Federal Politics – Page 69 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Slipping in the Slogan.

September 5, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It might surprise regular readers but this blogger does not believe in slogans. Oh yes, I use them, but more in sarcasm than in concurrence. It is just that I see an election as a sequence of events that can only become a slogan close to the end point: the voting. And the real theme is often something that the voters see before the politicians.

For the prime minister to be running around the country spouting some silly slogan about “choose forward” to anyone who is still listening is insulting to the listener and makes him sound feeble minded. What is the alternative? Walk Backward?

But, speaking of ‘feeble minded,’ have you heard Chuckles Scheer confounding the voters with “It is time for you to get ahead” which sounds rather mean-spirited. I think it works better if you change it to ‘It is time for you to get a head.’ You could consider it something of a public service slogan.

But it is not.

It is not as self-serving though as the NDP slogan that has been introduced as “In it for you.” It is unclear as to why they are in it for ‘you.’

It has potential though when you consider the additional words that could clarify the message. It is like the slogan used on billboards for conservative Barry Goldwater in the 1964 American presidential election. It simply said “You know he is right.” It worked until somebody started buying adjacent billboards saying “Yes, Far Right.”

But that is not as bad as the silly slogans that my city of Barrie uses. Depending if you approach the city from the north or the south on Highway 400, the northbound traffic sees the city as “Well played” and the southbound get the slogan “Well connected.” ‘Well played’ is a British term usually thought of as related to the game of cricket. ‘Well connected’ is more of a business term. Why either is used for a city such as Barrie, is lost on me.

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Can Kenney, Curly (Ford) and Moe pull it off?

September 4, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Conservative leader ‘Chuckles’ Scheer might not offer much of a challenge to Justin Trudeau but when you consider the three stooges running in the back field, it makes you think.

Canadians, outside of parliament and his Regina riding, have little reason to have an opinion of Chuckles. Very few of them know much about him. And nobody was wasting time calling for his head when he was such an inept speaker of the house of commons from 2011 to 2015. And in the time, he has been leader of his party, he pales behind the image of his former boss, Stephen Harper.

But having the three stooges running his backfield offence might just be the focus that pulls it off. They would add weight to any football team. They are certainly more colorful than most. Jason Kenney might be premier of Alberta today but he knows the tricks and lies needed to work the Ottawa scene. Curly (Doug Ford) premier of Ontario might be a bit of a bull in a china shop, but bull is bull and he is full of it. Scott Moe, premier of Saskatchewan, on the other hand, is an experienced Prairie politician.

And Jason Kenney has put together a particularly lethal false news team in Calgary. It is made up of writers from Paul Godfrey’s PostMedia and some key conservatives. That is potentially the deadliest weapon in the arsenal but it has not yet had a chance to really show its stuff.

It is assumed that Ford is just puttering around in the backfield awaiting a call when his style of bluster is necessary. Chuckles did publicly ask that Doug take a break and do nothing but that is not part of Ford’s nature.

While premier Moe would have been in the Regina MP’s corner anyway, he is probably more suited to the team approach.

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The Good Ship Singh is Sinking.

September 3, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Today’s comments were supposed to be a scholarly discussion about understanding political speeches. Maybe we can leave that for another time. Instead, we can have fun critiquing the new democratic party’s present-day prat falls.

Good grief folks! This election isn’t even ‘At Post’ yet and the NDP is falling apart. We have been expecting it but we assumed the funeral would be part of the results of the election.

I was thinking about this early last week when it was the liberal’s Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland who were being lionized at the Unifor convention in Quebec City. This is Canada’s largest union and there was not a single prominent NDPer in sight.

The poor dippers have been out of gas for quite some time. They made a disgrace of themselves as a party when they stabbed poor Tom Mulcair in the back in Edmonton in March of 2017. It was hardly just Mulcair’s fault that the party fell on hard times as Trudeau’s liberals talked of ‘Sunny Days.’

The schism between the old guard socialists and the newer NDP environmentalists was too broad. And with the Lewis name on the Leap Manifesto, it garnered more supporters than it really deserved.

The final straw was the surprise of Jagmeet Singh being able to swamp the membership of the NDP with Sikh immigrants in B.C. and Ontario. He won the leadership but seemed to have no plan on what to do with the party once it was his. His was just too long a learning period to please the old timers.

As it stands, the NDP has stumbled badly in fundraising and in organization for the election. With limited funds and starting to lose candidates before the election is even called, the NDP still has almost half of its candidates to find.

Jagmeet’s only plan at the moment is to try to save as many seats as possible. The way it looks though, the NDP could get wiped out in Quebec and lose at least half of their other seats across Canada. Jagmeet Singh’s leadership will be a short-term experience.

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The secret lists of our political parties.

September 2, 2019 by Peter Lowry

They are like the lists Santa Claus is supposed to keep at the North Pole as to which children are naughty or nice. With millions of listings for the voters of Canada, the raw data of name and address is provided to registered political parties by Elections Canada. It soon becomes a party-specific and confidential list of voters in each electoral district as each party adds information as to who is believed to be voting for which party.

In the case of the liberal party, the list is called Liberalist and also contains information about who has registered as a liberal with the party and how much they have donated to the party.

The most reliable information gained during the election campaign is what canvassers are told when they come to your door. And people that you thought were pollsters doing surveys also provide information for the lists. Back when I had direct access to the lists, I had to go in and change my own information periodically because I rarely told survey personnel the truth and never told the truth to automated calls.

If the canvasser determines you are a vote for his or her candidate and if you have not voted prior to election day, you can count of getting phone calls and people knocking on your door on election day. Their purpose is to make sure you vote.

This effort is very serious. In my riding of Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, had the liberals been able to find just one additional voter per poll, to go and vote liberal in the 2015 election, the liberals would have won the riding instead of the conservative.

How parties collect and use personal information has mainly been ignored across Canada. This might change though as various privacy authorities realize what information those databases contain and how easy they might be to hack. There is not that careful a screening of people gaining access to these political databases.

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Left, Right and In-Between.

September 1, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Labelling people is always a mistake. Even in psychiatry, people show tendencies down different pathologies. You hesitate to label them. In politics people are often confused by the parties in an election making promises outside their usual right or left-wing stance. During an election is no time to be doctrinaire.

I think it was Paul Martin Jr. who used the slogan, in private, “Campaign Left, Rule Right.” Whether he did or not, he was the first federal liberal leader I refused to support. I despised the way he could so callously strip Canada of much of the federal support for social programs during the Chrétien years. And I think a large number of Canadians agreed with me. The only problem was that I regretted my anger when we ended up with Stephen Harper as the booby prize. He was even further to the right than Martin.

It is amusing that in John Ivison’s recent book on Trudeau, that the author thinks Canada might be less progressive than Trudeau seems to believe. I really do not think Canadians vote right or left. They vote for leadership. They vote for the leader who appears to be taking the country in the direction necessary. And many just vote for the guy or gal running in their riding who best represents them.

John A, Macdonald and his confreres put this country together with vision and bands of steel. His thing was the railroad linking the country together. And, come hell or high water, he achieved that goal.

I think today, Canadians have too many pressures on them to come to a common understanding of where this country should be headed. All it should take is leadership and, frankly, we are not getting any. There is not one leader of a federal party in Canada worth a damn.

I would make something of an exception for Elizabeth May but her problem is that rag-tag bunch behind her that could not even run a Tim Hortons franchise. And do not ask them if they are right or left. Most would have to ask their leader.

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The Change in Chuckles.

August 31, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Did you notice the change in conservative leader Andrew Scheer? I was watching a Blue Jays game the other day and they had a political commercial between innings featuring him. It was not smoke and mirrors but make up. His prominent cheek bones had seemingly disappeared. I walked over to the high definition large screen TV and had a close look. That was it, just make up.

It probably will not help. He is still ‘Chuckles’ to many Canadians. We first noticed him when he was chosen house speaker for Stephen Harper’s last four years as prime minister. It was a time of unruliness in the commons for the conservatives, the insulting answers to serious questions in question period, the lack of decorum, and the uncontrolled conservative members of parliament.

It was not a surprise that the conservatives would compromise on Chuckles when choosing a new leader four years ago. The tide for Justin Trudeau’s liberals was still running strong at the time. Nobody seriously thought of Chuckles as a threat to him. Scheer was the stop-gap leader. He was just someone to hold down the job and to be replaced after this coming election.

Imagine the consternation when the tide for Justin turned to the ebb. He is hardly as smooth and as ready for being prime minister as so many thought he was. He makes foolish promises, he can be arrogant and he can make mistakes—even if he doesn’t admit it!

But imagine the consternation in conservative ranks when the polls started to say Chuckles could be the next prime minister. That blew the sleep out of many conservative eyes. What the hell were they going to do now?

But not so Kenney, Curly (Ford) and Moe. The three premiers thought that the Prairie religious conservative Scheer would be very cooperative with them—and they liked that idea. They were throwing their weight with Chuckles.

As the old Looney Toons cartoons used to say: “Th-Th-That’s all folks.”

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Senator Peter Harder tries harder.

August 30, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Former civil servant, Peter Harder really likes his new job in the Senate of Canada. As an independent(?) appointee to this body, he is also the government representative in the senate. Whether he is really an independent seems to be something of a wink-wink-elbow-jab condition open to interpretation.

And as many of his cohorts might concur, if the rest of those supposedly independent senators were really independent, running that place would be akin to the task of herding cats.

But luckily, as most of those habitués would attest, those independents seem to have a curious affection for the political party that appointed them as independents. Would you not have a warm and fuzzy feeling for the person who gave you a cushy job, paid at the same rate as a real member of parliament, guaranteed until you reach age 75 and a generous pension thereafter?

And I do not care how you spell ‘independent,’ Peter Harder was appointed by Justin Trudeau. And Harder knows where his boss’ office is located. It is hardly surprising that Harder thinks this new approach should be enshrined in legislation. He even has the nerve to say “I think Canadians would prefer a Senate that is less partisan, that seeks to improve legislation where appropriate, but doesn’t view itself as a challenging chamber to the political legitimacy of the House of Commons.” (From a Canadian Press interview.)

If Mr. Harder has the nerve to make such assumptions about Canadians, maybe he should be corrected on what he believes is the purpose of the Senate of Canada. It does have the right to challenge the Commons and that was its purpose when created by the founding colonies of Canada in concert with the powers that existed then at the parliament of Westminster.

The Senate exists today as an illegitimate and undemocratic embarrassment. Until it is either abolished or replaced with a properly elected body, Canada gets no value from it.

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Our political parties fail democracy.

August 29, 2019 by Peter Lowry

The party members have no one to blame but themselves. They have let the top-down party system run their parties since the Chrétien era. It was the simple change that required the party leader to sign off on the party’s candidates. It gave the party leader total control of the party. Nobody can run as a party candidate without the approval of a faceless committee—working for the leader.

In the liberal party, it is called a ‘green-light committee.’ The committee decides by its own standards (and on direction of the party leader’s minions) who will or will not be a candidate for the party. They try to keep the committee anonymous. With the potential for lawsuits, that is not a bad idea.

But when it is your riding that has no candidate this late with the election looming, you start to have dark thoughts about that committee. Maybe no as angry as the Quebec liberal riding executive in Vimy, who just lost their sitting member because it appears she was not meeting the standards of the green-light committee.

But there were also some angry liberals in my riding of Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte early Monday morning, when they got automated calls from the liberal party headquarters in Ottawa cancelling their nomination meeting scheduled for that evening.

It was not as though we were left without a candidate. The reason for the cancellation was that they had cancelled the green-light for one of our two possible candidates. Of, course, no reason was given, or questions answered. It was just that we did not need as large a hall for an acclamation event. It felt like we were being told “Here’s the candidate, we approved for you.” Like it or lump it!

We Canadians tell the rest of the world that it is great to live in a democracy. We should practice what we preach.

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There is an App for door-knocking?

August 28, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Having trained thousands over the years in the fun and accomplishments in knocking on doors for your local politician, I still know a bit about the art of identifying your vote. And that is what you are doing at all those doors on which you bruise your knuckles. You are finding out how the inhabitants of that household intend to vote.

I remember comparing notes with former Ontario premier David Peterson’s father on the subject. In a Toronto area by-election one time, he was getting the canvassers to come back to the committee rooms to be debriefed by C.-M. Peterson personally. That gentleman really understood what door-knocking was all about.

My first lesson in real door-knocking was when coming up against the NDP’s David Lewis family. I was something of an observer in that campaign. Former evangelist and then a newspaper executive, Charles Templeton was running for a by-election seat in the Ontario legislature. Despite having some of the most experienced liberals working on his campaign, Chuck got his head served to him on a platter. The NDP clobbered us.

And that was the last time where the NDP did that to a candidate of mine. The key was that your canvassers had to take ownership of their polls. Either alone or as a team, the canvassers had to know the voters in the poll and how they intended to vote. On election day or sooner, the canvassers had to make sure that the people supporting their party got to the polls and voted.

If someone, as reported by Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star, said they can access this new smart phone app and find out that one per cent of the households asked liberal canvassers about SNC-Lavalin, I would pay heightened attention to that concern. I would want to know if the person indicated a voting intention, the demographics of the household and the approximate age of the person being interviewed.

It is something like the question I would ask if the householder told the canvasser to get the hell off their porch. Was this request made before or after the canvasser identified with a particular political party?

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On running a national campaign.

August 26, 2019 by Peter Lowry

My late friend Senator Keith Davey used to start every day at his office with a ruled pad on which he would make all his notes for the day in amazingly small scribbles. Whether checking on perceptions of a current proposal by Pierre Trudeau’s government or reviewing a day’s progress during a national campaign, it was always just a single page that told the story. And Keith told it well.

I think the Rainmaker (as Keith was sometimes called) would have had to learn something about smart phones and texting to do that same type of research today. When you consider that a national campaign now consists of 338 electoral districts in a faster-paced world, I doubt his system would be as reliable as it was.

If anything worries me about the current campaign, it is that while those wrapped in the Ottawa mystique think it is just a repeat of their successful campaign of 2015, it is not possible.

In 2015, there was a hard core of the old liberals ready to work with whomever Justin Trudeau wanted to lead the parade. The Harper government was burnt out and the time was right for change. Trudeau and the team had an easy romp into office. He thought he had done it with ‘Sunny Days’ but the truth was it was those geriatrics of the old liberal party who had pulled together in hopes of the old glory days of Trudeau’s father. They shared that win proudly.

But Trudeau the Younger dismissed them. There was no rebuilding of the party after the election. It was a time of dismissal. The old liberals became not proud members of a party but a collection of names from which donations were requested almost daily.

The truth is that the old party is dying off and there is no renewal. There is no pride in liberalism. The political edge is being lost to the populists and braggarts of the right.

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