Federal Politics – Page 75 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Profiling politicians.

May 29, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It is often amusing in the popular American TV program Criminal Minds when one of the actors, playing the part of an FBI agent, without much script support, out of the blue, says it is time to deliver the profile. They remind me very much of how our political commentators can profile our politicians based on so little evidence.

In all sincerity, I believe that it takes considerable experience and observation to profile politicians. The reason we all fail when it comes to someone such as Donald Trump in the U.S.A. or Doug Ford in Ontario is that neither gentleman can be truly described as a politician. They are political wannabes and fail so miserably at the task before them.

But it is also easier to profile the run-of-the-mill politician than profiling political leaders. Leaders require a further set of profiling steps. Would you, for example, have profiled a young Reform M.P. named Steve Harper in the 1990s as potential leadership material?

Let’s look at an abbreviated profile of the three federal leaders of the major political parties in Ottawa and maybe we can see how it works:

Let’s start with the new democrats. Jagmeet Singh profiles well as a politician. Where he falls down is that he is an observant Sikh. Canadians, in general, have little knowledge or experience with Sikhism. It will work against his party. Some bigotry is involved though, in most cases, it is the just that people do not like to vote for a person they do not feel they know.

Andrew Scheer of the conservatives, on the other hand, is your typical white Prairie politician in a suit. He lacks personality and is easily forgettable. He has hardly done anything that would cause people to dislike him. Nor has he done anything to cause people to like him. He could get elected simply because he is a known brand of politician.

This counters liberal leader Justin Trudeau. In some parts of the country people love or hate him simply for his name. He is faced with being considered effete, elitist and ineffective. His signature promise in the last election of voting reform was a mistake and it is going to cost him this time.

Now, if the election was tomorrow, for whom would you vote?

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Defining a different destiny.

May 28, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott have chosen their political destiny. They have chosen the path to likely political oblivion. There are few politicians who have come back from the Coventry of parliament to survive as an independent. To run as independent candidates is an ‘All-in’ bet.

The two former liberal cabinet ministers obviously had the door held wide for them to join in almost any other party. For them to refuse all offers is either their inflated idea of their importance or a wish to make their statement and then fade into the night. If nothing else, they will likely deny their ridings to the official liberal candidate.

Frankly, there is little they can really contribute to Canada’s parliament as independent members. Even worse, there is little they can do for the people who vote for them. Seated in the furthest corner of the chamber and with no rights other than those given by one of the recognized parties, you quickly become the forgotten Canadian.

And even if they can afford to pay for their own campaigns, the election act blocks them from spending more than $5000 of their own money. They have to raise the rest of the money for their campaign at $1600 or less from many donors and then you are still blocked under the act from spending more than allowed for the number of voters in the electoral district. And, last time I checked, they are only allowed to raise the money during the election period—parties are allowed to raise funds year-round.

Frankly, I have never seen the value of running as an independent. You are far better off to start your own political party and build an organization that can come to mean something.

And while the two former cabinet ministers were elected as liberals, I would question that designation based on their performance in parliament. Both were involved in the medically-assisted suicide bill and that bill, as it finally came into law, was a serious disappointment to many progressives in the liberal party.

I will just say ‘bye’ to them now.

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Ignoring Bernier is bad advice.

May 26, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It amuses me that people are telling Andrew ‘Chuckles’ Scheer that former conservative MP Maxime Bernier is not a problem. That is bad advice. First of all, you have to ignore the pollsters who are having trouble measuring Bernier’s support. And then you have to understand the people who would support Bernier. Finally, you also need to understand that the People’s party does not have to elect a single MP to cause problems for Scheer’s conservatives.

Before getting into the whys though we should explain that Maxime Bernier came second to Andrew Scheer in the conservative sweepstakes a couple years ago because of the very stupid process they used to choose a leader. The conservatives used a preferential ballot to choose between 13 (final) candidates. People were actually asked to number their preference from one to thirteen. Then the computers just kept counting the ballots (dropping the candidate with the least votes) until somebody had a majority. It took every possible ballot to finally come up with Scheer, at a fraction over 50 per cent. The winner was Scheer because he was the least disliked candidate. Being the second least disliked hardly made Maxime Bernier a powerhouse in the conservative party.

Bernier is more of a libertarian than a conservative. Libertarians are extremists to the political right of Canadian conservatism. They are a strong segment of the party but would likely constitute less than 15 per cent of the general party membership. The former provincial wild rose party in Alberta was dominated by libertarian influence.

But where Maxime Bernier is a powerhouse is in The Beauce and the Quebec City region. Depending on how many people’s party candidates he can get in previously conservative ridings, he could cause the defeat of five or six conservatives in Quebec. There are not many opportunities for that in other parts of the country but in Alberta and B.C. where liberal votes will be hard to find, there will be throw away votes from both the right and the left and strange things can happen.

If the Trudeau liberals smarten up and start wooing voters instead of pissing them off, this election would not be such a string of question marks. As it is today, it would be very difficult to rationalize any form of majority government after Oct 21. The NDP are toast and the greens cannot believe their good luck. What will happen is anyone’s guess.

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Scheer would do better if he shut up.

May 24, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Sure, it is almost five months until the federal election but everyone is out stumping anyway. You would swear that the election was in June and everyone is getting desperate.

But there is no excuse possible for the blather we are getting from the conservatives. Who told conservative leader Andrew ‘Chuckles’ Scheer that he had to have an economic plan? He is a conservative. What else do you need to know?

The good news for Chuckles is that A) Not too many Canadians know anything about him and B), he is not prime minister Justin Trudeau. Add those two facts together and that, according to the public opinion pollsters, spells “winner.”

But every word Chuckles utters about the economy seems to be reflected back by premier Ford in Ontario. Ford never had an economic plan for his province. Why should Chuckles have one for the country?

The current problem is that premier Ford has fallen from grace. It seems that some of the cuts he has been making in everything for which the province has responsibility, are causing some second thoughts. It means that quite a few Ontario voters might look elsewhere rather than trust another conservative in Ottawa.

This situation might also be exacerbated by that new premier in Alberta. Here again we have a conservative who forgot to tell people that besides being a known misogynist, is also strongly opposed to abortion. His conservative caucus is probably dominated by social conservatives who are likely to try to end abortions in Alberta.

That is unlikely to become a problem in the other provinces except for the fact that Chuckles is also anti abortion and electing him might just get the arguments going again in this country in concert with those anti-abortion Neanderthals south of the border.

Bear in mind that there are certainly more conservative provincial governments now than there were in the last federal election. Chuckles will expect to have cooperation and endorsements from most of them. He also knows that their support of him comes at a cost.

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Choosing Chuckles for Canadians?

May 23, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Of all the ridiculous strategies for the coming federal election! Why should the liberals attack the conservatives when their real opposition in the October election is themselves? To waste time attacking conservative leader and Saskatchewan MP Andrew Scheer is assuming that he concerns Canadians. He never has been the problem.

The liberal problem is that they have not kept their promises very well. They have made some boo-boos. They were heavy-handed with a couple of their women cabinet ministers. Yet they can hardly resort to the 1935 campaign when the liberals posed the slogan “King or Chaos.”

You can well imagine that last year in Ontario, if the slogan had been “Wynne or Chaos.” Even more voters would have voted for the Doug Ford brand of chaos. And they are getting that chaos—in spades!

It seems to this political apparatchik that there might be two types of liberal parties. There is the liberal party that owns up to its mistakes and tells the voters how it is going to do better. And then there is the party that says, “So what, we are still better than those other guys.”

I hardly think the voters give a damn for that second approach. It just makes them angrier.

And even if Chuckles and his party remain climate change deniers, how are the liberals better if they go about doubling the Trans Mountain pipeline? The Trans Mountain pipeline equipped to ship tar sands bitumen to the ocean port in the Burrard Inlet would be a disaster. It would make Justin Trudeau Canada’s number one climate-warming hypocrite.

There is no economic, environmental or political rationale for the liberals twinning that pipeline. And they would lose more votes than they could win for the effort. The world environment does not need the added carbon pollution. The old pipeline can recoup some of the taxpayers’ money as it is used to send the west coast refined gasolines and other products. It will be needed long enough to support the changeover to less-polluting forms of energy. And then it can be dismantled.

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Poison Ivy is also Green.

May 22, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It has been very difficult to decipher exactly what Green party leader Elizabeth May has in mind. Our Ottawa parliamentarians were in an emergency debate on the climate emergency our scientists had reported. Being head of the Green party, Ms. May came out with a program to save the world—or, at least Vancouver Island.

Ms. May wants to abandon political divisions in the House of Commons and in cabinet. She wants a war cabinet with participants from all parties to face the climate change catastrophe in Canada.

But I am not sure I can do this program justice in explaining it. Please, do not get me wrong. I have always been impressed with Ms. May. She has been doing an impossible job, by herself in recent years. She is an excellent MP. Her real problem is her party. There are some very sincere tree-huggers, a bunch of knowledgeable environmentalists, and more than enough dingbats in that party. For Ms. May to get that party in shape for the coming election, she needs to be expert at herding cats.

She needs to get all 337 of her fellow Green candidates singing from the same songbook. They will all make promises but once they start winging it out in their electoral districts, you have no idea what they are promising.

And the chances of them explaining what Ms. May proposed in parliament the other day are tenuous, at best. In fact, I would wonder if even 25 per cent of the Green candidates could entertain any serious questions about the idea.

She is suggesting that everybody pitch in. We would all work on retrofitting Canadians’ homes. It sounds more like the cultural revolution in China during 1966 and 1967 under the Red Guards of Mao Zedong.

I agree with Ms. May that we all need to do more to cope with climate change. I just hope she has a Plan B that looks after the serious business of being a country while we are saving the world.

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War Rooms from the political past.

May 21, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It started back in the late 1970s and 80s when Senator Keith Davey, some of us liberal apparatchiks and the marketing communications experts, who volunteered their time, started to look on other parties as enemy combatants. I was even quoting Carl von Clausewitz’ On War when talking about campaigning to groups of party faithful. It was a stretch, but also fun, talking about beating your opponents with a war-like strategy.

The idea became somewhat passé later in the 80s when we were contending with the Mulroney government in Ottawa. It was also when a couple of New York advertising guys, Al Ries and Jack Trout, came out with a book on Marketing Warfare. It was practically Campaigning 101. We had to concede that the opposition could also read.

But the best war rooms in politics or in war are the ones nobody knows about. You can brag afterwards if you really want but in any election campaign I ever ran, the only person allowed in the committee rooms with an ego was the candidate.

This concept of a war room has become so common that PostMedia in Toronto wants to buy in on the action of Alberta premier Jason Kenney’s Energy War Room he is setting up to fight what he considers to be disinformation and lies by special interest groups in the coming election. Just why a newspaper would want to so blatantly support a province and a party in interfering with the federal election, leaves me cold. Mind you, PostMedia gave up all pretentions of neutrality in elections a long time ago.

The only problem is that Jason Kenney is not the type of person with whom you want to share any kind of room, let alone be on the same side in an election. Kenney is misogynistic, a mean-spirited schemer and a generally nasty politician.

He explains his rationale for an Energy War Room is to police the eastern media. He wants to make sure that they never use the word ‘bitumen’ when talking about what Albertans call the highly polluting, high-carbon, ‘heavy oil’ from the tar sands.

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Danger signs of elitism in the Senate.

May 19, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Prime minister Justin Trudeau is facing enough problems without his elitism coming back to bite his ass. We saw in the Senate last week where one of his elite appointees forgot who appointed her to the sinecure of the Senate. Supposedly independent senator Paula Simons from Alberta torpedoed the liberal ban on oil tankers off north-west B.C. on the senate transport committee.

This might be a bit of a sou’easter that will soon blow over but Trudeau’s environmentalism is already skating on thin ice, as it is. He hardly needs to be stabbed in the back by his own elitist choice for the senate. He would much prefer to be showing us sceptics that his elitism is paying off for Canadians as well as these people who act like the senate is their personal playpen and piggy bank.

We used to have some very conscientious senators who liked being part of the liberal caucus and did a good job of reviewing and making recommendations on new legislation.

But school teacher Trudeau did not agree. He thought we should not have liberals in the senate. He wanted them all to be elite. These elites would be chosen by an elite committee to enable the prime minister to select the best elites for service in the senate. They answer to nobody. They are beholden to nobody. They do what they want with legislation sent to them from the commons.

And this is hardly the first time the prime minister got a wake-up call from the senate that some key piece of legislation the liberals wanted was being screwed around by his elite senators. You would hope that the liberals would want to rethink this dumb elitism.

He would certainly get some support if he wanted to make the senate a form of a house of the provinces. This would be something like the American system but with more power ultimately in the hands of the house of commons.

Alternatively, we could just abolish the senate. There might be more of an argument about that but giving Canadians the right to vote on the proposition is the ultimate threat.

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Scratch the Mark Norman affair.

May 17, 2019 by Peter Lowry

If you are looking for something with which to attack the Trudeau government, do not bother with the Mark Norman affair. Norman was the vice-admiral of the Canadian Navy who almost went to trial over something to do with supply ship procurement. If Chuckles Scheer and his federal conservatives think they can make a case of this, they are likely whistling past the graveyard.

Wise politicos do not play in the military’s playgrounds. People in uniform are nothing but an opportunity for publicity pictures, at best.

And before you think that Admiral Norman is going to say anything political, you can forget it. Norman’s lawyer might come across as something such as the wicked witch of the north but he is a loyal Canadian through and through. And besides, those nice liberals are going to pay all his legal fees. They have already voted in the commons to apologize to the admiral.

It is also important to remember that there is another shoe to drop. There is a civil servant also charged with what might be a related offence. That is before the courts and the wise citizen restrains those thoughts of discussing the case.

This writer was a very young air craftsman (AC2) when first venturing away from home but it gave me a very rich appreciation for my country. I must have had that experience in mind later in life when I was on the Ottawa cocktail circuit with the deputy minister of defence and the defence staff. I was reminded one time while chatting with a gentleman who had been casually introduced as a lieutenant-general. He might have been in mufti but when I realized he was an air vice marshal and head of Canada’s air force, I found myself unconsciously stiffening to attention.

Those worlds are far apart and before you think the ranks have any concern for the general staff, think again. They do not even vote in the same ballot boxes.

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Requiem for the New Democratic Party.

May 12, 2019 by Peter Lowry

After a lingering struggle, with the family in attendance, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) of Tommy Douglas and the New Democratic Party of the Broadbent and Lewis families has passed into oblivion. Funeral services will be a come as you are event at summer barbeques in each of the provinces.

The federal party is survived by its provincial parties. In British Columbia, the party is only in power with the assistance from the Green party. The passing of B.C.’s estranged sister NDP organization in Alberta earlier this year, left B.C. as the only stand-alone provincial NDP government. Little can be said for Her Majesty’s loyal NDP opposition in the Legislature of Ontario under the dismal command of Andrea Horwath, MPP.

During its lifetime, the party gave up the stridency of the Regina Manifesto from 1933, softening it with the 1956 Winnipeg Declaration of Principles. The Winnipeg declaration relabelled the party in a more democratic socialist stance. The stance was further softened by the Statement of Principles of the party adopted at its 1983 convention in Regina. Each step away from the Regina Manifesto further confused the voters as to what the NDP really did believe. Attempts such as the LEAP Manifesto fell to earth, ignored.

What the New Democratic and its predecessor party did achieve was a third-party alternative for disgruntled conservatives and liberals. It seems they are passing the torch to the Greens, who do know what they want when it comes to the environment.

The failure of the NDP was its problem of being a class-based political party. It had defined its membership as the classic ‘working man’ and his family. It also attracted many academics who saw the party as the fast track to social justice. Some of the reforms that the CCF fought for over the years became reality as other parties came to agree. Canada’s early ‘Baby Bonus,’ unemployment insurance, old age pensions and Medicare were all CCF initiatives.

It was a desperation move for more power in parliament when the CCF made the deal with the Canadian Labour Congress. The new democratic party that was created in 1961 was too little and to late in the faster pace of social development in Canada in the last half of the 20^th Century. Despite a brief populist appeal by leader Jack Layton in 2011, the party failed to capture the confidence of Canadians.

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