Federal Politics – Page 70 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Singh is preying on fears.

August 24, 2019 by Peter Lowry

New democratic party leader Jagmeet Singh seems to think that the big and uncontrolled world is too much for our young people. He tells them life is ripping them off. He tells them that the world is a place of low-paid, menial jobs. He warns them of escalating tuition costs, insurmountable mountains of student debt and rapacious cellphone and credit-card companies.

And Jagmeet wonders why the Green party is pushing the NDP down to a possible fourth place finish in the coming election?

Politicians used to promise a chicken in every pot. The NDP leader is wanting to appear more modern and is only promising to lead the parade demanding justice. It can hardly hold a candle to Justin Trudeau’s promise that we can all join his wondrous middle class. The only people who might not be interested in joining the middle class are the much-maligned multimillionaires.

But Jagmeet promises to tax the rich so that they too can join the middle class.

Thinking back to when I was young and looking forward to my first vote in a federal election, I would not have bought the NDP proposals. I saw the world in a different way. I saw it as an exciting opportunity, an adventure and an endless opportunity for wonderful experiences. I saw no boundaries to success as I stepped away from the safe haven of caring family.

And I made a point of learning about politics and politicians as I thought about what it meant to vote. I was in a position that provided me an opportunity to not only meet my local politicians but I also met the prime minister of the time, John George Diefenbaker, and his main opponent, Lester Bowles Pearson. The men impressed me and I had memorable conversations with each.

But it was the liberal candidate in my riding who impressed me and won my support for him and his party. It launched me into a lifelong interest and involvement in politics.

This is the first federal election in 60 years in which I do not see an obvious result. It fascinates me and I will continue to try to give you a daily commentary on where our politicians are headed.

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Wilson-Raybould’s not a party person.

August 22, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It was amusing reading Jody Wilson-Raybould’s remarks yesterday seeking to justify her running as an independent candidate. What a terrible waste of talent, tenacity and time that is! It is also an embarrassing waste of money for her and her supporters. And, if by any slim chance that she wins her electoral seat, it will be an ongoing and wasted cost for the taxpayers.

Canada’s parliament, by tradition, by house rules and by acceptance of the governed, is run by and for political parties. Without bringing up the problems that the current system creates and the many abuses of the party system, it is a system that works for Canada. Until we collectively demand a better quality and more independence for our members of parliament, the system will work for parties and not for the electors.

Over the years, we have watched as poorly qualified people have manipulated our parliamentary system while those who cared about the needs of Canadians waited to be recognized. The one thing for sure is that you are but a wart on the system without the support of a recognized political party.

The one thing for sure is it costs too much to house, transport and remunerate a member of parliament for Canadians to support independents who are nothing more than a ward-healer for their electoral district. There is little else the member can do.

And that is why independents rarely win a seat. I doubt very much that Jane Philpott will win her Ontario seat as an independent. The most likely scenario, if she puts up a strong campaign, will be that she will draw off liberal support and enable the conservative to win. Will she be proud of that?

In British Columbia, no pundit is making any promises. This coming election night will be a long one until we start to learn the counts in B.C. As things stand at the moment, for every kilometre of pipe laid in the expanded Trans Mountain pipeline, another liberal stalwart will fall on the Left Coast.

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The Funny Farm runs the election.

August 20, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It is that time of year. Mid-summer is no time for serious. Even Elections Canada has joined the fun. In a television interview yesterday, an Elections Canada spokes person said with a straight face that she did not know what is being told to environmentalists about the rules of arguing with politicians who are climate change deniers.

It was the same laugh as I had when as president of the Multiple Sclerosis Society, a friend, who happened to be a member of Pierre Trudeau’s cabinet, told me I would have to register as a lobbyist before asking him to increase funding for medical research. All he got for that advice was a raising of my middle finger.

It seemed the media were having some fun yesterday interpreting the election rules that no judge would allow to waste the time of the court. While technically you could say that the MS Society was spending more than the limit for media space during the period of the election, that media time and space was all donated to the society by the print and broadcast media companies.

The entire discussion is inane but a friend called me yesterday to discuss the idea of the flat earth society running candidates in the election. He thought it would be funny if we would all have to stop showing the earth as round during the election.

But this is closer to the truth than you think. As much as you might think Maxime Bernier has scrambled a few marbles, he has a right to his disbelief in climate change. He seems to think this is all just some form of hysteria.

But what is even funnier. I am thinking we all should be complaining to Elections Canada about these stickers that Ontario taxpayers are paying to put on gas pumps in the province during the election period. How much did those political advertisements cost?

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Why listen to Bernier?

August 19, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Chantal Hébert made an interesting case the other day. She wrote in the Toronto Star that Maxime Bernier of our new People’s Party of Canada should be allowed to be part of the leader debates for the October 21 election. Despite it being doubtful that Bernier will retain his own parliamentary seat for Beauce in the election, the columnist thinks he has a contribution to make.

Hébert makes her case by complaining that people want to exclude Bernier because of his party’s policies. (The new democrats have complained that the PPC promotes “hateful and intolerant ideas.”) She notes that similar complaints were made about the Bloc Québécois and the Reform Party when they first appeared on the electoral scene.

She argues that the form of populism Bernier espouses has already taken root in the United States and is rampant throughout western Europe. She sees no reason to sweep this truth under the rug. She would prefer to address it head-on.

The only problem with her viewpoint is that time on national television is an expensive commodity and these arguments would be better handled in high school civics classes. Teaching tolerance and open-mindedness is not something you can convince people of in the hard pace of a political debate. And definitely not coming into the wind-up of a national election.

My one serious argument is that reality is there are currently 16 federally registered political parties in Canada and if they all were give access to the debate, it would be cumbersome and a frankly boring affair. It is bad enough that we will have five party leaders representing their respective parties in the two debates. It means that politeness will become more important than spontaneity and there can be little interaction between the leaders.

I think voters learn more about these so-called leaders when the debate is open and honest. They need to address each other and call out their dishonesties. The moderator is not there to referee but to ensure each is heard.

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Diogenes, Leadership and SNC-Lavalin.

August 15, 2019 by Peter Lowry

There is no time left for what might have been. Canadians are going into an election when what we so desperately want to say is ‘None of the above.’ Are we condemned to face a future of failure? Are we helpless? Have we found there is no honest man?

Justin Trudeau embarrasses us. Jagmeet Singh insults us. Andrew Scheer frightens us and there is no other workable solution.

Justin Trudeau has been weighed in the scales and found wanting. He should have resigned six months ago and given the liberal party a chance to regroup. His chief of staff knew to resign. The clerk of the privy council chose to resign. Justin Trudeau believed that he was untouchable. He was aiding his enemies. He was creating a conundrum for Canadian voters.

In a world facing disastrous climate change, we are seeing the frustration of electorates and civilizations around the world. Populists of the right and left are our false prophets. We turn to a Trump or Brexit and wonder at the failures.

In Canada, that so welcomes those seeking freedom from oppression, a single ethnic group swamps the membership of a political party. Singh embarrasses the NDP. This is no solution.

And it has been an extended silly season for the conservatives in the past few years. They had a federal leadership that chose the least of potential leaders in a federal lottery that proved that leadership does not matter. And then they chose right-wing demigods in Alberta and Ontario to claim the conservative brand.

With two months to go before the election, there is much to resolve. Canadians are resourceful. Let us find that solution together.

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When the real campaign begins.

August 14, 2019 by Peter Lowry

They remind me of a bunch of outlaw bikers, warming up their hogs for a race. They have all taken off their mufflers for that extra bit of speed. The full-throated roar of those bikes makes the ground seem to tremble. And the clouds of exhaust fumes obscure the start.

When you think about it, you realize that it was the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh who took the early start. He needed it. When you have to hitch-hike across the country, you need a good head start. (Have you checked the price of air fare or rail tickets across the country lately?) Fund-raising for the NDP has not been what it used to be.

And then the guy who really needs the exposure has been shy about it. ‘Chuckles’ Scheer does not do himself any good exposing himself to the voters. While the conservatives have no problem reaching into the pockets of their rich friends, Scheer is not the best campaigner. He was practicing on Cape Breton last week and there was concern expressed that he was doing serious damage to the local conservative candidates.

What puzzles the voters meeting Chuckles in the campaign will be questions such as: “Why does this guy not believe in climate change?” “Why does this guy want to keep Doug Ford away from his campaign?” and “What qualifies this guy to be prime minister?”

What is even more concerning about Chuckles is that he does not believe in campaigning by any form of Marquess of Queensberry rules. He is claimed to have used the classic ‘roorback’ political tactic against the NDP’s Lorne Nystrom in the 2004 federal election. He claimed (when it was too late for a response) that Nystrom was soft on child pornography to defeat the longest serving NDP MP by close to a thousand votes.

But in what should be a cakewalk of a campaign for Justin Trudeau, the prime minister has created obstacles such as the albatross of the Trans Mountain pipeline, the travesty of the SNC-Lavalin debacle and he will always have the pictures of the family visit to India. All is not that rosy for the liberals either.

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Who is this guy Scheer?

August 13, 2019 by Peter Lowry

The conservative party has been working hard over the summer at getting ‘Chuckles’ Scheer better known. It reminds me of that old Rodgers and Hammerstein song, Getting to Know You, that Julie Andrews made famous in The King and I. What should be remembered about the song is the point that the more the teacher learns about her students, the more they learn about her.

But when it comes to party leaders and voters, that is often not the ideal. Maybe the party needs to sugar coat that party leader to make him more palatable to voters. You can bring in all the performance experts you want but Scheer will always look like a clown ready for his make-up. And you need to be very afraid of this clown.

Scheer is much like Stephen Harper without the personality. He is a hard-line social conservative. Much of the bad parliamentary behaviour in the last four years of Harper’s government could be placed in the lap of Chuckles in the speaker’s chair. Chuckles was too partisan for the job. When he ran for the leadership of the party, his slogan of “Real Conservative, Real Leader” you knew the first half was easily accepted.

When he won the conservative leadership by a convoluted voting process, he won on the 13^th ballot by less than one per cent of the vote. The best way to describe the voting was that it drilled down to the least formidable of the 13 final contestants and chose Chuckles. It was anticipated that he would hold the position through this year’s election and then be replaced by someone more dynamic.

As voters see him in the spotlight over the summer, they are less than impressed. Even with a prepared text, he lacks the energy and drive that could make him credible. His policy positions are weak and his delivery of them is insipid. It is like none of his staff care to help him. Even though the conservatives and liberals were seen as equally good for the Canadian economy at the beginning of the summer, it is the conservatives that have been losing ground. They are on the ebb tide.

Once the real dialogue of the election gets under way, Chuckles will be the also-ran that was expected of him.

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Singh sings a survival song.

August 12, 2019 by Peter Lowry

You have to admit, Jagmeet Singh, leader of the new democrats, is a hard worker. His main objective in the run-up to the October 21 election is to try to ensure that the new democratic party elects the 12 members of parliament needed to be recognized as a party in the house of commons. He has to convince Canadians that there still is a need for his third party.

Singh’s dilemma is that nobody is listening and the NDP do not have the money for a campaign that would get your attention. With most polls now agreeing that the liberals are trending back to better numbers, October will likely be just a two-party race. And there is still a great deal to be decided in the race in the days remaining.

But it his own party that is doing Singh in. With a quarter of his caucus bowing out of the election, you wonder what Singh said to offend them. Maybe it was Singh signing up of enough Sikhs in British Columbia and Ontario to swamp the NDP membership and win the leadership of the party that annoyed them. It was a foolish move that is causing problems for the party.

Singh is trading off the 15 remaining NDP seats in Quebec that were held over from the Orange Wave of Jack Layton and kept alive by Thomas Mulcair. It is questionable if any of those seats are safe. And with the current political tensions in B.C., it is doubtful that all the current 13 NDP seats there are very safe.

To refer to the NDP brain trust might seem like an oxymoron but they really do have some people who know how campaigns should be run. Whether any of this expertise can help Singh is the question.

It reminds us of the old proverb: For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost, etc. In this case, the nail is the money the party needs to mount an effective campaign.

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From small creeks do mighty rivers flow.

August 11, 2019 by Peter Lowry

From the Manchester Guardian to the Toronto Globe and Mail, there have been reports of our federal government scientists testing spills of diluted bitumen from Alberta’s tar sands. As one source pointed out to me, this was the government laboratory that former prime minister Stephen Harper forgot to shut down. They are still doing their job today. They just do not realize how much has been done for them.

The researchers are at the Experimental Lake Region near Kenora, Ontario. They are pouring measured amounts of diluted bitumen into a fresh water lake to determine its impact. Everything is measured and contained to enable the researchers to forecast the impact of larger amounts of spilled bitumen.

The most important discovery to-date has been that diluted bitumen floats—for a while. The earlier assumption was that diluted bitumen had a lower density than water and could be easily be scooped from the surface of any water. This was a seriously incorrect assumption.

On the word of Americans in the area of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan and Canadians in the area of the North Saskatchewan River in Canada, diluted bitumen floats—for a while—and then sinks to the bottom of the water. In the earlier example in Michigan, the Enbridge people stopped counting the costs of clean-up at a billion U.S. dollars.

The smaller spill in Saskatchewan River was cheaper for the Husky company that owned that pipeline. The problem here was that less news got out about the spill because of the bias of the Alberta and Saskatchewan governments. They prefer to keep quiet about diluted bitumen spills.

But science is relentless and the federal government scientists will eventually get to experiment with water currents and tides and be able to tell us that diluted bitumen is a serious hazard in spills because it will drift or move with the currents until it can no longer float.

It is to be regretted that so much false information is still out there about using pipelines for diluted bitumen. It is not heavy oil.

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Never trust a guy with a pipeline.

August 10, 2019 by Peter Lowry

The prime minister can joke about it if he wishes but there are lots of people who will not vote for a guy with a pipeline. If it was just the old Kinder Morgan line that spanned the Rockies, we would not be as worried. It is all that pipe and equipment poised to twin the line and add heaters and higher pressure that are of serious concern.

The current plan for the Trans Mountain pipeline is to twin it, add those heaters to the line and increase the pressure in it. It only adds up to Burrard Inlet being crowded with ocean-going tankers taking on diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. It is a plan based entirely on greed, stupidity and climate change denial. The question is not just when will a couple of those ocean-going tankers play at being bumper cars but how many ways can we help destroy the habitats of the Orcas?

And the question of increasing the pressure in a pipeline commissioned in 1951 to enable it to push through diluted bitumen begs the question: ‘For how long?’

This is not a question that the prime minister would ever be expected to answer. Nor could he. And that is why there seems to be some delays in the decision-making process in Ottawa.

My guess, for what that is worth, is that the liberals will sell the Kinder Morgan property to the aboriginal tribes who have shown an interest. Since no Canadian banker, in his or her right mind, would put up the billions needed to complete the twinning of the line, that might just be the end of that foolishness.

While the people who care about the future of our earth will be working at reducing our requirements for carbon-based products, we know that for the next few decades we will still need some refined oil products. These can easily be shipped into B.C. and the Pacific coast states of the U.S. by pipeline. This will give the aboriginals a return on their investment. It will allow Justin Trudeau to be a bit more credible in promising to save the world.

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