority government. Where there is no news, news reporters have become more creative.

The most creative of all are the pollsters who are building pyramids on spurious presumptions. They hope if they just promote their guesses enough, they might come true. When found false, their alibi is the fickleness of the voters.

Or is it the politicians, who have failed us?

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Banking on the Bigotry of the Bloc?

by Peter Lowry

When does la laïcité (the separation of church and state) become the political war cry in Quebec during a federal election? And why does it front as a cover-up for the institutionalized bigotry that exists in la belle province?

Since the time of the ‘Padlock Law’ of the Maurice Duplessis government of the 1930s and the growing disenchantment with the once-powerful Catholic Church, Quebec politicians have declared an open season on political thought, religious garb and artifacts, and the use of any language other than French.

This attempt at creating a regressive island, speaking a quaint form of French, in a more liberal North America has caused some strange anomalies in the politics of Canada. If not appreciated in Quebec, English-speaking Canadians have, at least, been quiet over the past 20 or so years about Canada’s arcane and out-of-date constitution. If you want to strike fear in a Québécois heart just mention the possibility of updating the Canadian constitution.

I had a series of good laughs the other day reading an opinion about constitutional renewal from the doyen of the Toronto Star’s opinion writers, Susan Delecourt.

The best laugh was when I thought her initial reference to what she calls a constitutional creep was just a nasty way to talk about the premier of Alberta.

What she was really getting at was the possibility of the constitution again coming to the fore in the catastrophic possibility of a Bloc resurgence next week, giving Andrew Scheer the prime minister’s office.

The constitution is certainly not on Justin Trudeau’s agenda. The last time I talked to him, I tried to point out the need for a constitutional review. His elitist solution to the problems of the senate and his failed attempt to change how we vote are his answer to any real change. He seems to have some pathological fear of constitutional change. How his father left him with that attitude, I have no idea.

But Susan Delacourt is quite right when she says that conditions might be ripe for a prime minister Scheer and Canada’s current collection of conservative premiers to really screw up the constitution. If they just promised Quebec’s Legault anything his heart desires, they would have the 50 per cent of the population and the seven provinces needed to really put the conservative screws to our country. And probably start a civil war in the process.

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Pot foils police and politicos.

by Peter Lowry

After a full year of government legalized and regulated marijuana sales, nobody is making money other than the criminal element that has been in the business all along. These people know their market, look after their market and have no problem with undercutting government pricing.

What the police and politicos, who planned this failed legal pot operation, across Canada do not understand is that it is a service business. When you build barriers to providing service, your business goes to those who can provide service. Your friendly pot purveyor down the street is there for you. This person is making substantial profits up and down the supply chain in a commodity that is no longer illegal for you to have in your possession.

The first mistake, the politicos made was to give the challenge of planning a legalized marijuana market to a cop. And, to make matters worse, this is a cop with a dubious reputation when it comes to human rights. Former Toronto police chief Bill Blair’s officers kettled Canadian citizens out for an evening stroll during the G20 in Toronto in 2010, denied them their rights and created what is considered the worst abuse of human rights in Canadian history. He, somehow, got swept into office as an MP with the Trudeau tide in 2015.

And with a political point-man such as this, a stiff, oppressive plan was put in place by the civil servants, who also seemed to know little about the product or its marketing. Their objective, so they said, was to undermine the illegal trade, instead, they guaranteed a lucrative illegal market for years to come.

Their first mistake was to put the actual marketing chore in the hands of the provinces. They built more barriers to success. In Ontario and Quebec, there are some 25 stores in operation in each province plus a mail order system—for a total market of over 23 million people. In Ontario, selection of retail outlets is by a strange form of lottery and there are huge gaps in market coverage. Instead of an open legal market, we have a highly restricted market where there is only profit for the illegal sellers.

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Watch out for the mathematics!

by Peter Lowry

It was mentioned the other day that it is impossible to selectively elect a minority government. Before you think you are voting for a minority, you need to check your mathematics and your logic. I would suggest to you that if most people across Canada voted for a second-tier party to keep one of the two main parties from winning, we could be back at the polls within 90 days. And that would certainly cost us.

Take the current suggestion that the Bloc Québécois could win the most seats in Quebec. If that happened, the result might be a conservative minority government that could hold on to power on an issue by issue basis, with Bloc support, for almost a year.

But what if the Bloc won so many seats in Quebec that the result was a conservative majority? The Bloc would be ignored and useless in an antagonistic house of commons for the next four years.

The problem is that you can only control your own vote. Everyone else’s vote is their own business.

Canada’s problem is not how it votes but the lack of leadership. We are so bereft of leadership in this country that an untried and unknown lawyer from Brampton, Ontario has caused a small flurry of hope because he spoke up at a leaders’ debate. He did not say anything important nor did he suggest any path to enlightenment. I can pin down about three seats that are likely to be won by his new democratic party. Anything else is guesswork.

At the same time, I know that the disappointment with Justin Trudeau is palpable across Canada, He might mean well but he has let us down. He is not a leader. He is more like his mother than his father. He is but an actor. He enjoys the role but he does not lead.

But for all our complaints, Trudeau could do a job better than he has. He can certainly do it better than the woefully inadequate Andrew Scheer. Anyone who seriously watched Scheer as speaker of the house of commons during the final four years of the Harper conservative government would be appalled at the thought of that man as prime minister of Canada.

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

On the home straight.

by Peter Lowry

We are in the final week and nobody really knows how this election will play out. We tend to confuse what we hope will happen with what is really happening. The pollsters seemed locked in secondary races and are ignoring the real one.

Maybe green leader Elizabeth May is the only realist. She admits to the media that she is not running to be prime minister. She does have images of being the balance of power dancing in her head but the pollsters are even pooh-poohing that idea.

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is the least likely to achieve. Instead of dealing with the realities of being a third party, he has delusions of the glories of the prime minister’s office. His princess is going to be terribly disappointed with the results. The reality for Singh next week will be the heavy loss of Quebec seats for the socialists. And there is no way those losses can be recovered with a few possible gains in B.C.

But, in the same way, the higher poll figures in Quebec for the Bloc Québécois do not seem realistic. I agree that these voters are telling the pollsters that they are inclined to vote for the Bloc in rejection of the Tories. I also think many Quebecers are up to their usual tricks on the pollsters. There is a possibility that more than a few of those reported Bloc votes are really parked votes that the voters are embarrassed to admit are going to the liberals.

What worries me the most is the deteriorated state of organization in Ontario liberal riding associations that are not running an incumbent. If the effectiveness of the Tory ground game when Doug Ford had his romp to power provincially, is even half as good this year, it will be more than the liberals will be able to match.

And it should be obvious by now that the conservative weakness this year has not been Doug Ford but Andrew Scheer. Chuckles is no leader or debater or politician and he was lame when on the defensive. Even his attacks on Trudeau often come across as hollow and rote. He is not credible as a leader.

I think the forecasts in our Morning Line are still valid. We will be putting it all together next week. We live in interesting times.

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

And who is suing whom?

by Peter Lowry

It came as a surprise to learn that the CBC has filed a complaint with the courts claiming that the conservative party has infringed on CBC copyright. I am not sure yet if I find it more amusing or concerning.

In a career as a writer, I must admit that I have never been involved in a court case over copyright. When you consider the thousands of speeches, news releases, magazine articles, scripts and opinion pieces cobbled over the years, it must have been the early mentoring that kept me out of trouble. You learn that facts require proof, opinion needs to be identified and to always recognize sources.

It was in the past few years that I found myself trying to explain that principal to the publisher of Patrick Brown’s ill-considered book on his problems in Ontario politics. The various lawsuits initiated by that book appeared to be nothing more than warning shots over the bow of whatever skiff Brown was rowing.

Much ballyhooed lawsuits in politics are most often withdrawn after the point has been made. Our judges already have dockets overloaded with serious cases and have little patience for the spurious.

And this one by the CBC is probably in that category. While the Corp needs to assert itself and tell the politicians to not play fast and loose with its creative material, nothing would be gained after years of dragging the case through the courts.

And considering the feud between the Tories and the people’s broadcaster, that has been going on for many years, I was surprised that the last Harper government did not do more to eviscerate the CBC than just deny it the funds it needed. Some wiser heads must have realized what ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ meant to Canadians.

But I also remember during the 1963 federal election, the joke at the Jarvis Street Kremlin (CBC English headquarters at the time in Toronto) was that a planning meeting was supposed to have been ended by the apocryphal comment: ‘Let’s get to work. We have a government to defeat.’

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

On being progressive.

by Peter Lowry

I have been wondering lately how we can determine if what we write is progressive? When does a tweet from Twitter become a blog? Maybe we progressive bloggers need to ask some serious questions about what constitutes a progressive, and what constitutes a blog?

I, for one, appreciate the initiative of progressivebloggers.ca. Google Analytics tells me that as many as 30 per cent of the daily readers of Babel-on-the-Bay.com find my thoughts through this aggregator. It has helped built a substantial readership.

So far, nobody has said that progressives need be liberals or new democrats. Nor would I suggest that all liberals or dippers are progressive. Liberals in Canada are often referred to as a ‘big tent’ party. I have participated in policy discussions with liberals for close to 60 years and I can assure you that there is a wide range of attitudes.

I remember one time at a policy conference at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, I was asked to keynote a session on labour relations. Charles Caccia was the minister of labour at the time and he just sat there looking daggers at me while I, figuratively, tore his department to shreds.

But before we get off the track, let me come back to the point about progressives. In any election, there is always some rumour going around about this leader or that candidate. It is a terrible timewaster. It is certainly not productive. I stopped reading Warren Kinsella’s material when I saw where he was headed in this election. He is entitled to his opinion.  I do not share it. Neither do I read the Toronto Sun nor the National Post.

As writers, we can only stay with the truth as we see it, strive for balance and build some hope. Sure, we have our bias, but as long as we recognize our bias, we can wrap it in good humour, fairness and compassion.

I also treasure the comments from my readers. I am sorry I do not display these comments for other readers. Most are positive, some controversial and a few scathing but I am never sure if the writer might regret something said casually. And maybe, I am a bit selfish. If you want a soapbox to disagree with me, get your own!

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

On sharing atonement and thanks.

by Peter Lowry

Living in central Ontario, we see the changing of color in the leaves as Thanksgiving and Yom Kippur are celebrated. I have often thought that Christians and Jews should share those days as we all have much to atone for and much to give thanks. This year we might never be able to atone for our political situation but we can be thankful that the election is almost over and we can go back to our normal complaining.

It is unlikely that we can ever atone for the way we have mistreated our aboriginal peoples but Canadians are getting tired of all the apologies and no real action. We need a ‘let’s fix it’ attitude in Ottawa.

I have never understood why people think slander should be punished and then allow opponents and third parties to smear real or imagined opponents in an election? I think Canadians have the right to expect civilized debate both on the hustings and in Ottawa. Sneaking in a nasty comment is not civilized debate!

In a career of writing news releases, speeches and newsletters, I have always found that there are far more ways to write the truth. It is only the lazy writer who needs to resort to lies.

I do not think I have ever been so embarrassed by my fellow Canadians than in this election. This is the first federal election I can recall where I have not heard a single complaint or query from voters about international affairs. Canada is a major trading nation boys and girls and that does not happen by accident.

Our people at the United Nations have been working hard to get Canada elected to the Security Council. News of this federal election is making Canada a laughing stock instead. And if we accidently elect the conservatives, you can count on our taking a harder hit when Scheer cuts our pitiful foreign aid budget by 25 per cent.

And I know that a lot of people are counting on a minority government after October 21. You should be careful what you wish for. Under our system of voting, it is almost impossible to cause a minority government. It can happen, but you cannot plan it!

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]