Federal Politics – Page 73 – Babel-on-the-Bay

‘Chuckles’ challenges secret(?) tax.

July 12, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Conservative leader Andrew ‘Chuckles’ Scheer sent another letter to prime minister Justin Trudeau. He wants Justin to come clean on his secret tax. You know the one. It was the secret tax the prime minister updated the news media about on June 28. It was the one first mentioned two years ago when the government announced it would work with the industry to set new standards for cleaner fuel for cars and for home heating oils.

Some people think it makes good sense for the government and the industry to work together to set these new standards. There is no point in government setting standards that the industry cannot achieve. And nobody is saying that the industry cannot improve the cleanliness of its products. The only problem is that it takes time to work it through. There are a lot of people needing to discuss this.

And that is why it could be some time in 2020 that some standards can be set. It took the Harper government over ten years of supposed discussions until 2015 and Canadians never did hear of any results.

But Chuckles is not happy with the delays when the shoe is on the other foot. He says that if he is elected in 2019, he will scrap any standards for cleaner fuels. He will also scrap the liberal government carbon tax that the government takes from the fuel producers and rebates to the public.

In his letter Chuckles demands that the government tell him how much the new standards will cost—even though they have not been set yet. It is assumed he wants to know in case he has a chance to also cancel that charge. He is already upset with the four-cent carbon tax on a litre of gasoline that consumers pay and get back in an annual rebate. He is sure that the new standards, when set, will add another four cents per litre to the cost of gasoline. He might just be guessing.

It is not that Chuckles does not have a plan to help save our world. It just seems to be secret.

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Singh scans the Six.

July 11, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Canada’s new democratic party leader has been seen in Ontario. Party leader Jagmeet Singh is engaged in a desperate rear-guard action this summer for some Toronto area ridings. Faced with the possible loss of their party standing in the house of commons, the NDP have realized that the Toronto area is where they will take their last stand.

The only problem Jagmeet faces is that most of those ridings that traditionally vote NDP deserted and went to the liberals in 2015. There is little chance of getting any of them back this time. With very few exceptions, the distaste for the Ford conservative government at Queen’s Park is driving many previously conservative votes to the liberal party. Jagmeet can’t catch a break.

It is similar confusion across Canada. While the opinion polls are coming into line with forecasting a minority government situation in Ottawa, it is different parties benefitting in different provinces.

While Jagmeet has hopes for holding his own Vancouver area riding, Elizabeth May’s Green Party looks like it will have its breakthrough in that province. Nobody is assuming anything but the ‘same-old/same-old’ across the prairies. All we know about Quebec is that that the NDP Orange Wave created by the late Jack Layton in 2011 is dead, the Bloc is moribund and Maxime Bernier is going to knock the conservatives out of the Quebec City area (and probably leave those ridings to the liberals). And that leaves the Atlantic playing some musical chairs but not causing much change. It all comes back to Ontario.

My best guess is that if Justin Trudeau spends all of September and October, up until the 21^st, in central Ontario, he has a chance. There is a band of red-necked farmers stretching across the province, from Ottawa to Windsor, who think God is a conservative.

But I am sure, those farmers would all like a selfie with Justin. That is his only chance.

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The inscrutable ‘Chuckles’ Scheer.

July 8, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Conservative leader Andrew ‘Chuckles’ Scheer sent a letter to prime minister Justin Trudeau the other day. He has come to the conclusion that Justin needs help in foreign affaires. He is particularly concerned that Canada is being bullied by the Chinese. “Chuckles’ is full of helpful tips—he seems to think he knows so much about the subject.

One can only hope that Justin ignores all advice from this source. You have to wonder if Chuckles has ever spent more than a few minutes in conversation with a person who grew up in Beijing, or anywhere else in Asia. Does he have any idea of the Chinese mindset?

He would be better off advising Trudeau on how to deal with his friend Donald Trump. Chuckle’s conservatives are always saying they are the business-oriented party and Donald Trump claims to be a businessman. And speaking about bullies! I would agree with Trudeau getting tough with Trump. Tough talk is the only thing that bastard Trump seems to respect.

But the Chinese do not tolerate tough talk as well. It is not their style. North American business people often used to talk about Chinese business people as being inscrutable. It was their way of admitting that they did not understand them.

And yet, it is so simple. The Chinese like to deal with relationships first. The product is secondary. If we could just let them save a little face out of this fiasco, it would go a long way to correcting the current problems. Canada can hardly win a tit-for-tat pissing match with a huge trading partner who really just wants to be friends.

And what kind of a relationship does the Canadian government think it is maintaining with the Chinese when it will not even replace the Canadian ambassador after firing him in January for being frank about the Huawei extradition claim by the Americans. Mr. Trudeau has insulted the Chinese in his ignorance. He hardly needs help to make things worse by following the ignorance of Chuckles.

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The failure of Justin Trudeau’s Senate.

July 2, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It had to become obvious to Canadians eventually that Justin Trudeau’s version of a Senate is a disaster. Justin seems to think that an elite group of senators, picked by an elite committee will produce hard working senators. Well, it doesn’t and it won’t.

This was the equivalent of Justin promising voting reform when Justin knew very little about any of the alternatives. Canadians are used to first-past-the-post and it works for them.

But this Senate is now a problem. Whether you pick elites for the Senate or for the House of Commons, you are going to make mistakes. What frightens me is that these people do not understand the political realities. The problems that the prime minister created with his politically correct Cabinet were bad enough. I could care less if they were all women—provided they knew what they were doing and had some political smarts to help keep them out of trouble.

Justin threw the lambs to the wolves in both the Cabinet and the Senate. Stephen Harper at least had some basic criteria for the people he appointed. They had to be conservatives with some provincial or federal experience and his supporters. He had only a few failures.

Maybe he would still like to throttle Mike Duffy, but the reality was that Duffy did what he was told. The only problem was that Duffy, though he reported on politics, consorted with politicians and obviously had a generous expense account when with CTV, had no idea of the trust involved in the parliamentary system. Somebody had to blow the whistle on him.

Canada now has a Senate that does not function for us. You can hardly fire these people, so they are enjoying themselves. And what the hell is Justin going to do about it? It might be too late to swamp the Senate again with liberals. If ‘Chuckles’ Scheer wins the election on October 21, he will have a line up of conservative senators ready to appoint.

The reality in October could be a minority parliament. We will have a House of Commons that will take forever to make up its mind and the Senate will delay everything further.

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Think Big for Canada.

July 1, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Do you really believe in this country? Do you believe in your good fortune to be a Canadian? These questions are asked this July 1 in all seriousness. We should ask them more often. I think there are too many of us who pay lip service to the country on this day and then go back to wondering what the country can do for them.

I think we have too much rhetoric on this day and too little commitment. What we are doing is thinking small. We are looking inward to our own wants—not necessarily our needs. Today and maybe every day, we should set aside our wants and look to what others need. If we all put some energy into the needs of others, we would not have to look so hard and so long for what we might need.

On the world stage, Canada is an underachiever. Oh sure, others think of Canada as nice. They admire the green of our forests and the richness of our land and its resources. Yet we restrict admission to this land of plenty and we build resentments. Canadians can be hypocrites.

Canada has to open its doors much wider. We have to tell those people Donald Trump is keeping out of America that there is room for them in Canada. We have to learn from the Germans how they took in the hordes of the desperate from North Africa and from the Middle East.

The point is that this country has to grow much faster. It has to grow in workforce and in energy and in attitudes. We need more soldiers for aiding the populace in peace and protecting them. We need more navy to patrol what is becoming our northern shores. We need more air force to properly patrol our skies.

Farming is becoming more mechanized, more corporate but it still needs people who can endure, dream, work and achieve to feed a larger population and develop more to feed the world.

We need high-speed transportation in Canada and that will take engineers, and emerging technologies and the workers to build the greater Canada for tomorrow.

But you add to the list. Each and everyone of us shares this responsibility. Each of us to our own ability. Each of us to add to the dream. Each of us to build. Happy Canada Day. Let’s get out there and wave our flag!

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‘Chuckles’ challenges consensus.

June 27, 2019 by Peter Lowry

There will be no apology for calling federal conservative leader Andrew Scheer, Chuckles. He practically giggled his way through a ten-minute on-air version of an interview with Mercedes Stephenson on Global’s West Block last Sunday. Mercedes might not have the gravitas of a Tom Clark or a Vassy Kapelos, but he could have answered some of her questions. For Chuckles to blame the model, on which his environmental plan is based, on the parliamentary budget officer was not only silly but irrelevant.

In the same sense, Chuckles and his crew must have been smoking something soothing when they came up with the plan to have industry dream up the environmentally friendly ways of cutting greenhouse gas. Without suggesting costs or the benefits to industry, or who would provide the funding and who would oversee the program, it seemed to be a half-baked idea—whose time has not come.

After his interview we were still left assuming that he will be keeping his commitment to ending the carbon tax for premiers Ford and Kenney. Since the liberal’s carbon tax is basically a revenue neutral plan, it is only being discontinued by the conservatives because it is annoying for those premiers who do not seem to have any plan for the environment of their own.

Where Chuckles really gets himself tied in knots is the conservative proposition that major polluters will pay if they do not cut emissions. Now that promise might sound much like a carbon tax to you and I, but Chuckles said it was not.

But for all of this supposedly tough talk about the environment, Chuckles also wants to assure Canadians that he is really a moderate guy. He figures it worked (for a while) for Stephen Harper, so he should try to sail the same ship.

But he has also learned from watching his friend Doug Ford trying to do everything in the first year. Chuckles will try to take longer before annoying the voters. We hear that he is even going to take a few years before balancing the budget. Chuckles might as well chuckle. Nobody wants to see him cry.

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No facts please, a Toronto Star editorial.

June 26, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It is always assumed that editorials in newspapers are more about opinions than facts. And that makes the Toronto Star just as biased as the National Post. The other day the Star’s editorial was a full-bore, full column support for our prime minister’s pipeline. Like the PM, it was small on facts but big on hyperbole.

It promised you that it would take the average reader six minutes to read the editorial. It would take a generation to forgive. Mind you, like a stopped clock, the editorial was occasionally right. Yes, the original pipeline is more than 60 years old. Yet, they are going to heat the contents of the line, increase the pressure and add a second pipe along side the first, to effectively triple the throughput.

And then they start to lie to the reader. They say “Sending the oil through a pipeline, rather than by more dangerous rail, to Vancouver won’t increase the province’s carbon footprint.”

Other than implying that railways are an unsafe way to transport goods, this is a doubly ridiculous statement. The pipeline is not just being twinned. It is being repurposed to carry diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. That is not ‘oil.’

Converting bitumen to ersatz crude oil is the most polluting process carried out by refineries. The refining process for bitumen creates tonnes of carbon slag. And if your refinery is in Alberta or is one of the ‘tea cup’ refineries in Northern China, you are still producing this carbon to pollute our earth. We only have one earth at present and we need to think of that occasionally.

If the editorial writer assumes that the excessive pollution of Canadian bitumen does not weigh on Canadians and come back to us, the writer has no understanding of the earth’s atmosphere.

But the writer tells us: This is the opinion of the Star’s editorial board. Do not bother us with facts.

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It’s going to be a smack-down election.

June 24, 2019 by Peter Lowry

The anticipated federal election in October looks like one that nobody can win. All the political parties are going into the election with heavy baggage. Nobody has the confidence of the nation. It could be the most bitter, hardest fought election in Canada’s history. There is too much at stake for voters to not vote. There is too much to lose in voting for any one party. We need to vote for candidates who will work to reform their political parties.

We cannot have political parties tearing apart our nation.

There was a rare Canadian phenomenon recently, as we saw millions in Toronto come out to celebrate. They clogged the parade route in boisterous cheering. City hall and area were hopelessly crowded, beyond any imagined capacity—a sea of happy celebrants. They gave rapturous cheers for the players and coaches and their mayor. They gave proper applause for the participation of the prime minister. They gave raspberries and one-finger salutes to their premier. That told us more than any opinion poll.

The conservative party in Canada has lost all credibility as it denies the dangers of the detritus cast aside so casually in a scarred and warming world. The liberals lost their credibility the other day when they said they would complete the twinning of the Trans Mountain pipeline. They want countries that do not care about pollution and global warming to process the horrific output of Canada’s tar sands.

At the same time, the new democrats are offering everything if Canadians will give them a chance to govern. And the Green party brings its one-note band to the event.

The facts are that not one of these parties is fit to govern. Each is found wanting. The conservatives are ideologues, they want small government, tax cuts for the rich and privileged and they paint impossible scenarios of curing climate concerns. At the same time, Canada’s liberal prime minister tells us Canada is a country of law but tries to impose political solutions when our largest engineering firm breaks the law. His cabinet brags of their concern for the environment while approving a pipeline of pollution across British Columbia.

And there are our also-ran parties. They want to save our environment but who would run our country?

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NDP’s Jagmeet Singh is ‘All In.’

June 20, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It is the bet in Texas hold ‘em poker that separates the men from the boys. ‘All in’ is the act of pushing all your chips into the pot on a ‘winner takes all’ basis. In politics it is going all the way with a proposed program rather than taking the half-measures of your opponent. It is the difference between the mealy-mouthed approach to Pharmacare announced by the federal liberals and the full-blown version that complements Medicare and includes drugs, dental care and vision care.

As in poker, it is the player with nothing to lose that makes the best offers. Jagmeet Singh, as leader of the NDP has nothing to lose. The likelihood of his being able to implement such a program is in keeping with his ability to fly by flapping his arms.

Yet it is really too bad that the NDP are going to lose in October. Canada would regain some of its momentum in becoming a really good country in which to live and work and play by implementing the NDP program. The plan is so much better that that sad-sack approach put together by that former Ontario health minister Eric Hoskins. I had always considered Hoskins to be a right-wing liberal. He proved it by suggesting to the Trudeau government that they have a phased in program that would cause years of wrangling between the provinces and the federal government.

Not that the NDP would not meet the solid rejection of their plan by the provinces. The conservative provincial legislatures as well as Quebec would dig in their heels in the same way as they fought the original Medicare. There would be road blocks and court challenges. Voters would be confused by the various arguments.

Of course, the most serious opponents are not just the right-wing politicians. They would be funded by the insurance companies that see a large part of their revenue disappearing as Canada goes to a single-payer. The $5 billion plus in savings for Canadians would include the profit insurance companies have been making on their health care plans for industries and unions. We would have to wrest that money from their ‘cold, dead hands!’

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Circle your wagons; they’re on the warpath.

June 15, 2019 by Peter Lowry

And here we thought war rooms in politics were a thing of the past? Now we see that the Toronto Sun has resurrected the idea with a one-time liberal in command. This must be the companion war room that PostMedia, owners of the Sun, promised Alberta premier Jason Kenney to complement his war room against the ‘lying’ eastern media. This includes those particular media that do not approve of Kenney’s province shipping highly polluting tar sands bitumen in pipelines or any other way.

I checked out what must have been a podcast coming from PostMedia’s Sun war room. I was not impressed. It was a seemingly tired diatribe against prime minister Justin Trudeau. It was, what it was.

But it seems Paul Godfrey and friends are taking an ‘anything goes’ approach to this election campaign. While PostMedia publications are well known for their conservative bias, bias might be too mild a word for their current stance.

Despite Trudeau’s insistence (to this time) that he is intent on finishing twinning the Trans Mountain pipeline, it is not fast enough for Kenney and PostMedia. It is not really ideal for democracy when you consider that PostMedia with both the Herald and Sun newspapers in Calgary and both the Journal and Sun newspapers in Edmonton dominate Alberta media with a combined daily circulation of well over two million copies.

PostMedia is majority owned by American Media Inc. (AMI) which has a stayed indictment by the southern district of New York federal prosecutor office on condition of good behaviour for three years, until September 2021. This possible prosecution was over some improprieties believed to be in support of Donald Trump’s presidency. It was because of this that AMI was forced to sell the National Enquirer and other similar publications.

Canadians have never been too impressed with the National Post or any other PostMedia publications. I tend to think of them as Paul Godfrey and Conrad Black’s legacy.

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