Federal Politics – Page 76 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Don’t get too excited Ms. May.

May 11, 2019 by Peter Lowry

If you want an area of Canada where the Green party runs rampant, go to Vancouver Island. In fact, the entire area around the Strait of Georgia seems overrun with Greens, Druids and other pagan religions. Just standing under one of those magnificent, lordly trees on the Island fills you with wonder and a sense of the spirituality.

But—maybe getting one more Green party member into parliament might be a brief, but quickly lost, breeze. I hardly believe that two seats in parliament are the beginning of an avalanche. I think the wise voters of Beautiful British Columbia sent a message to the east. It was a polite wake-up call.

It was a very strong message to the NDP. It said get with the program. Get a leader, get a raison d’etre, get real. The Winnipeg General Strike, the Dirty Thirties and the Great Depression are fading into the mists of time. Join us in the 21^st Century.

It was a kick in the ass for the conservatives. Ignore Global Warming at your peril. Your rich friends can fund you but do you belong to them? Are you the menials of foreign owners? What are you doing for Canada today?

I think the strongest condemnation was of prime minister Trudeau and the liberals. The handwriting is on the wall—and they have been found wanting. You cannot walk away from your failures. You own them and you have to stand to account for them. Nobody is happy with the liberal’s careless handling of the SNC-Lavalin debacle. And they owe Canadians some apologies. No person who cares about the environment can allow Justin Trudeau to twin the Trans Mountain pipeline. Is that the best he can do in helping our aboriginal peoples? There is a very big difference between diplomacy and simpering. He needs to learn that sometimes we all need to speak—loud and clear.

All Canadians can hope is that over the summer, our politicians will come to understand the concerns of Canadians. They need to understand what brings us together as well as what divides us. We need a new rationale from all parties. None are exempt. That is not a recess bell that will toll on October 21.

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Scheer Madness and Foreign Policy.

May 9, 2019 by Peter Lowry

They wrote a speech the other day and ‘Chuckles’ Scheer, leader of Canada’s conservatives, read it. At the end of the day, Chuckles’ party had some foreign policy to show off and little was changed. The essentials of it were that Donald Trump and his friends were the good guys and the Chinese were inscrutable and the Russians over ‘bearing.’

But what is wrong with the conservative party’s stance on foreign affairs—whether mouthed by the party leader or other minion—is that it is more ideological than realistic. It is a quest for strong relations with like-minded right-wing governments. And Mr. Scheer has hardly considered the price tag of such alliances.

It is not just that the Trump administration, for example, is demanding that allies cough up more money in support of alliances such as NATO and NORAD, there is a very expensive missile shield in the works over continental North America that president Trump wants us to help fund. To-date, we have wisely said no to the system that probably puts us more at risk of being hurt by fallout from the system than anything aimed at us.

And do not forget that in the alliance the Americans want, we are supposed to buy their very expensive jet fighters that are designed for a close-in combat role in support of American objectives. Canada needs long-range defensive capability to assert our territorial claims up and into the Arctic Circle.

The madness of these close ties with Trump’s foreign policy is that we hardly need to add the growing number of countries that hate Trump to our list of countries who see us as lackies of the Americans. Canada once had the general respect of the United Nations and that is done by standing as a country that speaks and acts independently.

All in all, the conservative speech on foreign affairs had some fine words and a positive approach. It is too bad that there is nothing to back it up. It contained the words but not the vision. There was no intention nor conviction in it.

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Who runs this country?

May 7, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Like it or lump it, Canada is a confederation. And that means the parts of the country that created it think they are just as important as the whole. As many wise politicos have noted over the years, it makes the country a bitch to govern. The federal government got the best of the deal though. It appoints the judges of the supreme court and that is where most of the complaints of the provinces go to die.

Scott Moe, the earnest premier of Saskatchewan learned something of this lesson the other day. He took the federal government’s effort to reduce carbon emissions to his province’s court of appeal only to get a 3 to 2 decision that the fed’s really do have the authority to do that.

Now Moe and his friends from Alberta, Ontario and maybe other provinces, will take the case to the supreme court. It might seem like a terrible waste of taxpayers’ money but every once in a while, it is necessary for the supreme court judges to take a look at how this country is, or is not, working.

It also means that the question is unlikely to be answered before some time late next year. What those provinces are really doing is getting behind Andrew “Chuckles’ Scheer, leader of the federal conservatives. They figure with Chuckles running the frat house on the Ottawa River, they can pretty well do anything they want.

It would mean the gutting of Medicare across the country. Our aboriginals would become lesser citizens. And federal transfer payments could become history. It will be like having the stupid members of the Trump family running the farm on the north side of the border.

What would also be history would be the liberal attempts to revitalize Canada’s middle class. Justin Trudeau has never defined the middle class very well but he has done a good job of improving the lot of families with kids in the process.

But we should be thankful that this country is not run by narrow-minded, right-wing schmucks such as Jason Kenney, or Doug Ford. It is bad enough that we are having to listen to them snorting like hogs in the mud in their respective provinces. Canadians can do better.

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Is Kenney a Constitutional Crisis?

May 6, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It seems that between Jason Kenney and his predecessor as premier of Alberta, Kenney has the shriller voice. When he goes to Ottawa to bitch and whine about how his province is not given everything it wants, he knows the buttons to push and the people to harangue. There was no sign at the airport saying ‘Welcome Home Jason!’

And nobody is buying that crap about “a growing crisis of national unity” in Alberta that has only been created in the smarmy mind of Jason Kenney.

Who would believe the threats over Kenney’s opinion that the federal government “doesn’t care about a devastating period of economic adversity”? Any economic adversity in Alberta was created by greed and a lack of economic diversity.

It is disappointing that Kenney and his narrow-minded party got more than 50 per cent in the recent election. It says that Albertans, by and large are buying into the bitching and whining. It is easy to understand people who think they should not pay taxes. And it is easy to understand greed but there is nothing wrong in Alberta that the voters did not bring on themselves.

Albertans have ignored the very wise advice of former premier Peter Lougheed and devastated his Alberta Heritage Trust Fund. This was a fund to build a future for Albertans and instead successive provincial governments have used it to pay bills that were the taxpayers’ responsibility. This kind of waste and misdirection of the funds will continue as long as Albertans vote for it.

If the voters did not know what a sleaze Jason Kenney was before they elected him, they are certainly going to learn now. He took his victory lap in Ottawa to make foolish threats against the liberal government and prime minister Trudeau.

When is he going to learn what is needed to be done in Alberta?

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Pipe dreams and nightmares.

May 5, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Nobody seems eager to address the questions of pipelines properly. Is it not possible that some pipelines can do good and some can commit unspeakable evil? Are we to be treated as idiot children incapable of sorting out the good from the bad?

We should start with natural gas pipelines. These are everywhere. The odd time that one of these baby’s bursts or is entangled in an accident, it is easy to cut off the feed, squelch any possible flames and fix the problems. If nobody is hurt, the environmental damage can be quantified and ameliorated.

And that is why I see few problems with the liquified natural gas (LNG) operation in B.C. that takes the provincially sourced gas from a pipeline. It makes business sense and is hardly a serious polluter. And did you know that modern LNG tankers use some of the natural gas to power the ship?

And then there are the pipelines designed to ship everything from crude oil through to refined fuels throughout North America. While more volatile and heavily regulated, these lines are essential today to keeping our North American economy moving. They are certainly an excellent reason to always check before you dig.

The third type of line that pipeline people have been less reluctant to tell us about is the type of line that can handle transmission of tar sands bitumen. It was only in talking to knowledgeable experts that I could find out what Enbridge, TransCanada and Kinder Morgan people were talking about when proposing lines such as Energy East and the line to Kitimat, B.C. These lines were specific to push large quantities of diluted, heated bitumen from our tar sands at high pressure.

Of some 40 significant spills (each of more than 50 barrels) of Enbridge lines over the years, the spill of diluted bitumen up-river from Kalamazoo, Michigan in 2012 was the most expensive, at a cost of over US$700 million. It never could be completely cleaned up.

I remember how shocked I was when Enbridge applied to change its Line 9 through Toronto and on to Montreal to enable it to also to heat and push bitumen at higher pressure. I was there when that line was installed down a hydro right-of-way and across the top of Toronto’s Yonge Street subway. I sent a scenario to the National Energy Board of the tens of thousands of casualties from a leak and a flood of flaming bitumen running down the subway.

Some scoffed at my concern as though it was like a thousand-year flood. The only problem is that, even in Canada, we are now getting thousand-year floods every couple years.

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Why we are pissed with politicians.

May 4, 2019 by Peter Lowry

They are even quantifying just how pissed Canadians are with their politicians these days. It makes sense. And interestingly, we see they are happier with their mayors and councillors. These local people are able to generate a 50 per cent approval rate. Provincial and federal politicos do not make it that high.

Greg MacEachern of Washington-based Proof Strategies’ Ottawa and Toronto office has been studying Canadian attitudes and claims that the low-flying politicos these days are the provincial ones across the country. Based on recent vote results, the provincials are probably lucky to be trusted by as many as a third of Canadians. At least the federals are at an average of 40 per cent trust rate.

There is certainly a lot of logic to those figures. The municipal people are close at hand and you can get to talk to them when you are dissatisfied with what they are doing. Besides, it is relatively easy to verify what is being reported by the local news media. And as there are supposedly no political parties involved, you get used to those politicians municipally who fall into right or left- wing categories.

But what is obviously pissing off the populace is the power of the political parties and the secrecy of our federal and provincial cabinets. When these people are planning how to change your life, people get concerned. The politicos are springing changes on them that the people get to pay for—like it or not!

One of the things I have found travelling back and forth across Canada over the years is that trust seems to come with the smaller size of provinces. In PEI and Newfoundland and Labrador, you can get to stop and have a pleasant chat with the premier in passing and nobody thinks anything special about it. The bigger the province, the more self important the politico can be.

The federal government just has better public relations. I go back to the era of both John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson and both were delightful gentlemen with whom to chat. I found I could always get a laugh from Mr. Pearson and his successor Pierre Trudeau. And you could trust them. We seem to be going downhill since.

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A year late and a candidate short.

May 3, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Welcome to the fray, Jeremy Broadhurst. As the just appointed campaign chair for the liberals this year, you have your work cut out for you. I would not say the job is impossible but Easter is over and I am sure God restricts us to only one resurrection per year. Getting Justin Trudeau’s liberals campaign for re-election back to life will be a tough chore.

But you have to admit that any guy who could have us believing that foreign minister Cynthia Freeland is at least a foot taller than actual, has to be a miracle worker in anyone’s book. As the minister’s chief of staff, Broadhurst backed her up during some very tough negotiations in Washington. She might not have come off a miracle-worker but surviving the melee counts for something.

And it is too bad Broadhurst is probably having to work on the if-come. Fund-raising for the liberals has been tanking and there might not be much on the dinner table for a while.

But when you realize that Broadhurst took on the tough jobs in the last federal election, while back-stopping the group of dilettantes around school teacher Justin Trudeau, you are inclined to give him a look. Justin might have been raised in a quasi-political household but his father learned to let the politicos do their jobs.

Broadhurst has nowhere near the seasoning of the late Senator Keith Davey. Nor does he have the training for the job that Keith gave to Senator David Smith.

A funny footnote on David Smith was that he had never won an election as a candidate without my help. He called me when the writ was dropped for the 1993 election and asked me to spend the election commuting to Barrie from Toronto to run the liberal campaign in what was then York-Simcoe riding. I do not recall what I told him. It was probably something terse. It amused me later that York-Simcoe was the only riding the liberals lost in Ontario. David complained to me that Jean Chrétien kept telling, anyone who would listen, that it was David’s fault the liberals lost York-Simcoe.

But the point of this is that Broadhurst is taking on this campaign about a year too late. He is starting from the bottom of a hole that Justin Trudeau dug with the help of Gerald Butts and company.

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Our aboriginals also want the waters.

April 29, 2019 by Peter Lowry

This news comes with the sinking feeling that we are paying for this foolishness. Did you know that Canada’s Saugeen Ojibway Nation is suing the Crown to return most of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay to the tribes? It seems the white man might have spoke false in some treaties in the 1800s. The case is expected to tie up the courts for many years to come.

How you lay a claim to the waters flowing through the Great Lakes is mind boggling? I guess we are going to find out. I suspect the aboriginal nation has also found out the value of fresh water in this modern world.

This reminds me of my old friends up in Tiny Township on Georgian Bay where some of the home owners land was sold to them to the shoreline instead of the beach line. The native claim should add an interesting complication to an already complicated argument.

It seems to me that it would pay dividends for the federal government to pass a statute of limitations on those old treaties. We could not only save a lot of money and time of the courts but it could give our aboriginals an opportunity to get a life. There is a lot more to it than just drumming, dancing and demonstrating.

And the courts need to realize that the aboriginal bands that were here when Europeans discovered America were mainly nomadic. They tended to park in places where food seemed plentiful, until it was no longer plentiful and then they would wander off again.

This style of life tended to leave ancestors where they fell and that is why just about any land that is not too rocky can be considered as an ancient and sacred burial ground.

I have met and known many aboriginal and métis people across Canada and by and large they have earned my respect. And the more they do to improve the lives of their fellow aboriginals, the more respect I have for them.

And I am sorry I will not use the word ‘indigenous’ in talking about them. The word ‘indigenous’ means ‘from here.’ They are not from here. Their ancestors came to the Americas maybe 15,000 years before my ancestors arrived but we can all work together to make this a great country in which to live together.

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On being liberal in disquieting times.

April 28, 2019 by Peter Lowry

The word ‘disquieting’ took a while to choose. I have been trying to define the times leading up to the October 21 federal election and it reminds us of flying through clouds. You want to break into the bright sunlight, you know is above you, but that oppressive cotton candy is just a grey mist that continues to embrace and smother you.

In these disquieting times, the clouds are a metaphor for the cocoon of a country’s confusion. The angst of the SNC-Lavalin affair is but a construct from which we draw the prejudices of our times.

There is no question but the voters are disquieted. It is not the anger that produced the Doug Ford victory last year in Ontario or meeting the demands of greed recently in Alberta. Even peaceful little Prince Edward Island showed some spunk by bringing on the Green party to be the official opposition.

But neither of the major opposition parties in Ottawa have adequate leadership to survive the rigors of a general election. ‘Chuckles’ Scheer from Saskatchewan is but a servile retainer serving the aperitifs for the conservative wolves in premiers’ clothing. Jagmeet Singh is but testimony to the hospice condition of the political party that Tommy Douglas built.

But that is certainly no excuse for Justin Trudeau. He has unfulfilled promises from 2015. He is the one that still needs to prove he can save our environment. He has commitments to our aboriginals. And he still has to explain the events that cost him a justice minister and another cabinet member, his principal secretary and the clerk of the privy council. His hypocrisy in declaring himself an environmentalist and then buying the Trans Mountain pipeline has been a very difficult pill for many liberals to swallow.

His story is that he traded it for a guarantee from Alberta’s previous NDP government to put a cap on carbon from the extraction and the upgrading of the bitumen to allow it to be exported.

The incoming premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, has promised an end to all environmental protections in Alberta and threatened court proceedings to get the B.C. and federal governments out of his way. Now if we could just get Mr. Kenney to bend over, we could show Justin Trudeau what to do with his pipeline.

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If you’re counting on a Green Wave: Forget it.

April 27, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Elizabeth May, leader of the Green party, has a damn tough job and she has done it well. She does not always agree with her own troops and her main headaches must come from that quarter.

Talking to a chap at a function where the speaker was Peggy Nash the former Toronto NDP MP, I assumed he was of that party. I was explaining to him why polls showing the Greens winning the election in PEI were inflated.

He agreed that over the years that the NDP vote forecast by pollsters was quite often four to five points higher than the actual vote. It was my opinion that this was because of people who supported other parties, did not want to tell the pollster the truth, and would say they were voting NDP. We referred to this as a ‘parked vote.’ I told him that it was obvious that today voters were also parking with the Greens. It shows Canadians are paying more attention to that party.

While I see it as a compliment to Ms. May, I am still very sceptical of her party getting broad support from Canadians. The simple reason why is that you can get the same line on environmentalism from the NDP. And I am hardly the only liberal who is concerned about our environment and takes a consistent stand on stopping the exploitation of Canada’s tar sands.

But it is not enough to build an effective political party just around the environment. The country needs much more. Ms. May might be a very knowledgeable and well-rounded person but the local Greenie in my area who has run in multiple elections does not seem to want to talk about anything that is not about the environment. I find him boring.

And it is this same tendency of Green party members to bore people with a pre-occupation in environmentalism that tells me that they cannot convince Canadians to give them a real shot at governing.

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