Federal Politics – Page 85 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Can Canadians live with this?

October 11, 2018 by Peter Lowry

It is more important than we knew. We are talking about the environment. Our environmental poster boy Justin Trudeau has made too many promises that he has no way of keeping. Our Pollyanna environment minister Catherine McKenna makes promises she cannot keep and quotes government policy that will never happen.

And you saw what happened in Ontario. That pig, Doug Ford is busy tearing down the work of the provincial liberals of the last decade and a half. Ontario went off coal, invested in clean energy and established a strong cap and trade relationship with California and Quebec. Nobody said the plan was perfect but it was starting to pay off. Doug Ford is putting an end to that.

And to make matters worse, Ford is allying himself with Western climate change deniers such as premier Scott Moe in Saskatchewan and conservative trouble maker Jason Kenney in Alberta. These conservative leaders put profit ahead of our children’s future and are fighting against federal program attempts to try to curb pollution such as a proposed carbon tax.

But the most serious problem is that Trudeau’s liberal government seems to think it is not responsible when it ships pollution to other parts of our world.

This government wants to construct a doubled pipeline to Burnaby, B.C. to ship Alberta’s tar sands bitumen to other countries. The highly polluting process to make synthetic crude oil out of bitumen is destroying our world whether it is processed in India or in Alberta.

And the pollution of creating ersatz crude oil is just one of the problems in tar sands exploitation. The rapidly growing areas of settling ponds (that can kill wildlife) in northern Alberta are a testament to the process of sending heated water into to tar sands deposits to bring the bitumen to the surface.

And to make it even worse, bitumen has to be mixed with lighter oils and be heated to be forced at high pressure through pipelines. The diluted bitumen is abrasive and far more likely to cause leaks and spills. It can get in streams and rivers and cause endless destruction of the environment and the further killing of wildlife.

If Justin Trudeau and his cabinet do not know how exploitation of the tar sands is speeding global warming, they are either ignorant, do not care or are hypocrites. Take your pick.

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“Never trust anyone over 30.”

October 9, 2018 by Peter Lowry

Hearing from readers in attendance at the recent Ontario liberal gathering, most were impressed by the numbers of younger attendees. Those are the ones to rebuild and revitalize the party. What they hardly need is us greybeards. We have had our day at the helm. Use us for cannon fodder or what you wish but what this new party needs is youth, energy, enthusiasm and ideas.

And do not worry about a name and descriptors until you have come to common agreement on the political direction. And the last thing you need to worry about is leadership. If you define a party by its leader, you know that your party stands or falls on that human’s strengths and weaknesses. Think of the strong leaders of the past and the parties that sought to do their bidding. Think of what lives longer: an idea or a person?

While the American right wing can make ‘liberal’ a curse word, it has always been an honourable word in Canada. The liberal party of Canada has been tall with the likes of Wilfrid Laurier, MacKenzie King and Pierre Trudeau. Each brought strength and honour and progress to Canada.

Consider first the new party’s objectives. And what type of political future do Canadians want? Do they want the opportunities offered by progressive government? Do they want the concern for individual rights and freedoms that true liberals want? Do they care about green space, protecting our farmlands and the environment? Do they want vibrant, active cities with training and job opportunities for all? Do they want freedom for the arts, expanded challenges for our academics, and an open society to entertainers? Do they want us to keep our word to our aboriginal Canadians?

Many will say that all of these concerns need leadership. If we make them common cause, we are all providing the leadership. A party leader is a pilot who brings you into harbour, a priest or priestess who serves the temple, an industrious sales manager, a chief executive officer and chair who heads the board, a spokes person. The party must define the leader. The leader does not define the party.

“Never trust anyone over 30!” was a slogan attributed to the free-speech movement at American universities in the 1960s. Maybe we need to revive it today to get us out of the same failures of politics in the 21^st century.

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The sinking ship Singh.

October 7, 2018 by Peter Lowry

Taking a positive stance when your chief of staff quits, can be delaying the inevitable. It happened to federal new democrat leader Jagmeet Singh the other day and all he could do was gain a little time. The truth was that the federal NDP needed to keep his chief-of-staff and dump Singh.

But Singh must first understand the difficulty of his position.

Canada has been welcoming to Sikh immigrants since the 1800s. As Canadians, Sikhs have joined professions, academia and created new businesses. They are industrious and care about how we govern ourselves. They know that ‘raghead’ is not a sobriquet but they hear little of that ignorant racism in a society of so many newcomers.

But it does tend to encourage clustering. Living near others who attend the same temple is a reassurance in a land far from that of your childhood. There is a defiance to be seen among the observant of the second and third generations of Canadian Sikhs. Nobody cares very much if the observant and their 5-Ks want to stand out in our secular society. It is their choice and nobody need criticize.

But—and there is always a ‘but’—there are barriers that it can create. Jagmeet Singh has the same opportunity for election as prime minister as a Muslim woman in a burqa or a Hasidic with his dreadlocks. You can hardly expect the bulk of society to understand the why of these differences. They are seen as barriers to wide acceptance.

And that was what Jagmeet Singh did not understand when he encouraged the Sikh communities in Canada to swamp the membership of the NDP and win him the party leadership. What he did not understand was that he could easily count on his fellow Sikh Canadians to support him but it was his acceptance by Canadians of all backgrounds that was the critical test.

There is much to admire in the character of the man who has worked tirelessly over the past year to lead his party forward. The problem is that he has not been in the commons where he could be seen as a leader. Donations to the party have fallen off in a time when reserves are needed.

Fleeing to British Columbia to find a possibly safe seat for a by-election could be the final mistake.

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Donald Trump’s Win?

October 2, 2018 by Peter Lowry

We might as well let Donald Trump think he won. You hate to give a bully the victory but he would just go away and pout if we did not. What he really got was the right to rename the deal. That way, he can tell his claque that he got rid of NAFTA. It is now called the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement (USMCA). It sounds like a branch of the United States Marine Corp, but what the heck—as long as it works for everybody involved.

It might be that Canada let the U.S. in on a bit of its milk market but the farmers can easily be compensated for that small encroachment. It leaves the fresh milk market to Canada’s farmers and that is the important part for consumers.

I would say it is a win for Justin Trudeau and his foreign affairs minister. They held the course throughout the negotiations. They did not let Trump’s irresponsible twits rattle them and they held the course to the end when the Americans had to agree to the deal or look terribly stupid.

The best part of the win was Canada sticking to its guns on bringing Mexican auto-worker wages into line. The $16 minimum wage for the Mexicans making autos and trucks is a huge jump and the impact it will have in Mexico will change that country a great deal. It will help drive up the costs of a holiday in Mexico for Americans and Canadians but that is fair too!

The other part of the deal that was vital to Canada was the continuation of the dispute settlement clause as it was in the original deal. The idea of submitting disputes to America’s highly politicized judicial system was a guarantee of constant harassment.

It also looks like Canada came out ahead on the automobile part of the deal. It looks like we have strengthened our position on auto parts and there are fewer concerns about the bleeding off of final assembly.

All in all, we can have the pleasure of looking south and giving Mr. Trump what Americans often refer to as the Canadian salute. Middle finger at the ready…go!

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Perchance, a prophet’s pipeline pays profits?

September 29, 2018 by Peter Lowry

If there is bad news among the brochures delivered in the post this day, is the bad news to be blamed on Canada Post? And should a government encourage the building of a pipeline for the transmission of natural gas to replace more seriously polluting coal-fired plants to produce electricity? Do the politicians get plaudits? Or are we, as a caring society, conflicted by these moves?

Listening to Ontario environmental commissioner Dianne Saxe the other day, did not help. It was, without direct accusation, a serious indictment of Ontario’s current conservative government.

But was it, at the same time, an indictment of the Trudeau government in Ottawa? Was it an indirect challenge to the climate change potential of the government’s recently purchased Kinder Morgan pipeline across the Canadian Rockies? Could it be that the expanded pipeline is to be just a blameless delivery mechanism such as Canada Post? Or is it political one-upmanship?

The conservatives and liberals in Ottawa these days are arguing about who is the biggest friend of the pipeline business. Conservative leader Andrew ‘Chuckles’ Scheer and liberal leader Justin Trudeau are arguing about who has created the most pipelines to take the pollution of Canada’s tar sands to tidewater. These are not just pipelines for crude oil but pipelines for diluted bitumen—that creates more than three times the carbon pollution in being processed to synthetic crude oil products.

And besides, Trudeau must be a prophet—as he can so easily brush aside all the concerns about a high-pressure, dual pipeline spilling bitumen into the ecosystem of the Rockies and the fragile fisheries of the west coast.

Does the liberal government in Ottawa have the right to say “We won” because of the use of taxpayer billions to buy the Kinder Morgan pipeline? Does it make Justin Trudeau the prophet, loved of Alberta admirers? Or does it make him the dupe of Albertan greed? And is Alberta premier Rachel Notely but a stalking horse for the greed and ambitions of united conservative party leader Jason Kenney?

And can the prophetic Justin Trudeau profit not from his perfidy? Is there not a federal election in 2019?

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Dragging down the dialogue.

September 28, 2018 by Peter Lowry

That Donald Trump is at it again. The diplomats laughed at him in the United Nations in New York the other day. Prime minister Justin Trudeau of Canada was walking by in the U.N. building the next day and did not want add to the American president’s discomfort and stopped to commiserate. Trump brushed him off.

It could have been left at that. It is just that Donald Trump never knows when it is best to shut up. In a no-holds-barred bear baiting with the news media the next day, where the media was the bear, Trump insulted the chief Canadian negotiator on the NAFTA file, lied about and maligned Canada’s prime minister and made it almost impossible for America’s chief negotiator to bring anything positive to the NAFTA table in future negotiations.

It begs the question as to whether there is any point to further discussion of the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States?

The point of this is that Mr. Trump knows that the Canadians are not going to tell him to ‘Get Stuffed.’ They, of course, know they have a right to tell him to but they are also being diplomatic and it is inappropriate for prime ministers and foreign ministers to tell the head of another nation to ‘Get Stuffed.’ No nation has gone to war over the head of the nation being told to ‘Get Stuffed,’ though there could always be a first time.

In all my years in politics and communications, this is the first time I have seriously felt that it is time to break with the diplomatic protocols and call a spade a spade.

There is no question but that Donald Trump is enjoying spewing all this garbage because he knows he can get away with it.

It is to Canada’s credit that our negotiators and prime minister have put up with this crap from Trump without responding in kind. Never let it be said that Canada walked away from NAFTA because of that disgusting Donald Trump.

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“Some animals are more equal…”

September 24, 2018 by Peter Lowry

George Orwell’s Animal Farm told us more about humans than about animals and why some pigs are more equal than others. This subject came readily to mind the other day when reading about our liberal government’s attitude regarding protecting political party databases. Having worked with some of the earlier and cruder database efforts by the liberals, I find their attitude concerning.

Despite the recommendation of an all-party committee of the house of commons, the liberal government has refused to have any oversight or privacy rules applied to party databases. Their obduracy goes so far as to refuse to advise liberal adherents if their data has been hacked.

For myself, I would prefer that the liberal party’s present version of Liberalist knows less about me until the party’s system security takes a quantum leap forward.

The last time I had easy access to liberal party data, I had offered to do some back-up data entry of canvassing results. An ulterior motive was that it gave me entry to correct my own data. With the unrestricted use of automated calling to ostensively poll the voters, I had taken lying to pollsters to new levels. I always told automated systems that I was voting for a party or candidate at random.

The problem was that since the days when we kept the data about voters on ‘3 by 5’ cards, data collected by supposedly ‘independent’ pollsters was often the parties calling to find out how you would vote. Back when we actually talked to a human pollster, I had always engaged the caller in conversation and, usually, had determined who was behind the poll before answering anything. I could follow the effectiveness of this on voting day when all three major parties would call to remind me to vote.

It was even funnier when voting and seeing all three inside scrutineers check me off as a vote for their party.

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“Once more unto the breach, my friends…”

September 21, 2018 by Peter Lowry

The Hordes are at the gates of Castle Liberal on the Rideau and William Shakespeare, once more has appropriate words at the ready. With a year left of his tattered mandate, prime minister Justin Trudeau had best take the advice of Henry V and plug the breach with his dead and soldier on.

And speaking of soldering, you might be wondering how soon we will be dusting-off the Highway of Heroes for the casualties of his ill-considered and ill-fated peace-keeping expedition to the Sahara Desert?

Like most of his political problems, Justin creates them for himself. A good example was his promise in 2015 hat it would be the last time voters would use first-past-the-post voting. He disappointed a few people with that one.

He did the same with assisted dying. The bill was so watered down by the time it passed, that not even many of the dying were pleased.

And while he might have helped some families and the theoretical middle class over his term, he has ignored seniors. They vote too.

And while some people think he has stood firm with U.S. president Trump, his stance is really something more like petrified. He has absolutely no understanding of how to handle that child-man. Judging by their relative ages, he might hope to outlast him.

There are two things that really griped this commentator: In Trudeau’s desperate attempt to feel some love from Alberta, he has spent $4.7 billion of public money on a pipeline to serve the greed of one province.

And by completing the planned twinning of the line, he will be making a farce of all his promises and all our hopes for the world environment.

At the same time, Trudeau has been destroying the federal liberal party. There are no memberships in to-day’s liberal party. He has turned the party lists into an unequivocal sucker list. This list is held above the law and nobody has any guarantee of its privacy. Can you believe that you get better protection on Facebook?

But, it should be pointed out that Justin Trudeau has help going into next year’s trials. They are Andrew ‘Chuckles’ Scheer and Jagmeet Singh. They are the leaders of Canada’s conservative and new democratic parties respectively. They have both shown themselves inadequate to the task before them. Their parties need leadership.

Justin Trudeau needs to be challenged.

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And confusion for ‘Chuckles.’

September 20, 2018 by Peter Lowry

There must be days when conservative leader Andrew ‘Chuckles’ Scheer goes home to his taxpayer-provided hideaway at Stornoway and asks the wife why he is doing his duty for the ungrateful. He gets scorn from across the aisle in parliament. He gets static from his loyal(?) caucus. He is ignored by most Canadians. And then he has to go wash out his mouth with soap for what he says about Maxime Bernier.

He thought he had an uptick the other day when a disgruntled liberal crossed the floor. The last thing Chuckles needs is another conservative caucus member who feels entitled.

His concern is that it might not be worth it. He knows the loss of Bernier from caucus is a load off his mind. He just has no idea how many conservatives Bernier might take with him to the newly minted Peoples’ Party of Canada (PPC). Like Doug Ford in Ontario, Bernier could suck up more of the publicity that Chuckles needs.

Chuckles has enough trouble with Justin Trudeau. He hardly needs Bernier to add to his problems. Scheer’s brain trust has impressed on him that he has to be seen as backing Trudeau’s effort to save NAFTA. He has no choice but to back Trudeau on the damn Kinder Morgan pipeline foolishness. How else is Alberta and the conservative ‘enfant terrible’ Kenney going to make Alberta rich again?

It is really a good thing that Chuckles has never had a reputation of thinking for himself before. He is not doing much better now that he is caretaker of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC).

But what burns him is that Trudeau has become vulnerable. And they are just not playing a friendly game of bridge. Trudeau has created a serious sore in the body of the liberal party. There is a very large group of environmentally conscious Canadians who normally vote liberal. These liberals are concerned about this pipeline that is designed solely to spread pollution from Canada’s tar sands around the world.

And next year when the construction of that pipeline gets into full swing, the newspapers will give the environmentalist protestors front page and the television networks will show the mayhem in B.C. What will really stick in Chuckles’ craw will be the NDP and the Greens at the front of the parade. The poor guy cannot get a break.

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Bernier bids from the Beauce.

September 17, 2018 by Peter Lowry

The beauty and tranquility of La Beauce makes the region a must for tourists seeking the essence of Quebec’s joie de vivre. Each season in La Beauce offers its special attractions. This year, a new season has been added: it is political, it is the ‘silly season.’ It is Maxime Bernier’s introduction of his new political party: The People’s Party of Canada.

The party name tells it all. The name is classic in its hypocrisy. Think of all the contemporary politicians who talk about being for the people—are they really? Do they not just use people?

Is Mr. Bernier a people’s politician? Or is he just a libertarian? He looks down on Canada’s conservatives. He calls them “morally corrupt.” He has always represented the extremist right wing of the conservatives.

Last year Bernier was the second last choice of almost half of Canada’s conservatives voting for a new party leader. That was not an impressive accomplishment. It meant that in a preferential ballot, he was among the 13 candidates in a count of 141,000 ballots cast. To further complicate the counting, all electoral districts were allocated up to 100 votes. Where more than 100 votes were obtained, the vote percentage applied. Who really won hardly matters as the ballots were destroyed after the count.

Preferential voting tends to drill down among the candidates. If you do not have a winner on the first count, you count the losing candidates’ second choice and so on until someone has more than 50 per cent. In this way, the losers get to choose the winners and usually nobody is happy.

Bernier was certainly not happy playing second fiddle to Andrew ‘Chuckles’ Scheer. Their honeymoon only lasted a year while Bernier made plans. It was in this time that he came up with the idea of the peoples’ party. Which only proves that Maxime Bernier only has a vague idea of what it takes to launch a new political party.

He knows it takes money so he proudly announced that he had raised $140,000 to fund his party when he announced its name. Where he will get the $5 to 6 million required in just the coming year, he might not know. You would think if he checked with people such as Preston Manning of the former Reform Party or Lucien Bouchard of the Bloc Québécois, they would have told him the real needs. Bernier needs to get real.

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