Category: Federal Politics

Singh’s sendoff into the sunset.

by Peter Lowry

New democratic party leader Jagmeet Singh is not going quietly. He caught some wind in his sails from that disgrace of an English debate this past week and is running with it. It was such a bad debate that Singh came out looking better than usual. And yet, it is the cruelest of deceptions to think he is on a level playing field with the two major parties in the election. Reality will return.

And reality is that we can expect the Orange Wave to be washed from the Quebec electoral scene. Few seats in Quebec will hold for the NDP? The NDP are going back to Ottawa with a greatly depleted number of seats. How many less is the question?

There is no future for a third-party leader to go through the election insulting the two leading party leaders. All it does is emphasize the futility of his position. It makes him sound mean and angry. It says to loyal NDPers that a vote for their new democratic candidate is just aiding a less progressive party candidate.

It is admittedly more difficult for a third-party leader to stay above the fray when the two leading contenders are constantly reminding the voters of each other’s weaknesses. In the end, it just turns off the voters to both.

Babel-on-the-Bay is hardly the only progressive commentary that refers to the conservative leader as ‘Chuckles.’ The man looks like a clown and often acts like one.

The biggest laughs in this federal campaign, at least in Ontario, are that the conservative leader can actually campaign in this province without ever mentioning our conservative premier Doug Ford. Wait until you see how fat Ford is getting, sitting in his Queen’s Park office and fuming. He hardly took out a gym membership during the legislature’s extended holiday.

But Doug Ford will recover and Jagmeet Singh might not. My guess is that the NDP will soon be looking for another saviour. I hear there is a former Alberta NDP premier looking for a challenge.

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

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

Voting and Thanksgiving.

by Peter Lowry

I am voting in Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte this weekend. And I am voting for the liberal candidate. My sense of this riding is that the green candidate is taking some votes from both the liberals and new democrats. That combination will give the riding to another do-nothing conservative.

I expect that situation to be duplicated in a few other Eastern electoral districts and is why the liberals are looking at the possibility of a minority government. If the trend continues to grow, it could change that liberal minority to a conservative minority. A minority conservative government might not last long but we can cross that bridge if we have the bad luck to get to it.

Some ridings are talking strategic voting to ward off that situation but when you have never seen strategic voting work, it seems pointless.

The problem is that the country has never been so divided. Voters came out of that English-language debate confused and angry. There is a heavy line drawn down the Ontario/Manitoba border with an arrow pointed east saying ‘liberal’ and an arrow pointed west saying ‘conservative.’ The only problem for the conservatives is that there is another line drawn down the Rockies that says ‘We do not want your bloody bitumen.’

And this is the position that British Columbia voters have always dreamed of: deciding Canadian elections. With 42 seats to be decided, a unified effort in B.C. could not only determine which party forms the government but determine the fate of the Trans Mountain pipeline.

Just remember some observations from the east. Not much change is being forecast in the Atlantic provinces. The conservative and new democratic parties are in trouble in Quebec. The main beneficiary there will be the liberals. The conservatives are in play in rural Ontario and the liberals favoured in the cities.

Think of it as a train crossing into Manitoba from Ontario with at least 140 liberals, maybe 70 conservatives and a few NDP. The conservatives pick up some friends while the train crosses the Prairies.

It is B.C. that holds the balance.

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

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

Another bad night for Canadian democracy.

by Peter Lowry

When will we treat these election debates as what they are? When they told us that there would be six leadership hopefuls and five moderators for the one English-language debate, we knew trouble was coming. It would have been much better to drop some of the moderators and pay a competent sound engineer. No viewer needs to listen to the babble of people trying to shout over each other.

And what were all those ’moderators’ running for?

Lisa LaFlamme of CTV got my vote for just acting professional. Maybe she had the easiest job at the beginning and the end. We were certainly glad to see her end the event.

Althia Raj of HuffPost won the award for being the coolest moderator.

You would expect someone with the CBC’s Rosemary Barton’s experience to help ease the confusion about what is going on. Since the audience is expected to make sense of what people are saying, it would help if the rules were explained to the audience—as well as the supposed leaders.

But then, there seem to be too many confusing rules at these events. Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star was the only moderator who seemed to be unsure of why she was there.

The only moderator who seemed to show a bias was the normally stony Dawna Friesen of Global Television. Maybe it is because I have watched her interview Justin Trudeau at various times and I sense that she does not like him.

The best idea of the night was from Elizabeth May when she mentioned a financial transaction tax. Canadians deserve an airing of that idea. This is a logical extension of the GST into banking and financial institutions that is long overdue in Canada. We have too many sacred cows in this country that are not paying their way.

The best line of the night was Jagmeet Singh’s reference to Trudeau and Scheer as “Mr. Delay and Mr. Deny.” It is a common enough perception. Whomever gave him that line did him a favour. It would even be more effective if Singh was not saying one thing to Quebec and something else to English Canada.

All I can add about the torture of that English debate is that we certainly have a long way to go to get it right!

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

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

The Morning Line: 43rd Canadian General Election

by Peter Lowry

Welcome to Babel-on-the-Bay’s starting point in understanding the coming election. Bear in mind that these are starting odds only. There will likely be changes by election day. Be sure you get full odds on any of your wagers.

And, believe me, this is not a simple calculation. It has never been more difficult. In the past five years there have been far too many surprise elections. It made us question our judgement. It certainly made us question the judgement of the voters. Our guess is that it is most unlikely that any party can win a majority of seats as a result of this election. The odds are for the possibility of any party forming a majority government.

Liberal Party: 2 to 5 – Likely Seats: 152

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has neither justified all his actions nor quieted concerns but he is the best choice for prime minister in a weak field. His Johnny Appleseed scattering of goodies during the campaign did him little good. He needs to stay close to home and learn what leadership means over the next four years.

Conservative Party: 3 to 5 – Likely Seats: 145

This was Andrew Scheer’s race to win until voters got to know him. He is not the choirboy he says he is. As he is unlikely to win, the conservative knives will be out for him on his return to Ottawa.

Green Party: 9 to 5 – Likely Seats: 18

Elizabeth May’s greens are coming on strong and are likely to replace the NDP as the third party after this election. She needs to learn that voters can remember one or two promises but when the promises come by the bushel, the memory no longer functions well.

New Democratic Party: 15 to 1 – Likely Seats: 15

Jagmeet Singh is going to rue the day he swamped Canadian  NDP membership to steal the leadership of a dying party. If only he knew where they wanted to go!

Bloc Québécois: 50 to 1 – Likely Seats: 8

Leader Yves-François Blanchet stepped up to bring the leaderless Quebec party into this election. He will get the troublemaker vote from Quebec’s aging rural separatists for a pointless four years.

People’s Party of Canada: 100 to 1 – Seats: 0

Leader Maxime Bernier came second to Andrew Scheer for the conservative leadership. He is a libertarian and a loser.

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

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

Jason Kenney: Doug Ford’s understudy.

by Peter Lowry

Every actor needs an understudy. It just seems appropriate for the much-detested premier Doug Ford in Ontario to have a truly obnoxious stand-in during the federal election. It is conservative leader Andrew Sheer’s good buddy, Jason Kenney, premier of Alberta, who was standing in for premier Ford this past weekend.

It seems that nobody trusts Ford to behave. What makes them think Jason Kenney is housebroken is open to question?

But real conservatives love Kenney. He is a misogynist, selfish, mean-spirited and a global warming denier. Since he was at a Catholic college in San Francisco, he has shown his dislike for women. He is a social conservative but insists on calling his upcoming budget slashing in his province by the more diplomatic words: fiscal restraint.

To put it simply, Kenney thinks he can hide the fact he is a weasel by telling people he is really a loveable koala. He has the majority of Alberta voters convinced he is the second coming of Peter Lougheed. They think he is going to get the Trans Mountain pipeline twinned so that the province can ship diluted bitumen to Pacific nations and carry on the free ride for Alberta taxpayers while the foreign owners of their tar sands companies get rich.

It was reported that when Kenney was in Toronto, he was busy campaigning at Buddhist temples and checking out the dim sum at local restaurants.

But while campaigning for the conservative candidate in Doug Ford’s federal riding, Doug Ford was nowhere to be seen. In helping that conservative candidate in Ford’s riding, Kenney was campaigning against Ford’s late brother Rob’s widow, who is running for the People’s party. It is assumed that not everything has been patched up between Ford and his sister-in-law.

Jason Kenney also visited Ottawa while he was in Ontario. This might just have been nostalgia for the time Kenney was playing a role in the Harper government—a much bigger pond than the Alberta legislature.

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

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

It’s time to deliver the profile.

by Peter Lowry

No, this is not for that American television show. The profile we will be presenting one day this week is best described in horse race terms. It is called a Morning Line. It is commonly in the Racing Form, newspapers and shown on the track totalizers. It is simply an educated guess as to the possibilities for that race. In this case, it is an election. It makes no guarantees. It is more of a starting point to get the betting underway.

What needs to be remembered is that under our voting system, we do not have one election. We are having 338 elections to decide who runs the country. Some of the elections are considered a slam-dunk and many are being hotly contested.

Not all the candidates are the same. Not all the voters feel the same way. There are regional differences. There are different candidates. Canadians do not think alike from coast to coast. There are rural voters and urban voters. And did I mention different languages? There are also smart voters and less smart voters. There are many age groups and supposed classes of voters. This is why political leaders exhaust themselves fliting around the country, making extravagant promises to all the different types of Canadians.

And sometimes it is not a question of who are the 70 per cent of Canadians who voted but who were the 30 per cent, or so, who did not?

It is all so much simpler under proportional representation. Bear in that that method of voting works well where the voters are mostly illiterate. All you have to do is count all the ballots from the election and let each party appoint members of the parliament according to their percentage of the vote. The only problem is that the only person you can vote for is the leader of the party. You might never have a member of parliament who represents you or your area. You probably, never again, have a majority government that can get things done.

I like the way we do it today. Canadians are going to be interested in seeing who wins. Because the only poll that matters is the poll we will be counting on October 21.

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

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

 

Don’t sweat the big stuff.

by Peter Lowry

This election campaign is built around small stuff. We even have small minded politicians to keep the arguments unimportant. Nobody seems to want to fight over the important things that could change the way of life for Canadians. It seems like a typical Canadian election.

After all, why argue about his silly power corridor for Canada when you can accuse Andrew Scheer of being a closet American? Did you know that John A. Macdonald built the first real power corridor across Canada and called it a railroad? Did you know that the first telecommunications corridor in Canada ran down those same tracks? Scheer is really a latecomer to that power corridor game.

And who complained about the liberals having two airplanes for this election? If our lame news hounds cannot get off the bus and walk to the airplane, then you are going to have the occasional prang on the tarmac between bus and plane. The liberals are just showing that they are prepared by having two planes already painted and ready to go.

Who cares if the green party promises will be kept? Do you really expect Elizabeth May to be forming a government? What makes you think her green party would even be able to make a deal with a minority government?

It looks as though the conservative campaign should be happy with all the dirt being dug up about Scheer. It must prove to them that Scheer has a chance.

What is the definition of a loser in this election? Have you ever realized that it is someone to whom nobody bothers to attack? It is hardly that his opponents love Jagmeet. They just do not want to take a chance on being called racist. They will leave that to Maxime Bernier of the peoples’ party. He is going nowhere anyway.

But what a two-bit, useless election this is! I could have filled a file drawer with all the small-minded promises of the unimaginative parties with the knowledge that very few are ever likely to be kept.

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

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

TVA provides a forum for losers.

by Peter Lowry

Making sense of the political sparring on Pierre Karl Péladeau’s French language television network, TVA, on Wednesday was easy. It was the time for Yves-François Blanchet of the Bloc Québécois and the New Democrat’s Jagmeet Singh to come on strong and hard. This was their first major chance to make their case for rural Quebec votes.

Both of these minor party leaders are faced with not being recognized as an official party in the house of commons. You need to elect 12 members to be recognized as a party. And with that recognition comes staffing money and the right to ask questions in the house.

It is no surprise to note that the urge to separate from Canada is a dying proposition in Quebec. It is not the challenge it was to the province’s youth 60 years ago. Blanchet stepped into the leader’s role of the Bloc because no one else was interested in the thankless job. A life-long Péquiste, Blanchet had previously served as a cabinet member in Pauline Marois’ Parti Québécois government.

But times have changed and instead of being the left leaning party of the past, Blanchet promotes the right wing CAQ government of François Legault. He cheerfully promoted the CAQ bigotry in Bill 21 that forbids the wearing of religious symbols by people in authority representing the Quebec government. He even needled Justin Trudeau on the subject but Trudeau stuck by his guns that he wanted to see how the courts treated the various challenges already in play.

I think the best act was by Jagmeet Singh who was fighting desperately to save even one or two of the 14 Quebec seats the NDP had on dissolution. He is fully prepared to give Quebec voters anything they want if he could just keep those seats.

Early in the day, I think Singh did a little street theatre with an old gentleman who told him, in English, to take off his turban and get a haircut. It would have been more credible if the media had not heard the old gentleman say he was going to vote NDP as he strolled away.

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

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

Doug Ford: The man who isn’t here.

by Peter Lowry

We hear that premier Doug Ford is low bridging this federal election. It is at the begging of his friend Andrew Scheer. Conservative leader Scheer did not want to be upstaged by his provincial supporter. Scheer’s handlers have enough trouble convincing voters that ‘Chuckles’ is not just a tool for the premiers.

It is hardly surprising that Scheer’s opponents travel around Ontario always mentioning the conservative leader and his provincial pal in the same breath.

But an education workers strike that will hit Ontario next week will be the convincer. It will be a fine example of what conservative policies will mean. Electing Scheer would mean erratic cuts in critical fields of government responsibility. Just one example will be a disaster for companies that export around the world. The other day Scheer said he would cut the small amount of foreign aid that Canada provides by 25 per cent. Just think of that as creating another 25 per cent decline in foreign purchases.

And Doug Ford does not need to say anything to make that connection. He is not just a blow-hard who recklessly cuts programs needed to help people. He is a man who thinks wealth has its privileges. He lied his way through the last Ontario election, saying he was ‘For the People.’

As soon as he was elected, he showed his vindictive side and proceeded to get even with the people of Toronto by cutting the number of councillors to a minimum that could not do the job for constituents. He downloaded social costs to municipalities stripping them of their ability to budget effectively and he took away municipal control of their mass transit operations. Doug Ford has since turned his sights on the health and education portfolios of the Ontario government. He has cut and has had to restore programs critical for the sick. He has reduced the number of teachers and increased class sizes in our schools.

This is the conservative strategy for all of Canada. It would be bare bones government if we elect Andrew Scheer and the conservatives on October 21.

And if you do not think he is like his friend Doug Ford, you did not pay attention when Scheer was speaker of the house of commons for the last four years of the Harper conservative regime. It was an unruly, disrespectful government and past legislation that shamed Canadians. We do not want to go backward.

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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

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

The confusion of the pollsters.

by Peter Lowry

It is difficult sometimes to explain why the opinion pollsters are straining themselves in this current Canadian election. If we had proportional voting, it would all be so easy. It is because we use first-past-the-post voting that we are so confused. It is because Canadians actually prefer first-past-the-post that it comes to this.

What needs to be remembered is that under our voting system, we do not have one election. We are having 338 elections to decide who runs the country. Some of the elections are considered a slam-dunk and many are being hotly contested.

Not all the candidates are the same. Not all the voters feel the same way. There are regional differences. There are different candidates. Canadians do not think alike from coast to coast. There are rural voters and urban voters. And did I mention different languages? There are also smart voters and a few dumb voters. There are many age groups and supposed classes of voters. This is why political leaders exhaust themselves fliting around the country, making extravagant promises to all the different types of Canadians.

And sometimes it is not a question of who are the 70 per cent of Canadians who voted but who were the 30 per cent, or so, who did not?

It is all so much simpler under proportional representation. Bear in mind, that method of voting works well where the voters are mostly illiterate. All you have to do is count all the ballots from the election and let each party appoint members of the parliament according to their percentage of the vote. The only problem is that the only person you can vote for is the leader of the party. You might never have a member of parliament who represents you or your area. You probably, never again, have a majority government that can get things done.

I like the way we do it today. Canadians are going to be interested in seeing who wins. Because the only poll that matters is the poll we will be counting on October 21.

-30-

Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry

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