Municipal Politics – Page 17

No Morning Line for by-elections

January 6, 2016 by Peter Lowry

There are two types of by-elections. There is the one that gets a pre-selected candidate into a seat and then there is the scramble version that is almost impossible to forecast. It looks like we have one of those unfathomable ones coming up. The by-election is in Barrie, Ontario on February 1 and it is to replace a Conservative city councillor who is now a Member of Parliament.

Yes, we know there is no party politics at city hall, but we also know that the winner in this scramble will be one of the two Liberal candidates or one of four of the Conservative candidates. None of the other seven candidates gets any kind of chance at winning. If either of the political parties got their act together, we would already know the winner.

Major political parties usually tend to stand back and watch by-elections to see who can organize enough friends to drive out a winning number of voters. It is one of those situations where the person who can get 1000 votes is going to be the winner. There are more than 9000 potential voters in the ward but the average turnout in regular municipal elections in Barrie is about 30 per cent. By-elections can have an even lower turn-out.

Finding people to knock on doors or deliver literature is always a tough job in Barrie but in the snows and chills of January it takes more than just party loyalty.

The only heating up of the campaign is the death-wish of the north and south Barrie Liberal party organizations supporting different candidates. Here we were hoping for a new detente between the different factions of the party in this small city but they keep sticking sticks in each other’s eyes.

The south Barrie Liberals (where the by-election ward is located) are supporting a former police services board member. We had a chance to chat with him at a recent Liberal event in that part of the city. It was puzzling to see him there until we found out he was considering running in the by-election. He was trolling for workers.

But despite the Liberals in the riding that cover the ward choosing this candidate, the Liberals in the north of Barrie have chosen another to support. There was no meeting in either part of the city to make these decisions. They appear to be unilateral decisions of some of the riding executives.

It will be interesting to follow this fiasco to its conclusion. The hypocrisy of this shadow party politics in municipal politics is something that needs to be addressed. In Toronto, the lack of political platforms and direction to allow voters to help steer their city is a disgrace. It is stifling growth and progress. Cities need responsible government.

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“The last election under first-past-the-post.”

December 21, 2015 by Peter Lowry

That statement by our new prime minister is likely to be the one to haunt him for years to come. It is like many such statements in the heat of an election campaign—effusive, rhetorical, quotable and foolish. And to give the promise a reality would be a disservice to Canadians. First-past-the-post voting will serve us well for many years to come.

The problem is that Canada has made first-past-the-post work. The system keeps us involved in how we are governed. It works at all levels of government. It is the simplest, least complicated, easiest form of voting ever devised. And it brings us closer to government in that we directly elect the people who represent us.

To change such an easily understood and connected method of electing municipal, provincial and federal governments would be causing confusion when there is no need. There is no reason to believe that there is a groundswell, consensus or need for change. British Columbia and Ontario voters have indicated their lack of interest in alternatives. They have also established the precedent of holding a referendum on change.

What is even more disturbing than the federal examination of how we vote is the proposed unilateral change in Canada’s largest city. The suggestion is that the city forego its current beauty-contest form of selecting councillors to embrace a method of electing the least obnoxious of the candidates. In a form of government desperate for political direction, they are trying to change to ranked voting that would ensure that the person selected is at least the second or third choice of people voting for the losing candidates. It is called preferential voting and what you do is number your preference of the candidates.

Ranked voting such as this is supposed to make campaigns friendlier, more accurate and solve all the problems—other than the main problem of producing results.

But what most of the people railing against first-past-the-post want is proportional representation. They want a party getting 20 per cent of the vote to get 20 per cent of the seats in parliament. There are some simple ways of doing that. You can just vote for a party and the party will choose the members. You can also have a huge riding, multiple candidates and transferable voting—which takes a lot of explanation.

Frankly, first-past-the-post is getting a bum rap. When people understand how easy it is to use Internet voting, we can have run-off elections if you really want the majority choice. Why not fix first-past-the-post instead of dumping it?

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Life in a world without heroes.

December 5, 2015 by Peter Lowry

There are no longer heroes in North America. Small children used to look up to police in their uniforms and want to emulate them. Now they fear them. And it is the fault of the police themselves. The police have placed themselves beyond our reach. They have made a sham of the controls society should have over them. They protect each other and they defy the rest of society.

And they are unnecessarily killing people.

The killing goes on both in the north and south of the Unites States and in Canada too. The police are out of control. Just have a white police officer kill a black person in America and you can have race riots in that jurisdiction for the next year. The only persons who seem to survive the melee are the police officers who did the killing.

In Canada, we have police abusing their position in society to target the racially sensitive with ‘stop and question’ tactics that can inflame racial tensions. And when told to stop the practice, the police ignore the order.

But the answer by law makers in America is to provide military equipment to local police forces. American police today are dressed and equipped more like storm troops than your friendly neighbourhood cop.

Even in Canada, we had the experience of police gathering from across the country to practice the art of “Kettling.” When they did it at the G-20 in Toronto in 2010, the police destroyed a hundred years of good community relations. This was not policing but the unnecessary strong-arming of innocent civilians. And when it came to blaming someone for the tactic, they picked a mid-level supervisor who must have pissed off his fellow white-shirts. Mind you he was finally slapped on the wrist and lost a few days pay.

The guy really responsible for that example of bad policing might have had to finally retire from the force but he found a new sinecure. He is now the Member of Parliament for Scarborough-Southwest.

But nobody is doing anything about the problems behind this loss of innocence in policing. In Canada, we have failed to ensure that there is proper civilian review of police actions. We have police service boards who think they are some form of super police. They are allowing themselves to be co-opted by the people they are supposed to supervise. They have to stop working for the police and realize they are responsible to their fellow civilians.

It is one hell of a note when people are not protected from their own damn police.

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Pay yourself first.

November 29, 2015 by Peter Lowry

It is a rule that the rich have to follow. They are taught that you always pay yourself first. It is how they stay rich. Take the situation of Chief Executive Officer Paul Godfrey at Postmedia. The company loses hundreds of millions of dollars every year and the stock is in the toilet. If the company was any more leveraged, the fulcrum would be left behind.

But CEO Godfrey and his inner circle still get their bonuses. Paul took home his one and a half million or so this year from a company that he acquired out of bankruptcy with a very large chunk of American hedge fund money. His promise was to slash costs and salaries to profitability. He is still a long way from that objective.

The recent and highly-leveraged acquisition of the English-language assets of Sun Media has not produced his promised reduction in the fiscal bleeding. The leveraged buyout from Karl Péladeau’s Quebecor for just $316 million was a good deal until you realize that it added another $650 million to Postmedia’s already massive debt.

Maybe that is all you need in business today. Nobody denies that Paul Godfrey has chutzpah but with his added hubris, you would think he would look for better challenges. He might have lost his friend Stephen Harper in Ottawa despite his forcing all of his newspapers to endorse the Conservatives but he has embraced Barrie Ontario’s own Patrick Brown as though he were a long lost son. His next ambition could be to make that boy Premier of Ontario.

Mind you the question of making Patrick Brown palatable to Ontario voters might be far more of a challenge than even Paul Godfrey can handle. As you have noticed lately, the lad only speaks occasionally but he does have a decent hair cut, an expensive suit and the proper accessories. At least Patrick no longer looks like a sow’s ear.

But the concern is that Paul Godfrey’s house of cards at Postmedia is working on constantly diminishing returns. If Paul keeps paying himself and his henchmen while still paying the vigorish to the American hedge funds, he will ride that gravy train right into what Lord Connie Black recently referred to as his own end zone. And as other writers have noted, Paul is no wunderkind in the newspaper business. He is barely in the mainstream of Canadian politics. Maybe at 76 it is time for him to take his millions and retire to some warm place in the sun.

The newspaper business is no longer for people who love the smell of newsprint. Paul was always a manipulator and never an innovator. As a retiree, he could just carp about things like the rest of us.

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Go big or go home.

October 24, 2015 by Peter Lowry

It hardly matters what level of politics you are contesting. “Go big or go home” are the watch words. The entire country witnessed the scenario through the recent federal campaign as the losers struggled with their old Bill Clinton-style “It’s the economy stupid” campaigns. They actually forced the Liberals to take a different tack. It was the tack that won the country. The best example before that though was John Tory’s campaign for mayor of Toronto last year. His SmartTrack transit plan was an excellent example. John Tory went big.

The really smart thing about it was that it was hardly perfect. It needs further assessment and lots of tweaking to make it work. What the quibblers do not realize is that no matter how much they might doubt the plan’s feasibility at least John Tory is trying to solve the problem. If anyone does not know there are serious gridlock problems in the city, they have never driven anywhere there.

The beauty of the plan is that by routing it on the Ontario Government’s GO right-of-way rail line, it is already part of the planned electrification of GO. Additional stations can be added at which the GO trains do not necessarily need to stop.

The real coup for Tory in the SmartTrack proposal is the extension to the Mississauga airport corporate centre. He can easily leave the problems and the funding for that portion to Metrolinx, Mississauga and the province while getting the credit. It looks like it will also be the saviour of the Union-Pearson Express that might find itself integrated into the plan as just another surface subway route.

One of the biggest surprises last year was when Timmy Hudak and his Ontario Conservatives took a really good plan to give beer sales to convenience stores and then scrapped it to offer to fire 100,000 civil servants. Going big is not a Conservative thing!

While Wynne was smart enough to make a deal with Quebec for some of that province’s hydro power, she has still not seen the light on the Windsor-Quebec City high-speed rail corridor. That is the ‘Go Big’ coup that can win the hearts and minds of Canada’s two major provinces. It can be the tie that binds them into the future. It is a joint venture that gives them a future.

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What editing standards at the Toronto Star?

October 4, 2015 by Peter Lowry

It has always been an understood thing that the editing standards in the sports section of a large newspaper are often more relaxed than those of the general news. The editors tended to give the jocks in sports a looser rein. And it now seems that the Toronto Star—touted as Canada’s largest newspaper—has decided that simple decency is not needed on the city hall beat.

To describe a faction of councillors at Toronto City Hall as a den of snakes is an affront to the democratic process. It is the right of councillors to make up or change their minds about issues that is being challenged.

And when does an editor allow the city hall bureau chief to refer to an individual councillor as leader of “a flip-flopping band of turncoat councillors”? It seems that this councillor changed his mind on a pet project of the Toronto Star’s editorial board.

This kerfuffle is about rethinking the two-year old motion by council to ask for legalization of ranked balloting for Ontario municipal elections. The Star thinks that councillors have no right to change their minds. And thank God they do. Just because some people at the Star are for something does not necessarily mean that they know anything about it.

As we have written before, ranked balloting is a system where the losers are choosers. This is where voters are asked to rank their first, second and third choice on a ballot for a position with three or more persons running. If no candidate has more than 50 per cent of the vote, the candidate who came last has his or her second votes added to the other candidates. If this still does not put a candidate over the 50 per cent mark, another loser is eliminated and their third choices are added to those still standing. What happens if there is still no 50 per cent plus winner after all the preferences have been counted is never properly explained.

But what we do know is that a preferential ballot is not the answer. What people need to realize is that as more and more municipalities are moving to Internet voting, the cost of having run-off elections becomes very reasonable. And where there are more than 10 candidates in a race, any candidate with less than 10 per cent of the vote needs to be dropped off the ballot to speed the process.

But there seems to be nothing we can do about the rudeness of the Toronto Star editors when things do not go their way. Maybe they are just failed bloggers who think they can say anything they wish.

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If you fail to try, you are guaranteed to fail.

September 15, 2015 by Peter Lowry

While watching from the catbird seat in Barrie, Toronto is still our city. We were both born in Toronto. We wept for the Leafs through the 70s and 80s. We were there for the Jays in their first World Series and the repeat. We bet on John Tory as mayor last year to return our city’s honour. We saw the Pan-Am Games as a provincial success. We were enthusiastic for the Olympics because it is a rite of passage for a great city. We could not be more disappointed with the ignorance of the naysayers.

Great cities lead. They build iconic beacons such as the CN Tower, SkyDome and a leaky but identifying city hall. They create wildly successful festivals such as Pride, Caribana and Taste of the Danforth. The world looks to Toronto as a leader in fashion, film, music, theatre, serving foods of the world and a tourist Mecca. And everyone should be embarrassed for how long it is taking to have a world-class casino.

And Toronto is a city where people feel safe. It is safety without boredom. It is a city of churches without much proselytizing. It is where the hookers are not too aggressive as they offer their services. It is a polite city. It is generally clean. The city water tastes good. Even the police tend to be deferential.

So who elected the misanthropes who are against a bid for the Olympics? We understand former Mayor Rob Ford. He is against anything that might be progressive—especially if it was not his idea. That bunch of downtown councillors are sad sacks who are against anything that might get them off their bicycles. They feel it is a bad day when they cannot think of something to retard the growth and success of the city.

If Vancouver can do a Winter Olympics and Montreal can do a Summer Olympics, then Toronto can do a Summer Olympics to make all Canadians proud. And this has to be remembered: we are carrying our country on our shoulders. We are helping restore Canada’s international reputation. It has been going downhill in the past decade and we have to help rebuild it.

Canada cannot take pride in its athletes if we do not step to the bar and host our share of Olympic Games. It is an obligation we have to accept. This is a time for leadership.

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What do Trump, Ford, Harper have in common?

August 12, 2015 by Peter Lowry

If you think the front runner for the Republican Party nomination for American President is a joke, you did not understand Toronto’s former Mayor Rob Ford either. And Stephen Harper has his own place in Hell next to both of them. All three show signs of being misanthropes—which means they really do not like people. These guys are not there for the people they say they care for. They are users, not caregivers.

These are people who care so little for others that it is only their ego that feeds them. Trump and Harper appear to share a hair fetish. Trump’s fluffed-up mane is a joke and those in the know would never dare laugh at Harper’s lacquered hairpiece. You wonder just how many hours a day it takes them to be coifed to their satisfaction. Harper’s staff hairdresser is no secret while Trump can afford as many as he wishes.

And all three are political prim donnas. They are not democratic. It is their way or the highway. And Trump and Ford are boors. They insult women as though they are from a different form of civilization. Harper is the better actor but he is even stiff around his wife. It is obvious that none of the three are really comfortable around forceful women. Not one of them has strong women on their teams.

For Ford, cancer was a minor bump on the road. It set him back but he kept the Ford name in the race for mayor at the time and another Ford in the running for his council seat. When he made it back in time to run for council, he bounced the substitute Ford to just a school trustee. Ford has to wait four years to flog his mayoralty hopes again.

Trump believes his own propaganda. He has the billions needed to fund his campaign for the White House and he will run as either a Republican or as an independent. If he does take the independent route, he is likely to be vilified by Republicans for taking votes from the Republican candidate to the advantage of the Democrats.

Harper probably believes he is better off than Ford or Trump. He is coming from a position of strength. He is an incumbent but there is baggage to that too. He is dragging the country into the second recession on his watch. Most “progressives” on his team have jumped ship. Their replacements are weak and uninspiring. He has been at loggerheads with the Supreme Court because of his disregard for Canadians’ rights and freedoms. He has trashed the Senate and scoffs at the Commons. He has annoyed our friends the Americans and made enemies for Canada in the United Nations.

And yet there are people who will vote for men like Donald Trump, Rob Ford and Stephen Harper. Be gentle with them for they are the angry, the disconsolate, the losers.

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The problem with problem gambling.

July 4, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Usually in diatribes against the sin of gambling, you get disjointed, uninformed and confused information based on bible studies, imagination and urban legends. It was interesting the other day to read an objection from someone with a surfeit of supposedly scientific information. A gentleman named Rob Simpson signed the article. He is reputed to have spent ten years as the chief executive of the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre. That meant the Ontario government provided about $3 million per year for his organization to arrange for professional studies of problem gambling.

These studies would probably have shown that problem gambling could affect up to 3.2 per cent of the population from a mild to serious degree. Mr. Simpson does not mention that finding in his lengthy opinion piece in the Toronto Star. Nor does he mention that Ontario has far more serious concerns with alcohol, drug and tobacco addictions. And it should be noted that the Ontario government makes even more money from alcohol and tobacco addictions than it does from gambling.

Mr. Simpson considers just five concerns in his lengthy article damning expansion of Woodbine’s racing and slots to a full casino resort operation.

His first objection is that the expansion is “massive.” He obviously is not an observer of what has happened in Las Vegas since ‘Bugsy’ Seigel built the Flamingo. You would think the Vegas slogan should be ‘Grosser is Greater.’ If we are going to have all this foolishness about having just one casino in the Greater Toronto Area, it is going to have to be big enough to handle the traffic. And one casino resort operation is hardly going to cause more than a ripple in Toronto’s leisure and entertainment sector.

The second objection is that the casino would get most of its revenue from the 6 million Greater Toronto Area residents. Why this is an objection is not really clear. He points out that gambling revenue is down in places like Atlantic City and Las Vegas. That is a really profound observation when you consider that the world economy has not been overly healthy for some time. Mind you the new Woodbine complex will not be in full operation next week either. Mr. Simpson is obviously not an economist.

The third objection he raises is that problem gambling is a problem. We could ignore that observation but he goes on to tell us that slots and table games are the most harmful. And we always thought we were trapped by gambling when engaged in pitching pennies with our lunch money during recess in public school. Are lotteries and bingo less harmful? Is that poker game with friends not friendly enough?

Our favourite was the fourth objection. He makes the statement that gambling is inefficient. He complains that only 35 per cent of gambling revenues are turned over to government. Would you like to invest in a billion dollar enterprise that returns 35 per cent net profit? And at the same time he complains that the local burghers will only get 2 per cent of gross revenues for finding it in their municipality. That is found money and is hardly chump change.

And he wraps it up by saying nobody wants the casino anyway. Since there are many investors quite willing to gamble hundreds of millions on this venture, he should let them. It is highly unlikely that Mr. Simpson would have the last laugh.

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Toronto Star doesn’t know diddley.

June 27, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Got up a bit late the other morning and found the wife grumbling over her coffee and the Toronto Star. She had read an editorial that annoyed her. Her complaint—on which she was quite voluble—was about the Star’s new stand on a casino at Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto. Since she has always been in favour of having a full blown casino resort operation at that location, her complaint needed explanation. It turned out her complaint was about how little the writer knew about the subject.

Her first complaint was that the Star editorial writer suggested that blackjack and roulette tables could be added to Woodbine’s slots operation and it would be a full fledged casino. She considered that an insult to her and her fellow craps players. She does not consider a casino to be legitimate without at least one full-size craps table and a crew of at least four to keep it running smoothly. She is a purist: after trying the one-sided craps tables with their single croupier at the Casino de Montrèal, she has never been interested in going back to that casino.

But there is a strong possibility that her real complaint was the foolish suggestion in the Star that the casino at Woodbine should only operate 18-hours per day. The writer had the audacity to suggest that the casino close between 4 am and 10 am. That proves it: the writer is not knowledgeable and has probably never been to a casino in his or her life.

This is the kind of thinking that has hamstrung Atlantic City and cost it big in becoming a gambling destination. The wife and yours truly were once simultaneously ejected from an Atlantic City casino at 4 am. We had never been told that the casinos in that town closed every night. We were outraged. We were both on a roll. The wife was leading the riot at the craps tables and we were racking up some major loot at blackjack. And you never, ever interrupt a gambler on a roll. Atlantic City is also off the list.

And we could be dealing with similar problems in Ontario. We have newspaper editorial writers and politicians in this province ignorant about gambling and thinking they should make the rules. Few people really understand gambling. Not everybody wants to go to casinos. Yet they want to say ‘no’ to casinos for others. They say they are worried about people becoming addicted to gambling. Our society has far more serious problems with alcohol, drugs and tobacco.

Ignorant politicians who think they are protecting people from gambling addiction by saying ‘No’ to casinos are helping criminal elements to take gamblers’ money. Society can deal more easily with addictions that are out in the open. It is those that hide in back alleys that threaten us.

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