Federal Politics – Page 78 – Babel-on-the-Bay

If Harper is a bully, what is Trudeau?

April 4, 2019 by Peter Lowry

The last two prime ministers tell us much about this country of Canada. In June 2015, I wrote a comment on PM Stephen Harper, accusing him of being a bully. It seemed to be his way of making up for his deficiencies as a human. A reader reminded me of that comment the other day when I forecast that Jody Wilson-Raybould would soon be a non-liberal MP. He wanted to know if that meant Justin Trudeau was also a bully?

The answer was ‘No.’ If Stephen Harper was still prime minister and Jody Wilson-Raybould his justice minister, she would have been out of the cabinet last December. Nor would his chief of staff or clerk of the privy council need resign. In Stephen Harper’s Canada, the divine right of kings and prime ministers still prevails. And he is very much a hands-on type of guy.

But we now have Justin Trudeau at the helm of this ship of state. He watched as his hand-picked chief of staff and his obsequious clerk of the privy council each (figuratively) took a bullet for him. He did not have the guts to tell a woman what he wanted and he paid the price.

The late Pierre Trudeau was a great guy who stood up for Canada and he stood up for his own legacy. His son, Justin, is a wimp. Some legacy!

But there is a rub folks. Who wants a Jagmeet Singh government? Who could tolerate a ‘Chuckles’ Scheer government? There is a country at stake here, smarten up!

Liberals across Canada have six months to do better. First, we tell Justin Trudeau to resign. Then we have a leadership race to replace him and have a fair fight down to the wire in October.

And remember that you do not have to have a sitting liberal MP as leader of the party. Let me just throw the name of Elizabeth May into the mix. We have choices.

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Team Trudeau tells the tale.

April 3, 2019 by Peter Lowry

An invitation came from the liberal party the other day to sign up for Team Trudeau Campaign College. It is just $25 for the day and you have your choice of attending campaign management, official agent or a single stream covering the three areas of digital management, volunteer management and canvas management. I heartily recommend the three-part stream as better bang for the buck.

And teaching at these efforts can be a great experience in itself. I sometimes offered to talk about dirty tricks to get a bigger turnout to my classes. The time I told people that our text would be from Carl von Clausevitz’ On War, we had to get a larger hall. If you want people to remember, you have to make it memorable.

The only stipulation on these particular classes is that you have to be a registered liberal to even get an invitation. When running the ground game in a municipal campaign a few years back, I found I had the conflict of teaching local conservatives and NDPers as well liberals. In the 2015 federal campaign, the ground game for the conservative in the next riding was being run by one of my keener students. She actually phoned during the campaign to thank me for the training. Oh well, I liked the liberal she helped defeat, but he never listened to me anyway.

But memories in politics are short. I would not be of much help as a trainer today. Yet I miss it. I might be critical. Small things can annoy me. For example, they say ‘Team Trudeau’ in the logo and do not mention ‘Liberal.’ What is funnier is the stylized pencil the artist has drawn under the name ‘Trudeau.’ The pencil is designed to represent voting. The only problem is that a pencil such as that would never be used in a polling place. It has an eraser on it—which might just turn out to be a metaphor for the coming election.

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Trudeau cannot un-fumble this ball.

April 2, 2019 by Peter Lowry

A chick does not spring new-born from the egg knowing which worms are the tastiest. Life can be a game of trial and error and nowhere is it more treacherous than in the game of politics. Politicos, the hangers-on of the political scene have much to learn but are a dime a dozen and easily disposable. To survive the years I did, as one of those groupies, took the ability to learn fast, build lasting relationships and be useful. Now that I am no longer considered useful, I guess I might as well tell you which worms will give you a tummy ache.

One of the more serious lessons is about recording someone who might be embarrassing him or herself. Nothing can throw a meeting into a tizzy better than to put a recorder on the table and ask someone to repeat what they last said. Not being a lawyer, I cannot say what the rules are about recording telephone conversations without both parties being aware, but it is not a way to make friends or earn trust.

In the case of Jody Wilson-Raybould, the MP has probably guaranteed her expulsion from the liberal caucus by recording the conversation between the clerk of the privy council and herself. The release of that recording will certainly have serious ramifications for the prime minister but it was also the former justice minister’s swan song.

While her career in politics might be over, her suicide mission could be taking Justin Trudeau out of politics with her.

One of the things you always watch for in arranging media opportunities for politicians is that nothing happens to make your politician look awkward. Like Robert Stanfield showing a lack of skill with a football in 1974, Justin Trudeau’s less than sincere ‘thank you’ to a Grassy Narrows protestor the other day was his fumble for 2019.

But you cannot un-fumble a ball. And Canada’s aboriginal peoples will be haunting Justin Trudeau throughout the coming campaign—for his failure at reconciliation, for his treatment of the first aboriginal woman in the cabinet and for his ignorance in dealing with the Grassy Narrows protestor.

He would hardly listen to this old apparatchik, but if he asked, I would tell him; he still has time to resign.

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This just in: Nuttall’s out.

March 28, 2019 by Peter Lowry

If there was ever an individual in the wrong place at the wrong time, it was Alex Nuttall, the M.P. for our electoral district of Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte. Alex was Patrick Brown’s hand-picked successor on Barrie city council and subsequently in the back benches in Ottawa. On a recount of ballots, in 2015, Nuttall won by a skinny 86 votes, against an inept campaign by the local liberals.

Oddly enough, the various times I saw Alex Nuttall in the riding, during that campaign and for the recount afterward, he seemed angry. That was very different from when he was on city council where he tended to mumble and bumble along. He never did seem to do much in either job.

He gave the standard answers when he announced his leaving federal politics at Barrie city council last Monday. It seems, like a wounded animal, he was returning to a place of comfort to lick his wounds. He used the stock excuse that he was leaving to spend time with his young family. I am guessing that it will be a while before we find out the real reason.

But it is unlikely we have seen the last of Alex. He has been receiving an MP’s salary for these past four years and that is more than he might have ever been making before. It will be interesting to see what he picks when he has to go back to earning a living in October.

He seems to have a comfort factor in the financial businesses such as banking and mortgages but few if any of these jobs would have a starting salary as high as we pay our parliamentarians.

I expect this news will get our sleepy local federal liberal party organization out to see if anyone can see their shadow. We need a live liberal candidate in Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte folks.

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‘Scheer’ Foolishness.

March 27, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It is to be hoped that someone in the Scheer family is keeping a scrapbook of the positive commentaries on Chuckles’ prospects in the federal election in October? It is a shame to get the poor guy’s hopes up. The scrapbook will help prove to his grandchildren that he really thought he was a contender.

But is it really fair? Andrew ‘Chuckles’ Scheer was the thirteenth choice out of thirteen contenders in the last confused conservative leadership contest. The second-place loser, Maxime Bernier, lost by so few percentage points, that he went off to form his own Peoples’ Party.

Not that the choice of Chuckles was all that popular. All his previous reign as Speaker of the Commons proved is that he is a conservative. He is dull, predictable and will lead the party nowhere. In a recent speech to a conservative audience, he hit all the hot buttons such as deficit reduction, building more pipelines and more free trade deals.

But, when it is time for leadership, Chuckles clocks out. We are not getting any sense of where he might be headed—besides some conservative Valhalla. In that speech, he also talked about dumping a couple of the liberals’ investment programs. These are the Canada infrastructure bank and the Asian development bank. Both of these programs are more conservative than liberal in origin and both have been slow at getting off the ground. Why Chuckles would want to dump them is not clear.

The one thing that is clear for Chuckles is that he cannot wing it in the election campaign in the same was as Doug Ford did in Ontario last year. While there is some disquiet about Trudeau and the liberals, there are not enough people mad at them to affect a change of government. For every pissed off liberal who thinks supporting Chuckles is the answer, two more new democrats will switch from Jagmeet Singh to Justin Trudeau. The pollsters can speculate as much as they like, but when push comes to shove in October, Trudeau will still be prime minister.

And even if it is a minority, do you really think a corporal’s guard of new democrats or greens would be crazy enough to support Chuckles?

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Trudeau trashes his flight of fancy.

March 26, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It was nine years ago that I met Justin Trudeau. Working through liberal party friends in Ottawa, I had invited him to a party fund-raising dinner in Barrie. While we raised enough to get the party out of debt in Barrie, the conversation I had at the time with Justin was disquieting. This is a man who can easily turn himself on and off.

And he does not appear to be a guy who likes heavy thinking. He prefers the route of the selfies and the simple keywords. He had a well-practiced warm and fuzzy stock liberal-sounding speech that evening in Barrie. It lacked a single memorable word. It also caused me to miss some of the bad habits he now shows in his extemporaneous speaking.

It seems most pundits agree now that Justin is more like his mother than his father. If he could just live with some wiser advisors in the PMO, he would sail through. His buddy Gerry Butts was too much like him and that was a deadly combination. They created a mutual admiration society that got them nowhere.

There is no question that the PMO needs a couple people over 50 and, preferably, with some experience in crisis management. It is really too bad that Trudeau had so little experience in the House of Commons before he became prime minister. The opposition will eventually stop bringing up a subject if you get everyone laughing at it.

Trudeau needs to turn on his ‘man with a mission’ persona for the coming election and he can hardly do that if the SNC-Lavalin mess keeps sucking the oxygen out of the political air. He needs to get together with the liberals from the justice committee and ask them nicely to stop blocking things at that level. And do not send a flunky to tell them or you can count on it not coming out right.

In a few months, Justin needs to be on the barbeque circuit talking about Canada’s future and not boring subjects like Quebec engineering firms. He needs to define the dialogue, and ignore the opposition.

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The pundit’s putsch.

March 25, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It is fun to forecast chaos in these frightful times but we have to compete with some very convincing pundits of the news media. Just the other day Chantal Hébert of the CBC and Toronto Star tells us that Jody Wilson-Raybould MP and Jane Philpott MP are planning a putsch against Justin Trudeau. Other pundits are quickly on her heels, almost down to telling us the colour of the dress each woman will wear to the prime minister’s cashiering ceremony.

It is not that I think it is such a bad idea but neither of these women has the experience with liberals across Canada to pull this off. They need help. And not the kind of help pundit Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star reported on the CBC the other day. Susan said there were card-carrying liberals ready to take up arms for the two women. The only problem is that Justin canceled all our liberal party cards three years ago at the Winnipeg meeting of the party.

It was always assumed on my part that liberal party membership card, number 1054910, was dishonourably discharged from the liberal lists when I, in turn, canceled my monthly five-dollar donation to the party. I figured if they did not want me as a member, I no longer had an obligation to help keep the party solvent.

The point is, I really am a liberal. And in my humble opinion, Justin Trudeau is not a liberal. Not only that but I think he is more like his mother than his father. He still has to prove that he is anything other than an elitist, who plays at being liberal.

I will give Jody Wilson Raybould and Jane Philpott the benefit of the doubt but I have been waiting for a chance to ask both women why they screwed up the legislation for doctor-assisted suicide. That piece of legislation embarrassed real liberals across the country. They both have a lot to explain.

Neither of the former cabinet members has demonstrated much in the way of political smarts. When sitting in those lofty seats of parliament, you really need to remember one thing: It is not all about you!

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Something for everyone; Nothing for all.

March 20, 2019 by Peter Lowry

There is supposed to be a little something for everybody and it turns out there is nothing overly impressive for anybody. It is a strange feeling going over this federal budget. Nothing is particularly surprising. Nothing impresses.

What is with these Liberals? They are a big tent of neoliberals, right-wing liberals, condescending liberals, lying liberals and honest liberals, do-gooders and progressives. I am a liberal and they make me want to have another shower. It makes me wonder what, if anything, these cynical people believe in?

Where are the big ideas? Pharmacare is coming, or is it on hold? At least adding that key step to Medicare would have been something to hold on to. I have always believed that if you were going into debt for something, make sure it is worthwhile.

This is a country that was created on a ribbon of steel for trains that ran from coast to coast. Was John A. Macdonald the last visionary? Where are the high-speed electric trains that this country needs today?

Sure, our cities need infrastructure help. That might sound like a lot of money to help the cities but we know they need far more. It is like the nickel-diming of skills training. Cheapskates!

Look, I am glad that we have pulled more than a quarter million children out of child poverty. Do we now have to drive a million seniors into poverty to pay for it?

I am not saying that this is a Morneau budget. That finance minister is a neoliberal and this is what he thought people wanted. If I had been in the House for the reading, I would have helped the opposition shout him down.

It reminds me of the last will and testament from the Ontario finance minister last year before the Wynne government fell to the Huns.

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Peaking early; Peaking late, in politics.

March 18, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It is something like a fertility cycle. If you are too early or too late, that little sperm has lost an opportunity. It is like that time in a political campaign when unfertilized minds can be receptive to a particular message. It is only the entire costly campaign that is at risk.

It has always seemed to me that there is a point in campaigns when there is a peak of receptivity. It is that point when a maximum number of the uncommitted voters minds close around a particular political failure or inspiration. (Though inspirations are rare.)

Sorting out the last federal election, I think the receptors shut down prematurely. Canadians were tired of the arrogance of Stephen Harper’s conservatives and the last half of that tedious campaign became just so much blather.

And what us politicos need to always keep in mind is that, non-political people have little tolerance for discussing politics at most times. To actually catch them at the right moment is rare.

It is probably the reason some historical figure came up with that silly warning to never discuss politics or religion with strangers. Mind you, I love encouraging strangers to talk politics. If the person does not know you, nor think you can do anything for them, you can get an honest opinion. Honesty is a rare and precious commodity in politics.

Though what you usually find out from strangers are rather superficial views of political events and trends. It most often reflects the recent items heard or seen on You Tube or Facebook as well as the evening news. It might not always pay for you to argue with a person’s opinion but it can become part of your memory bank on the subject. The strongest arguments that voters get to help convince them are the ones that trigger their own experience and knowledge.

Reading a review of a book by a political scientist the other day, he makes the astute observation that if we want to make better political decisions, we first have to want to. Since the solution would involve going beyond their comfort zone for many people, he is not optimistic.

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Did they forget to tell Jagmeet?

March 16, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It seems strange that the NDP apparatchiks around their leader Jagmeet Singh have forgotten to tell him something important. He certainly has enough French to understand that Québec Solidaire is a separatist party based in Quebec. It might share the orange party color and the left of centre politics of the NDP but from that point they go their separate ways.

The confusion with this started when newly elected MP and party leader Jagmeet Singh announced that Alexandre Boulerice would be the party’s deputy leader for Quebec. Boulerice is the MP for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie and was first elected in the Orange Wave of 2011.

Boulerice followed up on Wednesday by announcing that Nima Machouf will be the NDP standard bearer in the riding of Laurier—Saint-Marie in October. The riding is currently represented by NDP MP Hélène Lavadière, who is stepping down after holding the riding since 2011.

The only problem with this is that Nima Machouf is also a member of Québec Solidaire. She is not only a member but her husband, Amir Kadir, was a member of the National Assembly for Québec Solidaire from 2008 to 2018.

My guess is that the rest of Canada would be caught off guard if it had to deal with a group as left of centre politically as Québec Solidaire—if they were ever in a position to call the shots in Quebec. As unlikely as it might be that they might win, I see an appeal to their proposal of calling for a constitutional assembly to plan the future of the province. I believe they would have to agree if the rest of the country asked to join with them in planning an improved country—conditional on a national referendum afterward to approve of the proposed plan.

Just think of what could be done!

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