New – Babel-on-the-Bay

Seeds of Civil War.

December 5, 2023December 5, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Recently I wrote that I was tired of writing about Donald Trump. He was boring everybody. That was until he started entertaining his followers with how he intended to use Americans against Americans. This man might be a compulsive liar and a damn fool but the prospect of a second American civil war is not good news. It is when Donald Trump refers to New York and Chicago as “crime dens.” He promises to treat those cities differently if he can get back into the White House. He intends to use the U.S. Army—and not to give shooting lessons.

What was surprising in Trump’s complaint about the two major democratic cities was that he was complaining about the number of shootings. He told his audience about the number of shootings that took place and the number of fatalities. At first, I thought he was complaining that the shooters were not very accurate. It was just surprising how few of the shootings were fatal.

But any military expert can tell you that wounded enemy soldiers are even better than dead as they become non-combatants and take up medical resources.

And since the United States already has more guns in civilian hands than the military—and, in fact, by a factor of almost 20 to one, it could be a very bad scene.

Mind you, judging by the mental acuity of your typical Trump supporter in America, I would not want to be the bookmaker taking odds on the outcome.

Looking at the logistics for the Trump side, would be the problem of militarizing the American borders. Wide spread rioting and looting in major cities could be out of control very quickly. Elements both north and south of those borders would want to get in on some of that action and the situation would get quickly out of control.

But that is Donald Trump for you, always out of control.

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Co-opting COP.

December 4, 2023December 3, 2023 by Peter Lowry

We should not be amused. This year’s United Nations conference on climate change has brought the foxes into the hen house. Whomever chose Dubai in the United Arab Emirates as a place for the conference must have a strange sense of humour. It is like getting the foxes to set the price for eggs.

And just how much do these members of the Organization of Oil Producing Countries (OPEC) know about global warming? Maybe the global warming is not as serious in the desert countries of the Middle East. Floods and wildfires might not be much of an everyday problem. And why would another degree or so of temperature extremes bother a Bedouin?

They probably think those of us of European origin as wusses who should stay out of the kitchen.

But what the Hell are all those oil company people from Alberta doing in Dubai?

I have to compliment David Climenhaga of Canada’s Progressive Bloggers for his efforts to explain why that dingbat, Alberta premier and her entourage are enjoying the scenic sights of the United Arab Emirates this December. Taking that bunch of Neanderthals from their reserved seats in Calgary and Edmonton Petroleum Clubs is the most egregious waste of public funds I have heard of in many a day.

I used to enjoy Alberta, not only when I was stationed there in the air force, but of the many fun times when visiting the province on business and pleasure and for the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada. I will never forget one time when visiting Calgary, I was doing some late-night editorial work at the Calgary Herald offices and being unable to get a cab back to the Calgary Inn. It was a long but brisk walk at minus 35 degrees.

Another memory of Calgary was a conference of business executives at the time that John Turner had left the Pierre Trudeau cabinet in a bit of a huff. They had shut the door on the meeting room so that John could tell us how he really felt. After he, as expected, maligned Mr. Trudeau and most of his staff, I walked up to John at the podium, waved a reporter’s pad at him and asked him if I should give it to my friends in the Calgary media. It was the first time in years of knowing John, he was speechless.

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Crowning Cinderella.

December 3, 2023December 2, 2023 by Peter Lowry

It took time. It took patience, but Ontario has a new party leader for its liberals. The television networks missed some great programming opportunities in the finale. For all its weaknesses, the stupid balloting system played into the party’s hands. It proved that the liberal party is a progressive, centre-left party.

If you didn’t hear Bonnie Crombie’s acceptance speech, you missed a good one. It was light, it was homey, it was appreciative and it looked at the road ahead. What she told the liberals is that there is a lot of work to do and she was there to do the job.

The bad news of the finale in the race was that Crombie was only a few points ahead of the somewhat maverick Nate Erskine-Smith. It told her she needs to be freer in her leadership style. It told her that old style politics was not going to cut it. It told her that there was a need for new approaches to the old questions.

Of major concern was the fact that some 30,000 votes were cast out of a potential of over 100,000. That is bad news and the lady has a tough task ahead of her. First, she has to get the party to change its approach to fund-raising. She knows that there is nothing better than direct fund raising to those with the money. You cannot use the party worker lists as your political automated teller machine (ATM). That does not work.

Second, the party has to start training its supporters in door-knocking. They need to start as soon as possible in the new year. It is great if the members want to support the party with some money but they are really needed out there selling the party and its plans and what it offers our citizens. And they need to be trained in door-knocking in the coming election.

Third, the party has to work with its present and potential electable possibilities. They need to be assuring their voters in the coming election of their working for them.

They hardly need to be showing the voters that the Ford conservatives will keep making mistakes. They can do that without anyone’s help. The new leader and her party have to get the voters excited about the possibilities.

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Mad Math of Moralists.

December 2, 2023December 2, 2023 by Peter Lowry

They’re back. The blue stocking crowd are weighing in on the prospect of having alcohol more available in Ontario. It is called convenience. Having alcoholic beverages available in convenience stores is a red flag to those who disapprove of booze. If we can have cannabis stores on every street corner in our towns and cities, what the heck is wrong with catering to those of us who prefer booze?

What annoyed me the other day was an assistant professor writing an op-ed in the Toronto Star used studious-sounding statistics to prove that the province would lose tax money to let booze be sold through convenience stores. I really doubt that he needs to tell the province how to raise more tax money. They are already doing that very well, thank you.

What the province is not doing well is taking very good care of our health system. If you listen to researchers to often, you find that there are many foods and beverages that can make you sick or destroy your liver. There are also those that can give you cancer or maybe enable you the get run over by a truck. And it really is amazing that foods touted as beneficial one year are denounced the following year. We never seem to make up our minds.

But for those such as the Ottawa assistant professor, the convenience of being able to buy booze at your corner convenience store is too much. It is, he pronounces, bound to “put an enormous burden on the health system.” Oh well, everything puts a burden on our health system.

What I cannot fathom in this diatribe in favour of abstaining from consuming alcohol is how he determines that the Ontario government is going to give up a substantial amount of tax revenue by allowing booze in convenience stores. He thinks this weakening of resolve to restrict the sale of booze is going to cost the government revenue. Just how that works was not explained.

In addition, the writer complains that the government seems to have been convinced of this loosening the reins by alcohol industry stakeholders. He says that the one (?) study of what Ontario citizens want has not been released.

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And a Very Merry to Alberta.

December 1, 2023December 1, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Alberta’s Looney-Toons premier must have gotten away from her keepers again. She has used her screw-ball Alberta Sovereignty in a United Canada Act to forbid Alberta’s provincial agencies from obeying a federal law that does not yet exist. That should leave us relieved for a while. When you consider that the provincial police in Alberta are just recently trained federal law officers, it could contribute many more laughs at the expense of Alberta citizens.

Alberta premier Danielle Smith has an excuse. She believes that provincial agencies have to obey the provincial laws. If you have any idea how much it costs to defend an action at the Supreme Court of Canada, you might help find an adult who can convince the premier to back off.

Sure, creating electrical systems and selling electricity is a provincial responsibility but what the province puts into our air is obviously a federal responsibility. The federal government realizes we have to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.

You might have to speak slowly and use simple words but someone has to tell that Alberta premier that fun time is over. Global warming is serious. Carbon-based fuels that contribute to getting excessive carbon into the atmosphere of our planet can make human life here much shorter than we would like it to be. It is also contributing to the large number of wildfires that are destroying the forested beauty of Alberta. It also contributes to freaky floods.

I am sorry to tell you this but someone in Alberta has to tell the people exploiting the tar sands that they have to start cutting back on their obviously noble effort to get every last bit of bitumen out of Alberta. And don’t even bother us with that crap about carbon capture and storage. It is simply bull shit. All it can do is bring up more bitumen. Why would anyone want to get involved in that game?

And Mr. Trudeau’s Trans Mountain pipeline is his problem. There is no way the Canadian government can recoup the billions wasted on that bit of federal generosity—that was never recognized in Alberta anyway.

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The Tiring Trail of Trump.

November 30, 2023November 29, 2023 by Peter Lowry

As a political commentator, I am tired of Donald Trump. He is no longer a mystery. He bores us. He barely holds the draw of Pierre Poilievre in Canada. Even the Donald’s lies are boring. His histrionics are wasted. He is old news.

But don’t ask any of the Donald’s supporters south of the 49^th Parallel. They are blind to his faults and ignorant of his objectives. Would you believe they think he is going to make America great again? So why does he have to pull it down first?

Yet there appears to be a drift. Very gradually, the Donald’s lustre is fading. There are American Republicans looking around, casually, wondering what the flavour of the month could be next November?

Like Pierre Poilievre here, the right wing of the political divide can neither be believed nor be trusted. Just the other day when news broke about the strange event at the Rainbow Bridge at Niagara Falls, Poilievre rushed to the news media saying it was a reported terrorist attack and then lectured a Canadian Press reporter on accuracy in reporting.

Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau was sitting back and waiting for more information. The breaking news on my computer had to do a lot of back-tracking that day. And thank goodness most of the panicked response was on the American side of the bridge. In fact, the entire event and the panic was on the American side.

And Mr. Poilievre had egg on his face, again for being obnoxious with the media.

The problem is that Canadians do not have the certainty of Americans on just when the election will take place. Mr. Trump can plot with confidence that the presidential election will be held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November next year which will be November 5, 2024.

If Mr. Trump can stay out of jail until then, he just might have a better chance to really defeat Joe Biden. As it is, he has more than enough legal problems to keep him answering for them until he is 100.

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The Enigma in the Lake.

November 29, 2023November 28, 2023 by Peter Lowry

There was dancing in the streets of Toronto the other day. Doug Ford had capitulated. He has taken responsibility for the highways through the city. He has promised cash in the billions to fund the city’s needs. It was manna, not from heaven, but from Queen’s Park. And all the premier asked in return was to control the former artificial islands of Ontario Place. There is something very strange about the deal.

Doug Ford is a boor, a schemer and a conservative. He has made no secret of despising Toronto’s NDP-affiliated mayor. They are not friends. He put others ahead of her in the land rush version of a by-election. He was disappointed when she won. And yet, he gave into all her demands but one. He kept the foreign spa down on Lake Ontario.

There is a strange imbalance in this. Doug Ford might not be the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree at Queen’s Park. He just played a huge role as Santa Claus. What conservative Mike Harris down-loaded on Toronto when he was premier, back at the turn of the century, has been restored with interest.

The NDPers on Toronto council are ecstatic. They literally have money to burn—and they probably will. They have money for new housing. They can fix some of the dilapidated transit system. They can dig up some more major streets and turn the city into permanent gridlock for car and truck drivers. They even closed off the city’s grand boulevard, University Avenue, to replace a water pipe reputed to be 150 years old. The avenue will take years to be restored.

But down at the lake shore, there is trouble brewing. Doug Ford has some strange fascination with an imperial spa. He is lucky if he can spell ‘spa.’ I doubt he wants it built for his wife and daughters. Or is this one of those unisex spas?

What puzzles us is that we have no idea why this spa is so important to the premier. It was easy to see why he would give some developer friends an $8 billion gift in the Greenbelt. Those were the good guys as far as Doug Ford was concerned. They got him elected premier. They paved the road for Ford to Queen’s Park with gold.

Do those man-made islands on the lake shore explain the mysteries of Oak Island?

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Not an Organized Party.

November 28, 2023November 27, 2023 by Peter Lowry

We used to joke that we are not members of an organized political party. We are liberals. And it was never more obvious than when the wife and I went to vote the other day in the provincial leadership for the party. I have been seriously considering suing the party for its total incompetence.

If you have never seen my wife really pissed, you have had a lucky life. My problem is that I am the nearest liberal on whom she can direct her anger. The wife has been a paid-up member of the Ontario Liberal Party for more than 60 years. She actually married me despite the fact that we had never taken the time to talk about politics. It just wasn’t a topic on our agenda. Imagine our surprise when we came home from our honeymoon in time to vote in a federal election.

We went to our separate ridings to vote where we had been enumerated. It was then that I found out that we both voted liberal. She was the first to get involved in the party when she met our provincial candidate and offered him some help—mainly me.

She felt up to coming out with me to vote for Bonnie Crombie on Sunday and I was concerned about it. I was concerned because I had done everything to make sure she was registered to vote in the election and I had never seen anything to confirm she was listed. And my concern was confirmed. The liberal who was acting as poll clerk knew us and also expected to find the wife’s name on the list. Out of more than 300 liberals registered in our electoral district, the wife’s name was missing.

I consider it Justin Trudeau’s fault. I don’t think he likes the liberal party. We took up too much of his father’s time when he was a youngster. He dumped the liberal senators in the senate, he cancelled the federal membership fee. He uses the party list as his ATM.

And the Ontario party followed suit. They cancelled the wife’s membership. She was supposed to re-register but they forgot to tell her. I re-registered her to be on the safe side. It never happened.

When you consider that our ‘One person, one vote’ in an electoral district with over 300 registered liberals was treated as about a third of a vote each, it hardly seemed worth it.

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Wrestling With Wrongs.

November 27, 2023November 26, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Two pet peeves I have these days are self-checkouts and gratuities. They are wrongs inflicted on employees and customers alike. Gratuities and self-checkouts belittle the employee and are an imposition on the customer. I am not in this place to help the owner to insult the employee and do the check-out job for them. Nor am I there to ensure that your employee receives a living wage. It is just not my responsibility.

If you are so miserably incapable of providing your employee with a living wage then your business model is wrong. Gratuities came into being ‘for service added.’ Why are we seeing ‘recommended gratuities’ as high as 30 per cent these days? And why are restaurants and other businesses recommending anything? If I wish to tip someone for service, I will also choose the amount. Whether it is a waiter or waitress or the person who delivers to my front door, I will determine the value, not the employer.

Face facts: it is not the value of the items delivered but the value of the extra service. If the person making the deliver has to climb a particularly arduous flight of stairs, that they might not have to climb to make normal deliveries, a gratuity might be justified. A dour and dull delivery demeanour deserves diddly.

And why should I contribute to the booster bucket at Tims? I came in for a cuppa and maybe a cruller. These high school kids at the counter are there earning some extra money as part of life’s experience. And life experience is not awash in additional dimes and nickels.

But I save my most egregious complaint for last. It goes to my corner Shoppers Drug Mart. This used to be a good store when it was really run by the pharmacist franchisee. When it was bought by the rapacious Loblaw clan, I thought they should add a sign over the door, along the lines of: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.

They forgot that the last chance the store had for some redemption was the cashier. If you could just say hi to that last hope for a friendly face. That friendly face could lighten your step as you go out the door.

But NO. That one lonely, harassed clerk has a long line of customers to serve and your only recourse is the self-checkout. What I have found works is to attack the self serve computer with so many screw ups, it starts ringing bells for help. Someone will come soon to help the clumsy old man. I appreciate the help.

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A Climate Change Critique.

November 26, 2023November 25, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Help is here. After the past several years of feeling like a voice in the wilderness, there is support for the contention that capturing and storing carbon is a dumb idea. And, what I found was particularly infuriating, was the tar sands exploiters wanted our government to pay the costs of the sham.

And even better, it leaves conservative leader Pierre Poilievre adrift on a sea of BS. It was his pathetic support for carbon capture and storage that would leave him free to criticize everyone other than himself. His friends in the Pathways Alliance of tar sands exploiters have been so busy ramping up oils sands exploitation that they have actually increased Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions when we were supposed to be cutting back. The tar sands billionaires have moved into the state of being the single largest producers of greenhouse gas in Canada at 28 per cent of the total.

Mind you, the equal stupidity of the federal government throwing billions away on the Trans Mountain pipeline is inexcusable.

And, can you imagine, in his usual rush to gather media attention, Poilievre was even criticizing Justin Trudeau for imposing some carbon tax on our friends in embattled Ukraine. That is not only untrue but it is a stupid lie, which is what we hear so often from those cheap seats. Poilievre is actually making Justin Trudeau look good.

The current critique of Canada’s tar sands exploiters comes from the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) that represents some 44 countries and has spend the past 49 years studying and reporting on the world-wide energy consumption. The agency points out that the cold hard truth is that Canada is the only G7 country to actually increase greenhouse gas emissions since 1990. The tar sand exploiters are bringing up more bitumen from the earth’s core every year. It is estimated that if every liter of greenhouse gas emissions were to be found space underground, it would cost as much as US$ 3.5 billion every year to capture and store the greenhouse gases.

The latest figures of world-wide demand for oil and gas are expected to reach a peak by the end of this decade. And yet many oil companies continue to expand production. It is as though the world-wide industry members are competing to provide the world with its very last barrel of oil.

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