Federal Politics – Page 8 – Babel-on-the-Bay

The Trains to Nowhere.

July 21, 2023July 19, 2023 by Peter Lowry

The Last Spike was a momentous event in Canadian history, a hundred and thirty-eight years ago. The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway across Canada also marked the beginning of the end of a dream. In a country that pioneered inter-city rail, passenger traffic on our railway’s has given way to freight. We have crassly declared that passengers are not as important and relegated them to the asphalt of the highways and to the pollution of air travel.

But it will only be by reviving enthusiasm for high-speed travel by train that we can bind our country back together. We’ve talked about high-speed rail long enough. The Quebec City to Windsor corridor needs high-speed trains today. Halifax to Vancouver is the challenge of the next decade.

And the Americans are already beating us to the punch. High-speed trains in the 160 miles per hour category are already being prepared for the Boston to Washington corridor. The first really high-speed line is being built from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Forbes Magazine tells us that billions of dollars are already committed to high-speed trains. Even the gamblers cannot wait.

But what is Canada doing? Nothing. If any prime minister ever needed a positive legacy, it is Justin Trudeau. Is it a proud legacy to have fired a justice minister for doing her job? Did it make Canada proud when Justin Trudeau and his family visited the Bahamian island owned by the Aga Khan, or when they played dress-up in India?

You need to do something positive for our country Mr. Trudeau. If Sir John A. Macdonald can leave us the first cross country rails, you can do it one better.

This cannot be left to provincial governments. The Ontario government of Kathleen Wynne was preparing for a high-speed test track west from Toronto. The next step would have been Toronto to Ottawa and Montreal. And that needed federal and inter-provincial cooperation. Yet the plans for trains and the electricity from Quebec were all swept aside by the Ford government when it came to power.

The only thing worse than the failed legacy of the Trudeau government is the rapacious and self-centred role of the Ford government in Ontario.

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What’s News, Pussy Cat?

July 17, 2023 by Peter Lowry

It feels like we are all having our chain pulled here. I do hope that the average person on the street knows that there is a lot of crap on the Internet. As a writer, I spend more time researching than pounding the keys of my computer. And I can still make mistakes. It is when I don’t take the time to double and triple check my facts that I can get in trouble.

Any good researcher is aware of the biases of the various search tools on the Internet. You can skip the first purchased entries on Google. You can reject the supposed news feed on Facebook. I am not sure those organizations can tell the difference between news and scams. You believe their news at your peril. They feed ignorance with false news. They mix advertising that looks like their news to fool you.

And yet, we hear from pollsters that 29 per cent of Canadians get their news from Facebook. If you have ever hoped the pollsters might be wrong, that is the time for it.

It was many years ago that I worked for the Globe and Mail in Toronto and yet I still believe I get a better balance of news from the Toronto Star. When digging deeper into world news, I try to check the opinions of the North American edition of the Economist with the New York Times.

You have to feel sorry for the people who do not tune in to the broadcast news on radio or television, or read a newspaper. There is a world out there and we need to be attuned to what is happening. And by the way, Blogs are not news. Blogs are opinions.

I still do not understand why news articles found by Google and other search engines, should be paid for. If the newspaper or magazine does not have a pay wall, that is the media’s problem, not the search engines.

And you can hardly blame the legitimate news media for wanting to be paid for their output. Costs keep rising and you can be very frustrated with people who think it should be free.

I am not charging anyone for this output because, it is what it is; my opinion.

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Cashing in on Change in Canada.

July 13, 2023July 12, 2023 by Peter Lowry

There seem to be no barriers that money cannot erase. Yesterday, we were talking about the frustrations with change and the situation of Canadians being unable to change their constitution. What we should not be doing is constantly bribing provincial bodies with federal funds. A case in point is reasonably priced daycare.

What Canada has recognized is that women are a huge resource. Reasonable cost daycare can free much of that resource to contribute to Canada’s economy. The failure to recognize this is what keeps most of the Middle East in the Middle Ages.

But the simple expedient of getting the provinces and territories to respond to bribes hardly speaks well for our country. I guess the fact of Medicare in this country is the single largest bribe. We should not forget though that the initial input on this idea came from the province of Saskatchewan. Under the Canada Health Act, Medicare requires that all provincial and territorial health plans must be accessible, comprehensive, portable and publicly administered. While some provinces constantly beat on the doors of those requirements, it has proved to be a highly successful program. Canadians are proud of it and politicians besmirch it at their peril.

I somehow get the feeling that inexpensive national daycare will not end up at $10 per day. Inflation is already doing damage to that idea.

But the public acceptance of a national daycare program is creating some strange bedfellows. When the act creating the national daycare program passed in the house of commons recently, the vote was 315 for yes, and no votes opposed. Despite the negative comments from the conservative benches during debate, it seems that conservative leader Pierre Poilievre had an epiphany. He came over from the dark side. He realized that Canadians wanted this program.

This seems to be digressing from Poilievre’s usual dyed-in-the-wool libertarianism—his extreme right-wing stance. Some of the talking heads are prophesizing that he will even be on side for a national drug program and the coming national dental care program. I guess it is just the possible difference between staying in opposition or maybe winning the coming election.

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Protecting Provincial Powers.

July 12, 2023July 11, 2023 by Peter Lowry

The other day, I mentioned that Oliver Mowat, Ontario’s premier for much of our country’s formative years back at the end of the 19^th Century, fought with prime minister John A. Macdonald over provincial rights. At the time, he was right. In today’s world, he would be very wrong. What is very wrong today is that we have been left with a constitution that is almost impossible to fix. We end up trying to work around the country’s constitution.

The problem is that our major social programs, that are more of a right than a ‘like to have,’ have to be negotiated piece by piece with the provinces and territories. It has become a form of self abuse that most federal politicians enter into with caution.

Every few years we re-open the arguments over Medicare. And yet we want to add a national drug plan. People would have laughed at you if you brought it up as Queen Victoria’s ministers were writing our constitution. So, what if daycare was only something a neighbour would offer at the time? Our constitution split the responsibilities of the different levels of government as they were viewed in the 1800s. Aldous Huxley, and his book Brave New World, were not born yet.

So, where does that leave Canadians? I doubt we would have a revolution. Hell, we get into better brawls in hockey games. It is doubtful that we are going to start a civil war. The péquistes in Quebec City have proved they are just a malicious bunch of bigots who want power exclusively for themselves. Compared to them, that silly woman who is premier in Alberta and her “Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act” has people across Canada laughing.

Our world has just muddled its way through a deadly pandemic and our constitution proved to be a barrier to healing for Canadians. We had the federal government trying to shore up the country’s economy while the provinces struggled with trying to support our medical delivery system. Here in Ontario, we had a conservative government bleeding out the healthcare system. They blocked the hospitals from the extra funding needed to encourage medical staff. They just watched as our hospitals fell into disrepair.

But the feds and the provinces remained true to our outmoded constitution.

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The High Price of Buying Jobs.

July 11, 2023July 10, 2023 by Peter Lowry

When I was working for a computer company back in the 1970s, our manufacturing manager came into my office one day with an idea. He had looked ahead at our manufacturing situation and all he could find was bad news. The markets were changing. Desk top computers were popping up in our offices to do accounting and even the word processing for my department. He wanted some government money to develop a new product for his manufacturing teams.

His idea was what were called work stations at that time. He figured that a bare bones development of a miniature work station might cost as much as $50,000. I shook my head. I explained to him that the project had to be related to keeping his plant growing and creating jobs. And besides, if we were not talking in millions, the government would not be interested.

Only today, you have to be talking billions. The batteries for electric vehicles are the latest buzzwords in government support. And as these companies need to build special plants to produce these batteries, the provincial government can be included for its support. It is all done in complicated tax incentives and financial supports.

Back in the 70s, the plant manager and I worked up a deal worth $100 million. All we wanted from the feds was cash to the extent of $40 million. That was the proposed cost of the hardware and we would find the other $60 million to develop the initial software needs of this new product. We got a lot of skepticism from the company’s head office in Minneapolis but they signed off on our proposal. And I got the okay to take the proposal to Ottawa. There were a couple Silicon Valley start ups in California heading in the same direction and we needed to move fast.

It might surprise the reader that no politicians were involved in the transaction. I did the whole deal in one department with sign-offs from the deputy minister, assistant deputy minister and director general. I even had an old friend who worked for the department involved to do the due diligence on the proposal. He spent an entire day grilling me on the ins and outs of the deal. It was a Friday, so the Ottawa day ended at 4 pm. He ceremoniously handed me a government of Canada cheque for $24 million as the down payment. I caught my flight back to Toronto and went home with that cheque in my briefcase for the weekend.

This was never a success story. The Minneapolis company was bought by one of those Silicon Valley start ups and I heard they gave all the money involved for the project back to the Canadian government. I had already moved on to other challenges.

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Poilievre’s Problems.

July 8, 2023July 7, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Federal conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has had one objective in his life since leaving the University of Calgary. He wants to be prime minister of Canada. He seemed to be on his way to his objective last fall when he won the leadership of the conservatives. Only now are conservatives and their opposites in the other parties questioning if defeating the liberals is possible.

He is going to need to do a heck of a lot more than trade his glasses for contacts. The problem with that is he let that his button-down look become a trademark. Dumping the glasses just makes him look myopic.

His basic problem is his own determination. Nobody really believes that this little man wants to improve the lives of Canadians. He is more of a libertarian than a conservative. He is doctrinaire in this extreme conservatism. He seems to promise to make you like it.

But he also has the problem of how he is trying to get to that brass ring. He has spent some 19 years in parliament both as a back bencher and as a member, briefly, in the Harper cabinet. If he ever did anything worthwhile in parliament, Canadians have yet to hear about it.

While some polls have his conservatives edging out the Trudeau liberals, these are a long way from the next election. I expect that the edge for the conservatives is among younger voters. They are the toughest to get to the polls in an election.

But those younger voters will also be finding out more about Mr. Poilievre and they will not like all they find. He made his name in politics as a trouble maker. He welcomed the infamous Trucker’s convoy to Ottawa. That got him some attention. He also promoted bitcoin as the great inflation protection before it did a nosedive. He does not seem to know anything about economics.

It is interesting that women do not like him as much as men might. And despite his French name, Quebecers are not enamoured with him.

In Ontario, he is known for his Alberta birthplace and his pledges to the westerners to build them more pipelines and his lack of concern for global warming.

I only wish he had Justin Trudeau worried. I think Trudeau has run his course. A new liberal leader in the next two years, could do wonders to allay concerns about the future of our country.

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A Devil’s Pact?

July 4, 2023July 3, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Just some thinking today about where our parliament might be heading. In a polarized situation such as the Canadian parliament, it would not take the transfer of many seats to upset the liberals and transfer the largest number of seats—but not a majority—to the conservatives. That thought leads us to some interesting considerations. What if, for example, the only party in the commons with a large enough number of seats (other than the liberals) to be able to create a voting majority for the conservatives was the Bloc Québécois? Could there be a deal struck? Would Pierre Poilievre make a deal with the Devil?

You have to admit that Yves-François Blanchet and his fellow Bloc separatists love being the trouble makers. They have no other purpose in the House of Commons. They will say that the purpose is to ensure that Quebec always gets its share-or more.

But recently, on the issue of foreign influence on elections, the Bloc has been working hand-in-glove with Poilievre and the conservatives—all the more to embarrass Trudeau and his liberals. Blanchet and his colleagues could not be further away from any foreign influence problems but once trouble-makers, always trouble-makers.

I would hardly put it past Poilievre to be willing to make a deal with Blanchet. Believe or not, Poilievre would love to get off the hook on his position on climate change and energy policy. The only seats where his change of position might mean trouble are in Alberta but to lose a few seats in Alberta and gain ten to twenty in Ontario and Quebec would be worth it. One of the things that Poilievre has probably noticed in his life in politics is that not many voters really worry about your policy positions that do not affect them directly.

Besides, supporting the conservatives comes easily for Quebec premier François Legault. He already showed that stripe in the 2021 federal election. Poilievre’s offer of hands-off Quebec and his repeated promises of a laissez-faire federal government is right in Legault’s wheel house.

It is likely that the only action by the liberals that could really screw up Poilievre’s plans is Mr. Trudeau’s resignation and replacement in the next two years.

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Fiddling With Figures.

July 3, 2023June 30, 2023 by Peter Lowry

There seems to be some confusion around what kind of voting prime minister Justin Trudeau might be promoting these days. All I have ever heard him promote was ranked ballots. Which just goes to prove that he is no student of voting systems.

What former conservative leader Erin O’Toole was talking about as he quit politics was “brokerage” voting which is just another name for proportional representation. It is assumed under proportional representation that most of the time there will be no one party winning a majority. This is the situation Mr. O’Toole referred to as parties would be required to broker an arrangement to share or just support whatever combination of political groups can form a government.

It is probably somewhat premature to assume this is the answer to Canada’s political problems. Proportional voting was developed to solve the voting problems when a large portion of the voters are illiterate. The illiterate need only select a pictograph that represents the party for which they want to vote.

One of the aspects of proportional voting is that it encourages the creation of many small parties. In Israel for example, the larger parties always encourage the religious parties in what is a mostly secular country, in case they need a bit of support. It is why Saturday in Israel can be the most boring day of the week.

The other problem with proportional voting is that Canadians are used to sending a candidate from their electoral district to parliament or the provincial legislature. In proportional voting, the members of the parties are appointed from lists according to the voting results.

Toronto was very lucky in the voting system used for the recent byelection for mayor. They had asked the provincial government for permission to use ranked ballots. Luckily, premier Ford said ‘No.’ It is very hard to guess who would win when you have 101 candidates to choose from for your second choice. It would be my guess that Olivia Chow would not be the second choice of anyone who did not make her their first choice. Mind you, can you imagine ranking 102 candidates? It would be an interesting computer program needed to count the results.

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A Marriage Made in Hell.

July 2, 2023June 30, 2023 by Peter Lowry

There must be more serious financial problems than we thought at the Toronto Star. We could have switched to electronic distribution several years ago, but instead maintained a very expensive subscription. I have always admired the Bitove family that is currently at the helm of Torstar. And I was delighted that Jordan Bitove wanted the Star to carry on in the Joseph Atkinson tradition. To hear of a potential involvement with the vipers at Postmedia and their masters at Chatham Management is the most discouraging word I have heard from the declining media scene in Canada in many years.

How Paul Godfrey ever managed to get American Media Inc. (AMI) and its National Enquirer involved in Postmedia and Sun Media must have been a first in brilliant con jobs. Today, his cranky creation of right-wing newspapers is owned and indirectly controlled by the people at Chatham Management in New Jersey, U.S.A. These are the Republican Party cheerleaders who produce tons of mindless crap every month for housewives to pick up as they go through the grocery counters of America.

Why Torstar’s Jordan Bitove would even consider getting into bed with those people is nothing more than engaging in the world’s oldest profession. There is redemption though if he really thought about it. Bell Media just dumped a lot of reporters and editors and is in desperate need for good reporting. And Corus Entertainment is in desperate need for broader reporting capabilities. You will never get people to wake up for the commercials, if your news constantly repeating, puts them to sleep first.

I never could understand the late John Basset’s mistake when he dumped his Toronto Telegram newspaper in favour of concentrating on his CFTO-TV which became the CTV network. Cross media editorial was a formula that worked in the United States but has never been given a reasonable chance to develop in most of Canada.

Maybe I am one of those people who want something more challenging than a crossword and coffee over my breakfast. While there is a tendency in the Star today to overwrite the various news columns, the individual who subscribes to print media can simply self-edit and draw the news he or she wants from it. Whether delivered in the early hours of the morning or electronically on a tablet, it introduces you to the realities of your day. I welcome it. If you want opinions, just keep reading Babel-on-the-Bay.com .

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Some Notes for Canada Day.

July 1, 2023June 30, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Canadians live in a wonderful country. And it sure isn’t broke. Neither its financial wellbeing, nor its physical condition, nor its governing structure are broken. Only a foolish demagogue would be out on the barbeque circuit this summer telling Canadians that their country is broke.

Canada always rates high with people around the world for its democracy, its beauty, its prowess at winter sports, its cities, its banking system, its productive prairies, its dairy farms and the diversity of its peoples. And despite the complaints of some politicians, it is in excellent financial shape. We came through the pandemic without totally destroying our health system and at a lower cost in lives than most countries.

Did you know that three of the top ten of the world’s most liveable cities are in Canada. The cities are Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto.

I used to arrange seminars on Multiple Sclerosis on behalf of the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis in other parts of the world. I was often amazed at the number of people who came to those seminars because they wanted to hear how things were done in Canada. As much as they wanted to hear about Canada, I had to make sure that they heard how other countries were also solving the need for public education into Multiple Sclerosis, how they cared for patients, and the promotion of ongoing medical research.

But there is no getting around the promise of Canada as a country that welcomes newcomers and offers them so much in opportunities. No matter where you go in this world, that Canadian passport is pure gold. If we tripled the number of people working for Immigration Canada, I still don’t think we would make much of a dent in the number of applicants.

Every time I see the Statue of Liberty that dominates New York Harbour, I think that the Americans should regift her to Canada. For it is really Canada today that calls out for the “tired and poor and huddled masses, yearning to be free.”

Happy Canada Day. We are among the luckiest people in the world.

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